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

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