Wednesday 27 November 2019

SHOCK AS MORE FAMOUS PEOPLE DIE OF OLD AGE.


Millions of emotionally infantilised half-wits have taken to the Afterlife Internet, sending their condolences on his death - at eighty - to Aussie Chinwagger and Champion Gabshite, Clive James.


 A member of Celebrity's Charmed Circle, James was known for his literary pretension and his sneering. That cultural giant, the Daily Mail, proclaimed that James  died surrounded by his friends and his books.  Me, personally, I can think of nothing, absolutely nothing worse than dying surrounded by others; fuck that for a game of soldiers. Still, no business like showbusiness.

 Disappointingly, Lord Death and his Sergeants failed to simultaneously harvest the unspeakable antipodeans,


 Barry Humphries, 
the  pornstar professor and pisshead, Dame Germaine Greer 


and that surviving ugly bloke bastard from the BeeGees,


 a woefully unappealing trio of falsetto warbling popsingers who somehow managed to escape their just transportation to Australia and then infest the radio waveband of Eternity with shrieking, agonising disco music.
 Jive talking, they called it.

Another celebrity culled at only eighty was self-publicist and polymath, Dr Jonathan Miller. 

 A current Radio 4 dramadoc series reveals that Johnny, despite his self acclaimed brilliance, was a casualty of the birthing wars of the National Theatre, a victim of towering thespian towering giant, the towering 



Sir Peter Hall and never really worked again, unless it was in the construction of toweringly facetious abstract sculpures.  One of those gifted men, Jonathan, could turn his hand to anything, badly.

My only knowledge of his work is his dismissive critique, still here, on my shelves, of  Marshal McLuhan's seminal Understanding Media, a work which resonates the louder with every passing decade.


 It was McLuhan who, in the '60's,  coined the phrase and thus the consciousness of  what is now the everydayism of the Global Village. McLuhan's perspicacious understanding of what we now call media, what he properly saw as extensions of self, foreshadowed the corrosive and all-consuming juggernaut of social media, McLuhan declaring that in an age of electronic media, minority groups could no longer be suppressed; his aphorism that individual consciousness is an evolutionary dead end is vividly accentuated as billions upon billions grasp futilely  for  roast-beef-dinners, i-things, dish washers and BMWs. Miller, an airhead dilettante, dismissed McLuhan's insights and prophecies as the ramblings of a provincial Canadian academic. No tears, here, therefore, in Ishmaelia, for the passing of another lucky Oxbridge dunderhead.


In other Dead News, celebrity shit-peddlars are aghast at the death of Sir Gary Sugar.

 
 Gazza, for a long time the public face of the British Sugar Corporation, entreated children and their parents to stuff their faces with his patron's product, never troubling his rock-star head with thoughts about obesity, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes, conditions which he enthusiastically promoted, the cunt. 

Speaking for the entire food-whore industry, the BBC's Sir Gary Crisps  

 said that he was totally and absolutely gutted by the death of his old mate, Gazza.
 I mean, I sell greasy, salty and entirely unhealthy products to generations of children. The BBC only pays me a million and a half pounds per year to talk shit about football. How'm I supposed to make ends meet if I don't earn a crust from poisoning the little ones? 
And so it was with Gary Rhodes, selling poison to children. 'Snot like he was a drug dealer or anything, is it?

200 comments:

SG said...

I have slightly more time for Mr Humphries Mr I, as he said of himself, in the FT, way back up the road:

“I had a friend in Salzburg who was in the German embassy in the late 1930s working with von Ribbentrop, whom he despised, as everyone did,” Humphries says. “He was an old SS man, he died last year. I called his widow and expressed my sympathy and she said she ‘It’s so funny you should have called, Barry, because Reinhardt and I vere talking about you just before he died.’ And I said, ‘Oh what did he say?’ And she said, ‘“It’s extraordinary,” he said, “you know zat Barry Humphries, ze Führer would have adored him.”

The others, hell yes, throw them under the bus...


call me ishmael said...

That whole luvvie drag thing irritates me, mr sg, doesn't matter who's doing it, it is always contemptuous of half the population and seeking a conspiratorial alliance with the other half.Dame Edna is like Billy Connolly, like a forced laughter camp. He's croaking too, isn't he, Connolly, and making as big a song and dance about it as James.

Anonymous said...

"Fender Gluidity, my asspussy", as J.Edgar Hoover used to say...

v./

call me ishmael said...

What?

SG said...

Indeed Mr I, but no matter how hard you prick it, the Celebre-sphere appears to be impervious to the laws of gravity. Regarding the Dame, I found the ‘Cultural Attaché’ to be a more agreeable personae. Meanwhile, it takes a couple of ‘bum boys’ (absent tank tops but fully clothed) to call all this shit out, that’s going on (apart from your good self - there long before...). They’re a wee bit ‘up themselves’ but nonetheless:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIJPUX6SYu4

Anonymous said...

Apologies - that was over-elliptical - I just meant that cross-dressing & gender-fluidity are (inter alia) cultural embodiments of spoonerism. And J.Edgar liked a nice frock on a good night out, by some accounts.

v./

call me ishmael said...

Yeah, I like Sir Les, too.It is hard to find a worst-of celebrity moment but Jools Holland stuttering to Sir Tom Jones about Good Music is a bottomless pit of banality. I will look at that tomorrow, thanks, mr sg.

call me ishmael said...

Thanks, mr verge, I see, now. Thought you were talking about 'lectric guitars.

SG said...

Yes - bear with it Mr I, it gets quite interesting once you get past the ‘buy my book’ schtick!

mongoose said...

The young people are into collecting virtual Scout badges of their wokeness. If you aren't gay, you can still get one for pretending to be bi - or one of the other roads even less travelled. This is all good fun until it starts to involve the damaging of mental health, and indeed bodily health, risk and inventory. The poor kids are traumatised into thinking everything an emergency capable of immediate solution. Climate emergency, extinction emergency, gender emergency. It is all unfathomably wicked and trivialises what is actually important when such comes along.

Clive wasn't a bad lad but his supposedly sardonic delivery with the inappropriate tonal hiccough was deeply irritating. I would have thought that a man of his advantages would have had access to a proper actor or comedian or two who might have helped him learn to deliver a line. His relentless taking of the mickey of the idiotic japanese TV ordeal show will in time prove to have been just another brick in the wall of cruelty tv. Candid Camera is part of a continuum that currently has that other Australian (jungle) rubbish as its extreme.

Miller? Lord, he was a damaged lad for all his wit. Of course, a good Socialist boy, he sent his kids to state schools in London and then berated them for failing to come up to scratch. Such a clever idiot. Such an arse.

Mike said...

Not sure the world is a better or worse place for the passing of these celebs.

I've just been to the doc. Minor thing, a fungal ear infection, but annoying. Seems to happen at this time of year. Something in the air. Mr Pug has the same problem, but gets excellent treatment at the vets - he's a celeb of sorts.

The GP service here is very good, and they take time to evaluate everything - maybe too much time. Given I'm over 60, after dealing with the ear thingy, he quizzed me about getting 2-yearly bowel screening (I did one, but poking in one's own shit is a bit off-putting), and cardi-vasular screening, blood tests etc. I told him I was in training for a 1000km walk next year and didn't want any bad news. And anyway, playing golf everyday is hard enough without distractions. He asked if I had any family history. I told him my ancestors were champion archers who fought at Agincourt. He asked if my dad smoked; I told him he fought in N Africa for 5 years, so I expect so.

In the end, as I told him, the Grim Reaper will call.

mongoose said...

Well, Mr Mike, 8:16 in Hanoi. It's time for breakfast.

Mike said...

Mr mongoose: go for it, the ga. BTW my daughter is over there at present. If you see a 6 foot drop dead gorgeous bird in a bar, don't buy her a drink. Very high maintenance.

mongoose said...

Aren't they all, Mr Mike, aren't they all?

It is cool here - well, 15C at night - and they are all swaddled as if about to drop frozen on the wing. My favourite bar girl (that's the grouchy one - but the only one who notices when I have finished my beer) is wearing a knee length quilted coat/wrap thing that would not be out of place in Bergen in February.

Had fruit this morning, and jammy toast. And about six cups of tea. I am beginning to like some of their tea too. Had eaten nothing but aircraft dross for 24 hours and was hungry. Apologies. But tomorrow we are out early and the boys will eat pho by the side of the road. God help me, I will be as brave as he made me.

SG said...

Another observer chronicles the folly of the ‘new people’ - the first piece of sense I’ve seen on the matter (other than that anticipated by our host at many junctures back up the road...):

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/12/the-failed-lessons-of-the-london-bridge-attack/amp/?__twitter_impression=true







Mike said...

Mr SG: I had read that piece, and Douglas Murray is one of the few to stick his head above the parapet on Islamism. But, I suggest he is addressing the problem several stages removed. De-radicalisation (it failure, or more correctly its snake oilism) isn't the issue. For me, its why would you allow an alien culture from the third world into the UK. Can't remember which Labour luminary it was who admitted it was to rub the Tories noses in it. FFS. Then compound the problem by joining in the US illegal wars in the Middle East; getting involved in all sorts of dubious ops (eg white helmets, chemical weapons false flags etc). Then wonder why the want to rape the girls and hate whitey. Its too late, I'm afraid.

mongoose said...

It's not necessarily too late, Mr Mike. Look at Yugoslavia. That's what happens. Look at London Bridge last week. Four lads hounded the miscreant out with a spear and a fire extinguisher and were busy beating the bastard to death before the bobbies came and sent him on his heavenly way. One day soon a bunch of Northern rapist lads will get a very ugly comeuppance and then we'll see. It is not fair, nor seemly, nor right in any way but it is inevitable.

Pho ga? (And my minder probably took me to a very nice one.) It's alright, Sir, quite easy-to-eat actually - the ga bit not being the point - but it's not for breakfast, not early, not for my Irish palette. Of course, now I'm bloody ravenous.

SG said...

Mr Mike, in defence of Mr Murray - he addresses the point you make, in his book “The Strange Death of Europe”, and he doesn’t hold back. The Labour luminary was Andrew Neather, an advisor and speech writer for a certain former PM:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Andrew_Neather

I share Mr Mongoose’s more optimistic outlook. There are emerging signs that the public are no longer willing to put up with being terrorised and bullied by imbeciles, as we saw with the XR maniacs being ripped off the roof of a tube train and thrown to the ground...

Mike said...

MR mongoose and Mr SG: I truly hope you are correct and the Yeomen are reasserting themselves. If they do, in sufficient numbers, then the politicians may cotton on to where the votes lie and act accordingly. I've revisited the UK 3 times in the last 15 years, and the change (for the worse) has been palpable. There are many deeply rooted forces and institutions to overcome - Mr Murray's own article about the Government-funded industry of "de-radicalisation" is proof to that. To my mind, the key to all this is for the UK to throw off the yoke of the EU and the US and rediscover itself. At this point, I'm not as optimistic as you are.

Mike said...

Mr mongoose: the Pho will make a man of you. After all, it defeated the US. I've totally embraced the (3000+year)SE Asian culture of holistic medicine. Food, massage, exercise.

Mike said...

Mr mongoose: sad to hear of the passing of Bob Willis. Good obit in the Telegraph, not behind paywall. I still vividly remember Headingly 81, called Botham's test, but it was Bob what won it.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2019/12/04/bob-willis-former-england-captain-dies-aged-70/

mongoose said...

Great days, Mr Mike. I watched in the telly, 20 years young. These things shouldn't be possible in proper cricket matches although they happen all the time in the sort of rubbish ordinary folk play.

