The chronicles of Ruin, continued.
Call me Ishmael said....intelligence is knowing what to do when you don't know what to do.
Anonymous said... When I don't know what to do,I come here.
10 September 2009 22:59
Tuesday, 15 July 2014
SiCK NOTE
Away for a few days, maybe a week; enjoy the reshuffling of Ruin's knavish deck. And expect to be dealt from the bottom.
There's no harm in hitting that old pump for a day or two Mr. Ishmael. There are some interesting spaces to be explored whilst cuddled in the arms of Morphia.
Haste ye back Mr I. Much knavery is indeed afoot! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10978937/Alex-Salmond-finally-publishes-five-star-hotel-list.html. Though on reflection no better or worse than the MediaMinister crowd I suppose. SG
We need you back Mr I if only to defend Ms S. Shoesmith, the one who was tellysacked by a Miliband, shamefully hounded by the press and now told that she will have to subsist on a paltry 600,000 quid.
Ms Shoeface was, mr banned, by tne standards of these affairs, it is true, cruelly used. Sacked peremptorily by an even more improbable minister than Spitty Gove, no less a moral philosopher than Mr Balls, himself, one of NewLabour's darkest, most anti-democeratic buttresses.
I daresay that like chief execcutives throughout the public sector whe was a vicious, greedy, arselicking incompetent who had trampled on the faces of service users and colleagues alike.
Her public sacking, though, was, like all of Ed Ballses proclamations, inept and self-serving and as it turned out, wrong; he was Gordon Snot's SPAD bumboy and everything he says and does is wrong.
Nice to see you back Mr Ishmael. I hope you are "up and about and holding your own." I'm just back from a "prostate and stone" job and I am having to hold mine. Fortunately it is a small task!!!
Glad to see you are still wriggling, Mr Ishmael. Hope it all went well.
BTW I was of the opinion that sacking that utterly vile bitch was the only thing Balls has ever done right. Downright incompetent, to the point of lives being lost, then mealy mouthed and defensive over the extent of her responsibilities. Hob-nobbing at Ascot, wasn't she, at taxpayer expense, whilst Peter was hardly cold in his premature grave?
She, and a thousand others like her, constantly remind me of Kipling's 'A servant, when he reigneth'.
THREE things make earth unquiet And four she cannot brook The godly Agur counted them And put them in a book— Those Four Tremendous Curses With which mankind is cursed But a Servant when He Reigneth Old Agur entered first.
An Handmaid that is Mistress We need not call upon, A Fool when he is full of Meat Will fall asleep anon. An Odious Woman Married May bear a babe and mend, But a Servant when He Reigneth Is Confusion to the end.
His feet are swift to tumult, His hands are slow to toil, His ears are deaf to reason, His lips are loud in broil. He knows no use for power Except to show his might. He gives no heed to judgment Unless it prove him right.
Because he served a master Before his Kingship came, And hid in all disaster Behind his master’s name, So, when his Folly opens The unnecessary hells, A Servant when He Reigneth Throws the blame on some one else.
His vows are lightly spoken, His faith is hard to bind, His trust is easy broken, He fears his fellow-kind. The nearest mob will move him To break the pledge he gave— Oh a Servant when He Reigneth Is more than ever slave!
I like Kipling, too, whatever they say about Jingo; I don't know all or even much of his stuff but what I know speaks to me of Skepticism's awakening, nudged and prodded by Everyman.
I meant that Balls was wrong in that he was procedurally wrong, despite having the advice of legions of Oxbridge civil servants. His error, there, only comforts those thousand others like her, mr vincent, better top have held his fire instead of being moved by the nearest mob. Not quite sure how he - a NewLabour parachutiste - has survived whilst Brown - OldJockLabour aristcracy - flounders. Balls, more than any since Thatcher, was the banksters' partner-in-crime, eating prawn-cocktails from their arses, wasn't he?
Wriggling's about right. These general anaesthetics, Christ, they hew the balls from a bloke, half-a-dozen in a twelve-month, been down so long it looks like up to me. Still, survived them; could just do with a big, strong illicit joint or something, an illegal smile, to counter all these drab, humourless downers.
I have seen the film, mr sg, although I wouldn't claim to know it.
