My point, which you totally missed, was that if you basically had an identical movie, with pretty much exactly the same story, special effects, etc, that was told as a stand-alone movie, then it wouldn't have been so likely to sweep the board dramatically.
A fair amount of the voters who voted for ROTK weren't just voting for ROTK they were voting for the trilogy as a whole. In essence, it's likely that ROTK won Oscars in several categories that it wouldn't have won solely on it's own merits.
Being the final film in a trilogy (and a trilogy that was played out to audiences over a relatively short period of time), ROTK greatly benefited from earlier parts of the story when it came to the Oscars and other awards.
Similarly, the first two films will, to some extent, have been hurt by the fact that they were the opening and middle acts of a trilogy, and some people who were blown away by The Fellowship Of The Ring or The Two Towers or both won't have voted for them because "it wasn't the right time" to recognise Peter Jackson's achievements, for fear of having the trilogy monopolise the awards for three years running, etc.
Oscar voters don't always recognise the best performances. Often people will win awards "because it was their turn". Martin Landau winning Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Ed Wood over Samuel L. Jackson for his turn in Pulp Fiction is the best example. Michael Caine's recent Oscar for Cider House Rules is another.
Whether you want to admit it or not, it's a simple fact that, sometimes, voters ignore the rules and reward people for their careers rather than for any single effort. In a way, the voters were doing that to some degree when they feted ROTK this year.
If you still think I'm talking rubbish ask yourself this question: why did ROTK win so many Oscars, every single one which it was up for, when both FOTR and TTT came away relatively empty-handed? Was ROTK that much better than it's predecessors? Was it that groundbreaking compared to what had come before?
To answer your question directly, the point isn't to create a hypothetical and ask "What if there hadn't been two other movies?" the point is to recognise that all three movies were being voted for this time around, not just one.
In terms of cinematography, the footage of the fires calling Rohan to Gondor's aid was fantastic, but overall the cinematography wasn't that impressive. You've got to remember that a great many scenes used mainly CGI backdrops, and I'm not sure this category was designed to cover footage of non-live scenery and action.
The winner of that category, Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World was absolutely in a different class to the rest of the field, ROTK included. I don't think Peter Jackson would argue that he was slighted in that department, especially after his 11 out of 11 haul.
Let's be honest here, the voters didn't award 11 Oscars for Return Of The King, they awarded 11 Oscars for the trilogy.
All the good karma generated by the first two movies helped ROTK enormously. If it had been a stand-alone film then it's highly doubtful that it would have been so successful at gaining the votes of the Academy's members.
There's a difference between asking someone a few questions, scanning their coat, checking their other clothing and carry-on luggage and that of any travelling companions and automatically treating someone like they've committed a crime and giving them the "bright lights in their eyes" treatment for daring to wear a common piece of clothing.
On the other hand, there's the total incompetence of allowing a passenger to travel with live ammo.
I'd rather live in a world where fuck-ups were of the first kind than of the latter kind but they're both pretty good examples that security at airports isn't perfect. What good is the vigilance that flags up so many false positives if the actual positives are totally missed?
And on top of that, some of the security systems are inherently flawed. Someone recently tried entering Osama bin Laden's name on the US fly/no-fly list only to find that the US's number one target was cleared to travel. Now we all know that bin Laden isn't going to be flying into the US on a commercial flight using his own name any time soon but it's just another indicator that the systems that the US has put in place to prevent potential hijackers from boarding aircraft isn't totally up to the job.
These are actual examples of how security personnel at airports screw up. I'm not an advocate of racial profiling but you don't think that a Sudanese man, someone from a country that the US has bombed in recent years to retaliate against Al Qaeda strikes, shouldn't be able to get live ammunition onto a transatlantic plane leaving from Washington DC?
As for the x-ray machines and the damage they can do, well, you obviously don't know any professional photographers or even regular businessmen.
Contrary to popular belief, airport security personnel aren't exactly smart.
Two recent examples for you:
1. A passenger from Germany who was stopped and detained for having wires protruding from her jacket. It was nothing more than an ordinary electric jacket as used by bikers for the last twenty-odd years but that didn't stop the security guys from treating the passenger like a terrorist.
An example of them getting it wrong by going overboard.
