I remember first seeing The Evil Dead so many years ago and thinking it was awesome. I recently came across a DVD for sale that touted itself as the Ultimate Edition. It has two discs, with loads of extras and all sorts of goodies.

I haven’t got around to checking out all the extras yet, but I did sit and watch the movie again yesterday. Man, what a great film. This is something that is a true cult classic; it’s even spawned a musical. The effects are pretty ordinary, but it was made in 1981. The story might seem cliched watching it now, but at the time it wasn’t.

Written and directed by Sam Raimi, it’s a fantastic effort for a first movie. It propelled Bruce Campbell to absolute stardom and spawned sequels every bit as good as the first. Interestingly, the sequels are more camp and funny than the original. It struck me while I was watching it that it’s actually a pretty scary movie. The comedy, which is very evident in the sequels, isn’t so obvious here. There are some really toe curling gore moments (such as the pencil in the ankle - not just stabbed, but really ground around in there) and some truly spooky moments with good jumps. And, as fas as I know, the only tree rape ever committed to film (which was banned in some places).

The whole thing centres around the Necronomicon, the Book of the Dead. Originally this concept surfaced in H P Lovecraft stories, supposedly written by the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred, and was subsequently referenced in other fiction. Lovecraft greatly approved of this development of his ideas, calling it “a background of evil verisimilitude.” In one of those fantastic examples of fiction becoming “fact”, there are people out there now that consider that there really is something called the Necronomicon, with many booksellers being asked if they stock it or can order it. Do some web searching and you’ll come across some really entertaining stuff.

The Necronomicon (one version of it anyway). Supposedly written in human blood and bound in human flesh.

And check out the imdb trivia page about the movie here. Some really funny stuff on there. If you’re a fan of this genre, check out the movie again. The claymation effects and dodgy make-up are dated, but it’s still an absolute classic.

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“If someone commits suicide bombing to protect the honour of the prophet Muhammad, his act is justified.”

Yes, that’s right. Adherents to the so-called religion of Peace are at it again. The quote above was from the Pakistani Religious Affairs Minister, Mohammad Ejaz-ul-Haq in response to the Knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday honours list for the author Salman Rushdie. Ejaz-ul-Haq also said, “The West always wonders about the root cause of terrorism. Such actions are the root cause of it.”

So, Knighting a writer for his outstanding contribution to world literature is justification for the murder of innocent civilians that had nothing to do with the book, the Knighthood, the religion that claims to be affronted or anything else remotely connected. Sounds like more barbarian chest beating to me from people desperate to justify their violence. Then again, what do you expect from a religion that has world domination as a central tenet?

The Pakistani parliament passed a unanimous resolution deploring Rushdie’s honour as an insult to the feelings of the world’s Muslims. Rushdie spent around a decade in hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini denounced his book The Satanic Verses as an insult to Islam and the prophet Muhammad and issued a fatwa calling for his murder. In 1998, when the Iranian government said that it would not support the outstanding fatwa, Rushdie emerged from hiding. Now there are fears for his safety all over again. Apparently Ejaz-ul-Haq was later forced to clarify his statement and claimed that he was speaking about the wider causes of terrorism and not of Sir Salman specifically. Yeah. Sure.

Salman Rushdie

According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

On Monday Pakistan’s religious parties ordered supporters onto the streets of two provincial cites. Effigies of the Queen and Sir Salman were burned while some protesters chanted “Kill him, kill him.”

Brainless idiots jump at the chance to burn another flag. (Pic from smh.com.au)

Pakistan’s lower house Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, said, “This is a source of hurt for Muslims and will encourage people to commit blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammad.” It’s ironic that he doesn’t consider calling for the murder of someone for a book they wrote some kind of blashpemy against all humanity. After all, is it not written in the “holy koran” “when you kill one human, you kill all of humanity”? Of course, as usual, religious zealots are picking and choosing what suits their current agenda as they have little else to occupy their feeble minds. There are even those that consider non-Muslims to be less than human and apostates even worse.

The Iranian foreign ministry’s director for Europe, Ebrahim Rahimpour, said, “The British government’s insulting, suspicious and ill-considered act is an obvious sign of Islamophobia which has terribly hurt the feelings of 1.5 billion Muslims.” What a load of bollocks. Has he asked all 1.5 billion Muslims? I’m sure the large majority of them consider statements like that far more damaging than anything Salman Rushdie has ever written.

I’m going to be away for a week or so, on a well deserved little holiday, so don’t be surprised if things are a bit quiet around here. However, before I go, I thought I’d leave you with this bit of entertaining news via Reuters in Hong Kong:

More than 800 Hong Kong residents have called on authorities to reclassify the Bible as “indecent” due to its sexual and violent content, following an uproar over a sex column in a university student journal.

