Colm Tóibín

The Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, who is gay, has an interesting take on the abuse of young boys by priests. According to the Irish Independent: "Although not abused by priests in the Wexford school he attended, he positively fancied some of them. "Aged 15 or 16," he tells interviewer Susanna Rustin, "I found some of the priests sexually attractive, they had a way about them . . . a sexual allure which is a difficult thing to talk about because it's usually meant to be the opposite way round"'.

No comment...

Nice headline:

"NYU professor to have camera surgically installed in back of his head"

Nice phraseology (talking about Isis, a new cell phone payment system):

“Isis intends to deliver a complete mobile wallet experience"

Technical point

According to the Vancouver Sun, Canada has decided not to follow the U.S. lead to ban alcoholic beverages containing caffeine. The legal reasoning behind the U.S. decision, which considers the caffeine an unsafe additive, is explained soberly by a former FDA employee:

"The presumption under the law here in the U.S. is if you're using a food additive in a manner that is not approved by the FDA, then it is unsafe as a matter of law, even if it doesn't pose a risk," said Carvajal, who worked at the FDA for five years until leaving in 2007.

"It's a technical point, but we could have something here that is both unsafe in the legal sense and unsafe in the everyday meaning of that word."

That is a very nice technical point.

French Policemen

Read in France-Ouest yesterday that the criteria for becoming a policeman in France have been changed. They no longer include height, corpulence and capacité d'élocution. So you might come across a policeman now who is small, round and unable to express himself clearly.

Barcelona

In the metro I sat opposite an older couple, 70's maybe, with a very small dog between them. The woman was suntanned, had carefully done hair, several gold chains around her neck, with things hanging from them, and very white capris which really showed off the veins and swellings and puckerings on her lower legs. On her feet she had pink polka dot sandals, with a tight strap around her ankle, adding to the swellings no doubt, and a little hole at the front where three of her toes stuck out strangely, with dark brown painted toenails. She kept leaning over to talk to her husband, caressing the dog who twitched a lot and had one of those permanent snarls but seemed otherwise quite pleasant, and then every time she'd move her hand a little further over and leave it cupping his crotch (the husband's). It was weird.

Massachusetts Now

"It is not a foregone conclusion, [a lawyer for the U.S. Justice Department] said, that the federal government would withhold funding if Massachusetts allowed gay married couples to be buried in veterans' cemeteries." (quoted in Boston.com)

You wonder how many of these happy newly-weds are clamouring to get into the local cemeteries.

Watching TV

BBC weatherman, reassuringly: It won't actually be wall-to-wall rain...

Then there's the relentless ad on CNN for Clear Essence, "specially formulated skin products for people of color; eliminates black spots".

Saw part of a program about Coca Cola yesterday. The presenter was saying that the great thing about their ad campaigns over the years was the way they got people to associate Coke with great life experiences. The Coke woman nodded and offered an example: Yeah, we wanted people to realize that nothing goes better with a good hot dog than a coke.