2. A Sudanese man who was stopped at Heathrow with five live bullets in his coat. The man had just travelled from Washington DC, and the fact that someone was carrying live ammunition onto an aircraft was totally missed by the security in DC. So, security at Washington is so tight that you can get munitions onto a transatlantic aircraft without being spotted.
An example of them getting it wrong by making basic mistakes.
Remember, these are the people who insist on everything going through an x-ray machine, even materials that are highly sensitive to rays and easily damaged, because they know best and because the machines are "harmless".
As you've found out, coming up with an area for continental Europe isn't as easy as it first appears. If you want a comparison with the US, counting just the EU states allows you to compare similar populations (US has around 285 million people, EU has around 300 million) but clearly there are more countries in Europe than are included in the current membership of the EU.
If you're going to compare x, y or z in the US to x, y or z in Europe, comparing the the US to the current EU membership has strong merit.
Comparing the US to the entire continent isn't as valid, if you're concerned about comparing apples with apples: the population of the whole of Europe (as defined by that site) is in excess of 728 million, and a fair chunk of those people, perhaps even the majority, live in former Eastern Bloc countries that are hardly analogous to the US in terms of education, industry, technological development, etc. Some of them them are so poor that they could even be classed as developing nations.
However, let's not talk about that for a second, let's talk about the physical (non-political) geography of continental Europe.
The very site that you link to describes Turkey as being in two continents, Asia and Europe. Istanbul, which lies on the entrance to the Black Sea in one of the most western parts of Turkey is commonly described as being the only city in the world that's in two continents too, so it's fair to say that anything to the south and the west of the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara and the Bosporus (collectively the channels that lead into the Black Sea, and all shown in the top left of this map) is in Asia.
So, very little of Turkey's 769,630 sq km of land mass is actually in Europe. I don't know the exact figure but, if I had to estimate, I'd say that somewhere around the 7 percent of the country is in Europe, give or take a couple of percentage points. So that's roughly 716,000 sq km (769,630 * 0.93 = 715,756) of Turkey that should be discounted.
Similarly, including Georgia and its 69,700 sq km is stretching it a bit too as, apart from the Russian Federation, it's only "European" neighbour is the eastern-most extreme of the Asian portion of Turkey. The other former Soviet states that are in the same region (Armenia and Azerbaijan) are classed as being in Asia, and it seems to me that the only reason for calling Georgia a European country is its small Black Sea coastline.
Politically, these areas might be considered part of Europe but geographically they're clearly not.
Even including Iceland, with its 100,250 sq km, could be considered a stretch, as it's hardly part of the continental geography. Heck, if they had put it in its real location rather than moving it for convenience then it wouldn't even be on that site's initial map of Europe!
So Asian Turkey plus Georgia and Iceland make up a fair chunk of land. If you take them away from the total land mass of Europe, given as 9,938,000 sq km by the same source, then you're left with an area of roughly 9,052,000 sq km.
So it that it? No. It would be nice to be able to say so, but if I've demonstrated anything it's that how big Europe is is very dependent on how you define it in the first place. It's not as unambiguously defined as, say, North America or Africa, as the point at which Europe ends and Asia starts isn't exactly set in stone.
Is the US bigger than continental Europe? I'd say so, for the reasons I've given above, and so would most others, but you're free to disagree.
Even so, the point I was making to the AC to whom I was originally replying to was that comparing the US to any one country in Europe is not comparing like with like, and that's plain for any fool to see.
Can you imagine how screwed up Jack Bauer would be if he took that long to find a Presidential assassin/rogue nuclear device/killer virus? And can you imagine how torturous watching the scenes with his wife/daughter/girlfriend/whoever being inept and all girlie woud be if they lasted a few centuries each? You'd kill yourself before the next episode...
Hey dumbass, the EU (which is basically every country in Western Europe apart from Switzerland and Norway) and the USA have roughly equal populations, so comparing Europe and the US is pretty fair. Heck, do you even know how much larger the US is than the entire European continent?
If we did things your way you'd compare the US to Luxembourg, a nice country but with a population of only 386.000, which is smaller than most cities. Next time, dumbass, try comparing apples to apples, not apples to oranges.
