Saturday, March 20, 2004

The only sign language I know is a word I can't repeat here

This will surprise no one here, but the Bushies are trying to prevent the use of generic drugs for AIDS in the Third World, and will waste taxpayer dollars by buying the expensive stuff. What hadn’t occurred to me as an advantage of generics is that sometimes you don’t have to take as many pills. The AIDS cocktail consists of pills the patents for which are held by 3 different companies, so you have to take 6 pills. If it’s generic, they can combine it, and you only have to take 2.

In Melbourne, a bicycle thief turns out to have been a fetishist. Or something. His house was packed with 1,000 bicycles.

British Sign Language is being revised to remove its incredible racism, with someone monitoring what goes out on tv programs for the deaf. The Sunday Telegraph: “The abandoned signs include "Jewish", in which a hand mimes a hooked nose; the sign for "gay", a flick of a limp wrist; and "Chinese", in which the index fingertips pull the eyes into a slant. Another dropped sign is that for "Indian", which is a finger pointing to an imaginary spot in the middle of a forehead.” Astonishingly, the deaf lobby is complaining that this is discrimination, interfering with deaf culture. The new sign for Jews mimics a menorah (although deaf Jews prefer something imitating stroking a beard), and the gay one is an upright thumb on one hand in the palm of the other, wobbling from side to side, whatever that means. The sign for Germans is a fist held to the forehead a finger pointing up--the shape of one of those World War I Prussian spiked helmets. Now in China, the sign for a Westerner is the shape of round eyes.

Repulsive, so I’m linking to it:
http://www.einsteinshrugged.co.uk

Yasser Arafat says The Passion of the Christ is not anti-semitic. So that’s ok then.

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