Profound discussions on Iranian culture

I was watching Omid Djalili the other day (and what more reliable source could there be) and he mentioned that Iranian carpetmakers will deliberately make an error in their designs, because only Allah is perfect.

I realise that discussing Islamic theology online is fraught with peril, particularly when I don’t know the first thing about it, but that seems a little presumptuous to me. Surely their innate human fallibility should ensure unintentional flaws, rather than them having to rely on deliberate mistakes to disfigure the carpets.

However, I’d be more concerned if this practice was replicated in other sections of the Iranian economy. Perhaps the reason Tehran does not have a flourishing automobile industry may well be down to people suspecting that the brakes might be faulty as a gesture of man’s imperfection.

Imagine if you were in an Iranian aeroplane. You’d probably be delighted to find that your seat adjuster or TV screen were broken, in the hope that you’d located the deliberate mistake. But you couldn’t be entirely certain that it wasn’t just a routine malfunction and that the undercarriage wasn’t deficient.

Perhaps the reason the US is so exercised by Ahmadinejad’s focus on nuclear power is not that they fear it being adapted for military usage, but simply that a meltdown may result from excessive fervency amongst it’s designers.

Sordid Secrets of Medieval Monarchs

Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Pedro the Cruel. Many countries in Europe choose to regularly identify their rulers with an adjective, so much so that in Russia it seems that all you had to do was to survive the coronation to earn the appellation “great”. Further west, descriptions tended to be more personal, Charles the Bald, Louis the Fat and Joanna the Mad among those who’ve graced the palaces of Western Europe.

The kings and queens of England have proved relatively immune to this trend, especially after the Saxon kings like Alfred the Great, Æthelread the Unready and Edward the Confessor were displaced by the Normans. Our rulers have tended to be known by number alone – roman numerals to emphasise their elevated status. So Henry VIII is the name that is recorded in the history books, not Henry the Wifekiller. The truly great royals are noted in other ways; such as the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award.

However, this is not the full story and many of our Kings and Queens did have contemporary nicknames based upon their personal, often sexual, peccadilloes that censorious historians, mindful of the impressionable minds of their young students, sought to suppress. They have been remarkably successful in this endeavour, with only the most evocative descriptions – like Richard Lionheart – remaining in popular consciousness, and then only distorted from its origins.

Now the true story is revealed.

Welsh Weather Forecast Storm

More sub-The Onion nonsense

The controversy over the alleged distortions of the ITV Wales weather forecast grew today with sponsors bmi baby putting out a press release which appeared to contain admissions that they had been pressurising the programme to give deliberately erroneous forecasts.

The Pensioners Time Bomb

Sub-The Onion nonsense

The government yesterday unveiled their most radical solution yet to the problem of paying for the UK’s ageing population. While social security minister, Chris Davison said that some of the details remained to be finalised, the government was firmly committed to the plan as the only other alternative sources of funding for the healthcare and pensions of Britain’s growing army of OAPs were outlandish ones like taxing those on high incomes.

The basic premise of the scheme is that every British citizen is to receive an implant that will detonate on the day after their 70th birthday, killing them reasonably quickly and without too much agonising pain. Explaining how the government had come up with the proposal, Davison revealed that he’d heard the phrase “pension’s time bomb” so often that it had put the idea into his head. For the same reason, he’d decided that a minor incendiary device was the best way to bring about the deaths of British citizens, even though medical experts suggested that lethal injection of some sort might be more humane.