Pick up a book every once in a while and read something. You never know, you might learn actually learn something about physical and human geography or statistics or logic or (shock, horror) manners. Perhaps if you did that more often you'd be more than just a dumb ass yourself.
Yeah, because quality programmes such as Dead Ringers, Little Britain and Nighty Night, all three of which are new shows that the BBC has come up with in the last couple of years are just figments of my imagination.
At least two of those three debuted on BBC3, one of those new digital channels, and it's hard to imagine that all three would have been made if the BBC still had only two channels.
So that's three great new shows and those only touch one genre (comedy). I think perhaps you're writing off the BBC's ability to foster and develop talent a little too quickly.
I'm a hypocrite because I want equality where others don't? That's a new one on me.
Marriage is a subset of civil union? Care to describe similar types of civil union that are recognised by the law?
There are wider issues here; it's not just about gay marriages. For example, there are still issues in most Western societies with gays serving in the military. Why should that be? Is a gay soldier any less able of defending his or her country? And it's not even just about gays, it's about how we treat minorities in general: today's issue is about gays, tomorrow's may be about you or me.
I find it ironic that a President who was so quick to argue that the reason that America was a target for terrorists was because they hate the freedom that Americans enjoy yet actively seeks to use federal law to deny some of those Americans freedoms that their individual states have granted them.
One minute he's supposedly liberating the world from tyranny and the next minute he's persecuting American minorities is order to win votes? What happened to being a "compassionate conservative"? Where's that compassion gone now? You want to see hypocrisy? Well there's your hypocrisy!
America was founded on lofty ideals. The men and women that built it truely were pioneers, not just in terms of physical geography but in terms of politics and equality too. They had noble goals and honorable intentions, and they set out to build a country where the persecution that plagued Europe was a distant memory. It's a shame that persecution of a different kind, sexual rather than religious, is given life today by a President desperate to win at any cost.
Oh, and in future, if you're going to attack me, please don't post anonymously. Stand up, be proud of your position and don't be afraid to stand up and be counted. If you're not ashamed of what you have to say then why not log in like everyone else?
What's wrong with legitimising the homosexual lifestyle? Does it threaten you in some way? Are you scared of it?
A perversion of nature? There was a time when accepting anyone of any faith other than your own was "a perversion of nature". There was a time when putting a black man in a suit rather than chains was "a perversion of nature". There was a time when educating women was "a perversion of nature". There was a time when women working was "a perversion of nature". There was a time when an interracial relationship was "a perversion of nature".
Guess what, buddy? Nature evolves. Humanity does too, socially as well as genetically.
As for your comments about other species, well I put it to you if other animals engage in homosexual behaviour, or are born with too many or two few appendages, all without any intervention from man then, be definition that is natural. How you can say that something that occurs naturally isn't natural is beyond me.
Homosexuality is a fact of life. Trying to ban it isn't going to work. It might not be desirable from a "propagation of the species" point of view but it's here so laarn to live with it. You can either hate people for being gay and treat them as second class citizens for something that's none of your business or you can accept them for what they are and move on to more important matters.
Because marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Because they can procreate, and make babies, and if no one had ever done this, we would not exist.
This is valuable in society, and life. We need to make babies....
You do realise that marriage isn't a prerequisite for procreation, right? People were having babies before the concept of marriage ever existed. How do you think we all got here?
Of course, the U.N. isn't a governing body that makes enforcable laws superceding those of its member sovereign nations. It's more of a toothless tiger whose declarations hold as much water as a sieve.
And it will remain so as long as nations such as the US who claim to be world leaders use its channels when it suits them but ignore and ridicule it whenever it looks like they won't get their own way. Part of being a world leader is showing leadership. If you're not part of the solution then you're part of the problem.
Perhaps the US needs to start being a part of the solution by showing better leadership on issues such as the Kyoto accord, the International Criminal Court, the Geneva Convention and human rights, landmine usage, the Israeli/Palestinean situation, etc.
A sieve is what you end up with when you constantly drill holes into your best water bowl.
I don't have an issue if homosexuals want to get together and have the same rights as married heterosexuals. Just don't make me throw out my dictionary in the process. Call it something else like "legal union" and then make sure "legal unions" get the same benefits as "marriages".
You don't want gays to be allowed to have marriages but you want them to be allowed to get the same benefits and the same deal if they have legal unions? So you're getting all worked up over semantics? Over a word?
