Sounds like a 1970s porno, but is actually an ancient and thoroughly respectable Arabic pastime, and the second it started, it immediately went to the top of my "Why El Fenn is better than everywhere else" list.
Perhaps surprisingly, this temple to a key pastime of students and the hungover has been launched by a physiotherapist, Bryan Robertson.
While their growing eminence may or may not presage a new era of European dominance, their swelling popularity reveals the power of their thumb-twitching pastime — and how eager golf fans are for vivid personalities.
The clubs then use them as sounding boards for the opinions of their general support, which is where a harmless pastime can become quite dangerous.
In Britain, by contrast, it's a pastime for thirtysomethings down the pub or on holiday.
Yes, I know the SNL bit was just a joke, and Palin was a surprisingly good sport about it (much like shooting wolves from a helicopter, another favorite Palin pastime).
That honour, instead, went to John Wycliffe, a 14th-century theologian, scholar and clerical troublemaker who translated the Bible into English in the 1380s, and argued for much of his life against the power and wealth of the pope – a somewhat edgy pastime that led to his bones being dug up and burned after his death, before being chucked into a river in Leicestershire.
National stereotyping became a European pastime: German papers castigating Greeks as tax-dodging, venal and work-shy; Greeks hitting back with Angela-Merkel-as-Adolf-Hitler posters.
Tanty, the most prominent female character in the book, is a nosy old matron whose favourite pastime is discussing other people's business at the top of her voice in shops, as if she is "in the market-place back home".
The favourite pastime of us on the so-called liberal left and the chic radical websites we turn to when we need a comfort blanket is to lob fruit at Westminster and the private school elitism that drives it.
Our appeal to readers to prove that this wasn't just a metropolitan pastime produced the following gems from the UK and the US.
