Foreboding

One thing was certain,

Cheam

I'm so glad I don't live in Cheam any more.

Winter Solstice

Missed it.

Drats.

Oeutres Turps Oueutres Meoures

In my day the folk singingy people used to stick to a reliable Cornish-Bristol sort of accent which anyone can do, so anyone can join in. And it's goodbye to arrrll you young ladies of Spairrn, for we're bound for the Rrrriooo Grrrrande. You know the sort of thing.

The stakes have been raised, now you have to offer a fruity and you'll-be-amused-by-its-pretentiousness Dublin and all the fun has gone out of it. I blame the Pogues. And the Chieftains. Too-ra-li-oo-ra-li-add-ity? A simple -addy will suffice, thank you.

Also the English have to be blamed for everything, including lack of sexual intercourse, persecution, the sending of criminals to Strine instead of hanging them &c &c (& as well deserved). I find this tiresome. O bogus Gael, the 'craic' you smoke from a pipe is brain-damaging enough.

Readers: Why the lack of posts? Have you died?

Self: No, I am in paid employment. 06:00 Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night!
21:00 Hooome to Hooove and bed. From Bexhill. M2F.
Weekends, coma and rooting out five clean shirts.
But - I am not ungrateful.

Readers: What has been th'biggest lifestoile change sints y'divoce? Two years ago.

Self: Then, I would spend my Saturday evenings silent upon a page in my Larousse Gastronomique.

Readers: Now?

Self: I have just fucked up opening a can of Prince's chopped pork and ham because the key went all wongly. Again.

The Ten Most Shit Singles Ever

#1 Black Lace - "Agadoo" (1984)



None of the fruit ever worked again. I made very sure of that with my meat cleaver. The pineapple was difficult because she still wanted to live.

#2 You were expecting The Tweets' "Birdie Song" (1981) or The Firm's "Star Trekkin'" (1987) or Joe Dolce and "Shaddap Your Face" (1981 again OMFG) or..?

..? I lost the will to carry on.

Wilson Keppel and Betty (again)

Sexual intercourse began
In Hull in nineteen sixty four
(I was six and had no idea)
Those who had been had, had hadn't
None had had been had before.

Sexual intercourse in Hull
Commenced in nineteen sixty three
(We won the war...
In nineteen sixty four
There was more.

Erm...

So you didn't buy your girlfriend a pack'o'five gentleman's underpants from Marks & Spencer as a pre-Christmas present and explain that they were roomy, flannel-bloomery, warm, high quality, long-lasting and basically the finest underpants in town and why she should give up on the pinchy flimsy pantie cutty knickery things and the point of that sort of hole at the front is...

...also book tokens are available from - well, they are available.

Readers: But you don't have a girlfriend. You don't even know any women. Or men. But women or girls especially, you have not even talked to one for three months or more.

Blogista: My advantage is I have several unused packs of underpants.

It's Down to th'Wire - Noooooooooooo CHAIR!!!!

Here's a bit of a competition fo' y'all.

Readers: Woo-woo! What are th'prizes?

Prizes? Were you born yesterday or what.

Anyhows, the point of this here Competition is to decide who done the best "Green Green Grass of Home".

#1~ Could it be ~ your starter for 10 ~ George Jones --- or Jerry Lee Lewis?



Hokay. If you picked Jerry Lee Lewis then your concept of a "musical instrument" must be pohaps a lift (American: elevator) or a mall (British: shopping centre). Clue: neither of these are a musical instrument. Well they weren't in my day.




Couple of textual subtleties before I feed you the raw meat...

"The old home place is still standing though the paint is cracked and dry" - but maybe only in the protagonist's imagination? Discuss.

"For there's a guard and there's a sad old padre with arm in arm will walk |at daybreak" - you were wanting to hear "|beside me" to rhyme with "padre"? Deny.




On with the Competition...

#2~ Great guitar-picker, but where is Chet Atkins going with this?


#3 Porter Waggoner - love the mellophones or whatever they are:


#4 Boris Godunov (no, not that Борис Годунов) and his "set old badre", and then the Sov U went and folded and all. Shit.


#5 Elvis. Wellll... bit like Frank Sinatra singing "Diamond Dogs" but there y'go.






Let's take a quick break from this exciting competition to consider a few Facts:

1) Soup does not figure in any ancient text or mythology, and it was not a factor in the Renaissance: it is largely a modern or post-industrial concept.