Pardon my language, but please tell me what the fucking difference would be then? I believe Shakespeare put it best when he said "a rose by any other name would still smell so sweet".
A "punter" is someone who punts, a punt being either:
1. A type of lat-bottomed boat pushed along the water by pushing off on the river/canal/sea bed with a long pole; or
2. A bet.
The term "punter" can also refer to a customer, which is derived from the betting usage. Bookmakers (the people that are licenced to take bets) naturally refer to their customers as punters, and the term has spread to become a colloquial term for a customer in general.
Of course, the American Football definitions of punters and punts are derived from sporting usage elsewhere, in this case football (soccer if you must), where a punt is a kick upfield, and the term is normally used when a player kicks a ball with the express intention of just getting it away from the part of the field that he was in.
Basically, it describes a semi-desperate precautionary defensive manouvre, which, I suppose, is not too dissimilar to how a punt works in American Football. However, rarely (if ever) have I heard the term punter used in this context, so it's doubtful that any Englishman that you hear use the word is referring to this meaning.
Why just the EU? Why can't we all have access to the stripped down version?
Because if you can't handle a one second shot of a bare nipple during the Super Bowl halftime show then I don't think you're ready for a stripped down anything.
Yeah, I agree with that assessment. If that's the grandparent's definition of "barely audible" then he needs a new hearing aid. The sample was the song, from the first note to the last. A few drums and a base on top of it didn't change a damn thing.
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My point, which you totally missed, was that if you basically had an identical movie, with pretty much exactly the same story, special effects, etc, that was told as a stand-alone movie, then it wouldn't have been so likely to sweep the board dramatically.
A fair amount of the voters who voted for ROTK weren't just voting for ROTK they were voting for the trilogy as a whole. In essence, it's likely that ROTK won Oscars in several categories that it wouldn't have won solely on it's own merits.
Being the final film in a trilogy (and a trilogy that was played out to audiences over a relatively short period of time), ROTK greatly benefited from earlier parts of the story when it came to the Oscars and other awards.
Similarly, the first two films will, to some extent, have been hurt by the fact that they were the opening and middle acts of a trilogy, and some people who were blown away by The Fellowship Of The Ring or The Two Towers or both won't have voted for them because "it wasn't the right time" to recognise Peter Jackson's achievements, for fear of having the trilogy monopolise the awards for three years running, etc.
Oscar voters don't always recognise the best performances. Often people will win awards "because it was their turn". Martin Landau winning Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Ed Wood over Samuel L. Jackson for his turn in Pulp Fiction is the best example. Michael Caine's recent Oscar for Cider House Rules is another.
Whether you want to admit it or not, it's a simple fact that, sometimes, voters ignore the rules and reward people for their careers rather than for any single effort. In a way, the voters were doing that to some degree when they feted ROTK this year.
If you still think I'm talking rubbish ask yourself this question: why did ROTK win so many Oscars, every single one which it was up for, when both FOTR and TTT came away relatively empty-handed? Was ROTK that much better than it's predecessors? Was it that groundbreaking compared to what had come before?
To answer your question directly, the point isn't to create a hypothetical and ask "What if there hadn't been two other movies?" the point is to recognise that all three movies were being voted for this time around, not just one.
In terms of cinematography, the footage of the fires calling Rohan to Gondor's aid was fantastic, but overall the cinematography wasn't that impressive. You've got to remember that a great many scenes used mainly CGI backdrops, and I'm not sure this category was designed to cover footage of non-live scenery and action.
The winner of that category, Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World was absolutely in a different class to the rest of the field, ROTK included. I don't think Peter Jackson would argue that he was slighted in that department, especially after his 11 out of 11 haul.
Let's be honest here, the voters didn't award 11 Oscars for Return Of The King, they awarded 11 Oscars for the trilogy.
All the good karma generated by the first two movies helped ROTK enormously. If it had been a stand-alone film then it's highly doubtful that it would have been so successful at gaining the votes of the Academy's members.
I think the number you're looking for is 42.
There's a difference between asking someone a few questions, scanning their coat, checking their other clothing and carry-on luggage and that of any travelling companions and automatically treating someone like they've committed a crime and giving them the "bright lights in their eyes" treatment for daring to wear a common piece of clothing.
