Heaven and hell to merge services

It has just been announced by a joint panel of representatives from both above and below that Heaven and Hell are to merge many of their services in an attempt to reach budget targets set by their respective bosses.

According to a press release, admin and some policy roles currently supporting both Saints and Sinners are to be cut back with many positions merged into one service.

The aim is to continue delivering the complete heaven/hell experience to those who arrive but reduce the amount of paperwork required for the process [...]

The statement said the proposed amalgamation of the policy divisions of heaven and hell would bring a more robust approach to the development of guiding documents. It cited the Ten Commandments as a classic example of great policy writing.

"There are only 10 bullet points in the entire document. They are succinct, devoid of waffle and easy to understand. The mission statement developed by those managing hell is also sharp and to the point. Terms like fire, brimstone and damnation are very evocative and clearly represent the nature of the experience awaiting those heading that way.

"Merging these two different messages into one brief directive: "Good or Evil - You Choose" then syndicating the concept to a reality TV programme will reduce staffing costs and boost profits."

- Terry Sarten, Wanganui Chronicle, 28 August 2011

Children's face paint

Waiting in line for the boats, our children rub their chins in the dirt and push their foreheads against our feet. They roll around on the ground and shout obscenities, then run in circles, screaming nonsense, while we play with the car keys in our pockets and gawk passively at the boats. Typically, we don't allow our children to misbehave this way. However, we do our best to understand. Their faces are in pain.

Our children's cheeks begin to ache as they wait in line for the boats and continue to ache until their faces are painted at the Frost Mountain Picnic. We've come to understand that all children are born with phantom cat whiskers. All children are born with phantom dog faces. All children are born with phantom American flag foreheads, rainbow-patterned jawbones, and deep, curving pirate scars, the absence of which haunts them throughout their youth. We understand that all children are born with searing and trivial images hidden in their faces, the absence of which causes them a great deal of discomfort. It is a pain that only the brush of a face painter can alleviate, each stroke revealing the cryptic pictures in our children's faces. Any good parent knows this.

- Seth Fried, 'Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre', in The Great Frustration, Berkeley, 2011

Thor only knows

Special effects seem to muffle rather than quicken [director Kenneth] Branagh's interest, and, besides, there is no CGI in existence that could cope with the difference between [Natalie] Portman, a practicing sylph, and [Chris] Hemsworth, who looks to me like six and a half feet of corned beef. At one point, he takes his shirt off, and she stands beside him, a bit dazed, with the top of her head not quite parallel with his nipples. At the end - and I am giving away no secrets here - they kiss. But how? Is he holding her up, with her little toes kicking his kneecaps? Thor only knows.

- Anthony Lane reviews Thor, New Yorker, 16 May 2011

Cigarettes and Listerine

Creating and playing on consumer insecurities, advertisers told potential buyers that one key to maintaining beauty, youth, energy and attractiveness was health and personal hygiene. The actress Constance Talmadge, promoting cigarettes, declared, 'There's real health in Lucky Strike ... For years this has been no secret to those men who keep fit and trim. They know that Luckies steady their nerves and do not harm their physical condition. They know that Lucky Strike is the favourite cigarette of many prominent athletes, who must keep in good shape'. Advertisers' success in manipulating the gullible buying public became an article of faith. An essay of 1922 on the subject opened with the words, 'Do I understand you to say that you do not believe in advertising? Indeed! Soon you will be telling me that you do not believe in God'.

In the early 1920s Listerine, variously used in the nineteenth century as a surgical antiseptic, a cure for venereal disease and a floor-cleaner, was transformed by advertising into a magical product which would free its user from the dreadful, life-ruining scourge of halitosis - a faux-medical term for bad breath invented by the marketing men. Their advertisements showed a downcast girl holding her friend's bridal bouquet above the caption, 'Often a bridesmaid, but never a bride'. The cause of her loneliness was 'chronic halitosis' - which, happily, Listerine (rebranded as a mouthwash) promised to cure. Listerine's profits soared from $115,000 to $8 million in just seven years.

- Lucy Moore, Anything Goes: A biography of the Roaring Twenties, London, 2008, p.146-7.