2) The bite of Conscience, or 'agenbite of inwit' -as imagined by some Medieval thinkers - has proved not to be a 'bite' at all - it is more like being gummed or sucked.

3) The Chinese have never had a reliable postal system. You can put a 'tagged' dried duck into the Chinese postal system, and years later a Californian post-doctorate student will tell you where it actually got to.




On with the Competition...

#6 Tom Jones - young ladies still throw their panties at this Welsh Wabinogion when he sings, so there's hope for us all. Maybe $35 per used pant (no worries logistically, I got connections a website and a clothes-basket) and say four gigs a week at fifteen young ladies a stand, we're looking at erm well you do the math, I am the talent not the accountant.


#7 Has to be Piet and Tonny Kamper


And before you object that this is "Wimoweh" and not whatever it was we were doing,I say, they are troupers and I love them and...

#8 and it is the real Tom Jones and you can see how wonderful Swansea is at high speed or maybe that was Cardiff, or somewhere near Wales. God I am getting old and tired. I am sorry for my Life.



#9 Little Joanie Baez adds a touch of class and folk insouciance to this otherwise miserable and muddy struggle for survival



#10 Nice hat but has no idea what self-pity is about, also he gives the ending away. Hm. Who is Charlie Pride?


And the Winner?

Well that depends on the votes of you out there.

Trrrr trrrr trrr tapping of fingernails waiting for your votes to come in for some asshole or loser or other.

BING time up.

And the Results Are:

George Jones won, as was predictable from the start.

Piet and Tonny Kamper get Special Award just for not doing "Green Green Grass of Home" in a "Green Green Grass of Home" competition, and for doing it so well.

Fails

All this and more at the Fail Blog.

The Answer

Pilgrims: What was the question?

Wise Wossy: Tell me then, what the answer was.

Plogrims: Like a pub quiz only you get the answers and you have to guess what the questions were?

Woss of Ages (cleft by me): You could win a free weekend in Hilbert's Hotel.

Readers: By cleft, you mean fucked?

Blogista: Yes, I have had Jonathan Ross and all of his offspring and offsprings' offspring and offsprings' offsprings' offspring* unto - unless they were under age, not Homo sapiens sapiens (patent pending) or otherwise incapable of consent.

Readers: So your "sex" life lately has been more barren than even your real one.

*I could and would have had their hamsters, gerbils &c only I don't do that kind of stuff. I only do sentient human beings.

And don't bother calling out your lawyers about the "sentient". I already fucked your lawyers mostly (the sentient ones).

---

Postscript: It used in my day to be " Great Redeemer" not "Great Jehovah". And "purple hand"? "Feed me 'tl ('til???) I want no more" like foie gras, not "Feed me now and evermore"?

This must be an ironically ironic comedy combo. Or a first srike from that Damien Shark guy and his unpleasantly underpanted sidekick Trace.

Maybe God and the Flying Spaghetti Monster are both dead.

The great god Pan is dead.

Perhaps the beat combo would work better if theyhad an air of having emigrated recently from Veneuela or somewhere. They would need different hats, also ponchos. We would want to see a nose flute or two. What do you, the Readers, think?

Commentary

Armchair Blogeneral: Things are going down and up - and they should be going up and down!!!

This is intolerable. It is caused by Fools.

Ministers of State: We have not used the word "robust" for some time now, you will note. We have not called for the introduction of "robust measures", for instance, for some months now.

Armblog General: Aha! Your measures are to be as flimsy as the Circumstance itself?

Ministers of State: We will make some things bigger and others smaller. The bigger things must be biggened, the smaller smallened, or vice versa, partly in consequence of the Circumstance and partly in counter to it.

Blogchair Blogeral (shrewdly): Your method, then, is one of Sympathetic Magic: to "cure like with like" by continuing to do exactly what you had been doing, as one must rub a toad onto the face of one who has had a toad rubbed onto his face?

Ministers of State: It is a matter of both Faith and Science. "Christ on a Bike" is our watchword.

---

And on top of all this we have a milkman for a Foreign Secretary.

What what?

Milligan??? He was surely one of those Go-Ons.

I Been the Woild

Instructions: to operate this mechanism, please click on the patch taped over the mouth.

