Category Archives: Misc

What have the Greeks ever done for us?

The Parthenon in Athens

The Parthenon. Credit: Wikipedia user Thermos

I was thinking today about Greece and the problems it faces. Should the European Union bail out Greece with large sums of money? No, the EU shouldn’t but the entire world should.

I can already hear the economists among my two readers saying that this is a bad thing. They may be correct. Argentina decided to simply default on their debts and seems to be doing just fine. I am not an economist so what do I know? Here’s what I do know:

Python fans will recall the moment in The Life Of Brian when the question “What have the Romans ever done for us?” was asked. Just transpose Romans to Greeks and you’ll see where I’m going with this.

If you think about it for a moment, the world owes Greece a massive favour. Almost everything you see, do or touch today will owe something, somehow to Greece.

The Greeks gave us western civilisation, democracy, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, geometry and much, much more. These innovations affect everything. They may have stood on the shoulders of a few giants to do so but what we have today is largely thanks to Greece.

And while we’re at it, how about the United Kingdom returns the Elgin Marbles to where they belong. Every little helps.

Rental house

This is where we’ll be for the next three months.

v

Lounge

Lounge/Kitchen

Lounge/Kitchen

Eight inch spider

Eight inch spider

Lounge exterior

Lounge exterior

Bedrooms exterior

Bedrooms exterior

Verandah

Verandah

Verandah/Garden

Verandah/Garden

Garden/Driveway

Garden/Driveway

Lounge/Rear exterior

Lounge/Rear exterior

Front

Front

 

The problem with listening to the terminally stupid

It takes a particularly stupid and callous type of person to try and take advantage of the misery of others. Take this for example:

The Australian Christian Lobby managing director Jim Wallace criticised O’Connor over his remarks and said that if even a few deranged minds could be “taken over the edge by an obsession with violent games” then the game should be banned.

“The studied indifference of this killer to the suffering he was inflicting, his obvious dehumanising of his victims and the evil methodical nature of the killings have all the marks of games scenarios,” said Wallace.

“How can we allow the profits of the games industry and selfishness of games libertarians to place our increasingly dysfunctional society at further risk? Even if this prohibition were to save only one tragedy like this each twenty years it would be worth it.”

Asked in a phone interview whether he was specifically asking for a ban on Modern Warfare 2, Wallace said he did not want to single out a specific title as he did not know how many other violent games Breivik played.

“We need to look at each game on its merit and where the violence is excessive or gratuitous then we need to ban them,” he said.

Full story here with additional stupid comments.

I have not commented online about the tragedy in Norway for a reason: I don’t know all the background or the evidence. Not only that but anyone from around here knows what it’s like when people make ill-informed comments about a sad situation. I’ll just quote someone that understood so much about the failings of of the terminally stupid. Excuse the paraphrasing:

“[The terminally stupid] still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet.’ They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their day.” – Douglas Adams

Banning games would have made no more difference in Norway than the banning of Christianity or fertiliser.