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

Remember me.

> Terms and Conditions.




















*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.

Subscribe.

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

Today

Today being International Talk Like A Pirate Day, I suppose one ought to give it a go.

Ahem.

Ahhhrrrr.

There you are. Alas, I don't speak Somali.

How Capitalism Works

Punter: Hey guess what I bght tday.

Blogista: Wha.

Pontoon: A cow.

Blogista: A cow? No shit.

Pfuhl: Yeh an cow axtually. Wit a circulr hat on, an' allin formaldeuyde an' that. Like those Encient Agypitans.

Blogista: How much it set u back?

Ptooey: Awwwwww...

Blogista: G'wan.

Pinter: Fukin 97 mil. Fukin 97 mil.

Blogista: 97. Woooo, that is goin' some.

Pooter: But also I gotta haff a shak, an a lotof y'know like a haf a zebr.

Blogista: U got 1/2 zbra?

Pointless: U don' go fkin spen' 97 mil an u don' get 1/2 zebera. Basicly. An' in fuormoldyde.

Blogista: Shit, if I had 97 mil ponds I wd prolly by 1/2 azbr int a tnk of furmoldaxode as well.

Pongo: So whax wiv yr £3:20?

Blogista: I'll have a saveloy and chips, and a cup of tea.

Pondlife: Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

Philanthropy

In 1862 Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling patented the first machine gun.

As Wikipedia puts it...

He invented the Gatling gun after he noticed the majority of dead returning from the American Civil War died of illness, rather than gunshots. In 1877, he wrote: "It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished."

Quote Unquote

"NATURE," "natural," and the group of words derived from them, or allied to them in etymology, have at all times filled a great place in the thoughts and taken a strong hold on the feelings of mankind. That they should have done so is not surprising when we consider what the words, in their primitive and most obvious signification, represent; but it is unfortunate that a set of terms which play so great a part in moral and metaphysical speculation should have acquired many meanings different from the primary one, yet sufficiently allied to it to admit of confusion. The words have thus become entangled in so many foreign associations, mostly of a very powerful and tenacious character, that they have come to excite, and to be the symbols of, feelings which their original meaning will by no means justify, and which have made them one of the most copious sources of false taste, false philosophy, false morality, and even bad law.

J.S. Mill, "On Nature", 1894


herons flying upstream, their colour matching the sky so closely that they might have been flews of wind

Annie Proulx, "Fine Just The Way It Is", 2008

Wow

As Toys for the Boys go, this has to be the best ever.

Thanks to EU Referendum for the link, and as they comment, "Just why are we messing about with windmills?"

No doubt our cretinous Gubbmunt and our population of woolly-minded pinkoes will wet themselves in terror at the idea of having nucular atomy* things all over the shop.

Apart from carpeting the UK and pincushioning the seas with 1000000000000 windmills in an attempt to generate as much energy as a handful of nuclear power stations, there is always the utterly Green option of the potato battery still to go for.

But for a moment there, I thought... wow.

* With reference to the outbreak of the 2nd Iraq War and a bloke in his pigeon loft interviewed at the time by Aunty Beeb, who opined that he didn't want Saddam sending any of his "anthraxes" over here. That's why we should all have shotgun licences, in case we see an anthrax maybe idling over a double espresso in a smart coffee bar near the British Museum and clearly plotting our downfall.

Don't want any nucular atoms here. You're barred.

Desert

NobFriCorp®©¿ apologise to our customers, clients, or what have you, for the lack of blogging recently. This is due to:

1) Summer;
2) Winter;
3) Many more gut-wrenching personal crises than you could conceivably shake a stick at;
4) Wrong kind of snow on the keyboard.

(Only one of these is true).

You will be pleased to know that we are kicking off our unrelaunch or is it unrepositioning within the market with the immortal Shakin' Stevens...



He does that pointingyfinger thang a bit too often, but so does the statue in the garden. Poor man's Bryan Ferry and all that.

Which reminds me of an C18th gravestone in a country churchyard near Newbury which has a cast of the fore and second fingers of the deceased's right hand attached, so that you may introduce yourself to her across the centuries.

Sir.
Madam.
I am dead.
Why! So almost am I.