You just never know what glamorous star you'll run into at a MediaBistro party!
Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry, together again for the first time!!!
I love both of these tubby old coots as writers and currently loathe them both as human beings (isn't that always the way with the ones we once loved?), so I was delighted to find, on the Guardian Culture Vulture blog/dumping ground, their blasphemy debate from last year at the Hay Festival. No transcript available, of course, because that would be uncharacteristically bloggy, but here's the MP3. Right click, save, savour. If I'm being uncharacteristically ambitious, I may actually write a transcript, but at 78 minutes running time, don't be holding your breath!
One of the most talked-about events at last year's
Guardian Hay Festival was the Blasphemy Debate, chaired by Joan Bakewell and inspired by the Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill, which had been announced in the Queen's Speech the previous month. The speakers at the debate were the actor and writer Stephen Fry and the journalist Christopher Hitchens, and their frequently heated discussion covered issues of freedom of speech, religious tolerance, multiculturalism and orthodoxy…
Who cares if you can't understand them; they're hot! A fan-made recreation of The Two Towers, from a group of twentysomething Spaniards.
I wouldn't trust myself to review this book. Like the Necronomicon, this is a book best read by those you really wouldn't miss if it came right down to it. If you heard they'd become members of a sinister cult and had taken off to Arabia to rendezvous with a malevolent and unspeakably long-lived nobleman from Eastern Europe, to search for the Nameless City in the shifting sands of the desert, and you really wouldn't mind, then that's the person you should ask to review this book.
Because that means reading it. And that means the thetans will know you're out there. To say nothing of Tom Cruise.
Dianetics, Reviewed by Fat Joe Thomas, whom I do not know and so wouldn't particularly miss and who seems to have vanished from the blogosphere on or about April 4,
THE VERY DAY AFTER POSTING THIS REVIEW!
Half-way through this book, I wanted to stop reading. But, it wouldn’t let me. It made me finish. I couldn’t return it and get my money back and I couldn’t stop reading it. If I ever have kids, the book is going to make my kids read it. The book has put my family and friends under surveillance. They don’t want to talk to me anymore. They’re worried the book will take their money, too.
raincoaster 