Friendly Fire in the Culture Wars: Pt 1

With the weekend looming, time for some light-hearted news from the 'war on terror', courtesy of the UK media.

Metal musician arrested for terrorist facial hair

A story ripped through the media that British security staff at Luton Airport near London questioned a suspicious-looking individual. They were on the edge of getting out the rubber gloves because of his "Taliban" beard. The man in question actually turned out to be Metallica frontman and noted beardy James Hetfied, who was flying in to play the UK end of Live Earth.

Actually, what happened was that Hugo Rifkind made a one-paragraph passing comment about it in his Times of London column (sort of a rich man's Page Six). This got picked up and accelerated through the world's news pages. Rifkind, who many suspect only got the gig with the snooty Times because his daddy was a Conservative MP, is highly unlikely to have ever hung around with the "friends" who he claims were the source of the story – unless they were his own friends, who probably couldn't tell Harvester of Sorrows from a hole in the ground. And there's another slight problem. Hetfield's press people said it's never happened.