Secret Agent

A shriek as General... as Peter Lorre flips a chocolate button between her breasts.

It matters.

I have not bothered with a James Bond fillum for twenty years and am not tempted by the bovine Mr D Craig in the latest "outing"s.

"Secret Agent" (clicky on the linky 2 c th'flicky), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring John Gielgud, Peter Lorre, Madeleine Carroll, Robert Young - now there's a patchy and rather weird motion picture the way they used to make them.

Call me old and cranky but...

Readers: You are old, Father Blogiam, the young Readers said. And cranky.













"Oh I say, don't cry yet, have a cigarette." Everybody smokes for England in this flim and I approve the sentiment if not the methodology.

The days when I could puff contentedly at a Navy Cut or a Capstan Full Strength --- or a Number 6 ---

Tomorrow to the tobacconist on Church Street for a couple of boxes of oval Turkish, some proper untipped cigarettes and maybe a churchwarden pipe. Dammit.

Fold It

One 30MB download later and I'm hooked on folding proteins.

Somewhere

Somewhere near you a paedophile is grooming.

Somewhere near you and now.

The owl and the pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat...

It will be the same under President O'Bama.

I write with my CZ75 to hand. Only a buffoon would choose otherwise.

With One Bound He Was Free (2)

I live alone
In my own Heaven...

Gm. Not at all like the late and great Great Orlando.




Hamlet: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

The Wind: I will rattle your sash windows without cease.

Sausage-eaters: We have nothing to hide and nothing to fear. Smell our penises: they have not been anywhere they should't ought to have been and done nothing they didn't ought to have not done. Please be good enough, sir, to smell my penis. You will find I am an innocent man.

Shagspire: I'm getting... smoked mackerel. And a mouldy basement cluttered with broken office furniture.

Ground Porks: You mean that five-legged high-backed swivel chair only one of the arms has broken off leaving a Roehamptonly exposed steel joint and some loose yellow foam protruding from the mulberry upholstery, which you ought not to have to look at?

Shøgspør: Just leave th'poetry to me, k?

Groundlings: (who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise): K.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

After seven years, 900-odd witnesses called, 20 million words or so spoken or written or in some way recorded, £150,000,000 in legal fees, a presiding judge who is presumably hoping to retire before anything actually gets concluded or not, and a final bill for 000,000s more to be formally presented by the grateful taxpayer to the perhaps more grateful lawyers, the Saville Inquiry is getting to the point where it may have begun starting to stop.

What do you the readers think?

Martin McGuiness (first-time murderer oops caller from Derry): A somple opologo from tho Brotosh Govornmont wod have soffoced.

Retired Officer, 1 Bn. Parachute Regiment, looking a bit effete because he is still wearing his hair long and footballery in the early 1970s style but hard as nails for all that: Fuck off.

Uh-oh.












My Own Findings (pro bono publico): I would have been up Glenda Jackson like a rat up a drain, though I was only thirteen years old, if she had asked me. She never did, and my dreams have ingrown --- and reappeared as a cluster of tusk-like nasal and facial protrusions.

Peter Finch, Murray Head? Sorry, but not then or ever.

The Thing

O you headless chicken
Can those poor teeth take so much kicken
You're always so charming



Mr. Brian Eno used to sing to us in the olden days but now he is made into styrofoam packaging chips.

Nothing is what it used to be in the olden days, so at least you can be sure of Nothing.

Impropaganda

Why won't the Ghibellines stand up to the flying penis sodomy lobby?

An example of thirteenth century political propaganda from the excellent Got Medieval. The post above also links to magical private parts and the earliest medieval joke book... many of the best bits of human life are here.

Q&A

Earnest Enquirer: Whatever happened to Mr. Neil Kinnock? Has he died yet?

Iron John: Nope, he's still going strong.

Earnest Enquirer: What about that Mr. Mandelson person.

Iron John: He hasn't died recently either.

No Se Puede Vivir Sin Amar

¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN?
¿QUE ES SUYO?
¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!

DO YOU LIKE THIS GARDEN?
WHY IS IT YOURS?
WE EVICT THOSE WHO DESTROY!

Superiority

Blogista: Thank goodness our Leader totally thought of a plan to save the world at the last moment. I mean, phew. Bit like "Assault on Precinct 13" only without th'same kind of silencers.

Reader: I ham no englis.