Bob had a proper fast bowler's attitude too. Any tailender hanging around for more than five minutes was likely to get one up the throat. Poor old Iqbal Qasim, was it? Made the mistake of swishing and oustaying his welcome. Bob went around the wicket - bowling more or less from behind the eegit - and smacked one in his helmetless mush. The poor lad had an average lower than mine and barely knew a bat from a laundry basket.

mongoose said...

BTW Mr Mike, I have discovered Vietnamese coffee. Realising I was ignorant and that they probably didn't have any Gold Blend, I got myself advised by my incredibly impressive minder lad, who shames me. And I thought that I was polite. He took me to a sliver of a shed down a "ngo" back alley. (All of life's tapestry was to be seen down there and we didn't get but a quarter way in. Small mercies...) Anyway, I hoovered up enough to last until my next visit and then a bit more - samples whistled up of everything, beans blended, ground by a waif, vacuum-packed/heat-sealed into her smaller packets to keep fresh for longer because I was an idiot buying too much at a time, notations on the packets, sober and somewhat severe instructions how to make coffee properly... It cost me nothing. Tsin tutted that she had charged about 20% over local prices for my being a foreigner. I think he thinks he let me down. That was a couple of quid, I reckon, maybe three.

I quite like Vietnam. Alas, leaving tomorrow. And have made the damn installation work - no excuse to come back anytime soon unless some bugger breaks it for me.

Mike said...

There is a very good coffee shop close to where you stay, Mr mongoose. Its where I first had that coffee that comes from beans that squirrel type animals have eaten then its harvested from their poo. The digestive process does something to the beans. I was initially a little timid, but being an adventurous sole gave it a go. Beans ground and coffee prepared in the shop. Needless to say it was delicious - dark, smooth, deep intense flavours - I could go on. A year later I visited a coffee plantation in Cambodia. That was a fascinating education about the whole process down to final tasting. They claimed to be the leader in the squirrel stuff, but so did Vietnam. Sadly we can't bring this kind of plant stuff into Australia, or a 5kg bag would have been in my luggage. Makes you thing twice about a mug of Starbucks filth.

Mike said...

PS Mr mongoose: if you travel to Vietnam you should go via Bangkok - allowing a few days stay. Assuming this is not how you normally travel. Bangkok blows all the senses. It makes London feel like a small village. I like to stay overlooking the Chao Phraya river - watching the apparently random movements of the myriad of river boats plying their trade is mesmerising.

We usually stay here (a step back into the good old days).

https://www.shangri-la.com/en/bangkok/shangrila/rooms-suites/rooms/krungthep-wing/about-the-krungthep-wing/

A session at Lavana Sukhumvit 12 is a must (go for the 2 hour oil massage with one hour free facial). You will feel regenerated.

https://www.lavanabangkok.com/

The more you experience and learn about SE Asia the more it grows on you. I could easily live there.

Bungalow Bill said...

Fucking hell, Mr Mike, I'm not surprised SE Asia grows on you given those gigs. Meanwhile, back here, it's grey and shit and stupid; above all, stupid. Next Thursday won't cure us. Part of me wants to have done and let Jeremy kill us off entirely. It will be a sort of mercy.

Mike said...

Its certainly stupid, Mr BB. Major advising voting Labour; Blair supporting Tories. Any sensible debate totally absent. And the main crime of comrade Corby is he's anti-Semitic. FFS. It may all be a ploy to get May's WA2.0 through? But at this point a Corbyn win is not out of the question - probably for the reason you describe. Another hung Parliament would be a disaster. Al in all no good outcome, IMHO.

Again, my decision to pack my families bags 25 years ago, has been vindicated.

bungalow bill said...

Yes, Mr Mike, I curse myself for dithering when I should have made your decision. Far too late now for all sorts of reasons but I hope my children may yet get out. I truly weep for this country, as I suspect you still do. Our host's internal exile is, perhaps, an option not wholly out of reach.

mongoose said...

I first set foot in Bangkok in the 80's, Mr Mike. My brother had lived there forever on-and-off, mostly on. His kids were born there. (Oil industry... Why would you come back here ?) He indeed used to live just behind Sukhumvit somehwere. One day I went with his missus to buy a beer fridge for a party. It was chucked on the back of a tuk-tuk, I was chucked in the middle and the bugger hared off apparently the wrong way. Happily, I was not slaughtered for a $50 fridge.

Changmai is where I would hang my hat. Or my 1990 hat. it was wonderful then although, I have alas never managed to get back. Of course, the brother has now phycically retired to Phuket - which sounds great but is like fucking Blackpool as far as I can see - and he works electronically, three hours per day gazing out over the Andaman sea from one of those wee Thai summer house/sheds. It's a parallel, an oriental Orcadia.

In a matter of months my last kid will leave the house...

I am back in Blighty. God, it is grey and dank. Endless whining about Russian interference in this and that. As if they hadn't and we hadn't been at it for a hundred years now. Such empty tosh.

Mike said...

I like Phuket, Mr mongoose. So long as you keep away from the main town - too many Aussies letting their hair down. The coastline is beautiful, and the sea is like a warm bath. And costs are low. A lot of worse places to hang up the old hat. Same story with Bali.

Its going to be an interesting week. On reflection, if I had a vote, it would be Comrade Corbyn, for the reasons given by Mr BB.

mongoose said...

YEs, I think that's probably a fair call about Phuket, Mr Mike. We used to play when the kids were wee on some beach at the south end and they'd surf in on their belly-boards for as long as we'd let them. I may have had one or two goes myself, I reckon.

There is a great deal to be said for the people of SE Asia. Kind, polite, gently humorous people. Not mocking, not egotistical, "You" not "me". It was fun this time to see them all wrapped up against the cold as I strode about in shirtsleeves. 45 to 15 is -30degC that would -10 for me. They couldn't understand it.

