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.