: “It’s short, unimportant and uninteresting.” That will show him! (
I’m not following the controversy in question very closely, as it’s largely a UK thing (or so it appears to me), but there is a great dust-up about the management of the former SPCK bookshops in the UK by the Saint Stephen the Great Trust (I’ve seen a few variations on this). If you want the story, start here.
Sam Norton received a cease and desist letter from Mark Brewer (of SSG), which he published, and Doug Chaplin published a blog post in support, from which I just had to quote this sentence:
. . . Indeed, his letters as quoted by Sam, like many of his past statements, seem to bear such a complex and tenuous relationship to reality that it would be difficult to describe them as truthful without placing an inappropriate burden on the semantic resources of the English language.
Classic! Absolutely classic!
(HT for all links: Metacatholic.)
Alas, it’s not entirely original.
Hmm. (Reveals literarily impoverished background.) Who said it (or something very like it) first?
The second half of the sentence is based upon something similar said by the character Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Prime Minister
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8keZbZL2ero – possibly the best satire on UK politics ever produced
In my view probably the best satire on politics ever produced anywhere. I am embarrassed I didn’t get it. I’ve watched every episode of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister at least twice.
I’ll have to think for some time before I can come up with an adequate excuse for having missed the allusion.