I worked in a public library once and I mentioned to my friend the librarian that there weren't any war books by Sven Hassel. Oh, but that's pornography, sniffed Mel. Yeah, right, Mel, just like war is. God bless him, he got some in; veterans' tales from a Swede in a Nazi penal batallion on the Eastern Front, make your fucking hair stand on end, they would. They were from the same kitbag as the book filmed by Peckinpah and as devoutly human and profound as the later Das Boot.
Never felt I could afford decent brandy, it is horrifyingly expensive but I am sipping on a half-way there Remy, just now, in the hope that it will de-coke the word cylinders in my head, fit new rings to the thought pistons.
I love New Orleans, trad jazz and for twenty years or so I have been moved by the African muslim jazz pianist, Abdullah Ibrahim, Dollar Brand, as was, but I'm too stupid for most of it, all that stuff which Ken Clarke likes so much; Coltrane, Monk, Mingus, Miles Davis. I'd rather piss myself in my sleep than listen to that stuff.
Aye, Mr I, Peckinpah's Cross of Iron is worth revisiting - it does the horror and humanity of war in equal measure (and more than a nod to the Zen-Presbyterian-Marxist persective I think...).I haven't read the underlying book by Willi Heinrich ("The Willing Flesh") but keep telling myself that I should do so - but so much to read and so little time to do it in! SG
I think, mr bungalow bill, that I could probably walk into any bar in any city in the world and somebody's try to sell me some dope. I am also fairly sure that I would successfully defy any jury to convict me of self-medication offences. I will see how I go; it is just that, tonight, for the first time, I realised the massive residual burden of firstly the precisely sustained five or six hours of unconsciousness - far enough, but no further - and secondly of the potency of the painkillers. I have been home for four days, now, but it was, although confined to a small area, a huge operation, the primary one, and I dread to think what sort of restraints they must have used to keep me just-so for so many hours but I feel as though I have been on a martyrs' rack. Just fancied feeling a little more, you know, light-hearted.
So much to read is a problem. I can't do it at the moment, sometimes I can. I whizzed through the first half of mr tdg's-commended DH Lawrence's The Man Who Hated Islands but that was a couple of weeks back, can't manage a line, presently.
That Sven Hassel stuff - Wheels of Terror et cet - although poorly filmed, was, I suspect, the inspiration for The Willing Flesh.
Thanks, mr mike, I tried a ten-year old Spanish red the other night, just a glass, and it was warming and heady, but I stopped at that encroaching thick- lippedness which heralds being pissed, it's elevation I want, not intoxication.
There has been some interesting fiction from recent wars, hot and cold but nothing has the Apocalypsian dimension of the Russian Front; much seems overthought and overwritten, politically subtle special ops; nightsights, heads-ups, choppers and heat detectors; cyber combat, all skewed towards an eventual screenplay. That Russian Front stuff is pure, desperate kill or be killed survival. And Field Marshal Paulus was wrong, I think, in surrendering; his armies were all starved and frozen and worked to death, anyway, nearly a million of them.
All sounds a bit rum - the wrong sort of drugs coupled with severe intrusion is a far away bridge from the standard route to induced coma of getting wasted and hoping there's a taxi. Good luck with the recuperation and recovery - a decent brandy seems a fine idea.
On the Shoesmith thing, yeah - a total dog's breakfast. If you can't even sack a useless piece of shit properly then, frankly, what hope is there? Just because Balls was getting flak he couldn't allow the meeja to pop his wrath on her alone - she would have inevitably folded but no, speed - that's the thing and now £660k later everyone's a winner.
The Sven Hassel stuff sounds interesting and if nothing else, life affirming in that us lot will never know it.
All the best and take it easy. Good to see you back.
"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, And go to your God like a soldier."
(or possibly Gawd)
It'll chill the marrow of your bones but there's a war-film set in Belorus called "Come and See." You wouldn't want to watch it twice but it's quite something.
Glad to see you're home from the chopping block, Mr Ish. Take it easy - or don't.
Hanging Danny Dreever in the mornin' Thats's the one which always chokes me, mr verge.
There's cupboardsful of narcotics, mr dtp, but they are no fun. What is, though, in a strange way, is that brief, pre-op moment between being conscious and unconscious, when you are just about to enter a state of non-self; it was like this before I was and it will be like this after I have been, a silent vastness and then, in less than an instant, five hours later, it's, Wake up, Mr Smith, wake up, you are in the recovery room; now, that could become habit forming.
Sorry to hear that you are having a tough recovery Mr I. That 10 year old Spanish red does sound a bit heady - maybe a nice dry Provencal Rose would serve better especially if the weather is warm up there...
