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December 25, 2005
BP is not PC for BC, or what happens when Tory MPs don't check their facts
Philip Davies, Tory MP for Shipley in West Yorkshire is challenging political correctness, which he calls ‘this silliness’.
His first target appears to be a Somerset museum. He told the BBC. “Somebody decided that BC - Before Christ - was going to be offensive to other religions, so they changed BC to BP, which was Before the Present, I think it stood for. Examples like this happen all the time and we’d like to try and make people aware of it so they can fight back and say to people, we’ve had enough of this nonsense.”
Hmm. Doesn’t Mr Davies know how to google? If he had searched for the term on the net he would have found that BP is a standard way referring to dates in the past, associated in particular with carbon dating. It has nothing to do with political correctness and dates back more than half a century.
What would be really silly - Mr Davies and other Tory MPs please note - would be to refer to early hominids, say the celebrated Australopithecus afarensis called ‘Lucy’, as being 3.2 million years BC. (Christ really has nothing to do with it.)
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4558668.stm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present
Posted by Simon Holledge at 09:33 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
December 24, 2005
Ancient Persia Exhibition
We went to the British Museum yesterday to see the exhibition ‘Forgotten Empire - the World of Ancient Persia’. Absolutely fascinating!
www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/persia
Posted by Simon Holledge at 09:13 PM | TrackBack
December 06, 2005
Edinburgh on Wikitravel
Edinburgh is the destination of the month on Wikitravel.
Posted by Simon Holledge at 09:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack