Egyptian Scribbles: Wine Review

Friday, 2 November 2007

Wine Review

This acidic wine with overtones of vinegar and nail-varnish remover and hints of bleach would make an excellent addition to any greasy, unappetising meal. The wine has a distinctive, alcoholic aroma from which even the least refined taste-buds would recoil. Of particular note is the way in which this wine, a bargain at 55 Egyptian pounds (or 5pounds 50 pence in British money), is able to induce extreme indigestion after one tiny sip. I have tried this out on a few friends and they have all reported identical reactions: a pain in the stomach and acid in the throat. Buy it at your local sainsburys before stocks run out...

(and, yes, the bottle is sitting on top of the toilet. And please note the rather dog-eared nature of the cork... I've yet to put a bottle opener in a cork here yet without the whole damn thing crumbling away (most of it into the acidic depths below)...)

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Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."