If this was to go through, the Bible would only be available to over-eighteens in a sealed wrapper. Not a bad idea when you think about it. It helps to avoid the unconsented indoctrination of the young. I vote for all religious texts to be put in a brown paper bag and kept away from kids. Perhaps they should only be allowed to be read by people of high school age or older and only if they take religious education classes.

And religious education is not Christian studies or Muslim studies or anything like that. It means study of religions, plural. All of them. Let the kids learn about all the religions in the world and make up their own mind about what they think. How progressive.

The Hong Kong complaints follow the launch of an anonymous Web site called truthbible.net which claims that the Bible “made one tremble” given its sexual and violent content, including rape and incest. The website bears this banner along the top:

The English translations reads:

LEGAL DISCLAIMER WARNING: THIS WEBSITE CONTAINS BIBLE MATERIAL WHICH MAY OFFEND AND MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED, CIRCULATED, SOLD, HIRED, GIVEN , LENT, SHOWN, PLAYED OR PROJECTED TO A PERSON UNDER THE AGE OF 18 YEARS.

OK, no under-eighteens, we get it.

Interestingly, local protestant minister, Reverend Wu Chi-Wai, said, “If there is rape mentioned in the Bible, it doesn’t mean it encourages those activities.”

Yeah, right. Just like it doesn’t encourage belief in a magic Jew that was his own father and died for our sins. And it doesn’t encourage people to “bring forth that man or that woman, which have committed that wicked thing, unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones, till they die.” (Deuteronomy 17). Just like the Koran doesn’t encourage the conversion or extermination of all infidels as in IX. 5-6: “Kill those who join other gods with God wherever you may find them.”

I think those folks in Hong Kong are onto something. We should give all holy texts an MA rating.

In a quick update to the previous post here on The Word about the use of the word scrotum in a children’s book, I have to share the words of the author herself. In an article she wrote in the LA Times in response to the whole ridiculous controversy, Susan Patron eloquently and plainly states a powerful case. In particular, this paragraph stood out to me:

Of course, adults are right to fear a word in a book, although not, as in this instance, because it names a body part. They are right in the implied assumption that books have enormous power and influence. Children who read widely understand more about the world; they have a foundation for making better decisions. They think, and because of that, they may even challenge their parents’ beliefs. For some, a scary idea, but isn’t a thinking child preferable to one who accepts the world at face value and has no aim to change it for the better?

I have a new hero. Read the entire article here.

Susan Patron was on a roll. An author and librarian, she wrote a book for nine to twelve year olds called The Higher Power Of Lucky. It got a decent print run of 10,000 copies to start off with. Then it won the Newbury Medal, considered to be the most prestigious literary award for Children’s Literature in the US. Another 100,000 copies were quickly printed and rushed out.

The Higher Power Of Lucky

Then all hell broke loose. Why? Because she had the outrageous gall to use a real word. The word in question is scrotum. By anyone’s standards that’s a good word. It’s got substance to it. Patron describes it beautifully in the book:

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much. It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

The word appears on the first page, but the book is about Lucky preparing herself to be a grown-up, Ms. Patron said. Learning about language and body parts is very important to her. She overhears the word through a hole in the wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog on the scrotum. (Man, that’s bad luck for the dog!)

Susan Patron. She writes words like scrotum!

Naturally, people have thrown a fit about the book and it has already been banned from school libraries in some states in the South, the West and the Northeast. Librarians in other schools have suggested that they may well follow suit. It’s been a hot topic among librarians online since the book was initially shipped. Am I the only one that gets some perverse pleasure out of imagining evangelical librarians in a state of frothing horror, running around in circles screaming, “Scrotum! No!”? Then again, I’m sure that’s not exactly what they’re doing. They’re probably not actually frothing yet.

People are concerned about the vocabulary lessons that would result from reading this book to kids. Why?

“Sir, what’s a scrotum?”

“It’s a part of the body that only male people and male animals have. After class, go to the library and have a look in the dictionary for it.”

There. The kid got an answer to be going on with and a lesson in using a dictionary. If the kid actually has the wherewithal to go and look in a dictionary, then they’re probably not the sort of kid that would be scarred for life by knowing what a scrotum was. They would actually be a more rounded and educated individual.

These are the same knee-jerk, conservative librarians that tried to get Harry Potter books banned because they claimed that those books promoted witchcraft and Satanism. Even though there’s nothing illegal or wrong with the Wiccan religion and Satanism is not even hinted at in the books (and so what if it was?) Of course, to someone blinded by dogmatic Christianity and on a Crusade, that’s not the point and they’ll fight to force their views on everyone. Sorry, I’ll get off my soapbox now. For a little while.