Turning back to the Eastern Front, the thing that amazes me is the longevity of those guys. Both Hassel and Heinrich served in front line fighting. The former ended up as a POW in a Soviet camp, the latter was wounded five times yet they lived to be 95 and 85 respectively. Heinrich was especially prolific writing over 30 books (thanks Mr Mike, I'm fond of the film so the book beckons...). They must have had some mighty good DNA and a good measure of luck to boot given the casualty rates in the fighting and death toll in the camps afterwards. That time and place makes what is going on in the Ukraine at present look like a game of conkers... Best wishes for a speedy recovery. SG
Music, lovely and temperate, Wachet Auf perhaps, or La Folia on the harp. Sometimes words won't work. I hope you are having the sort of summer to lie on something comfortable in the shade, listening to the sound of the sea.
All the best, Mr I. return refreshed.
ReplyDeleteBest wishes.
ReplyDeleteBon chance, Mr Smith.
ReplyDeleteMay you return improved in body, mind and spirit.
ReplyDeleteAll the best dude, hope it goes alright.
ReplyDeleteGood luck with that, Mr I.
ReplyDeleteEvery good wish
ReplyDeleteThere's no harm in hitting that old pump for a day or two Mr. Ishmael. There are some interesting spaces to be explored whilst cuddled in the arms of Morphia.
ReplyDeleteBest wishes to you.
Come back soon. All the best.
ReplyDeleteAll the best, Mr Ishmael.
ReplyDeleteHope your time away goes well Mr Ishmael. Thanks for all the recent writings
ReplyDeleteI wish you a safe passage around the maelstrom Mr I and offer you an old piece of 'orange' to accompany you on your journey:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/fb4f8ae2-2003-11e1-8662-00144feabdc0.html#axzz37ZX37Ciw
We are enyoying 'Fuhrer weather' here just now. So we are. SG.
ditto and then some
ReplyDeletecheers
verge///
Ditto as well....
ReplyDelete-richard
Ditto all of the above
ReplyDeleteHope you're on the mend Mr Ishmael.
ReplyDeleteIn the words of Ian Anderson, you're too old to rock 'n' roll, and too young to die mate.
Vincent.
Haste ye back Mr I. Much knavery is indeed afoot! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10978937/Alex-Salmond-finally-publishes-five-star-hotel-list.html. Though on reflection no better or worse than the MediaMinister crowd I suppose. SG
ReplyDeleteP.S. I believe that you may have a certain photograph that may pertain! SG
ReplyDeleteGet well soon, Mr Ishmael.
ReplyDeleteGood luck Sir. We have been through stuff with doctorbastards recently ourselves. I wish you all the best. Moley
ReplyDeleteWe need you back Mr I if only to defend Ms S. Shoesmith, the one who was tellysacked by a Miliband, shamefully hounded by the press and now told that she will have to subsist on a paltry 600,000 quid.
ReplyDeleteAye, back asap would be nice, hope you are ok but missing my Ishmaeliae. Best regards.
ReplyDelete- richard
Best wishes! Stay away from hospitals, people have been known to die in one of those......
ReplyDeleteMs Shoeface was, mr banned, by tne standards of these affairs, it is true, cruelly used. Sacked peremptorily by an even more improbable minister than Spitty Gove, no less a moral philosopher than Mr Balls, himself, one of NewLabour's darkest, most anti-democeratic buttresses.
ReplyDeleteI daresay that like chief execcutives throughout the public sector whe was a vicious, greedy, arselicking incompetent who had trampled on the faces of service users and colleagues alike.
Her public sacking, though, was, like all of Ed Ballses proclamations, inept and self-serving and as it turned out, wrong; he was Gordon Snot's SPAD bumboy and everything he says and does is wrong.
"You're back too soon - I don't want to talk to you...(Kruger).
ReplyDeletehttp://thequietus.com/articles/06406-peckinpah-s-seminal-war-film-cross-of-iron
Somehow your return reminded me of this... SG
Nice to see you back Mr Ishmael.
ReplyDeleteI hope you are "up and about and holding your own."
I'm just back from a "prostate and stone" job and I am having to hold mine.
Fortunately it is a small task!!!
Glad to see you are still wriggling, Mr Ishmael. Hope it all went well.