Blogista: Oh, you are American or foreign or something? Well, I bent your daughter over the scrolliest bit of your chaise longue and - let's be frank - enjoyed her while she was trying to set the cushion straight.

Reader: I har no shez lonk.

Blogista: Well anyhow I took your daughter from behind. TOOK. From BEHIND.

Reader:

Blogista: Look, we have a giant cardboard Leader on sticks. Whenever we are told to, we can raise the Leader above th' crowd, on the sticks. So you gotta Leader like that?

Reader (note the missing 'L'):

Blogista: So suck my penis.

Holy, Venerable, Late Lamented and Sainted Woss: Wow that is an original gag. As (heh) 'twere. Shit, that's a double-take etc etc etc

Martrys

Yeah, our movement just suffered another couple of Martyrs.

Shit happens.

The er Martyred Two.

Plenty more where they came from, but still worth a chorus or so of our Anthem, just in case you thought we were losing.


There may be some readers who notice a teeth in this fillum allegedly even worse than Shane McGowan his teeth (neatly avoiding any controversy over the placing of the apostroph'e).












We are somwhat less incapable of dentistry than you may suppose
and we have the world-historical Sense of Humour against which even hyper-snarky Americans are defenseless.












The global importance of our media "Outlets" - and the late Wossy and Wanker were nothing if not "Outlets" - speaks for it and for them and for Our Selves.

The Wikipegg and I

Employment at last!!! - a Mr Dion O'Banion has offered me a job in his flower shop in Chicago.

I will certainly take the post, even though according to Wikipedia his name is really Deanie or Dean and the URL for his 'pedia entry is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_O'Banion.

I will address him as 'Gimpy' to be on the safe side.

---

Yes. I know.










It means leaving my beloved and well-governed country.

---

But he says if I work hard enough I could be enjoying a challenging position in one of his garage businesses a while from now.

It will be a big Life Change.

Joy for Monday and For Ever

Well, for a thousand years anyway... the Longplayer is playing in the here and now, here.

I miss (they are in store somewhere) my albums of Eliane Radigue. How influential do you get and still be not heard of much?

Nothing to do, then, but post Jem Finer (composer of Longplayer inter alia) and the Pogues and the Dubliners, and take ship on the Irish Rover...



Or maybe accept defeat and exit gracefully



If I should fall from Grace with God
Where no doctor can relieve me
If I'm buried 'neath the sod
But the angels won't receive me

Let me go boys
Let me go boys
Let me go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry

This land was always ours
Was the proud land of our fathers
It belongs to us and them
Not to any of the others

Let them go boys
Let them go boys
Let them go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry

Bury me at sea
Where no more a ghost can haunt me
If I rock upon the waves
No cunts will lie upon me

And I'm free boys
Then I'm free boys
Let me go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry

Mr X Record RequeX

A reader axes, what do you think of these, Sons of the Delta?

We sampled (forensicallly and scieintientiffxicaklly) a sample, "eBay Blues":

Well I came home early last Monday
She was standing in the hall
With twenty-seven suitcases
Stacked up against the wall

Well I knew she was leaving
But I never knew she had so many clothes

She took half out to the taxi she said
Honey you carry those

This is so true that they totally just pwnd my votey things. Bristol on the 28th October, Haringe in Belgium on the 8th November. Be there or

or be gasp square?

Blues for Mr X

Couple of tracks ("Detroit Moan" and "Telephoning The Blues", 1929) from the underrated Victoria Spivey



that led me to "How Do You Do It That Way", with Victoria Spivey and Louis Armstrong (on the 1929 Okeh version)

When the rooster and the hen go to the barn to play
Oh the henhouse chickens, how do they do it that way?

which is in my Top Ten Sexiest Records Ever list.

Now that I've found The Red Hot Jazz Archive posting may be rather slow, as I will be listening to everything several times over.

In fact I think I might grow a huge beard and start up a radio jazz programme, say Radio 2 at one o'clock in the morning, just an hour...

Readers: Come on Aunty Beeb! He pays his license fee like everybody else, give him a slot!

Blogista: Erm, I don't have a TV so I don't pay the license fee.

Readers: That's scuppered that, then.

Blogista: Meanwhile here's Clarence Williams with an oddly sinister recording of "'I'll Be Glad When You're Dead You Rascal You".