Mike said...

Just my observation, Mr mongoose, though over many years, but I believe the Buddhist faith gives the people a calmness, friendliness, and care for others (and animals).

call me ishmael said...

Zen-Presbyterian-Marxist, me, mr mike, always have been - Shit happens, take what you have and give it to the poor, workers of the world unite. Lately, though, I have been trying to incorporate Jainism, love that idea of gently sweeping the path in front of one of lesser but equal life forms, lest we walk on them. I know, I know mr mongoose, every time you turn around there's another hard luck story that you're gonna hear but a tiny attitudinal shift would move mountains, which is more than can be said about that horrid little fuckface, Greta and her spiteful ranting. I blame the parents. The New People have spawned serpents.

mongoose said...

The tide seems to be turning just now, Mr Ishmael, against the stupid and the vain. Although the Great Orange Terror could be said to be a prime example of both of those, he has loosened the shackles just a bit across the pond. One or two voices beginning to be raised against the orthodoxies of the day.

Here we just have to endure tomorrow. The two junior mongoslings get to vote for the first time and seem to be astounded that a) anyone would vote for Grandpa, b) so few vote for the Greens, c) so many for the Blue-arsed Bandits. Who does that leave, Dad? The Lib-Dems, children, aka the Dogshooters, the slaughterers of innocent pooches. "The who?" Well, it was like this see. When I was your age politicians used to conspire to murder folk. That's proper villainy.

I think there might be a little clutch of narrative votes tomorrow around here.

SG said...

Indeed Mr I! The Serpent advises ‘panic’. The Wiki definition of this is telling:

“Panic is a sudden sensation of fear, which is so strong as to dominate or prevent reason and logical thinking, replacing it with overwhelming feelings of anxiety and frantic agitation consistent with an animalistic fight-or-flight reaction. Panic may occur singularly in individuals or manifest suddenly in large groups as mass panic (closely related to herd behavior).”

Nauseating to see the virtue signaling imbeciles at the COP25 applauding this prescription. It is surely only a short matter of time before she shares a podium with Malala.

call me ishmael said...

I guess it is a smorgasbord of ghastly options, tomorrow - Jerry and Krankie being the worst as well as the least sustainable in the face of widespread outrage. I don't think BoJo has done enough to sink Labour although God knows he has enough ammo. Just on the NHS he hasn't mentioned Snotty and the great PFI scam or Burnham and the clown Johnson's successive refusals to act in the North Staffs matter. He has barely touched the Provisional IRA or the Pedophile Information Exchange, both Corbyn causes celebre and he should have kicked John McGoebbels' hat rabbits up and down the street. I fear that tomorrow we will all become Eyeties, governed by splintered groups of ruffians, stealing our taxes, shitting in unison in our faces.

If only the Salmond trial was on now, and we could see Krankie's involvement in covering up serious criminal charges.

call me ishmael said...

I guess it is a smorgasbord of ghastly options, tomorrow - Jerry and Krankie being the worst as well as the least sustainable in the face of widespread outrage. I don't think BoJo has done enough to sink Labour although God knows he has enough ammo. Just on the NHS he hasn't mentioned Snotty and the great PFI scam or Burnham and the clown Johnson's successive refusals to act in the North Staffs matter. He has barely touched the Provisional IRA or the Pedophile Information Exchange, both Corbyn causes celebre and he should have kicked John McGoebbels' hat rabbits up and down the street. I fear that tomorrow we will all become Eyeties, governed by splintered groups of ruffians, stealing our taxes, shitting in unison in our faces.

If only the Salmond trial was on now, and we could see Krankie's involvement in covering up serious criminal charges.

call me ishmael said...

Almost as pitiable as Bob Dylan winning the Nibel prize for lidderachure, mr sg, the ascension of gobby children.

SG said...

Mr I, I concur with your observations relating to the ‘smorgasbord’ and ‘ascension’ and for your subtle remembrance of an earlier, ‘Postman Pat’ Johnson, which may be lost on others. Somehow, I felt drawn to this last bastion of record, sanity and reason, that you have maintained, as we approach what I hope is not the ‘Eve of Destruction’. Music not, I suspect, to your taste but somehow appropriate for this time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYsXKhBknyM

call me ishmael said...

Everyone Hosannahs Andy Postcards Neil as the Last Great Journalist, to whom all contenders must make obeisance, yet he is just a cheesy old playboy cosied up for what seems decades to the very dodgy Dame Portillo, as secure for life in theBBC's Infinite Railways Division, as was Jimmy Savile in light entertainment and to the laughably incompetent and criminally negligent Cuckold Johnson, one of Snotty's Legion of the Damned. A grim trio, mr sg, a Murdoch gabshite and two simperingbdoxies too frightened to argue with him. No business like showbusiness. At least everybody knows that Graham Norton is just a vile cunt, nobody claims that he's Woodward and Bernstein.

SG said...

Aye! I’ve been fooled into thinking that about the ‘Last Great Journalist’ myself. I confess to quite enjoying the dissections of Swinson, Sturgeon et al. Easy work for a trained butcher I suppose. I seem to recall that Boris and ‘The Last Great Journalist’ have history, so the former was probably wise to give the latter a wide birth. I dunno about Boris, but I think he’s been playing a very long game, slingshot stuff and utterly ruthless, a charlatan etc. But a man for our times maybe... And, I’m beginning to think that I may be a Robot, judging by how many times I’ve failed the Captcha test!

Mike said...

Hope you boys have the diocalm and anti-nausea drugs at the ready for tomorrow.

mongoose said...

I think that we underestimate Johnson at our peril. He is anything but stupid. Remember that he won the mayoralty of London. London is a Labour lock-in, a third world ghetto, a family postal-voting model of corruption. And still he won, with his mop-haired schtick. Don't say I never warned you.

