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Public: Welfare
Disabled dancing allowance   (+5, -1)  [vote for, against]
A benefit for people who can't dance

If you can't walk well, you can get welfare benefits because it interferes with your ability to live properly. Likewise, if you're blind, you're lacking in one of the characteristics of living organisms and it's considered appropriate to compensate for that disability. You can go through the whole lot - growth - grants to modify cars for dwarfs; respiration - oxygen cylinders, respirators, maybe inhalers and so on.

But what about reproduction?

If you can't dance, you get up on that dance floor and attract nobody, or you just avoid the whole thing. You are reproductively impaired to some extent. Granted you can meet people in other ways but deaf people are often not blind and so on, so that's not a valid argument.

Therefore, i propose that government-employed dance experts be appointed to whom one can go in order for one's dancing to be assessed. If it's sufficiently bad, you can get a grant for it. Who knows, it might even look like a silly walk.
-- nineteenthly, Aug 31 2010

"Early indications from biochemical tests suggest that the men who were better dancers were also more healthy." http://www.bbc.co.u...nvironment-11223473
Hot topic of the week it seems! [DrBob, Sep 08 2010]

I read the other one and knew this was yours - funny old mood you're in today.
-- po, Aug 31 2010


For those that are unable to dance to attract mates, it is best to take inspiration from elsewhere in nature. For example, you could dig trapshaft in your garden and trick prospective mates into falling into your shaft by means of carefully placed copies of supermarket tabloids or soft-core pornography.
-- calum, Aug 31 2010


Yes, [po], i think i'm temporarily someone i'm not.

Good point, [calum]. You could maybe jump out of your front door in the middle of the night and grab them.
-- nineteenthly, Aug 31 2010


<ponders mental image of [nineteenthly] dressed as a giant trapdoor spider>

[calum], bower birds.
-- 8th of 7, Aug 31 2010


Ah well, there's also that spider which ties up its mate before sex. Seems rather familiar somehow.
-- nineteenthly, Aug 31 2010


Fishbone from me. The welfare system is an artificial interference with natural selection. What you're proposing is spending *my* tax dollars to create a further generation of duds, and encumbering my (dancing) daughters with yet another tax burden.
-- Tulaine, Aug 31 2010


// spider which ties up its mate before sex //

Notably, the male has to tie up the viciously predatory female lest he become her next meal.

In your species, it is apparently normal for the male to pay for dinner; in this case (as in yours, we understand) he merely goes the extra step of risking paying for dinner with his life ...
-- 8th of 7, Aug 31 2010


Fair enough. Most murder victims knew their murderers and are sometimes married to them.
-- nineteenthly, Aug 31 2010


That reminds me of the joke where the guy who is ashamed of his wooden eye goes out dancing. If you don't know the joke, I sympathize with you. It is not as funny as the joke about the pig with the wooden leg.
-- bungston, Aug 31 2010


You're right, that one IS funny.
-- 8th of 7, Aug 31 2010


Actually, carnivores tend to hunt as solitaries or co-operative packs, and rip herbivores' throats out. They rarely predate their own species*

*(Homo Sapiens excluded)
-- 8th of 7, Sep 02 2010


It took me ages to work out what you meant by "predate" there, along the lines of how something was supposed to exist before it existed.

Anyway, it does happen. Woodlice eat each other and i'm pretty sure a lot of filter-feeding animals with planktonic larvae couldn't help but eat their own kind. Don't sharks eat each other before birth?
-- nineteenthly, Sep 02 2010


//Homo Sapiens excluded//

Cptlztn: Homo sapiens.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Sep 02 2010


There used to be dances for people who can't dance, such as the quadrille, the hokey-cokey and "stripping the willow". They work out cheaper.
-- pertinax, Sep 06 2010


Well, in that case there should be government-sponsored clubs for people who can't dance where they do those.
-- nineteenthly, Sep 06 2010


Not advisable, it's an offence in some jurisdictions.
-- 8th of 7, Sep 06 2010


// goverthmenth taketh awayth//

Typing with your mouth full, [bigsleep]?
-- pertinax, Sep 07 2010


According to recent research (linky>, men who are rubbish at dancing are also old, weak, ill and impotent. I, of course, am a most splendid dancer. Get on down!
-- DrBob, Sep 08 2010


Well, according to that, [DrBob], i should be a dead eunuch.
-- nineteenthly, Sep 08 2010


You sound like a sad case, 'teenthly. If I were you, I'd start taking dance lessons right sharpish before an angry mob of image fascists come and drag you out of your house, make you wear a cap and bells and force you to wrestle with bears for public entertainment.

Other interesting facts from the study are that the rythmically challenged are also unable to change fuses or lightbulbs, can't cook anything more complex than cheese on toast and can't whistle without dribbling.

I thank providence than I am a disco god. Young ladies have been known to become instantly impregnated just at the rumour that I might be dancing near them some time soon and others have fainted dead-away at the sight of my snakey hips...although that's normally quite late at night, so it might just be the amount of alco-pops that they've consumed that causes that.
-- DrBob, Sep 08 2010


O wad some Power the gift tae gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

It wad frae mony a blunder free us,

An foolish notion:

What airs in dress an gait wad lea'e us,

An ev'n devotion!
-- nineteenthly, Sep 09 2010


One outbreak of verse deserves another, I feel

The Scotsman is mean, as we're all well aware
And bony and blotchy and covered with hair
He eats salty porridge, he works all the day
And he hasn't got bishops to show him the way!

The English, the English, the English are best
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest.

Flanders & Swann.
-- DrBob, Sep 09 2010


The British Isles are composed of four races of man

. . . the Scottish, who keep the Sabbath--and everything else they can get their hands on.

. . . the Welsh, who pray on their knees on a Sunday--and on their neighbours for the other six days.

. . . the Irish, who don't know what they want, but are willing to fight for it anyway.

. . . and the English, who consider themselves a race of self-made men, thereby relieving the almighty of a terrible burden....
-- 8th of 7, Sep 09 2010



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