2005-01-14 - Borat

[hallucienate]

London - British comedian Sasha Baron Cohen escaped a near-riot at an American rodeo while filming his satirical Da Ali G Show.

According to a report in the Roanoke (North Carolina) Times, a man who was introduced as Boraq Sagdiyev from Kazakhstan - in reality a Cohen character named Borat - appeared at the rodeo over the weekend after organisers agreed to have him sing the national anthem.

After telling the crowd he supported America's war on terrorism, he said: "I hope you kill every man, woman and child in Iraq, down to the lizards. And may George Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq." He then sang a garbled version of The Star-Spangled Banner.


The Roanoke Times reported that the crowd turned "downright nasty". One observer said: "If he had been out there a minute longer, I think somebody would have shot him."

Cohen and his film crew were escorted out of the Salem Civic Centre and told to leave the premises.

"Had we not got them out of there, there would have been a riot," rodeo producer Bobby Rowe told the paper. "They loaded up the van and they screeched out of there."

It is not the first time Cohen has wooed controversy with his show, which airs on Channel 4 in the UK and on HBO in the United States. In one episode last year, Borat sang an anti-Semitic song called "Throw the Jew Down the Well" at a US country music bar, prompting protests from the US-based Anti-Defamation League.

Producers of the Ali G show, Talkback Thames, were unavailable for comment.

[markfiend]

I bet the crowd were angry about this:

a garbled version of The Star-Spangled Banner

rather than any of the stuff he said about Iraq.

[Quiff Boy]

this may or may not be true, but amusing to think about all the same.



Does the statement, "We've always done it that way" ring any bells?

1. The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an odd number, don't you think?

Why was that gauge used?

2. Because that's the way they built railroads in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.

Why did the English build them like that?

3. Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did "they" use that gauge then?

4. Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

5. Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?

6. Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads?

7. Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot and bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.

Now the twist to the story...

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two Thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a Horse's Ass wasn't important.

[CorpPunk]

Take this for what you will, but Roanoke is in Virginia, not NC.

Duh.

[James Blast]

QB

[Brideoffrankenstein]

Borat sang an anti-Semitic song called "Throw the Jew Down the Well"

that was a classic

[hallucienate]

Borat sang an anti-Semitic song called "Throw the Jew Down the Well"

that was a classic

The article said that, not me. But it was rather funny.

[markfiend]

Sasha Baron Cohen singing anti-Semitic songs?

"What we got here Mordecai is one o' them self-hatin' Jews."
A line from Family Guy for anyone who doesn't get the reference.

[RicheyJames]

this may or may not be true, but amusing to think about all the same.

since mr fiend appears to have passed on this one i'll step in and declare it to be a load of bollocks

[markfiend]

this may or may not be true, but amusing to think about all the same.

since mr fiend appears to have passed on this one i'll step in and declare it to be a load of bollocks

[Brideoffrankenstein]

Sasha Baron Cohen singing anti-Semitic songs?

Yeah that was the whole point that he is actually Jewish