You know the thing that sticks with me the most about this whole debacle? Talking about the book and the word scrotum, Patron says she took the idea from a true incident involving a friend’s dog. That poor dog!

Still, Patron must be loving all this free publicity.

Warning: Strong language ahead.

Nigger has been banned in New York. Yep, they’ve tried to ban a word. The city that’s becoming famous for legislating against anything it doesn’t like has decided to declare a “symbolic moratorium” on a word used more these days by black rappers than anyone intending offence. Four other states have towns that have come to a similar decision, but it’s all only so much hot air. It’s an unconstitutional decision that is completely unenforceable due to the constitutional right of Free Speech.

Already most Americans and American media refer to it as “the ‘N’ word” for fear of upsetting people. The word is gaining a special place in the lexicon. Worse than Harry Potter’s friends refusing to utter the name of Voldemort for fear of giving him power in J K Rowling’s hugely successful fiction, the same is happening here. It’s just a word! If I call a black person a nigger, then I’m being offensive and racist, either deliberately or through ignorance. But if I refer to the word nigger in context, it’s no different than any other word. We have many words that are considered very strong language and used rarely, if at all. The word fuck has lost a lot of its sting in recent years, but cunt is still a word few dare to utter. But it’s still used without fear of anything more than a sharp intake of breath and perhaps a disapprovingly furrowed brow. So strong is America’s guilt, however, that it usually can’t bear to use the word nigger in any context at all and any that do are instant pariahs.

The original title and cover of And Then There Were None

Interestingly, the move, according to the man behind the motion, Leroy Comrie, is aimed at blacks in an attempt to stop them from using it to refer to each other. In much the same way that the gay community appropriated queer and removed its power, the black community has done the same thing with nigger. Or nigga, as even they seem to shy away from using the word in its accepted correct spelling. Sure, changing the spelling but keeping the phonetic makes all the difference. Oprah Winfrey was even corrected on her show when she accused a rapper of perpetuating “the ‘N’ word”. He explained that he spelled it with and ‘a’, not an ‘er’ and it was therefore not the same. Right. The guy’s plainly an ideot.

The word has been traced etymologically to the Latin niger, meaning black. It has a history close to slavery and is considered to be a subhuman, inferior, deliberately insulting reference. We get it. It’s a bad word. But legislating against it with a “law” that is completely without penalty is lip service of the worst kind. I could call someone a fucking prick and it would be equally insulting. But it’s just a selection of words to describe a position held. A woman in Texas put it best when the Mayor of Brazoria suggested a US$500 fine for anyone saying nigger; “What about the girls that are called white cracker, even whore? It’s not right to only pass it for the n-word.” Though even she showed the indoctrinated fear of the word when she felt fine saying white cracker, but couldn’t bring herself to say nigger.

Check out the Wikipedia entry on the word nigger for some interesting facts and a pretty good history of its use in literature.

One of the greatest funk albums of all time

A large recruitment agency in the UK, Robert Walters, has taken self-censorship to new heights with a list of words that it has banned from its job advertisements. In a knee-jerk reaction to Employment Equality (Age) Regulations which came into effect on October 1, the company has issued a list of seventeen banned words. The banned words should “under no circumstances appear in any Robert Walters advertising from this point forward” in a move that the company’s marketing director, Steve Edwards, called “being cautious” and having “defined guidelines on what you can or cannot say”.

The concept may seem fairly reasonable at first glance and ageism in the workplace is a problem, but the company has gone rather too far. It’s not just about saying something like “young person required”. Some of the words on the banned list are vibrant, dynamic, ambitious and hungry. I fail to see how an older person can’t have these traits. Dynamism and ambition are hardly the exclusive domain of the young; if anything, apathy can often be more accurately applied.

Perhaps one of the most absurd directives is that ads for gym staff and personal trainers can no longer openly solicit applications from fit or energetic people. Why not? It’s a requirement of the job. You can be 25 or 55 and still be fit and energetic. If the ads said, “No fat bastards” then that would certainly be offensive. Even if they openly said, “Over 50? You’re too old for us!” then that would be blatantly ageist and would certainly contravene the new laws. But asking fitness professionals to be fit and energetic is a given, surely? Would they advertise an accountancy position without requesting good numeracy skills to avoid being seen as numerist? Absurd.

The company has also requested that references to modern qualifications such as media studies or information technology be avoided in advertising. Imagine all the applicants for an IT job when they see an ad that doesn’t require IT qualifications. On arrival for the interview they would be informed, “Ah, yes, actually you do need a degree in Information Technology. But we didn’t put it in the ad because we didn’t want to be ageist.”

