The ever-so-slightly goofy Pamelia Kurstin shows the theremin isn’t just for B-movie soundtracks. Wait for the walking bass.

More.

Amid the customary hokum, there’s a flickering of realism in today’s Guardian. Further to this, Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association picks up on yesterday’s piece by Andrew Anthony and spies a possible explanation for Rowan Williams’ rhetorical contortions.

So, if the Catholic church wants exemption from laws to protect gay people from discrimination, you give them your support and even when you have to accept the case for abolishing the legal protection your own religion has from “blasphemy”, you can still salvage something by raising the spectre of offence caused to other religions (as the archbishop says, “The grounds for legal restraint in respect of language and behaviour offensive to religious believers are pretty clear”).

And if you want to protect the special status of the church and Christianity in law, then you speak up for the rights of those of other religions to have their religious law recognised (to quote the archbishop again, “Christians cannot claim exceptions from a secular unitary system on religious grounds (for instance in situations where Christian doctors might not be compelled to perform abortions), if they are not willing to consider how a unitary system can accommodate other religious consciences”). Replacing “Church of England” with “faith” makes any defence of special treatment seem a whole lot more reasonable.

And replacing Williams’ “secular unitary system” with something clearer and more precise – say, “the law” – makes his claim to special treatment, whether for Anglicans or Muslims, rather less reasonable. Which is presumably why the archbishop chose to deploy such opaque and circuitous language. And there I was thinking dishonesty is a sin.

Sound essential, and preferably loud.

Via Centripetal Notion. Related. And.

Theodore Dalrymple on the mellifluous flummery of Rowan Williams.   

British intellectual life has long harbored a strain of militantly self-satisfied foolishness, and the present archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is a perfect exemplar of the tendency. In an interview with the BBC on February 7, the archbishop said that it “seems unavoidable” that some aspects of sharia, or Islamic law, would be adopted in Britain: unavoidable, presumably, in the sense in which omertà seems unavoidable in the island of Sicily…

Rarely does philosophical inanity dovetail so neatly into total ignorance of concrete social realities: it is as though the archbishop were the product of the coupling of Goldilocks and Neville Chamberlain. Those more charitably inclined point out that the archbishop is an erudite man, a professor of theology who reads in eight languages and who was addressing a highly sophisticated audience, employing nuanced, subtle, caveat-laden arguments. He was not speaking in newspaper headlines, nor did he expect to make any headlines with his remarks.

Charity is a virtue, of course, but so is clarity: and it is the latter virtue that the archbishop so signally lacks. He assumes that the benevolence of his manner will disguise the weakness of his thought, and that his opacity will be mistaken for profundity.

Over at B&W, Ophelia Benson also trawls through the verbiage.

At last. Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, Japanese style.   

(Via Samizdata.)

Update:

Our resident Archivist of Such Things, Dr Westerhaus, writes to inform us that Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water was inspired by a Frank Zappa concert at Montreux Casino in December 1971, during which the venue’s velvet ceiling caught fire, thanks to a fan’s recklessly aimed flare gun, leading to the complete destruction of the venue. Other accounts suggest the fire was caused by the rubbing together of the wrong notes. The quite literal ‘smoke on the water’ can be seen here.