The question is: what do we want? Surely we want what we've always wanted. That's the truth, and honour, and an honest turn for the ideas we believe in. It seems to me that none of them currently offer that. This is post-TV politics and pre-internet politics. They don't get it yet and so they lie, and then accuse everyone else of same. Corbyn complaining of Russian interference? It is all a Fruedian moiling. Puppies in a sack make more sense.

Mike said...

BORIS=BRINO. I would still vote for Comrade Corbyn to bring the whole rotten edifice crashing down. If it can't regenerate then it doesn't deserve to.

mongoose said...

The WA Mr Mike is the invitation to the wedding. You will arrive at time X on day Y and wear garb Z. Everything else is everything else. It's the reception in the evening. Our fancy togs are off and we're full of beer and somewhere the bridesmaids are being shagged. The event is not what it says on the printed card.

call me ishmael said...

Better BRINO, mr mike, than Corbyn's crooked Remainerendum.

call me ishmael said...

Just as long as we don't upset the Provos, our partners in Democracy Nouvelle European. If we upset the Provos they'll be absolutely entitled to return to legitimate political kneecappings and buryings alive. The Good Friday Agreement, y'see, invalidates, as it must, the will of seventeen and a half million racist Brits, so it does. Progressive gay Paddies, still fighting the Cromwell wars, cheered-on by the Tribesmen and the Corbyn rabble, perhaps our new rulers. Oh, nightsticks, water cannon, teargas, headlights, Molotov cocktails and rocks behind every curtain..........Oh, Jokerman. Time for a coup, maybe.

Anonymous said...

Being, as ever, a bit slow on the uptake, it only occurred to me to wonder about this recently - did they call it "the Troubles" as a euphemism for Death? As in "sorry for your trouble" to bereaved folk at a wake?

v./

SG said...

I’m hoping the outcome in Scotland ain’t as bad as the initial projections indicate Mr I - Looks like Ruth Boy may have to fulfill that promise to skinny dip in Loch Ness. Worryingly I’m sick enough to watch that spectacle! You hang in there man...

Mike said...

Mr Sg: I have an old harpoon somewhere - may have belonged to Queequeg - I would be happy for you to borrow it.

mongoose said...

It's a massacre, gentlemen, a slaughter not seen since the Kinnock bastard. It looks a bit too far too for Labour to come back in one leap. So that's maybe another decade of the Tory bastards. Here in Bandit Country, inspiration failed me - not fot he first time - and a single diagonal line was put through all of the buggers on offer.

Thank goodness I do not live in the best part of England and will not have to listen to the harpie.

Mike said...

It will be interesting to see the detailed polling figures. Maybe the Brexit party wounded Labour in their northern heartlands? A Tory win at present is probably the least worse outcome, but a big Tory majority is a license to do all sorts of shit unopposed. As you say, the harpie will be insufferable, but at least Boris can tell her to piss off as he won't need her votes.

Mike said...

OK, just looked at a sample of results, and yes the Brexit party took enough votes to deny Labour wins and let the Tories get over the line (just) in traditional Labour seats. All in all, likely a big Tory majority, but not a resounding win, and Boris would do well to recognise the part the Brexit party played - if he has any sense. Its a single issue election, and one Labour could reverse next time when Brexit is forgotten, assuming they can get their shit together - a big if.

Doug Shoulders said...

I was initially dismayed to see that the krankie rabid toon army gained even more seats in fucking Scotlan’.
Never met an SNP voter who wasn’t foaming at the mouth and learning Gaelic …FFS..
The rub is, though, that they have their own parliament, a more remarkable turnaround of politico wotsit since Yeltsin stood on a tank and yet still no independence….the holy grail of sucking on the EU tit instead of the English one…still tantalizingly out of reach.

mongoose said...

Walking wounded today, alas, after bedtime delayed to gone 5am. (I also seem to have emptied the house of beer. Oh well.) It is interesting that some of them - including one or two of the BBC droids - seem to have twigged. Mind, when aged ex-coalminers vote for the Tories something is seriously fucked up. Those are big elephants in a very little room. These are not Maggie's white van men. One is quite sad that Yvette Cooper didn't get her comeuppance while aged Dennis Skinner did. He didn't show for his count. I hope that was anger and not illness.

I enjoyed flitting across the channels - Bercow a deliciously redundant window-licker on Sky did indeed look close to tears at one point. All that cheating and lying, all that work, all that destruction of his meagre reputation, all for nothing now.

The metropolitan coalition of identities wasn't enough in the end. The Luvvies now retreated from England to rehearse their ghetto grievances in the inner cities are disconnected from the rest of us. London, Merseyside, South Wales, look you, is all they have left.

Given the nature of FPTP in a multi-party election, it is virtually impossible for the Tories to poll a much higher share of the vote than last night's but Nigel's few % share will be available next time and the +30 seats (is it?) of boundary changes is now a certainty too. I don't think we'll see Labour back in power for a decade, maybe even a decade and a half. Please, can we not have Kier Starmer as leader. As mongosling2 says, a grown man with a seventeen-year-old's haircut is weird.

The Harpie has already overdone it. Nobody cares. Not today.

mongoose said...

And yet having read around the MSM for a couple of days, very few of them have any idea what just happened, what we have all been talking about here all these years. Denial and stupidity. Everywhere one looks an idiot is pretending. Say it ain't so, Joe, say it ain't so.

Mike said...

Of course, nothing has changed yet - except for which fat arses sit on the green benches. We need to see what Boris will do: will it be May2.0? will he give up the fishing to the Danes and Spanish?; will he pay the 39B?; will he succomb to all manner of EU structures (ECJ, single market...)?. The backwoodsmen in the civil service and his own party and MPs will be at work now.

SG said...