On the other hand, there's the total incompetence of allowing a passenger to travel with live ammo.
I'd rather live in a world where fuck-ups were of the first kind than of the latter kind but they're both pretty good examples that security at airports isn't perfect. What good is the vigilance that flags up so many false positives if the actual positives are totally missed?
And on top of that, some of the security systems are inherently flawed. Someone recently tried entering Osama bin Laden's name on the US fly/no-fly list only to find that the US's number one target was cleared to travel. Now we all know that bin Laden isn't going to be flying into the US on a commercial flight using his own name any time soon but it's just another indicator that the systems that the US has put in place to prevent potential hijackers from boarding aircraft isn't totally up to the job.
Anecdotal? Are you fucking kidding me?
These are actual examples of how security personnel at airports screw up. I'm not an advocate of racial profiling but you don't think that a Sudanese man, someone from a country that the US has bombed in recent years to retaliate against Al Qaeda strikes, shouldn't be able to get live ammunition onto a transatlantic plane leaving from Washington DC?
As for the x-ray machines and the damage they can do, well, you obviously don't know any professional photographers or even regular businessmen.
Contrary to popular belief, airport security personnel aren't exactly smart.
Two recent examples for you:
1. A passenger from Germany who was stopped and detained for having wires protruding from her jacket. It was nothing more than an ordinary electric jacket as used by bikers for the last twenty-odd years but that didn't stop the security guys from treating the passenger like a terrorist.
An example of them getting it wrong by going overboard.
2. A Sudanese man who was stopped at Heathrow with five live bullets in his coat. The man had just travelled from Washington DC, and the fact that someone was carrying live ammunition onto an aircraft was totally missed by the security in DC. So, security at Washington is so tight that you can get munitions onto a transatlantic aircraft without being spotted.
An example of them getting it wrong by making basic mistakes.
Remember, these are the people who insist on everything going through an x-ray machine, even materials that are highly sensitive to rays and easily damaged, because they know best and because the machines are "harmless".
As you've found out, coming up with an area for continental Europe isn't as easy as it first appears. If you want a comparison with the US, counting just the EU states allows you to compare similar populations (US has around 285 million people, EU has around 300 million) but clearly there are more countries in Europe than are included in the current membership of the EU.
If you're going to compare x, y or z in the US to x, y or z in Europe, comparing the the US to the current EU membership has strong merit.
Comparing the US to the entire continent isn't as valid, if you're concerned about comparing apples with apples: the population of the whole of Europe (as defined by that site) is in excess of 728 million, and a fair chunk of those people, perhaps even the majority, live in former Eastern Bloc countries that are hardly analogous to the US in terms of education, industry, technological development, etc. Some of them them are so poor that they could even be classed as developing nations.
However, let's not talk about that for a second, let's talk about the physical (non-political) geography of continental Europe.
The very site that you link to describes Turkey as being in two continents, Asia and Europe. Istanbul, which lies on the entrance to the Black Sea in one of the most western parts of Turkey is commonly described as being the only city in the world that's in two continents too, so it's fair to say that anything to the south and the west of the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara and the Bosporus (collectively the channels that lead into the Black Sea, and all shown in the top left of this map) is in Asia.
So, very little of Turkey's 769,630 sq km of land mass is actually in Europe. I don't know the exact figure but, if I had to estimate, I'd say that somewhere around the 7 percent of the country is in Europe, give or take a couple of percentage points. So that's roughly 716,000 sq km (769,630 * 0.93 = 715,756) of Turkey that should be discounted.
Similarly, including Georgia and its 69,700 sq km is stretching it a bit too as, apart from the Russian Federation, it's only "European" neighbour is the eastern-most extreme of the Asian portion of Turkey. The other former Soviet states that are in the same region (Armenia and Azerbaijan) are classed as being in Asia, and it seems to me that the only reason for calling Georgia a European country is its small Black Sea coastline.
Politically, these areas might be considered part of Europe but geographically they're clearly not.
Even including Iceland, with its 100,250 sq km, could be considered a stretch, as it's hardly part of the continental geography. Heck, if they had put it in its real location rather than moving it for convenience then it wouldn't even be on that site's initial map of Europe!
