For those who didn't see it the first time it made its way 'round the ``'blogosphere'', this film of LSD being tested on British troops at Porton Down is hilarious:
... the efficiency of the rocket launcher team was also very impaired. Ten minutes later, the attacking section had lost all sense of urgency....
One hour and ten minutes after taking the drug, with one man climbing a tree to feed the birds, the troop commander gave up, admitting that he could no longer control himself or his men.
He himself then relapsed into laughter.
For some reason, this film puts me in mind of the Monty Python Funniest Joke sketch. Hmm.
I've received this three times today so far. Twice from friends, and once -- in a slightly bowdlerised form -- from the Newsnight daily email:
``Umm Qasr is a city similar to Southampton,'' UK defence minister Geoff Hoon said in the Commons yesterday. ``He's either never been to Southampton, or he's never been to Umm Qasr'' says a British squaddie patrolling Umm Qasr. Another soldier added: ``There's no beer, no prostitutes and people are shooting at us. It's more like Portsmouth.''
-- I can't find this or anything like it on the Sky News site. The BBC site has a story with a similar quote, but without the Portsmouth reference:
``Umm Qasr is a city similar to Southampton,'' UK defence minister Geoff Hoon said this week. ``He's either never been to Southampton, or he's never been to Umm Qasr,'' says one of the British soldiers now patrolling the Iraqi settlement, which could barely be described as a town.
A search on Google News for `Southampton Portsmouth Qasr Hoon' doesn't match anything. My theory is that this is an invented quote based on the BBC story above, which was certainly written before I received the email, but only by a couple of hours. A look on flakey web-log search engine Feedster reveals some other instances, for instance
but it's a bit hard to tell the chronology, since nobody seems to give time zones for their timestamps. Idiots. In any case it's a bit poor that Jeremy Paxman propagated this one, simply introduced by
A marine based there writes....
I can't see any good way to get to the bottom of this. Any guesses from those more plugged in to the zeitgeist? I doubt it. I agree with Martin: [Web logs] make the Internet an even less safe place for information.
This is all done with wwwitter.
Copyright (c) Chris Lightfoot; available under a Creative Commons License. Comments, if any, copyright (c) contributors and available under the same license.