The best things...

Swimmers & towel: $something.
Petrol to drive to the Des Renford Aquatic Centre*: $somethingelse.
Being charged admission as a 15-and-under: $2.50 and priceless.

And from my spambox this morning: "My father and my elder brother were brutally slained to a painful death in their struggle to protect some white farmers who ran to take refuge in our farm." (No prizes for guessing context.) 'Brutally slained to a painful death', I must use that some time.

*My inner goth likes the acronym.

What exactly is 'offensive', again?

(Ganked from the Daily Illuminator.)

Wal-Mart is well-known for trying to protect customers from material that might offend them. Wal-Mart refuses to sell Tipper-stickered music; some of the albums it does sell are specially made with tamer lyrics dubbed over the regular versions. They won't sell Maxim or FHM, and they've been known to cover up the cover of Cosmopolitan to make sure nobody's sensibilities are offended.

However, until a couple of days ago, their website was selling The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, with this description (according to CNN story, original is unavailable): "If ... The Protocols are genuine (which can never be proven conclusively), it might cause some of us to keep a wary eye on world affairs. We neither support nor deny its message. We simply make it available for those who wish a copy." No worries about offending anybody there. No acknowledgement that the bloody thing has been known as a forgery for more than eighty years now.

Edit: Found a full copy of the blurb, which Wal-Mart reproduced unaltered from the publisher. Not *quite* as bad as the above story led me to believe, but still pretty poor; while the forgery issue is mentioned, it is presented as an unsubstantiated claim rather than well-documented fact. But judge for yourself:
( Full text of blurb: )

FWIW, the publisher have now accepted that it's a forgery; better late than never, I suppose.

I'm not in favour of censoring such material - that just encourages the conspiracy theorists (who'll get hold of it anyway) and makes it harder for everybody else to 'know the enemy'. But Amazon's page for the same book shows how to do it responsibly: they *tell* people it's a forgery created for propaganda purposes. None of this spineless "can never be proven conclusively" and "neither support nor deny its message".

I'll leave the last word to the Illuminator: "They've stopped [selling it]. A "business decision," they called it. Apparently it would have been inappropriate for them to admit to making a moral decision?"