This organ has long maintained that posterity will view Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, to have been the greatest statesman of this or any other age. That aside, his weekly column in the Daily Torygraph is well worth reading, and today’s is no exception.
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I, Editor by Henry Gee
This is the Nature Network and therefore Terribly Extremely Very Serious foothold for Nature Senior Editor Henry Gee. If you want fun and games, visit http://cromercrox.blogspot.com/
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Boris Johnson, Master of Scientific Metaphor
- Date:
- Tuesday, 03 Mar ch 2009 - 12:41 UTC
In this column he slams Labour’s Deputy Leader, the Rt Hon Harriet Harman, MP
The Rt Hon Harriet Harman, MP, yesterdayfor her allegedly synthetic ire at the alleged enormo-payoff of Sir Fred Goodwin, whose alleged inaction allegedly led to the alleged near-collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
By the way, I am advised to write allegedly a lot, as it allegedly has the same affect on potential libel suits as bezoars allegedly do on poisonous potions in Harry Potter and the Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization Time-Of-Flight Mass Spectrometry of DOOM. In other words, it renders them as impotent as one of Lazzaro Spallanzani’s taffeta-clad pet frogs (more on this in my next post). Rather in the same way that you may park your car with impunity on triple yellow-lines in the middle of major intersections provided you have your hazard-lights on.
But I digress. Mr Johnson’s article is worthy of note in these pages for his free use of wonderfully rich scientific metaphor. I quote (emphases mine):
I never thought that anyone would make me feel the tiniest batsqueak of sympathy for Sir Fred Goodwin.
Sir Fred has become the epitome of the bankers who collectively occupy a place in public opinion significantly lower than cannibalistic paedophile global-warming deniers
It was the kind of blind, gulping, insensate greed that you associate with some milk-eyed creature in a volcanic fissure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench – an organism with no understanding of the existence, let alone the feelings, of other members of the ecosystem
Cripes. That’s heady stuff. But where does he get such purplish prose? I follow his tweets – I wonder if he’s a secret reader of the Nature Network?
Last updated: Tuesday, 03 Mar 2009 - 12:41 UTC
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Comments
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It’s either BoJo, or his ghostwriting mole who’s been following goings on in the scientific world. Although, there’s often little of scientific interest on NN these days…
You may be right. But the pictures of cats are nice.
A great piece. Boris was an excellent editor of The Spectatory (much better than the present incumbent). I wish he’d stuck to that instead of muddling through politics.
Ah … but then we Londoners would have no credible alternative to Ken. Ouch.
I agree, the Spectatory was a peerless organ under Mr Johnson’s reign, somewhat like Punch under Alan Coren’s.