[updated 4: 15 to add Brendan Behan quote]
I got back from a trip to London and Ireland last week with a ridiculous added 14 pounds of newspaper weight in my bags and lots of international blog topics in my head. Have you been readin this British MP expense scandal story? It got better every day I was there. I only wish we had moats here in America so that politicians could attempt to claim taxpayer dollars to get them cleared on a regular basis. More to come on that.
__________
“Ever since Sir Peter Viggers, the Conservative MP for Gosoport in
Hampshire, was repaid 1,645 pounds from the public purse to fund the purchase of a smart 5ft timber-built duckhouse for his garden, duck lovers everywhere have been falling over themselves to acquire an elegant solution to the problem of foxes massacring your mallards.”
The Guardian, advertising its “Live like an MP!” contest inviting readers to win a duck house by finding the best example of “sheer skull-numbing crassness of this whole episode” in the 20,000 + pages of MP expense reports.
__________
“Such independence of spirit makes the Navy a service to which any resolute child persecuted by vegetables may still aspire.”
The Daily Telegraph editorial page, “Sea greens incorruptible,” 6/17, commenting on the front-page story that Capt. Wayne Keble has outlawed brussels sprouts from the HMS Bulwark, calling them “the Devil’s vegetable.”
__________
“The tiniest lump in an otherwise perfectly smooth roux sauce is now taken as the tumour of impending bankruptcy.”
Carissa Casey, Irish Times, “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” on how Irish restauranteurs are faring in the recession, 6/21
________
“While other writers horde words like misers, Behan sends them out on a spree, ribald, flushed, and spoiling for a fight.”
Literary Critic Kenneth Tynan on Irish playright Brendan Behan, as recounted through an actor on the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl, 6/22
__________
“I’ve never paid for a woman. I’ve never understood what satisfation there would be if there was not the pleasure of conquest.”
Italian Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi to Italian gossip magazine Chi on allegations that he has been paying prostitutes to come to his official residence, 6/24
does the pleausre of conquest include e-mail flirtation?
Inverted Soapbox 