Short list.

This week's list is "Things which are named after a school teacher who the founder [of the thing] hated, just to spite them."

I can think of two, there could be more. Click and highlight to reveal clues: 1970s Southern US rock band and English cut-price pub chain.

Short list

Totay's list: "Leaders of political parties with names that sound like 'Natalie Bennett'"

1. With an early lead, it's Natalie Bennett herself* of course, setting the bar very high for all the hopefuls out there.

2. Oof! What's this? Out of nowhere, almost certain to bag second place, it's... Naftali Bennett, all the way from Israel!!

* Natalie also has the honour of being on a short list with Julia Gillard. One was born in Australia and led a UK political party and the other was born in the UK and led an Australian political party.

See here for more politician-name-related tomfoolery.

Short list

Today's short list:

People who have written (or co-written) and performed two completely different songs with the same title.

I'm only aware of two examples:

Mick Jagger - "Think" (side 2, track 7 of Aftermath) and "Think" (track 9 of Wandering Spirit).

More famously, George Michael - "Freedom" with Wham! and "Freedom" (aka "Freedom 90") as a solo artist.

Any more?

"The strange phenomenon of twin films" - an excellent list of short lists

Steve McIntosh at the BBC has done an excellent list of my favourite kind of list, one with two things on it.

Films about a comet/asteroid hurtling towards Earth at an alarming rate, threatening the existence of the human race released between May and July 1998?

Films about the eruption of a volcano threatening the life of locals released between February and April 1997?

And so on.

Short list

"Female athletes whose surnames end with "-ke" who became in/famous for being good looking rather than winning anything of note"

I can only think of two.

This one and this one.

Cattle News, and a Short List

From The Daily Mail:

The wife of a top bullfighter looked on in horror as her husband was gored to death during a festival in eastern Span.

Victor Barrio, 29, from Segovia was fighting in Teruel, Aragon in eastern Spain when the bull speared him through the chest...

Also from The Daily Mail:

This is the horrific moment a raging bull gores a rider at a rodeo - before going on a furious rampage.

In the footage, a cowboy can be seen riding a large bucking bull at a rodeo in Mexico as an excited crowd cheers him on. But their excitement soon turns to horror as the man loses control of the beast, which charges into a rodeo clown, sending him spinning into the air...

I'm no animal rights activist or anything, but it serves them bloody well right, and well done those bulls for showing a bit of initiative and not going like lambs to the slaughter!

Emailed in by Ralph Musgrave, from The Times of India:

Speaking to TOI, Brijesh Pandey station officer of Itmad-ud-daula said, "The accused has been booked under 377 (unnatural offence) and is absconding after the supposed incident."

Dharmendra Verma, district coordinator of VHP said, "The accused is an unmarried youth and is often seen drunk in the locality. On Friday night, he was spotted having unnatural sex with the cow."

Bleurgh.

On the subject of cattle and cattle products, here's a Short List:

Mid-market 'steak house' chains with vaguely Scottish-themed names starting with "A".

Short lists

1. Mancunian TV presenters called 'Cox'.

2. Ginger-haired German tennis players who were very successful in the 1980s and 1990s.

3. Current UK prime ministers/first ministers who are men.

Short list

Actresses/former actresses who became Labour MPs

Short List

Rivers called "Don".

Any advance on two: one in southern Russia and one in Aberdeenshire?

Via the comments: there's another one in South Yorkshire and another one in Ontario.

Short List

Parts of Great Britain likely to be hit by flooding and which sound similar, if you say them in the local language.

Short Lists

Short List 1. Television channels named after a Beatles song.

Short List 2. Joan Armatrading and Tracy Chapman

Short List

"Numbers which became television catchphrases"

I'll give it five

One hundred and eighty! (darts commentary in the 1970s).

One, two, three, four (The Teletubbies).

Sev-en! (Len Goodman on Strictly Come Dancing).

Short List

Areas in Europe called Galicia.

Bayard adds: Galatia (ancient place name in modern Turkey)

Short List

"Advisors to English kings in the Middle Ages who were called 'Thomas' and ended up falling out with the king and being assasinated/executed."

Thomas Becket
Thomas More
Thomas Cromwell

John b adds: Thomas Cranmer

An earlier treasonous - albeit probably fictitious - Tom got off lightly.

Short List

I watched the last episode of Maps: Plunder, Power and Possession yesterday, and another short list sprang to mind:

Continents whose names don't start and end with the letter "A"

Or for an even shorter list:

Continents whose names don't start and end with the same letter.

Short List

I haven't done one of these for ages.

Today's Short List is "Pop/rock songs with a World War II theme"

To get the ball rolling, I can think of:

OMD: "Enola Gay"
Pere Ubu: "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo"
Motörhead: "Bomber"
Paul McCartney: "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey"

Short List

Famous people called "Roy" who pronounce(d) "r" as "w".

Short lists

Nobody even attempted the previous short list: "Titles of songs by the Velvet Underground which were later used by Led Zeppelin for completely different songs"

The answers were of course "(The) Ocean" and "Rock and roll". Glad to have cleared that up.

Next topic, I happen to know somebody who is in one of these minority religions, I think it's a Christian sect, I asked her whether her boyf was also from that church and she replied, yes of course.

