Gnome Chomsky 7: with Gnobert

Getting more sophisticated now, but more obscure.

From The Wizards of Ur:

And so Gnobert Wilson and Gnome Chomsky ride off into the sunset, leaving Gnoman Mailer to face the music. Gnome Chomsky and Gnoman Mailer are easy enough names to get, but we named Gnobert Wilson after Robert Wilson, a famed avant-garde theatrical director. Not long ago, I was talking to a fellow parent at my son's annual pre-school picnic and he mentioned something about Robert Wilson the theatrical director, so I told him about my comic. He seemed to find it incredibly hilarious that I had named a small blue gnome in a beret after Robert Wilson and kept going on about it. I'm not quite sure why he found it so funny, and didn't want to burst his bubble by admitting that name had been a bit of a desperate stab in the dark as far as Adam & I were concerned. If you know anything about the real Robert Wilson and why it might be funny that he is being depicted as a gnome we'd love to hear about it.

Meanwhile, I've already linked to this, but I will again:

Apparently [Noam] Chomsky was on his way to give a lecture at the Palestinian university in Bir Zeit when he was denied entry:

Prof Chomsky said the officials were very polite but he was denied entry because 'the government did not like the kinds of things I say and they did not like that I was only talking at Birzeit and not at an Israeli university too.'

Note that we only have Chomsky's word for the rationale behind his exclusion: handy that it aggrandises his own reputation. Note too the characteristic Chomskyan attempt to cast himself as the fearless outsider:

He added: 'I asked them if they could find any government in the world that likes the things I say.'

Well, yes, that might be difficult, now that Pol Pot and Milosevic are no longer around. But I reckon authoritarian populist Hugo Chavez is quite pleased with the things Prof. Chomsky says, and he also seems pretty popular with the theo-fascist government of Iran. [...]

Of course Chomsky shouldn't have been denied entry to the West Bank, any more than that other objectionable self-publicist Geert Wilders should have been refused entry to Britain. But to present this incident as the action of a repressive state against a poor innocent scholar is at the very least disingenuous (but unfortunately rather typical) of the BBC.