716,000 + 69,700 + 100,250 = 885,950 (For simplicities sake, let's call this 886,000.)
So Asian Turkey plus Georgia and Iceland make up a fair chunk of land. If you take them away from the total land mass of Europe, given as 9,938,000 sq km by the same source, then you're left with an area of roughly 9,052,000 sq km.
So it that it? No. It would be nice to be able to say so, but if I've demonstrated anything it's that how big Europe is is very dependent on how you define it in the first place. It's not as unambiguously defined as, say, North America or Africa, as the point at which Europe ends and Asia starts isn't exactly set in stone.
Is the US bigger than continental Europe? I'd say so, for the reasons I've given above, and so would most others, but you're free to disagree.
Even so, the point I was making to the AC to whom I was originally replying to was that comparing the US to any one country in Europe is not comparing like with like, and that's plain for any fool to see.
It's sure got 24 beat for time.
Can you imagine how screwed up Jack Bauer would be if he took that long to find a Presidential assassin/rogue nuclear device/killer virus? And can you imagine how torturous watching the scenes with his wife/daughter/girlfriend/whoever being inept and all girlie woud be if they lasted a few centuries each? You'd kill yourself before the next episode...
Hey dumbass, the EU (which is basically every country in Western Europe apart from Switzerland and Norway) and the USA have roughly equal populations, so comparing Europe and the US is pretty fair. Heck, do you even know how much larger the US is than the entire European continent?
If we did things your way you'd compare the US to Luxembourg, a nice country but with a population of only 386.000, which is smaller than most cities. Next time, dumbass, try comparing apples to apples, not apples to oranges.
Pick up a book every once in a while and read something. You never know, you might learn actually learn something about physical and human geography or statistics or logic or (shock, horror) manners. Perhaps if you did that more often you'd be more than just a dumb ass yourself.
Yeah, because quality programmes such as Dead Ringers, Little Britain and Nighty Night, all three of which are new shows that the BBC has come up with in the last couple of years are just figments of my imagination.
At least two of those three debuted on BBC3, one of those new digital channels, and it's hard to imagine that all three would have been made if the BBC still had only two channels.
So that's three great new shows and those only touch one genre (comedy). I think perhaps you're writing off the BBC's ability to foster and develop talent a little too quickly.
I don't hear you mourning the five million who've died needlessly in Congo's current civil war.
Even seen one report about it on CNN/FOX/ABC/NBC or in your paper? No? I didn't think so.
I guessed you missed the point of the "So misunderstood" and "What's the worst that can happen" lines in my original post.
Why are people suddenly questioning Professor iPod's, uh, I mean Dr Bull's credentials? I'm telling you, that guy is so misunderstood.
Just let go of your suspicion and paranoia and put your trust in someone for a change. What's the worst that can happen?
I'm a hypocrite because I want equality where others don't? That's a new one on me.
Marriage is a subset of civil union? Care to describe similar types of civil union that are recognised by the law?
There are wider issues here; it's not just about gay marriages. For example, there are still issues in most Western societies with gays serving in the military. Why should that be? Is a gay soldier any less able of defending his or her country? And it's not even just about gays, it's about how we treat minorities in general: today's issue is about gays, tomorrow's may be about you or me.
I find it ironic that a President who was so quick to argue that the reason that America was a target for terrorists was because they hate the freedom that Americans enjoy yet actively seeks to use federal law to deny some of those Americans freedoms that their individual states have granted them.
One minute he's supposedly liberating the world from tyranny and the next minute he's persecuting American minorities is order to win votes? What happened to being a "compassionate conservative"? Where's that compassion gone now? You want to see hypocrisy? Well there's your hypocrisy!
America was founded on lofty ideals. The men and women that built it truely were pioneers, not just in terms of physical geography but in terms of politics and equality too. They had noble goals and honorable intentions, and they set out to build a country where the persecution that plagued Europe was a distant memory. It's a shame that persecution of a different kind, sexual rather than religious, is given life today by a President desperate to win at any cost.
Oh, and in future, if you're going to attack me, please don't post anonymously. Stand up, be proud of your position and don't be afraid to stand up and be counted. If you're not ashamed of what you have to say then why not log in like everyone else?