I was about to ask her whether they belong to one of those sects where you are only allowed to marry other from the same sect, when I realised that her riposte would simply be that all religions or religious "communities" demand this, which is probably true, so I didn't bother.

So that's this week's Short List: "Religions where there is no pressure to get married to somebody from the same religion". I'm buggered if I can think of any, but perhaps there are some.
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That then led me to wondering why this might be.

1. The superficial answer is, that people in any religion consider themselves to be superior to 'everybody else'; the Catholics think they are better than Protestants, the Hindus think they are better than the Sikhs or Muslims; the Muslims (actually an inferiority complex, not a religion) want to wipe out all other religions; Jewish people like to keep themselves to themselves (and appear to think of themselves as a 'race' who share a religion, rather than just a bunch of people who happen to share the same beliefs, i.e. they are not a proselytising religion, which goes for Hindus as well) etc.

2. But actually, in practical terms, the reason for this is that religions are a meme. The ones which survive are those who lose least members and gain most new ones, and the main transmission mechanism for this is that most children adopt the religion of their parents. This is why the more extreme sects encourage their members to have as many children as possible.

3. Now, as we know from watching TV programmes about On The Origin Of Species, genetic selection only works if the subsequent improvements are kept within a species. So lions become better at catching zebras and zebras get better at running away from lions.

4. Obviously, lions and zebras are separate species so they can't interbreed. That is the definition of a "species", it's any group of animals which can breed with each other (I think). So each species gets a bit better at something specialised.

5. If there were only one type of omnivorous animal on an island, the species as a whole would neither get better at hunting nor at escaping. If it did the former, they would eat each other all up and the species would die; if they did the latter, they'd either starve to death or revert to vegetarianism, in which case they would lose both their hunting and escaping skills.

6. So, if we see the members of each religion as a sub-species of human, there is an advantage to having lots of kids (my wife knows a Moonie couple who've had five or six) but it is also vitally important that those kids follow the religion of their parents (or else their is no point in encouraging them to have as many kids as poss).

7. We know from observation, that if both parents are the same religion, about 80% of their kids will end up following the same religion - they are indoctrinated to think of themselves as somehow better than everybody else and will tend to marry somebody from that religion - not to do so would be 'unclean'.

8. We also know that if parents are from different religious backgrounds, it soon becomes clear to their children that neither parent has an automatic claim to be following the true path of righteousness (either the sabbath is on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, you can't believe in more than one). At least one of their parents must be in the wrong and quite possibly both. And out of courtesy to each other if nothing else, such parents are less likely to push their children one way or another, even if they continue to believe or practice.

10. So let's say, a third of the children of such mixed couple parents will follow neither religion, a third will follow the father's and a third the mother's (slightly different for most Jewish people, where it's only the mother's religion which counts).

11. Taking all religions as a whole, whose collective interest is that as many people as possible are religious, it must be quite clear that mixed marriages is a huge negative sum game for them, i.e. if two Catholics marry, they'll be under pressure to have as many kids as possible to create as many new Catholics as possible; if two Muslims marry, the same applies. Let's call it five kids each, of whom four will follow their parents' religion (i.e. 80% x 5).

12. But what happens if each Catholic marries a Muslim? Neither couple is under particular pressure to have as many kids as possible , because the Catholic relatives of the Catholic partners fear that the kids will become Muslim; and the Muslim relatives of the Muslim partner fear the same in reverse.

13. So mixed couples will have slightly fewer children. And not only that, of the fewer children they have, only a third will become Catholic and a third will become Muslim.

14. So in numbers terms one Catholic couple = five kids = four new Catholics and one Muslim couple = five kids = four new Muslims. Hooray! More power and influence and wealth for the ministers etc.

But if there are two mixed couples with three children each, of whom one-third end up non-religious, one third Catholic and one-third Muslim, those four adults only produce two new Catholics and two new Muslims. Boo! Instead of four new members over whom the ministers can exert power and from whom they can suck donations, they only get two new members.

15. Just sayin', is all.

Short lists

1. Titles of songs by the Velvet Underground which were later used by Led Zeppelin for completely different songs.

2. Heads of state/governments of "allied" European countries who were not in London during the Second World War.

Short List

The three items on the previous Short List ("Musicians who had a cameo rôle as a shop keeper in a major Hollywood film") are:

Ray Charles in The Blues Brothers (Pavlov's Cat and MacHeath)
Ian Dury in Judge Dredd (Pavlov's Cat, again)
Bo Diddley in Trading Places (The Stigler)

Near misses (not cameo rôles):
Mos Def in Be Kind Rewind (DBC Reed)
Phil Collins (florist-cum-Great Train Robber) in Buster (The Stigler, again)

Doesn't count:
Henry Rollins as a doctor in Johnny Mnemonic (Richard Allan)

UPDATE: Make up your own minds whether this one counts:
Ricky Gervais (who was a musician before becoming a comedian/actor) in Stardust

UPDATE2: Tom Seddon (on the original post) asks: "Wouldn't Aretha Franklin count as well? She was in Blues Brothers as owner of the food place where the guitarist and saxophonist worked, and then again in Blues Brothers 2000 as owner of a car showroom." Pavlov's Cat/Macheath, any answers?
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Next short list, and I can think of two (or three): "Television programmes, the title of which is based on/inspired by something/somebody in the book Nineteen Eighty-Four".