[Mary Meriam]

Originally Posted by John Whitworth

They recently arrested a student for the 'hate crime' of calling a police horse 'gay'.

What is it with horses over there, John? I recall these amusing Whitworthian lines:

Fired blank cartridge at the royal
Horse's arse did some poor sod.
Me, Your Majesty, I'm loyal.
I don't want five years in quod.

[David Rosenthal]

...nevermind...

(I was needlessly rehashing the PC debate, which seems to have given way to a better discussion about, of all things, Eliot and poetry and stuff. I said what I have to say about Eliot above. Onward...)

David R.

[Janet Kenny]

I wonder who the PC woman would like to play the role of Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier?
A woman plays the role of a young man who is in bed with a mature woman as the curtain rises and who later disguises himself as a woman in order to fool a lecherous man.

[Holly Martins]

I remember finding an old diary of mine and being appalled at the terrible person strutting through its pages. We all change as we get older - hopefully for the better - and I'm sure Eliot became nicer as he aged. The Quartets have a goodess and generosity of spirit missing from both The Waste Land and his letter to the Daily Mail demanding Edith Thompson's execution. And isn't The Cocktail Party about personal forgiveness and redemption?

[Philip Quinlan]

Yes

I've always thought Eliot's painting of ordinary people in The Waste Land was slightly snobbish - as if seen in great detail but from a great height.

Philip

[Richard Epstein]

John,

How do you get to be 6% white--I mean, other than lying out in the sun, but keeping your right foot, from the ankle down, covered?

RHE

[John Whitworth]

Dunno, mate. I'm quoting the Daily Torygraph. How far back do you have to get to have a hundred ancestors. Wait a minute. Go back to 60 That is 2+4+8+16+32. Great-great-great grandparents and their descendants. Three were white. Six were chinese. And the remaining fifty-odd were black. I think if you mess about with a tree diagram it'll come right.

[Richard Epstein]

So we think that the Telegraph tracked down the great-great-great grandparents of this recent immigrant rapist and their descendents, reckoned the ethnicity of each, and determined that 6 out of the 100 were white? Maybe the guy had a family tree in his pocket.

RHE

[Julie Steiner]

Completely irrelevant to the Eliot topic, and only tangentially relevant to the other tangents here, but some might find this interesting:

"At conception, half the mother's DNA and half the father's go into each of the child's 23 chromosome pairs. But there's no telling how much of it will make the more or less random cut when their grandchildren are conceived, or in any of the subdivisions after that. In theory, you may possess no genetic connection whatsoever to your own great-great-great-grandfather."
--Richard Conniff, "The Family Tree, Pruned: Its lure is powerful--but genealogy is meaningless, relatively" (Smithsonian, July 2007, pp. 90-97)

[John Whitworth]

Dunno. The Telegraph are great ones for tracking as many an MP has found to his cost. I suspect they are quoting some other source. The bottom line is it's a black guy, everybody knew it was a black guy, and though of course it COULD have been a white guy, it wasn't on this occasion. My children are 25% English 25% Scots 25% Irish 25% Welsh, if you go back two generations, but REALLY they are 100% English. Is that relevant? Probably not and you are probably right. Those percentages are crap. The guy's a black West Indian.