Well Ruth escaped the skinny dip by the skin of her teeth. I worry about Scotland. The Indy people should be very careful what they wish for - not the first time they’ve pursued fools gold (the Darien scheme refers). Regarding the Tories, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. From what I can see the new MPs from the old Labour heartlands are not place-men and they have a strong hand to play within the party. I hope they remain rooted in their local communities and remember who their masters are. If I were Boris, I would ditch HS2 and divert the money into improving infrastructure across the North, Midlands and Wales maybe Scotland too. Also, having a democratic mandate should strengthen his negotiating hand with the EU - though I dare say we haven’t heard the last of Gina Miller and her legal ‘team’. Boris has serious business with Blair’s Supreme Court... I hope he has the appetite for it.

mongoose said...

Bojo hasn't now got any excuses, Mr Mike, to protect him. He either ponies up or he fails. He has though alreaady demonstrated a pretty ruthless streak. I would be surprised if he didn't start out with a rock hard response to the EU. A Trump FTA - in both their interests to be achieved in 2020 - and he is away to the races. Re-election in five years, or at his earlier convenience, almost assured by the arithmetic that exists already. Sticking it to the SNP won't hurt either, Mr SG.

SG said...

With you on that Mr Mongoose! Albeit, I’d be tempted to call Sturgeon’s bluff. Yes, you can have another referendum, but this time fought fair. General Election, rather than local government, rules. Nae foreign nationals, only Scots born UK nationals or rest of UK folk living in Scotland plus Scots ex-pats... That would be fair... That would fuck the Scottish Nazis for a good while yet, so it would...

mongoose said...

Sturgeon knows, as Himself knew, that the game is up. With Brexit happening, the EU regional handouts will turn into London handouts. That makes the client state a client state of London. And then she is fucked for sure. There is nothing she can do but whine and keep her mush on the BBC. They have to await a cuddle up to a Labour minority government whenever one presents itself. Labour should be thinking though about how it gets its Scottish MPs back. And that's the Edin-Glasgow corridor for the most part. What can they do?

SG said...

Meanwhile, Labour’s ‘period of reflection’ begins:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50816058

mongoose said...

You couldn't make it up but now is not the time for any of it, Mr SG, and we watched all this in the middle eighties. It's on a loop isn't it?

Now is the time to be a Shadow of Something and to build a reputation - quick, bright, solid, personable, not opportunistic. I would have said Thornberry had a chance of building something until yesterday. Now she is toast. Has been toasted. God forbid that there is a recording.

Rebecca LB may be about to squander her political capital in vain, such as it is. The more level-headed Angela Rayner keeping her powder dry perhaps. They're not Tony and Gordon though are they?

I see Boris has already put a scatter under the soft brexit pigeons. There's plenty more of that to come. The boy Varadkar must be twitching and for good reason for he will soon be twisting in the wind, poor sod.

SG said...

Quite so, and indeed it is, Mr Mongoose.

Re- arranging the deck chairs on a sunk ship seems like a somewhat academic exercise to me.

Lady Nugee’s ‘building credentials’ were compromised some time ago, as you may recall:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30148768

As for ‘poor’ Leo, ah well, never mind! I leave his sentencing to our host!...

Mike said...

Looks like Boris is growing a pair? Forgive me if I reserve judgement for now. He's summoning up his inner Churchill, at least trying to sound the part.

mongoose said...

It certainly looks that way, Mr Mike. Then again, it is the beginning of the proper negotiation now. "I want all of A and none of B."

It appears, after a couple of insightful newspaper columns in the immediate aftermath gave out a wee twinkle of hope of understanding, that the luvvies have decided to revert to argument No 1. I think that they think that having a woman leader will be enough. Sometimes I despair of the Left. A collective stupidity overtakes them. If even Laura Kuennsberg (sp?) is breaking cover, there is surely something to think about.

call me ishmael said...

A bit of judicious largesse in Scotland, an unfavourable Salmond trial result plus questions about SNP covering-up; a threat to bluff-call on defence assets North of the border and bring them South; maybe even a word with Trump about increasing tariffs on Scotch, salmon, Harris Tweed and horrid shortbread - I think that's a comprehensive list of our exports - and maybe even the threat of an all-or-nothing referendum - win and you leave and the hard border goes up, lose and we close Holyrood and govern from London, there is just so much that BoJo can do to frighten the BeJasus out of the Tribesmen, who are both cowardly and stupid, even though, in my judgement, living here, Krankie would lose any form of IndyRef, however framed, whenever called; they are a neanderthal, inebriate, educationally deficient, wife-beating, serial raping, crossdressing, ginger abomination, the Nats. Has anyone seen that cunt who leads them in Westminster, in the blue three-piece suit? He looks like he is general secretary of the Glasgow Federation of Bookmakers and Turf Accountants, c.1963. I don't want the watching world thinking that this retarded, throwback guttersniperepresents me and nor, once Boris stonewalld him some more and Jake Mogg flirts with him some more, will anyone else up here.

Jon Sox and Huw Welshman will piss themselves, beating the Tribesmen's drum but noboby gives a fuck about what they say. Laura Skanksberg can screech and screech and screech about how Krankie is an existential crisis fof BoJo but nobody gives a fuck about Skanky, either or thank God, at last and finally, that dreadful poxed-up hobgoblin, Andy Neil, who thought himself political Truth's final arbiter but now knows differently, electors don't give a flying fuck about him and his fucking postcards. The myth, friends, of journalism, is exploded; we must speak among and for ourselves and rejoice.

call me ishmael said...

Labour is done, mr mongoose, be it Emily PissFace or Keir Hangman from the right which is most unlikely or any of the Corbynista children, the national party is insufficiently mature, too narcissistic, to elect someone who might appeal to actual voters. This must be the biggest ever example of ruinous, political stupidity; Corbyn's cowardice, McGoebbelses sneering sleight of hand, Abbotts cataclysmic incompetence and unsuitability and the Maoist chanting of the Shadow Cabinet children - we are righting a historical wrong, we are righting a historical wrong, sixty billion pounds doesn't matter because we are righting a historical wrong. These people will not coalesce again, around anyone.

