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.

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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.