Good riddance, Joerg Haider

For Mario Borghezio, a great European is dead. 

Trust the teller, not the tale. 

Mnemonics

I've noticed that many of my labels (the little words at the bottom of each post - I know you knew, but still...) have only been used once. This seems a very uneconomical practice, so I thought I'd try to boost the numbers of a few by reviving a mnemonics exercise I was taught many years ago. It goes like this. If you want to remember something you should associate it with something else in as kinetic, colourful and, if possible, obscene a way as possible.

Now I'm not going to do this for you. I'm simply going to give you the pairs of words and let you do the associating. Here goes (and I'll start with an easy one):

Borghezio - buttplug
Larry Craig - body snatchers
bars - pottery
circumcision - Paris Hilton
Ratzinger - very dark cave
fatwa - eucharist
heritage - dementia
Rupert Everett - soap

I'll be testing you in the weeks to come. Don't let me down.

Racist lunatic arrested

Good news from Brussels (and how often do you hear that?), as one of the most laughably despicable figures in Italian politics gets picked up by police after attempting to take part in an illegal demonstration against the 'islamisation of Europe'. Mario Borghezio, the ranting turd to the right of the photograph, is a member of the Northern League and, to Italy's shame, a European MP. He became known some years ago when he began to disinfect the train seats used by black women so that Italians could sit on them without dirtying their nylons, an action that should have led to disgrace and political oblivion but, among leghisti, had the opposite effect. He's the kind of person you remember, and remember avoiding, from school: the playground bully who picks on the really really weak then runs to teacher for protection. He despises authority when he's preaching to the racist rabble who support him, yet invokes it the minute he's in trouble (you can enjoy the vision of him bending to knuckle-lick the pope on his rudimentary official site). He's all in favour of violent 'solutions' when addressing the mob, and was once arrested for having set fire to the shanty home of some Romanian immigrants during a torch-lit march, a fire from which the Romanians barely escaped with their lives (two months in jail, never served), but a snivelling crybaby if anyone slaps him. And as an Italian Euro MP, he's among the highest-paid politicians in the world. Poveraccio.

UPDATE: Diddles wasn't given a glass of water for five whole hours. Altogether now - Poveraccio.