and yet you appear to be wearing the exact same outfit. interesting.
]]>I agree, but I also think John’s arsehole is nice and clean now, so we’re probably all safe to stop licking it.
]]>As someone who pushes words around for a living (both my own and other people’s), I couldn’t agree more.
Any boring tosser can don horn-rimmed glasses and write a pompous piece beginning "I disagree with the widely-held view that an Islamic takeover of the Western world is a serious threat" as the intro to a 10,000 word screed that no-one but himself is ever going to read in full (except for the purposes of piss-taking fisking), but a comment like "Anyone who thinks that an Islamic takeover of the Western world is a serious threat is a maniac and should be sedated, obviously." is pure blogging gold.
I particularly love the tacked-on "obviously" at the end – it somehow manages to be both utterly gratuitous and strangely essential at the same time.
]]>That’s the post where Hitchens refers to "the criminals who shattered London’s peace at rush hour" as well. Ahhh the pastoral idyll of Edgeware Road at quarter to nine.
]]>Or possibly they just can’t be bothered, and really, when they’re attacking the kind of people John B does, who could blame them? More to the point, the commentators who’re more concerned with showing off vocabulary than swearing appropriately end up using terms like "insouciance" when they actually mean "sheer bloody-mindedness", and then there’s nothing for it but to point and snigger.
And yes. I love my polysyllabic words and get ever so excited when people introduce me to new and obscure ones, but John’s way with words is hysterical.
]]>(This proves my point so perfectly that I wish I’d engineered it deliberately – but sadly it’s bona fide cack-handed idiocy).
]]>Obviously, this depends on one’s personality, but I don’t agree with this at all.
People who are happy to admit that they’re wrong (better yet, those who can be funny about it in the process – search this blog for the word "fucksticks") are usually far more congenial company both online and off than those who cling rigidly to their belief in their intellectual supremacy, petrified that even the tiniest chink in their armour might reveal a hollow core.
And I’d argue that this is much more important than you’re making out – I can think of a great many people in the blogosphere and elsewhere who I almost invariably disagree with as a matter of principle, but who I nonetheless genuinely like, and because I like them I read their stuff much more regularly than would normally be the case – and am much more likely to take their views seriously as a result.
If you can find it, a post I did on a Richard Dawkins lecture this February may meet your request.
It doesn’t at all – I can see why you might have been under the impression that it was, but it’s not self-deprecating in the sense that I was using the term, in that while you’re letting your hair down a little bit (literally and metaphorically), you’re still very careful not to own up to (let alone, heaven forfend, poke fun at) any personal weakness other than being temporarily tired. And even then you construct the story so that the butt of the joke at the end is the pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses rather than yourself, as underlined by your post header, which is the very opposite of self-deprecating ("Peter Cuthbertson 1 Jehovah’s Witnesses 0").
A genuinely self-deprecating anecdote would reverse that score and have you doing or saying something embarrassing in front of them – explicable through lack of sleep, granted, but embarrassing nonetheless, and where the butt of the joke is clearly yourself rather than the other characters in the story. Long experience tells me that this approach is far more likely to win friends and even influence people than the one you actually took.
That said, you have posted at least one genuinely self-deprecating comment in your time – I can’t for the life of me remember where, but in it you rather touchingly confessed that your antennae for sarcasm (and, by extension, verbal humour based on nuance in general) are so poorly tuned as to be effectively useless.
This admission came, inevitably, after you treated an obviously piss-taking post (and "obviously" is a bit of an understatement, as I recall) with typically furrowed-brow seriousness, all of which added greatly to the entertainment value – in fact, I recall your post being a lot funnier than the original. But fair play to you for being honest when caught out.
But this presumably explains why you don’t find John’s posts funny either – and certainly why you can’t appreciate the difference between them and something genuinely inane. It’s there, and to me (and Larry, Andrew, Dsquared et al) it’s obvious, but I suspect a point-by-point explanation would be worse than useless, in much the same way as explaining Private Eye jokes to anyone who hasn’t grown up with the magazine is generally an exercise in utter futility.
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