INTJ

I am a Mastermind.

"Masterminds are rare, comprising no more than, say, one percent of the population, and they are rarely encountered outside their office, factory, school, or laboratory."

Or outside of their flat, where this Mastermind is about to take his second bath of the day, for want of anything else to do.

Yaay yaay eye-en-tee-jaaay!

I am the King's own dog at Kew -
Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you?

Won't Someone

Blogert Island Blogs: The only Record I know of which ends with the Riff.

Readers: Erm...

(in case of) Readers (break galss

Readers: Y'mean we have to break this galss to get at th'hammer, smole mettal.

International Blogetary Fund: Yep.

Readers: An' hit th'other galss wit th'hammuh, and so xcape.






Readers: Weeeeel. We're going to go off an' read something else now.

Slow News Day

Nothing much happening hereabouts today so I mooched around the interwebs a while - and found these startling tilt-shift photography clips.

Inappropriate

Marmite banned from school breakfast club!

Welsh Assembly spokesman: 'We have not mentioned Marmite in our guidance. In terms of toppings for toast we indicate these are and optional and where required a low-fat polyunsaturated spread should be used and similarly a reduced sugar jam.'

Marmite spokesman: 'It does contain salt and it is important only small quantities are used for taste. But it is not harmful, and only a small amount is required to make toast tasty for children.'

Head teacher: 'I am aware Marmite is not on the menu but I have no input into the content of the meals.'

The language is dead, deader than my desire to eat toast spread with 'low-fat polyunsaturated spread' and 'a reduced sugar jam'.

Sweet Dreams

mgrphhr okx khhhh GH? ahhhh
















phrgrbrrr. snrk

rarr: likelihood nr zzzzzzzzzzzz hrgl






















khsnrgl hrgh mlp mlp mlp. Xnax xnax srrrrrr

Feedback

Feedback from the latest job interview...

"His estimated verbal critical reasoning ability is well above average when compared to a Banking, Finance and Professional Services 2006 comparison group. His result is better than 99% of the people in this group. This suggests that he will display an exceptional level of ability in understand and evaluating written reports and documents.

He needed to display a more proactive approach and have a more active contribution to the team discussions".

i.e. I'm a geek. TY.

Well, I come across as a quiet, calm, objective, laid-back kind of a person. Works for me. But this is the third job interview in five months where it has not worked for me.

Any beautiful submissivettes reading this and willing to boost the economy in these troubled times by teaching me Domineering and getting me and my superlative talents back into productive work?

Nope? Maybe I should buy a fluffy puppy

and shout at it and kick it around the floor for a week or two.

A real puppy would be better for the yelps of pain and stuff.

Hmmm. Any of you Trappist monasteries out there needing a Project Manager?

Apocalypse Then

...and in the death
as the last few corpses lay rotting on the slimy thoroughfare
the shutters lifted an inch in temperance building
high on poacher's hill
and red mutant eyes gazed down on hunger city
no more big wheels
fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats
and ten thousand peoploids split into small tribes
coveting the highest of the sterile skyscrapers
like packs of dogs assaulting the glass fronts of love-me avenue
ripping and re-wrapping mink and shiny silver fox
now leg-warmers
family badge of sapphire and cracked emerald
any day now
the Year of the Diamond Dogs...

This ain't rock'n' roll! This is genocide!

Bowie, Diamond Dogs, 1974.

And because I'm in the mood, the eerily beautiful "Sweet Thing"



I was working in the City for a stockbroker on Black Monday in 1987, responsible for developing and managing the trading floor software.

Walking onto the floor that morning and seeing red screens everywhere, I thought I must have made some terrible coding error, and began frantically wondering what I could have got wrong. It was a temporary relief to find out that the red was reality. That was my first taste of The Fear.

One of our traders was out in Ireland on a picnic and decided to show off to the girls by spending the day on his new-fangled mobile telephoonical device. "Buy! Hundred thousand ICI! Buy!"

It has always impressed me that all day not one of the traders he was buying from let on about the markets being in free-fall.

He lost more than £50m.

Sceptical Job Agents

Sceptical job agents.

Don'tcha just hate 'em?







From a job ad I was sent today...

"Candidates will have the opportunity to work in Brussels and enjoy the benefits of the stable Belgium economy and strong Euro."

