Roland Boer's Blog, page 80

Marriage under siege?

Marriage is a state under siege, we are told by conservative figures such as Cardinal George Pell, a childless man addressed as ''father'' who wears a red dress, a scenario seen as normal only in the Catholic Church and a number of bars in Collingwood. (With thanks to Guy Rundle)

Return of the Trabant!

In about the year 1989 the world took a turn for the worse. I don't mean the rolling back of a stale old communism in Eastern Europe - it was the Trabant. It ceased production in the main factory in Zwickau (East Germany) soon after the Berlin Wall fell.



This oh-so-sexy car with a two-stroke engine had a dipstick for the fuel guage and a blanket under the back seat for extra warmth. I heard that one model had a flap in the side of the diver's door through which you could stick your foot if the b

It's the season for wierd and wonderful blog responses

A couple of the more 'interesting' responses that turned up on my China blogs:

for your baby.
you are pretty good.
Your site very useful.
When I read the article and see a variety, it makes me happy.
Permission to offer my website,
A site about tulip dress

But Krulayar takes the cake:

ALLAH THE ALMIGHTY IS ALREADY ON EARTH !!!

The sign of His arrival: A face in the sky video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIsZ9bXqhxA

For details:Please stop in http://manaalmahdi.wordpress.com/

Please refer to someone inchar

Take goodness and beauty, for example

More on Socrates (aka Plato):

One of Socrates's standard moves is to ask a question like, 'what is goodness?' or 'what is a good rule?' or 'what is beauty?' Lovely abstract questions, aren't they, something males only can ponder in the peace of a symposium, in between bowls of wine and taking a moment to penetrate whatever comes your way (as long as it has a pulse).

What crap! Plato does a nice propaganda job of concealing the class interests in these questions. Like his fellow aristocrats, this p

Socrates was a pretentious prick and Plato a stuck-up aristocrat

Socrates has always annoyed me, ever since I studied him in philosophy. We were led to believe that he was a great champion of freedom, a Christ-like figure who paid the ultimate price for truth. But the more I read the more I found him insufferable. A painful know-it-all who would pontificate to any idiot who could put up with him. The Athenian assembly should have done away with him much earlier.

But did he really exist or is he a figment of Plato's imagination? Those famed dialogues are dreadf

T99: Shanghai to Hong Kong

Continued from my earlier China posts:

At last the time came for what I had really been waiting for: the train journey from Shanghai to Hong Kong (actually to Hung Hom station). Not the way people from overseas travel, I was told. 'Why don't you catch a plane?' Others opined. 'It's faster'. Not for me, an aviophobic who takes the strongest sleeping pills he can in order to bring on a coma for those dreadful long haul flights that are needed from time to time. No, I was after the train.

With a smal

Calvinolatry Up and Away

James Harding has risen to the occasion, so to speak, and given his opening salvo at Calvinolatry. Wonderful piece, revelaing some of the scintillating form of his Bible and Critical Theory Seminar paper on David and Jonathan. Here we find the strange sensibilities of the biblical commentator (the prudish Zehnder) mercilessly exposed, and much discussion about 'David's imaginary hard-on in 1 Sam 20:41 and Jonathan's mythical membrum virilis in 2 Sam 1:22'? Not to mention Ezekiel ... but you'll h

Humour in the Face of Death, Part 13

The palliative care nurse said: 'I find that people die the way they have lived'. I have thought much about that comment since, although in my father's case there was a slight but significant variation: he died the way they both lived.

The constant struggle for control – who was going to make the decisions regarding food, the hospital bed at home, the amount of morphine and actually when to die – carried on until the end.

My father stubbornly resisted morphine until he decided it was time to go, w

Two Great New Blogs: Dunedin School and Calvinoltary

A scintillating new blog comes our way from the 'great nerve centre of innovative biblical studies in NZ' - The Dunedin School. Well worth keeping on your regular reading list, especially since they quote me, kind of:

Nobody can quite pinpoint the time at which 'the Dunedin School' first became famous as the centre of what has become known as neo-iconoclasm. Many attribute the epithet to Roland Boer (yet the attribution has never been clearly established). Indeed, following a conference in New Ze

The Case of the Stripper, the Dildo and the Best Man

Here's a court case where I'd love to have been on this jury.

The complainant: a best man from the snooty end of town who organises a bucks' night.

He calls Simply Irresistable, an agency that offers XXX-rated entertainment. Given a range of choices, he opts for 'Anal'.

On the evening of the bucks' night, the same best man has had a few drinks; he finds himself on all fours on the stage with his pants around his ankles - as one does. He is joined by a certain Ms Naggs (!), a working mother who need