ReplyDeleteBTW I was of the opinion that sacking that utterly vile bitch was the only thing Balls has ever done right. Downright incompetent, to the point of lives being lost, then mealy mouthed and defensive over the extent of her responsibilities. Hob-nobbing at Ascot, wasn't she, at taxpayer expense, whilst Peter was hardly cold in his premature grave?
She, and a thousand others like her, constantly remind me of Kipling's 'A servant, when he reigneth'.
THREE things make earth unquiet
And four she cannot brook
The godly Agur counted them
And put them in a book—
Those Four Tremendous Curses
With which mankind is cursed
But a Servant when He Reigneth
Old Agur entered first.
An Handmaid that is Mistress
We need not call upon,
A Fool when he is full of Meat
Will fall asleep anon.
An Odious Woman Married
May bear a babe and mend,
But a Servant when He Reigneth
Is Confusion to the end.
His feet are swift to tumult,
His hands are slow to toil,
His ears are deaf to reason,
His lips are loud in broil.
He knows no use for power
Except to show his might.
He gives no heed to judgment
Unless it prove him right.
Because he served a master
Before his Kingship came,
And hid in all disaster
Behind his master’s name,
So, when his Folly opens
The unnecessary hells,
A Servant when He Reigneth
Throws the blame on some one else.
His vows are lightly spoken,
His faith is hard to bind,
His trust is easy broken,
He fears his fellow-kind.
The nearest mob will move him
To break the pledge he gave—
Oh a Servant when He Reigneth
Is more than ever slave!
Vincent
I like Kipling, too, whatever they say about Jingo; I don't know all or even much of his stuff but what I know speaks to me of Skepticism's awakening, nudged and prodded by Everyman.
ReplyDeleteI meant that Balls was wrong in that he was procedurally wrong, despite having the advice of legions of Oxbridge civil servants. His error, there, only comforts those thousand others like her, mr vincent, better top have held his fire instead of being moved by the nearest mob. Not quite sure how he - a NewLabour parachutiste - has survived whilst Brown - OldJockLabour aristcracy - flounders. Balls, more than any since Thatcher, was the banksters' partner-in-crime, eating prawn-cocktails from their arses, wasn't he?
Wriggling's about right. These general anaesthetics, Christ, they hew the balls from a bloke, half-a-dozen in a twelve-month, been down so long it looks like up to me. Still, survived them; could just do with a big, strong illicit joint or something, an illegal smile, to counter all these drab, humourless downers.
Have a large Scotch. You might start to like jazz if you start on anything more 'interesting' :-)
ReplyDeleteVincent
I have seen the film, mr sg, although I wouldn't claim to know it.
ReplyDeleteI worked in a public library once and I mentioned to my friend the librarian that there weren't any war books by Sven Hassel. Oh, but that's pornography, sniffed Mel. Yeah, right, Mel, just like war is. God bless him, he got some in; veterans' tales from a Swede in a Nazi penal batallion on the Eastern Front, make your fucking hair stand on end, they would. They were from the same kitbag as the book filmed by Peckinpah and as devoutly human and profound as the later Das Boot.
Thanks, mr alphons, hope things went well for you.
ReplyDeleteNever felt I could afford decent brandy, it is horrifyingly expensive but I am sipping on a half-way there Remy, just now, in the hope that it will de-coke the word cylinders in my head, fit new rings to the thought pistons.
ReplyDeleteI love New Orleans, trad jazz and for twenty years or so I have been moved by the African muslim jazz pianist, Abdullah Ibrahim, Dollar Brand, as was, but I'm too stupid for most of it, all that stuff which Ken Clarke likes so much; Coltrane, Monk, Mingus, Miles Davis. I'd rather piss myself in my sleep than listen to that stuff.
Good to have you back Mr I. Do you have no-one up there to deliver herbal remedies?
ReplyDeleteAye, Mr I, Peckinpah's Cross of Iron is worth revisiting - it does the horror and humanity of war in equal measure (and more than a nod to the Zen-Presbyterian-Marxist persective I think...).I haven't read the underlying book by Willi Heinrich ("The Willing Flesh") but keep telling myself that I should do so - but so much to read and so little time to do it in! SG
ReplyDeleteI think, mr bungalow bill, that I could probably walk into any bar in any city in the world and somebody's try to sell me some dope. I am also fairly sure that I would successfully defy any jury to convict me of self-medication offences. I will see how I go; it is just that, tonight, for the first time, I realised the massive residual burden of firstly the precisely sustained five or six hours of unconsciousness - far enough, but no further - and secondly of the potency of the painkillers. I have been home for four days, now, but it was, although confined to a small area, a huge operation, the primary one, and I dread to think what sort of restraints they must have used to keep me just-so for so many hours but I feel as though I have been on a martyrs' rack. Just fancied feeling a little more, you know, light-hearted.
