April 12th 2004 - April 18th 2004
Sunday Hi, hi, hi
Saturday Pagan Walt
Friday Noteworthy
Thursday Parp parp
Wednesday Jesus!
Tuesday Moral dilemmas
Monday Easter wishes
Sunday 18th April 2004
Always slightly eerie when someone you've chatted to in some gay bar subsequently features in the pages of the press; downright scarey when four of them turn up in a row, and all in the same paper: Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears, Marcos Brito aka QBoy, Alexander McQueen (interviewed by his mum), and Wolfgang Tillmans (talking cock).
Saturday 17th April 2004
Repeated search requests for priory keystone persuade me to offer you a further extract from Dan Brown's execrable exercise in Grail conspiracy theory. The following passage has stuck in my memory long after the rest of Mr Brown's caravan of nonsense has passed away into merciful darkness. See if it persuades you:
Langdon held up his up his Mickey Mouse watch and told her that Walt Disney had made it his life's work to pass on the Grail story to future generations.
Throughout his entire life, Disney had been hailed as 'the Modern-Day Leonardo da Vinci'. Both men were generations ahead of their times, uniquely gifted artists, members of secret societies and, nost notably, avid pranksters.
Like Leonardo, Walt Disney loved implanting hidden messages and symbolism in his art. For the trained symbologist, watching an early Disney movie was like being barraged by an avalanche of allusion and metaphor.
Most of Disney's hidden messages dealt with religion, pagan myth and stories of the subjugated goddess. It was no mistake that Disney retold tales like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White - all of which dealt with the incarceration of the sacred feminine.
Nor did one need a background in symbolism to understand that Snow White - a princess who fell from grace after partaking of a poisoned apple - was a clear allusion to the downfall of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Or that Sleeping Beauty's Princess Aurora - code-named 'Rose' and hidden deep in the forest to protect her from the clutches of the evil witch - was the Grail story for children...
Remember the truly scary part: there are people out there who take this kind of nonsense seriously, enough of them to have made The Da Vinci Code the best-selling hardback novel of all time.
Friday 16th April 2004
Worthy of note, or not
I'm sure I'm not alone in noticing a steep decline in the quality of the proof-reading at The Independent lately: rumour has it that the pressures of producing both a tabloid and a broadsheet version of each edition has taken its toll on the subs.
I tell myself it doesn't matter much. I tell myself I'm just being a grumpy old pedant. I tell myself it's not as if the actual sense of the stories is affected by the odd spelling mistake.
And then I find something like this, which, by missing one superfluous letter, turns the meaning of Wilde's quote precisely through 180 degrees:
Thursday 15th April 2004
Hundreds of bouquets of flowers, some bearing her nickname "Toad", were laid at the gates of her school, and near the spot where she was found.
Wednesday 14th April 2004
Overheard, or not, on Sunday
Me: At seventeen sodding quid on the door, you'd think they'd afford a proof-reader!
He: Eh?
Me: I SAID AT SEVENTEEN QUID...Jesus! What was that?!
Tuesday 13th April 2004
Easter television
CHANNEL 4
7:55 What would Jesus do? Moral dilemmas
7:55 Selling Houses Andrew Winter comes to the rescue of a couple whose 1912 terrace house is languishing unsold
7:55 The City Gardener Matt James applies his magic touch to a backyard in Bristol
Monday 12th April 2004
Prayers for Easter weekend
I hope you didn't mind me leaning over and saying, "The thing is, everyone wants to see your chest, not hers". And insisting you were Dutch
I hope you won't try kissing me again
I hope you stop walking as if gangsters broke your ankles over a drug debt
I hope you survive flying to Australia for a meeting and then flying straight back again
I hope you succeed with the Al Qaeda State Cabaret
I hope you didn't mutter at the Scotsman you picked up in the same mad fashion that you muttered to me
I hope you enjoyed the ostrich sausages
I hope you realised I fancy you rotten. (And yr salami)
I hope you have a pole long enough to prove useful (but I doubt it)
I hope you come down South more often
I hope you persuaded your friends that we really did meet at Trade last night
I hope you weren't offended when, after your pill, you wouldn't stop telling me how much you loved me and I had to tell you to shut up eighteen times
I hope you find your boyfriend; he was over by coat check the last time I saw him
I hope you persuade Patrick to come on Thursday
I hope you stopped worrying about the sound system
I hope you got the lampshade off your head
......previous week