What's wrong with legitimising the homosexual lifestyle? Does it threaten you in some way? Are you scared of it?
A perversion of nature? There was a time when accepting anyone of any faith other than your own was "a perversion of nature". There was a time when putting a black man in a suit rather than chains was "a perversion of nature". There was a time when educating women was "a perversion of nature". There was a time when women working was "a perversion of nature". There was a time when an interracial relationship was "a perversion of nature".
Guess what, buddy? Nature evolves. Humanity does too, socially as well as genetically.
As for your comments about other species, well I put it to you if other animals engage in homosexual behaviour, or are born with too many or two few appendages, all without any intervention from man then, be definition that is natural. How you can say that something that occurs naturally isn't natural is beyond me.
Homosexuality is a fact of life. Trying to ban it isn't going to work. It might not be desirable from a "propagation of the species" point of view but it's here so laarn to live with it. You can either hate people for being gay and treat them as second class citizens for something that's none of your business or you can accept them for what they are and move on to more important matters.
So the reason that Budweiser is still "the king of beers" is because the Chattanooga Choo Choo was slower than treacle over a century ago?
Damn, talk about unlucky. If only they could have got the trains running faster...
Because marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Because they can procreate, and make babies, and if no one had ever done this, we would not exist.
...
This is valuable in society, and life. We need to make babies.
You do realise that marriage isn't a prerequisite for procreation, right? People were having babies before the concept of marriage ever existed. How do you think we all got here?
Of course, the U.N. isn't a governing body that makes enforcable laws superceding those of its member sovereign nations. It's more of a toothless tiger whose declarations hold as much water as a sieve.
And it will remain so as long as nations such as the US who claim to be world leaders use its channels when it suits them but ignore and ridicule it whenever it looks like they won't get their own way. Part of being a world leader is showing leadership. If you're not part of the solution then you're part of the problem.
Perhaps the US needs to start being a part of the solution by showing better leadership on issues such as the Kyoto accord, the International Criminal Court, the Geneva Convention and human rights, landmine usage, the Israeli/Palestinean situation, etc.
A sieve is what you end up with when you constantly drill holes into your best water bowl.
I don't have an issue if homosexuals want to get together and have the same rights as married heterosexuals. Just don't make me throw out my dictionary in the process. Call it something else like "legal union" and then make sure "legal unions" get the same benefits as "marriages".
You don't want gays to be allowed to have marriages but you want them to be allowed to get the same benefits and the same deal if they have legal unions? So you're getting all worked up over semantics? Over a word?
Pardon my language, but please tell me what the fucking difference would be then? I believe Shakespeare put it best when he said "a rose by any other name would still smell so sweet".
We aim to please.
A "punter" is someone who punts, a punt being either:
1. A type of lat-bottomed boat pushed along the water by pushing off on the river/canal/sea bed with a long pole; or
2. A bet.
The term "punter" can also refer to a customer, which is derived from the betting usage. Bookmakers (the people that are licenced to take bets) naturally refer to their customers as punters, and the term has spread to become a colloquial term for a customer in general.
Of course, the American Football definitions of punters and punts are derived from sporting usage elsewhere, in this case football (soccer if you must), where a punt is a kick upfield, and the term is normally used when a player kicks a ball with the express intention of just getting it away from the part of the field that he was in.
Basically, it describes a semi-desperate precautionary defensive manouvre, which, I suppose, is not too dissimilar to how a punt works in American Football. However, rarely (if ever) have I heard the term punter used in this context, so it's doubtful that any Englishman that you hear use the word is referring to this meaning.
Hope that helps.
Why just the EU? Why can't we all have access to the stripped down version?
Because if you can't handle a one second shot of a bare nipple during the Super Bowl halftime show then I don't think you're ready for a stripped down anything.
I think you'll find that the artist that you're referring to is called Sting, as in what bees do, rather than string, as in old frayed rope.
On the other hand, copyright fees earnt by cover versions, etc is money for old rope, as they say here in Britain.
(I'll save the "I'm afraid not"/"I'm a frayed knot" gag for another time.)
Yeah, I agree with that assessment. If that's the grandparent's definition of "barely audible" then he needs a new hearing aid. The sample was the song, from the first note to the last. A few drums and a base on top of it didn't change a damn thing.