ReplyDeleteSo much to read is a problem. I can't do it at the moment, sometimes I can. I whizzed through the first half of mr tdg's-commended DH Lawrence's The Man Who Hated Islands but that was a couple of weeks back, can't manage a line, presently.
That Sven Hassel stuff - Wheels of Terror et cet - although poorly filmed, was, I suspect, the inspiration for The Willing Flesh.
May I add the the welcomes back? A good red wine won't do you any harm. And I strongly recommend the Heinrich book - much earthier than the film.
ReplyDeleteThanks, mr mike, I tried a ten-year old Spanish red the other night, just a glass, and it was warming and heady, but I stopped at that encroaching thick-
ReplyDeletelippedness which heralds being pissed, it's elevation I want, not intoxication.
There has been some interesting fiction from recent wars, hot and cold but nothing has the Apocalypsian dimension of the Russian Front; much seems overthought and overwritten, politically subtle special ops; nightsights, heads-ups, choppers and heat detectors; cyber combat, all skewed towards an eventual screenplay. That Russian Front stuff is pure, desperate kill or be killed survival. And Field Marshal Paulus was wrong, I think, in surrendering; his armies were all starved and frozen and worked to death, anyway, nearly a million of them.
All sounds a bit rum - the wrong sort of drugs coupled with severe intrusion is a far away bridge from the standard route to induced coma of getting wasted and hoping there's a taxi. Good luck with the recuperation and recovery - a decent brandy seems a fine idea.
ReplyDeleteOn the Shoesmith thing, yeah - a total dog's breakfast. If you can't even sack a useless piece of shit properly then, frankly, what hope is there? Just because Balls was getting flak he couldn't allow the meeja to pop his wrath on her alone - she would have inevitably folded but no, speed - that's the thing and now £660k later everyone's a winner.
The Sven Hassel stuff sounds interesting and if nothing else, life affirming in that us lot will never know it.
All the best and take it easy. Good to see you back.
Hard to fault Kipling:
ReplyDelete"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier."
(or possibly Gawd)
It'll chill the marrow of your bones but there's a war-film set in Belorus called "Come and See." You wouldn't want to watch it twice but it's quite something.
Glad to see you're home from the chopping block, Mr Ish. Take it easy - or don't.
cheers
verge//
Hanging Danny Dreever in the mornin'
ReplyDeleteThats's the one which always chokes me, mr verge.
There's cupboardsful of narcotics, mr dtp, but they are no fun. What is, though, in a strange way, is that brief, pre-op moment between being conscious and unconscious, when you are just about to enter a state of non-self; it was like this before I was and it will be like this after I have been, a silent vastness and then, in less than an instant, five hours later, it's, Wake up, Mr Smith, wake up, you are in the recovery room; now, that could become habit forming.
Sorry to hear that you are having a tough recovery Mr I. That 10 year old Spanish red does sound a bit heady - maybe a nice dry Provencal Rose would serve better especially if the weather is warm up there...
ReplyDeleteTurning back to the Eastern Front, the thing that amazes me is the longevity of those guys. Both Hassel and Heinrich served in front line fighting. The former ended up as a POW in a Soviet camp, the latter was wounded five times yet they lived to be 95 and 85 respectively. Heinrich was especially prolific writing over 30 books (thanks Mr Mike, I'm fond of the film so the book beckons...). They must have had some mighty good DNA and a good measure of luck to boot given the casualty rates in the fighting and death toll in the camps afterwards. That time and place makes what is going on in the Ukraine at present look like a game of conkers... Best wishes for a speedy recovery. SG
Good English apple brandy from Zumerset, that's the stuff.
ReplyDeleteIf you want cheering up, I found myself laughing like a drain at this:
Collie dog plays with garden sprinkler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsrMa4WVZlE
Glad you are with us and hoping you get more comfortable.
Music, lovely and temperate, Wachet Auf perhaps, or La Folia on the harp. Sometimes words won't work. I hope you are having the sort of summer to lie on something comfortable in the shade, listening to the sound of the sea.
ReplyDeleteAnd its good to see your smiling face tonight.
ReplyDelete