I suspect that Blair and Hillary's boy, Miliband, have the money and the nerve to think they could form another NewLabout from a rump of this lot but nobody'd vote for them and McCluskey'd mobilise millions of pounds against them.

It is annoying to see the labour movement, so long hijacked by ruinous Islingtonia, freeing itself only by voting for an effete, Bullingdon Boy thug and we must hope that the new, blue collar, Northern Tories keep his cock out of the pig's mouth, so to speak and look, those of us who remain, mr mongoose, for the new, we must be alert for a new banner to follow, for fresh marching bands but as for the Labour party we must all lay down our weary tunes.

Gordon Snot gifted us Cameron and Clegg and the burning of the wheelchairs; now, Corbyn and his cult give us ten or fifteen years of Old Etonia. The worst of it is that Corbyn could have helped deliver Brexit, and his standing would have been much higher, if only he'd been a leader.

call me ishmael said...

I watched, mr sg, Supreme court retiring justice, Brenda Hale, giving her valedictory to assembled lawyers, stooges and cronies and it was worse, a ballsachingly million times worse than any Oscar winner's speech you ever heard, a repulsive old crow, singing her own praises at the top of her ghastly voice for about half an hour.

They have allowed themselves to be individually documentarised by the BBC, this gang and one is bound to say that a two-year, limited tenure is more than enough. With any luck BoJo will quickly reform the Supreme Court and restrict its remit to matters of law and not politics.

call me ishmael said...

Things have changed, mr mike, mr tiny speaker is gone, humiliates himself and is humiliated by all who matter. There is a majority government. Grieve, Soubrie et al had their arses kicked and socialist or egalitarian measures are now sleeping on the streets. BoJo's hideous pater has proven that money really does talk and as I said above, the Myth of Journalism is exploded beyond reconstruction.

Perhaps the biggest change, however, is down your end of the street, Australia ablaze whilst its PM frolics on Waikiki Beach, Oh, but 'Strewth, only for his kids' sakes, n' everyone c'n unnerstand that, right? Somebody should throw the useless, impertinent cunt in the fire.
Once white folks start suffering extremes like this then maybe the nation, the whole region, will become more thoughtful.

Hope you and the mrs and Pug are out of Harm's way.

Mike said...

Thanks Mr I. In Sydney we are fine, although some days there is smoke in the air. The big fires are in a national park NW of Sydney, apparently the blaze is bigger than Belgium. Remote and impossible to put out. Some rural properties lost and some lives to accidents. Bush fires are an inevitable part of Australian life, indeed essential for the land and flora to regenerate itself. The problems are because some people choose to live in the bush. Our PM (like most people I can't remember his name) has done himself no favours. We get elections every 3 years and if Labor (sic) can get their act together he's out on his arse. BTW our Labor should not be confused with your Labour - our variety is more right wing than the Tories. And the "Liberal" party is the official right wing party. Confusing. The GE seems to have cleansed the political landscape in the UK, so to speak.

Boris has 5 aces in his hand now so its hard to see him folding to the EU, which is in recession and desperately needs UK markets. Even a complete idiot would win that negotiation, but with Government the capacity to disappoint is limitless.

Best wishes to all for Christmas (if that term is still allowed).

call me ishmael said...

It is around here, thanks, mr mike, same to you. Yes, BoJo certainly has a full powder locker, although he should highlight that Macron's EU France the Frogs are permanently rioting; German civil unrest, too, goes unreported by MediaMinster, here. I am fairly sure he'll get the deal he wants.

yardarm said...

The ' Supreme Court ' are a bunch of ignorant jackanapes. For a start they`re not the Supreme Court; that`s the Monarch in Parliament. Johnson`s prorogation was illegitimate, not ' un lawful '; his minority was lower than the winter temperature on the Ross Ice Shelf and if the Commons wanted to overturn it they could but didn`t. No vote of confidence against him, either.

The allegedly ' Supreme Court ' was acting above its pay grade; the Bill of Rights of 1689 specifically forbids a court to interfere in the workings of Parliament. That`s the same law that allows an MP or peer to say what they like about some fat cunt like Philip Green, it can be reported and no super injunction has effect. I bet the ambulance chaser libel lawyers will be licking their lips now a precedent has been established.

I felt like dropping a line to Farage and saying ' If the courts can fuck about with Parliament now, see if you can get them to enforce the Referendum '. I`m willing to bet that wouldn`t have got far.

And in an act of appalling bumlickery some chasers have even written a children`s book with the jumped up old bag Hale as the heroine, Equal to Everything it`s called. I fucking shit you not.

It could be said that the Jezzatollah did in a way bring about Brexit. By wrongly insisting only he could lead a Junta of the Damned he shafted that option, although the election result indicates that would only have delayed things a while.

mongoose said...

They are certainly finished for a decade or more, Mr Ishmael. I am sure that I lived these moments before when the previous embodiment of Worzel Gummidge went down in flames. And he was ten times the man Jezza is. The Welsh Windbag wasn't the answer then and Rebecca Long Bailey is not the answer now. She has a look of the Kinnock about her, and she is suitably miserable and censorious enough to botch the task.

It is unfortunate that the Dogshooters continue to fuck up everything they touch. Somebody somewhere somewhen has to unite the left. Christ, Swinson was the worst of a very bad lot. I have had cats - some of them dead - brighter than her.

It struck me then and it strikes me now that Baroness Hale had no business speculating upon the possible motivations of a Prime Minister. Has the PM the right or no to advise HM to prorogue parliament? Answer: yes. Her prattling about the seriousness of the circumstanmces surely invited the bewigged ones' old dictum of hard cases making bad law. She should have kept her trap shut. The Supreme Court just usurped the role of the Executive.

call me ishmael said...