Well, I suppose rubble is stable and strong, so maybe I'll go for it.

Sceptical candidates, don'tcha just hate 'em?

Mark to Market

Mr Paulson's bail-out bill includes the suspension of mark-to-market rules.

Which seems to mean that instead of having to say "may assets are worth what I can sell them for today" I can say "my assets are worth what I want them to be worth" or "my assets are worth what they were worth before they became worthless" or "my assets are worth what I think they might be worth one day, once they have ceased to be worthless".

Which is a bit of a boo if my assets really do have a useful market value: dodgy institutions can now pretend to be as sound as I am and the risks of lending to anyone therefore increase, which cannot help in a liquidity crisis.

I give up. I don't understand anything any more.

I will pour myself a very large whisky, settle down in my club chair, and laugh heartily as the Laws of Gresham, Unintended Consequences*, Murphy and so on inexorably work out their effects.

I recall that the Bank of England once prevented a run by having its liveried footmen deliver boxes of gold at the front door - under the eyes of the panicking depositors - then scamper round the back and deliver the same boxes again. Maybe a similar kind of swindle will work after all.

*
1) The Irish Government guarantees Irish bank deposits;
2) lots of people send their money to Ireland;
3) to the extent that the Irish Government cannot possibly afford to guarantee the deposits.

Immense Penis

Picture courtesy of Nurse Myra.








Aliens from Outer Space: Oh hh Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Blogista: Yap.

Aliens from Outer Space: What, you actually replied to our penis extension "spam" messages?

Blogista: Yappity yap. Every single one.

Aliens from Outer Space: What about the administrative messages from your bank or banks? Th' parttime job offers, th' work-at-home big opportunities?

Blogista: Never cut any ice, sir.

Aliens from Outer Space: So you have the biggest penis in the universe and we still don't know your bank account number?

Blogista: That's pretty well the way it is.

Chief Alien from Outer Space: Put this call on hold. Get me the Head of Spam, now.

Beautiful Titsy PA to the Chief Alien from Outer Space: Oohhhhhhhhh.

Project Manager (reporting up to Board level): Looks like he's having your PA through some kind of nth-dimensional wormhole. I'll put that down as a red "traffic light" on th' Risk Log.

Beautiful Titsy PA to the Chief Alien from Outer Space: Oh god I'm coming again.

Chief Alien from Outer Space: Add it to the Issue Log also.

Boy Beautiful

Nice pecs. I like the purple shading on the other musculature.

Nice bit of driftwood. It was just there on the beach and you decided to pick up on it and pose with it. Just because you are so spontaneous with flotsam.

Nice haircut. The sideburns dark and trimmed, the rest roughly ruffled and - well, we can all relate to peroxide and a dab of KY.

Pity about the penis.

Evvy day you are sent messages from well-wishing persons who only want to make your manhood bigger, or at least less small. Reply to them. You are thinking "spam"; I am thinking, you. And your future... get one, honeybuns.

Which reminds me...

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

(W.B. Yeats, 1920)

And...

I've never heard of Etta Baker before... this is just lovely.

The YouTube post is titled "Railroad Bill": what the song has to do with Railroad Bill, I don't know, sounds more like Louis Collins (another bad man) - but no matter.

Bessie Smith

Can't Can

To the tune of Adeste Fidelis...

Hey solid citizen
We just stole your boat

heeeee heee hee heeeeeeeee heeee

Can

One tries to leave one's comments on Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans" (1968) on the Times Online weekly Arts site but can't because it has broken down.

Warhol can't even get his lettering aligned properly, losing it particularly on the "TOMATO".

Nor can he quite get the perspective right, on a simple cylindrical object, viz a soup can.

No doubt this all has its meaning, in the peculiarly silly American way which H. Melville popularised with his stupid whale book ("Moby Dick", 1851).

This is an appalingly bad book about the Nantucket whale fisheries (obsessively about the Nantucket whale fisheries), written at best in a kind of overblown prose remniscent of a "club" chair in the mausoleous foyer of a now-defunct investment bank, shiny burgundy leather with studs sunk six inches into it and which no human being was ever supposed to actually try to sit on - combined with the rotten cod Shakespeherian* necessary to convince the punter that it is Arrrrrrrrrt and meaningful &c.

Which is why, for me, the ticky box on the Times Arts Commenty Box Thing carries such intense pathos.

