I almost missed it!

Today is the final day of the American Library Association's Banned Book Week.

It's not really what I expect from IHoP

They sure know how to have a good time down in Louisiana so no one should be surprised that the International House of Pancakes Prayer in Shreveport celebrated the coming of summer with a good old fashioned book burning. After throwing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and, for good measure, some porn into the conflagration one Adriane Banks is quoted as saying:

"As I tore the pages, I felt a generational curse of immorality and perversion breaking off my family...I felt it."

Like I said they sure know how to have a good time down there.

Quelle surprise!

Given how the administration of Captain Codpiece oozes corruption and incompetence from every pore we should not be shocked to learn that the White House has come out against the proposed media shield law put forward by known radical Arlen "Single Bullet" Specter (R - PA). Because what we do know will hurt them.

Your tax dollars at work

POPLINE is a US government funded project, run by USAID, that bills itself as the "largest bibliographic database on population, family planning and related health issues". Just don't go there and try and do a search on "abortion" because they have consciously excluded the word. You will get zero results. Just remember a freedom to speak is not a freedom to search!

The long arm of the FCC

Denied a US visa Amy Winehouse had to perform at the Grammy Awards via satellite. Despite the fact that she was on free British soil she still had to cover up a tattoo of a topless woman before her performance lest those defenders of the purity of American youth could spot the tattooed nipples from 6,000 miles away! For those of you who are strong enough you can spot one of these offensive nipples in the photo above (on her left arm).

Super Sunday special!

Apparently there has been a "costume malfunction" at an Abercrombie & Fitch shop in Virginian Beach where police have seized part of a mural on display and cited the shop on obscenity charges. According to a police spokesman the photographs contained the image of a woman where her "breast is displayed with her hand covering just the nipple portion...you could still pretty much see the rest of the breast".

Shocking. And the rest of the world laughs at you (and I will have to explain this behaviour should any of my mates read this post)!

In praise of the Lower Macungie Township library

"Outraged" parents to library: "Censor this book"

Heroic library to "outraged" parents: that's your job for your kids and other parents' jobs for their kids.

Anti-Judaic Nobel Peace Prize winner barred from Minnesota campus

I kid you not. The University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis will not allow Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu to speak there because he has criticised Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians and they are afraid local Jews will be offended. Curiously there was not concern that local human beings would be offended when the University allowed rabid right wing anorexic hagette Ann Coulter to speak. Funny that, innit?

Welcome to CensorWorld

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked"

Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of the court decision that said that Alan Ginsberg's great poem Howl was not obscene. However now that we are in 1984 2007 the entire broadcasting world is so frightened of the Holy and Christian yet perverted and sexually repressed toss pots at the Federal Communications Commission that WBAI-FM in New York was afraid to air a recitation of the work for fear of bankruptcy should the FCC not agree with the court decision and find the station huge amounts because it uses some naughty, naughty words that no one in Amerika had ever heard before nor have they been heard since.

I have a few choice words for the members of the FCC. You are a bunch of motherfucking, cocksucking, shit-slimed, censorous, small minded, needle dicked wankers! How do you like that? That is fucking obscene OK? The bloody poem is not.

You can read the poem here.