City’s alphabet gender soup

Pelters. Stand by for

incoming ...

They don’t just teach you the three Rs in Dundee – pretty badly it would seem, because the city had the worst record in Scotland for Highers results in 2018 – but you’ve got to bone up on LGBT terminology. All pupils get a charter with more than 50 definitions and descriptions about sex, gender, identity and way more.

It’s a bewildering array and I’m glad I didn’t have to sit a test on it. It’s also highly debatable, if not, in large part, downright nonsense. It asserts that a person’s gender isn’t necessarily what they were born with, but “deeply felt internal and individual experience ... which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned to them at birth”.

Or gender queer: “A person who does not subscribe to conventional gender distinctions but identifies with neither, both, or a combination of male and female genders.”

Agender, a new one on me: “A person who does not have a specific gender identity or recognisable gender expression.” Eh? Or, another new one, neutrois – “A person who has a neutral gender or no gender. It has considerable overlap with agender.” Then, bigender: “A person who has two gender identities or some combination of both.”

This is utter biological and tautological nonsense. If I was a parent in Dundee and my kid came home with this for homework, I’d follow the Nancy Pelosi example.


Totally batty

It only takes an epidemic to trigger hundreds of “internet experts” who know what caused it. According to innumerable posts and memes it’s the eating of bats, in soup, in Wuhan, which triggered the coronavirus. Except the virals soaking the web were taken, not in Wuhan, but mainly in Palau which is about 2,000 miles away and has a closer connection to the US than China.

Palau is made up of more than 300 volcanic and coral islands with an abundance of white sandy beaches (sounds heavenly) and dense jungle, where the bats hang out. It became independent in 1994 after being part of a UN trust territory administered by America and today relies on financial aid from the US. The islands were the battleground for some of the fiercest fighting in the Pacific in the Second World War when they were liberated from the Japanese. Palauans can also serve in the US military.

So, whatever has caused the virus it is almost certainly not connected to having a winged creature in your soup, which isn’t served in China anyway. I ate a witchetty grub once but I draw the line at a recently-deceased Chiroptera.

Down the hatch

There’s a proposal to put up one of those blue heritage plaques in Oxford to Bob Hawke, the former Australian Labour prime minister who was a Rhodes scholar there in 1954. Not, however, for launching Medicare in Oz, or floating the dollar or breaking from from Britain. No, for downing a yard of ale, two-and-a-half pints, in a then world record time of 11 seconds. Roger Bannister, who has a blue plaque in the town, could shift a bit. But nothing like the Silver Bodgie.

Trumpspeak

You would think that the President of the United States, never mind one who used to host The Apprentice, would know that the plural of a work trainee is not “apprentice-i”. But perhaps I am expecting too much?

Have a heart

A second defibrillator has been stolen from outside the Viceroy pub on Glasgow’s Paisley Road West. The first was installed after the landlord, Peter Derrick, died of a heart attack after throwing out a violent customer, who has since pled guilty to causing his death. His daughter raised £13,000 in a crowdfunded appeal to replace the stolen one, and now the second has gone.

What kind of person would do that? And is there a market for hooky defibrillators? If there’s to be a next one installed it should come with a burglar alarm wired to the local police station.

Or, better still, to a live current.

Come off it Tommo!

My brass neck of the week award goes to the former footballer and now TV pundit Steven Thompson, last spotted preening himself on last Sunday’s Sportscene. He came out with the statistic that after Celtic’s win over Hamilton Accies they had scored more goals than any other team in Europe. He was congratulated on the statistical research by host Jonathan Sutherland.

“Thank you,” he replied, totally failing to mention that he had lifted the fact from the highly-researched piece my son wrote for a well-known tabloid that day. Tut, tut Tommo!

Only Accies left alive

And still on Hamilton, perennially tipped for relegation, and perennially pipping it at the death. If there was nuclear nuclear winter tomorrow the subsequent fallout would be Hamilton Accies vs Cockroaches.

It’s major, Dom

Boris Johnson and his bunch of public schoolboys, when they’re not on jolly japes and concocting wizard wheezes, have come up with nicknames for those they don’t like. The PM allegedly called the First Minister that “bloody wee Jimmy Krankie woman”, but they even demean their own colleagues. Sajid David is known as “Chino”, or Chancellor in name only, and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who hadn’t quite realised that the majority of UK trade is through the Dover-Calais crossing, is known as “Dim Dom”.

All of this stems from the coterie around Dominic Cummings, Bojo’s chief weirdo – affectionately (and not) known as “Major Dom” – who is leading the battle against the Treasury and their boffins, pointing out that “the average expert was no more accurate than the proverbial dart-throwing chimp on many questions”.

Cummings is a director, and sole shareholder, in the non-trading company Klute Ltd, which once owned a Durham nightclub of the same name (you were advised to wipe our feet on the way out) where the big brain used to work, but probably not as a bouncer. I presume it was named after the 1971 movie starring Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda, the best line from which is: “Don’t feel bad about losing your virtue. I sort of knew you would. Everybody always does.” Got it Dom?