The list of banned words also includes youthful, quick-learner, self-starter, high-flyer, gravitas, newly qualified, soon-to-be-qualified, recent graduate and experienced. It would seem that Robert Walters recruitment considers older people to be slow learning, low flying and incapable of continuing education.

Any readers that are Christian might want to stop reading now and delete all their favourite blogs from their bookmarks. And if you are Christian and keep your own blog, watch out. It’s not that I have any problem with the combination of Christians and blogs personally, but some people do.

The Evangelical Restored Church of God has deemed blogging to be un-Christian. The monthly publication of this church, Ambassador Youth, has pointed out that blogging has become a socially accepted practice, just like “dating seriously too young, underage drinking and general misbehaving”. What about teenage pregnancy? What about drug abuse? Paedophilia? They missed a few opportunities there.

Kevin D Denee, writing in Ambassador Youth, notes, apparently without a trace of a comedy routine, that blogging “often makes the blogger feel good or makes him feel as if his opinion counts”. How dare those godless bloggers do anything to feel good or even consider, for a fraction of a second, that their opinion counts. They should have long since learned that the only opinion that counts is that of god, delivered, naturally, by the very human leader of their church and coloured heavily with that leader’s own agenda. Expressing their own opinion indeed. These people should be burned at the stake.

Denee also noted that, “Much of this is simply blathering on blogs - mindless words and idle communication. Blogs can be summed up as people talking about almost anything, but really nothing. There is no purpose to much of the contents - no direction.”

So what? Ninety per cent of regular conversations fall into this category anyway and, to be honest, it’s also a fair description of a large number of church sermons I’ve been unfortunate enough to endure. From any faith, not just Christian ones.

Funnily enough, the church recognises that there are “some professionals and specialists who use blogs to serve a proper purpose”. I wonder if that includes me? Their last piece of advice is to maintain friends the “old-fashioned way” through “actual personal contact, as well as letter writing, emailing or instant messaging”. Now they’re just trying to be cool by suggesting that email and IM are old-fashioned.

I’ll leave it for you to decide what’s un-Christian. If you want to read all of Denee’s alarmist and sensationalist article about the evils of blogging, you can find it here. But I warn you, “much of this is simply blathering”.

Freedom of speech can be an issue in more ways than just being prevented from speaking your mind. Freedom of speech is not just about being able to say what you want, safe in the knowledge that anyone else can say what they want in return. It’s also about being able to access, unconditionally, anything that anyone might be saying. One of the real strengths of the internet is the wealth of information out there and its ready availability. If big business and profit margins start cutting into that ready availability, we have a very serious issue on our hands. Let’s keep the internet neutral. Have a look at the video (link below) to learn more and there’s also a Save The Net link now in the sidebar to the right. If you want to comment, you can. And you can say whatever you like. And anyone else can say anything in reply. Well, within reason, as I moderate the comments, but that’s only to weed out the spam and the obvious hatemail.

Link to full size video on YouTube

Chickenhawk – (slang) someone who avoids going to war or fighting in his lifetime, but still advocates that war is necessary.

There was a significant victory for free speech in the US recently. Zachary Guiles, from Vermont, had a t-shirt that depicted George W Bush as a Chickenhawk and an alcohol and cocaine abuser. The t-shirt had a picture of the president’s face superimposed on the body of a chicken and the words “George W. Bush” and “Chicken-Hawk-In-Chief”. It also bore images of lines of cocaine, a martini glass and small print saying things such as “Crook”, “Cocaine Addict”, “AWOL”, “Draft Dodger” and “Lying Drunk Driver”.

Zachary wore the t-shirt to school once a week for two months. However, he was forced to censor it and had to endure a suspension from school after only one complaint from a student and parent with differing political views. Zachary opposed the school’s censorship decision, claiming that it was an infringement of his rights to free speech. A lower court upheld the school’s position, but in an appeal to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Zachary was successful in getting the lower court’s decision overturned.

The decision of the Appeals Court is really nothing more than common sense. They concluded that the T-shirt “uses harsh rhetoric and imagery to express disagreement with the president’s policies and to impugn his character” but that the images and message “are not plainly offensive as a matter of law.”

“We conclude that the defendants’ censorship of the images on Guiles’s T-shirt violated his free speech rights… Guiles’s T-shirt did not cause any disruption or confrontation in the school.”

Interestingly, further demonstrating the power and diversity of words, I did a few searches for the expression ‘Chickenhawk’, used in the context described above. It was quite hard to find one. However, by far the most common definition of the word, other than to describe the actual bird, is this one:

A Gay term for an older man that constantly chases after younger men.

Apparently there’s also a heterosexual female equivalent, which is ‘Cougar’.