Scottish politics

We have our own Parliament in Edinburgh, at a place called Holyrood, which, for information, is just north of Brigadoon. If you haven't been there and want to paint a mental picture for yourself, think of the glamour of Hollywood - then think of the exact opposite. With kilts.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me set the scene. The main political parties in Scotland are the SNP, Labour, and The Proclaimers. In addition to the main parties, a number of smaller parties have had some success, because we in Scotland have a system of proportional representation. 'What is this fictional form of voting,' I hear you cry, 'Is it something J.K. Rowling wrote of in the marvellous Harry Potter books?' No, it's real! You may have heard that PR is a concept that's as likely to work as Europe, but it does. As a result there are representatives at Holyrood from minority parties, such as the Greens... and the Conservatives. I should clarify that the situation for the Tories in Scotland is very different to that down south. In Scotland you're as likely to see a Tory as you are fruit. The majority party is the Scottish National Party, headed up by First Minister Alec Salmond. He's a tremendous orator, but he's got the unfortunate tendency, when he becomes passionate, to sound increasingly like a Dalek. 'Westminster must bow to the wishes of the Scottish people. Exterminate!'

- Susan Calman, The Now Show, Radio 4, 1 July 2011.

A peace activist

I think I can announce it as a fact, that it is not the wish or interest of that government [Massachusetts], or any other upon the continent, separately or collectively, to set up for independency [...] I am as well satisfied as I can be of my existence that no such thing is desired by any thinking man in all North America; on the contrary, that it is the ardent wish of the warmest advocates for liberty, that peace and tranquility, upon constitutional grounds, may be restored, and the horrors of civil discord prevented.

- George Washington to Capt Robert Mackenzie, 9 October 1774, quoted in J.C.D. Clark, 'British America: What if there had been no American Revolution?', in Virtual History, Niall Ferguson (ed.), 2011 (originally published 1997). 

On marriage and politics

Then there's the matter of "personal baggage", which in [Newt] Gingrich's case is a steamer trunk of Titanic proportions. Republicans are strong believers in man-on-woman marriage, so it makes sense that three of the most prominent Presidential possibilities - Daniels, Trump and Gingrich - have married eight times. (Only seven wives, though: Daniels married the same woman twice, with a Grover Cleveland-like four-year interval during which she left him to marry someone else). Gingrich stands out, for hypocrisy (daily demanding Clinton's impeachment which carrying on his own extra-marital affair with a subordinate), brutality (dumping his first wife while she was in treatment for cancer), and chutzpah (attributing his adulteries to "how passionately I felt about this country").

- Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker, 23 May 2011

Insert your own 'short leg' reference here

Freddie Owsley and his family were playing a game of beach cricket last week. Which was a fine thing for a teenager during a half-term holiday in Polzeath. The only problem was that nobody had brought a bat. No matter. Freddie found a suitable stick in the rocks nearby, long, thin and smooth with a lump at one end that would make a good club head. Freddie's hunch was right. The stick had a sizeable sweet-spot and when he swung and hit it sent sixes sailing out into the sea.

They were half-way through the game when a family friend who happened to be a doctor spotted that the reclaimed bat was in fact a human thigh bone. The police later found part of a pelvis and spine as well. Local archaeologist Phil Coplestone estimates that the bones are 200 years old, and thinks that they are the remains of a sailor whose body was washed ashore after a shipwreck in 1808.

- Andy Bull, The Spin cricket newsletter, Guardian, 14 June 2011

How to appear diligent

Sir - I can remember working in the City of London back in the 1990s when it started to become necessary to work longer hours. A colleague had an extra jacket that he left over the back of his chair so that it looked like he was away from his desk. In fact, he had left to catch his train.

- Cary Labdon, letter to the Times, 25 May 2011

Flashman weighs his options

In George Macdonald Fraser's 1990 novel Flashman and the Mountain of Light, the eponymous anti-hero and unabashed cad finds himself in a bit of a pickle during his secret mission to the Court of the Punjab in 1845. He sits down to tabulate the pros and cons of his present perilous situation, in his own inimitable style:

EVIL: I am cut off in a savage land which will be at war with my own country presently 

GOOD: I enjoy diplomatic immunity, for what it's worth, and am in good health, but ruined.

EVIL: An attempt has been made to assassinate me. These buggers would sooner murder people than eat their dinners.

GOOD: It failed, and I am under the protection of the queen bee, who rides like a rabbit. Also, [the American adventurer and agent Alexander] Gardner will look out for me.

EVIL: My orderly turns out to be the greatest villain since Dick Turpin, and is an American to boot.

GOOD: [Major] Broadfoot chose him, and since I see no reason why he should be hostile to me, I shall watch him like a hawk.

EVIL: Damn Broadfoot for landing me in this stew, when I could have been safe at home rogering Elspeth [Flashman's wife].

GOOD: Rations and quarters are A1, and Mangla sober is a capital mount, though she don't compare to Jeendan drunk.

EVIL: If I were a praying man, the Almighty would hear from me in no uncertain terms, and much good it would do me.

GOOD: Being a pagan (attached C of E) with no divine resources, I shall tread uncommon wary and keep my pepperbox [pistol] handy.