The Cavalier Laughing

The Nigerian Navy HQ - from The University of Maine

That John Lloyd of the various nice QI people is a bit cavalier with his own facts isn't he, despite the joyful highlighting of obvious-but-wrong answers on QI itself? Actually it might have been his mate who said in the Idler QI Edition that all the ships in the Nigerian Navy were called Hippopotamus but in various dialects and languages of the country. After a few seconds hesitation while I considered whether Nigeria actually had any coastline to warrant a Navy and then went on to speculate that even if it didn't, both the Bolivians and the Swiss have such forces, I began to call shenanigans on that particular fact. This list appears to show that the statement, while not 100% true is basically OK and, more-importantly, funny . There is a Hippo class in said fleet and the ships within it are named after Hippos in different languages. I suppose the lesson is that anything stated as fact is almost always vulnerable to being picked at by pedants.

Statement - All the ships in the Nigerian Navy are named Hippopotamus.
Truth - Sort of - some of the ships in the Nigerian Navy are named Hippopotamus.

Statement - Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow.
Truth - Sort of - but so do we in English if you include all adjectives.

Alright - I get the point - nothing is definite.

I know that my Protestant Work Ethic will show through in the following information but who cares? While I like the Idler and admire the writing, the general concentration of being idle winds me up. The nice, clean, white paper of the book can only be produced using the efforts of many people who do indeed come to work every day at a defined time and do the job as expected. Am I missing the point of the attitude? It seems anti-social and exploitative to rely on the efforts of hard-working people in order to produce a hymn to the layabout. I don't even believe that the contributors actually are Idle - I suspect they never stop thinking and doing and all of the guff they write is simply wish-fulfillment. I do agree that the never-ending push for growth has negative consequences and that we all need a bit of slowing down and fireside sitting for our continued mental health but The Idler crew are not really that sort of people are they?