Tuesday, July 12, 2005

All leads lead to Leeds Sherlock Holmes always gets his man.  A mere five days after the London bombings, while US intelligence continues to hunt for bin Laden and the US military erroneously drops 500 pound bombs on houses that turn out to be full of Iraqi civilians ("collateral damage"), British police have concluded that the four suspects,  who probably died in the attacks, came from Yorkshire.  The Yorkshire accent typically provokes great ridicule by Londoners, who often describe its singsong intonation as "deedle-deedle-deedle."  Presumably a Muslim fundamentalist born in Yorkshire would sound like "deedle-deedle-deedle . . Inshallah . . . deedle-deedle-deedle . . . Allah Akhbar . . . deedle-deedle-deedle . . . jihad." With its large Muslim population, today's Leeds must be a far cry from the city described in the limerick that David Niven, in his raunchy memoir "The Moon's a Balloon," claimed to have recited for his Hollywood screen test: There once was a young man from Leeds Who swallowed a package of seeds Great tufts of grass Shot out of his arse And his ballocks were covered with weeds 12:04:59 PM