Corrigenda

At the beginning of Latin lessons, we used to have to do our corrections, same in French and German. I think it was a good practice but not one that goes down too well these days. No-one wants to admit their mistakes, let alone correct them and learn from them.

Whatever. Here are my corrigenda that all came up yesterday, but maybe don't read today's post if you are eating or about to eat.

Osama bin Laden's birthday is actually 10/03 not 11/03, there goes my speculation down the toilet. Oh well.

Studio 60 has not been completely axed, it turns out it was simply shelved, it could and may return if scheduling allows. I guess the first reports we read must have been similarly misleading.

This one links quite firmly to Sleepy's comments about Gehenna on yesterday's blog. I had taken my 'The Week' to the hairdressers and was reading an article about a Jewish man and his Christian wife living in Austin, Texas. They knew they were having a baby boy and it suddenly occurred to the woman that her husband may want to have the baby circumcised.
She pointed out to him that the American Academy of Pediatrics no longer recommends circumcision. (This is my correction, I hadn't realised they had withdrawn support.) She also said she didn't want their child genitally mutilated, and in fact he agreed, he didn't see himself as a practising Jew.

Enter the family.

'6,000 years of tradition!' screamed the man's mother, 'your father says that without circumcision he won't recognise the child as his grandson.' She then went into guilt overdrive on her son.
'We have come to terms with your marrying outside the Faith, we can overcome that you moved to Austin, Texas, we can even overlook that you are naming the baby Elijah (huh? you'd think she'd be well up for that one, what with him being top prophet and all)but the no circumcision, that we can't forgive!' Amusant what?

So the man had to weigh up the guilt trip that only a Jewish mother can truly deliver against his marriage and the thoughts that he was trying not to have about his son's future orgasms being less intense because of the desensitising of the penis caused by circumcision.
Finally, 6,000 years of tradition wins out. The wife can no longer see her husband torn like this and gives in.
During the procedure, the child cries and screams and they torture themselves listening. The last line of the article was,
'He'll be fine,' said the mother-in-law,'it didn't hurt at all.'
Gehenna and a Jewish mother-in-law are strong foes to fight.

But the article actually makes me revise my original premiss too. What I was writing about in a previous post, was the idea that a quick-fix for AIDS in Africa was to circumcise men. Adult men at that. This in itself is controversial, since counter claims from research published in February of this year seem to point to circumcision being a way of spreading AIDS rather than diminishing its transmission.
My argument was that 'we mutilate our male children so why shouldn't you?'. The article in question however, points out that circumcision was re-introduced to some extent in the Victorian era to make masturbation less enjoyable. It also implied that 'little boys are dirty' (because they don't wash behind their foreskins among other things). 'Sex and the instruments of sex are dirty' was the message.
So, now, Neal Pollack (the Jewish subject and writer of the article) makes me think, are we simply saying that to the African men we want to circumcise? Just like the Victorians, are we really saying,
'You're having too much fun and you're dirty'?

So, tis summertime here, we have cried très bon and put the clocks an hour on. Or, autrement dit, pay back time for the blissful extra hour we had in the autumn, another imbalance corrected.