While Britain participated in the slave trade, they went out of their way to not do so in Britain; the slaveholders kept their slaves abroad and out of sight, in places where the laws of civilisation which rule such institutions to be obscene are waived. (Sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean were one such place.) And it was impolite to inquire too hard about the sources of fortunes that built stately homes.

The difference being that when the N-word was uttered in Britain, it was belittling and condescending in an exoticising way, like a colonial-era picture book of funny foreigners in their traditional costumes. In America, however, it had a more immediate edge of aggression and violence, implying an other that’s here rather than far away, and firmly below the speaker in the established racial hierarchy, and who must be kept there using tools including designating them as a (N-word).

He left out porn/erotic fiction/sexualised pop music (“erototoxins”, as the religious types call it)

Step 1. Feed coin into slot machine

Step 2. Pull lever

Step 3. Congratulations! You are now an open-source developer

The word carried somewhat less of a charge in the UK at the time, where black people were relatively uncommon until waves of labour migration from the Caribbean in the 1950s, than in the US, where it was freighted with the weight of slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws and such. Agatha Christie could call a book “10 Little N_s”, alluding to a children’s rhyme. This was an age in which the children who casually sang that rhyme probably had golliwog dolls.

Anybody stealing one would be disappointed, as, like all wildcats other than F. sylvestris (the nearest wild relative of the domestic cat), they’d be too paranoid and aggressive to be domesticable.

Not only a serial killer but also a cat burglar, pickpocket, arsonist and numerous other crimes. A regular Doktorin Mabuse.

Well, women want fish (and me fear me)

That’ll only work until the Mormons retroactively baptise it to have been LDS all along.

He looks very dapper in his tuxedo

Nude models from the 1890s when someone’s gaze lingers on their daguerreotypes slightly too long in an antiquarian shop.

I’m surprised Nokia never made a sauna-proof phone

The Land of the Free

It’s a true Morisettian irony

IIRC, the Mandarin word for owl translates literally as “cat-head eagle”

IIRC, the Mandarin word for owl translates literally as “cat-head eagle”

French literature: “I will die for love”

American literature: “I will die for freedom”

Russian literature: “I will die”

Paris is in the Schengen zone, and Germany could preemptively ban him from entering, under the Staatsräson.

The jokes write themselves

It’s only a matter of time until some ultra-conservative politician or hate-preacher is caught in flagrante delicto, only not this time helping a rentboy “pray the gay away” but living a double life as a sexually adventurous cheetah or something.

I thought the USAF was mostly Christian Dominionist.