*Required

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*In particular with anything to do with 1st Mate Starbuck, after whom your cup of hot liquid cardboard is named. Really. A tad ironic given that the original of Moby Dick may have been the whale Mocha Dick. See? It all fits.

The DP Brothers

I have only one remaining reader, and he claims to be worth exactly as much as I am as a gigolo.

1,102 dollars per hour. But what sort of dollar?

AUD? BSD? BBD? BZD? BND? CAD? KYD? XCD? FJD? GYD? JMD? LRD? NAD? NZD? SGD? SBD? SRD? TWD? TTD? USD? ZWD?

(How much are you worth? Take the test!)

Ladies! Imagine the pleasure of being gently but urgently TAKEN by two menroots at once. Mr. X will see to the more unmentionable end, I am sure. Me, I am only delihgt machine at your service of desire. It will be like a uncrontollable indstrial accident in a plastic tubing extrusion plant, only more wiggly.

Please do not be surprised when I demand cash up front in the Maldive Islands Rufiyaa (MVR), an ISO4217 registered currency.

I wash behind my ears and cut my toenails regularly and am clean of didease, including cattle didsease. I assume Mr. X. does the same.

Cattle dideaseases I have never been caught out wid include -

Acetonaemia: or, ketosis - and I thought ketosis meant something differen'
Muhh - I got confused with kenosis. Not a cattle disiease.

Acorn poisoning: 'Nuff said. Go eady on dem acornz, bro sta acornz clean.

Anfrax: Feh, i never had even seen a anfrax in my man hair.

Babesiosis (redwater fever): This parasitic disease is usually first reported in May/June when its tick host first becomes active. It is September, no worries bebeh.

Bloat in Cattle: Spring an' Autumn, well is nearly winter, or anyhows fkin cold for Spteberer.

Bluetongue (BVT): The disease is non-contagious and is only transmitted by insect vectors. The disease is caused by a virus belonging to the family Reoviridae. Well, I nver had no dealing wiv that famileh an it's non-cottageous. Don' uk a gif hoss in the mout' hehe.

Anyway I got no cattle dieses and nor don't Mr. X.

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Manifesto

A blood-curdling article from the Telegraph:

Pensioners are going to miss out on hundreds of millions of pounds of benefits owed to them under a government move to cut the time they get to claim tax credits [...] Ministers have abolished the 12-month period in which the pensioners can claim backdated pension tax credits and imposed a new limit of three months.

The rule change, which comes in on October 6, will affect 110,000 of some of the poorest pensioners many of whom are struggling with soaring fuel and food bills.

As a result, ministers believe they will be able to save hundreds of millions of pounds because claimants will not apply for payments in time.

What utterly loathsome & heartless bastards.

My own Government will abolish the tax credit scheme altogether, saving the taxpayer billions upon billions of quids as the public servants, computer systems and infrastructure involved in running the scheme become redundant.

We will instead commission 110,000 of the excellent Heath Robinson pancake-making machines illustrated above, for distribution in flatpack to the very poorest this winter.

At only 1 candlepower, the machine is economical on fuel (the coal in the scuttle is a counterweight, not to be burned on pain of death), more than offsetting the rising costs of egg, flour &c. The output is a hearty, warming and nutritious meal.

You may object that the machine itself is too complicated to be understood and used by the old trouts, but that is a technical point that applies in spades to the tax credit system itself.

The effect on Glooobal Warning will be minimal (far less than, say, a gas fire or stove) provided the old dears don't go and burn the coal.

Yes, a special task force of coal-scuttle inspectors will be needed to make sure the coal is not consumed, and apply simple on-the-spot death penalties to any old biddies who do so. But they will be paid out of local, not central, government taxation, so it doesn't really count. Also they will be low-grade morons whose only talents are for brutality and obstruction - unlike government ministers, public servants &c, so they will not cost a lot.

Unlike government ministers, public servants &c.

What?

Apparently.

Get your scores on the doors here.

Louis Collins

Mississippi John Hurt, "Louis Collins", 1928.








And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me.

And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron.

And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

Exodus 32 2:4

A fool and his money (£10,300,000 for a dead bullock with a bit of bling stuck on) are soon parted*.

So how come the fools got that sort of money in the first place.

* "A fool and his money are soon parted" © Thomas Tusser 1557