I wonder if the excellence of a blog can be evaluated by the quality and quantity of the humour that is embedded in it. The other day I announced that I found a wonderful Iranian blog. Why did I think it was wonderful? Because there was so much humour in it, explicit or implied, which I found delightful. The correct use of humour can help drive home a point where a thousand words will fail.

So here is another very promising blog I ran into, Boycotted UK Academic, which seems to have a light hand and an impertinent sense of humour (which, BTW, is very different from sarcasm*):

The blogger tries to explain what it feel like, trying to dialogue with the dogmatically-hermetic fanatics of the boycotting movement. Note, please, how I describe the boycotters. Not much humour there.

Or here:

As disheartening as it has been to watch the stain of anti-Israel boycott fever spreading through Great Britain’s trade union movement, the greater legacy of the episode may well be the angry rise of American labor in defense of the Jewish state.

Two of Britain’s most influential unions, the public service union Unison and the venerable Transport and General Workers’ Union, have adopted resolutions in the past month calling for a complete boycott of Israeli goods and imports. The boycott calls come on the heels of less successful efforts in two other unions: the university teachers’ union UCU, which urged its members to “consider” a boycott of Israeli academia, and the journalists’ union, which narrowly turned back a similar proposal.

The boycott calls have aroused widespread revulsion and condemnation, from British and American Jewish agencies to the Royal Society and the European Union, not to mention Israel’s own labor movement and academic community. None of these protests, however, had much of an impact on the ideologically driven radicals who dominate British labor.

But here is how Boycotted describes them:


In Jerusalem, an English female journalist heard about an old rabbi who visited the Wailing Wall to pray, twice a day, everyday, for a long, long time.

In an effort to check out the story, she goes to the holy site and there he is!

She watches the bearded old man at prayer--and after about 45 minutes, when he turns to leave, she approaches him for an interview.

"I'm Jane Collins from the BBC, sir, how long have you been coming to the Wailing Wall and praying?"

For about 50 years, he informs her.

"50 years! That's amazing! What do you pray for?"

"I pray for peace between the Jews and the Arabs. I pray for all the hatred to stop and I pray for all our children to grow up in safety and friendship."

"And how do you feel, sir, after doing this for 50 years?"

"Like I'm talking to a brick wall"

_________

* More on sarcasm, anger and simmering boil later.