Bravo, mr yardarm; extreme, like Rumpole on crystal meth.
I seem to recall that the Supreme Court was at least partly the creation of the self-regarding Jack Torture, then Lord Chancellor, now known as a war criminal and a cheap crook whose only punishment is to be the denial of a peerage. Perhaps Straw's success as a criminal will endear him to those now trawling through Labour's entrails, trying to stitch them together- shit, mucus, blood and membrane - in order to re-serve them to us, next time, warmed up. I did hear a BBC hack suggest that Tony Blair was the right man to review the situation, things must be bad at Broadcasting House.
When the SC was being established I remember thinking how very front'n'centre they all seemed, how very unBritish and so it has proved, no business like showbusiness. Talking of which, mr tiny speaker has been popping up, being lifted on to a stool and informing us how, in almost every single particular, this last parliament was the very best in history, the suppression of the will of the people being the solemn duty of all democrats. He looks more of a cunt out of Westminster than he did within; no mean feat, that.

Happy Christmas, me hearty.

call me ishmael said...

You omit Stevie Kinnock from your summary, he must stand a strong chance, Labour loving its aristocracy as it does.

A decade now, though, will prove different to a decade then, mr mongoose. There will be no tribal loyalty to rekindle among generational diehards, the already dwindling power of MSM, BBC and skymadeupnewsandfilth will be further diminished; climate issues and de-growth will be paramount and the non-trending, accumulated knowledge of political history represented here and in other places will be anachronistic or even extinct. And the first ones now will later be last......

Happy Christmas, my good companion.

SG said...

Meanwhile, the sore losers over at the FT propose this:

“Mr Johnson is now master of all he surveys. At the very least, however, it would be in his interests to demonstrate humility. Brexit Day cannot be the moment when one faction in society marks its victory over another. At 11pm on January 31, Big Ben should remain resolutely silent.”

https://www.ft.com/content/b6f5fa94-258a-11ea-9a4f-963f0ec7e134 (for those of you able to breach the paywall)

The author, one James ‘Blitz’ - oh the irony! I know that the Luftwaffe are short of serviceable aircraft these days but is this really the best that they can do now? I look forward to a rejoinder from Mx Kreig.

Note also the use of the word ‘faction’ - the ‘silent majority’ have spoken twice now, a mere ‘faction’ apparently. This ‘inter-sectionalist’ thinking is becoming pervasive.

Personally I’d have the church bells ringing out across the land but I doubt that the ‘liberation theologists’ in charge of the Church these days would oblige.

Merry Christmas Mr I and to all the other folks who wash up on the shore of your island from time to time...



Bungalow Bill said...

If the Baroness and her unanimous band of arid poseurs can make the law up to suit their prejudices on Boris, then anything goes. Why should we credit them as the authority on any legal matter since impartiality and intellectual rigour stand forfeit. The stupid, preening bastards laid waste the separation of powers at a stroke. How's that to be fixed? Never mind, they get to pleasure, and be pleasured by, all the right sort of persons at all the right sort of parties.

Fuck them but Happy Christmas, Mr I, to you and to all those on here enlightened in the darkness.

mongoose said...

There was no rigour, Mr BB. "No such blah blah has been laid before the Court..." Fuck you, madam. The Prime Minister was not required to explain his reasoning and motivations. Had he the power and the righ? Yes or no, woman? Yes was the answer weasleed away by circumstance.

A Happy and Merry Christmas is wished to you all, and especially such this year to our noble Orcadian friend and host.

call me ishmael said...

Never see the FT, mr yardarm, so thanks for that example of the theft of language; we have seen so much of it: righteous disgust at the four year festival of competitive promising is damned by the competitors as Voter Apathy - our rejection of their shitburblings damned as our laziness. Any rejection, anywhere, of Uncle Sam's brutal greed and rapine described as an insurrection or a rebellion; student or labour protests here gleefully described by skymadeupnewsandfilth as mob violence.

I did watch all of the Jonathan Sumption Reith lectures and enjoyed his lucidity, so refreshing after the dullard, shit4brains politicians, I enjoyed him in the same way that I enjoy Jake Mogg but Oh Fuck! his assertion that a democratic majority was illegitimate was a sophistry too far, even for me, a man super skilled in tying himself in knots.

And yes, the church bells ring out nowhere near enough, do they? Probably out of respect for the Sumptionesque Mohammedan minority/majority to which we must wish a Happy Whatever Causes You No Offence And Makes Us Cower And Shiver In Chilly, Counterfeit Virtue.

For the non vitue afflicted, however, let the choirs sing and the bells ring out, for Christmas, for life and even for loss.

call me ishmael said...

I remember being aghast, mr bungalow bill, at the shootings of the Caecescus and wondering, How can things get so bad that summary execution is the remedy; Lady Hale's smug shitrapping went some way to answering that question.

Happy Christmas to you.

call me ishmael said...

Lords and Ladies a-leaping, mr mongoose, snowflaked and woked; a quick Christmas rub-down with a house brick, that's what they need.

Woman on a Raft said...

I stop by to write a note in the book of remembrance and find you've been writing since MAY and nobody told me. OTOH, this is a fine Christmas present as I can read all the back issues. It is almost as exiting as being an Australian and getting all the back numbers from the auld hame by the packet steamer which was delayed in the Indies. Both instant and even slower than things used to be, before 1839, before the telegraph was invented.

I am well and in Yorkshire. I trust this holiday will be a peaceful one for you; I understand you have been invaded by geese and islanders have been given permission to eat some. Never sure about wild geese; they must be chewy with all the flying.

inmate said...


Fuck the politicians, lords n ladies, the royal fucking scroungers and our betters in the Supreme Court.
Enjoy Christmas with family if you can and try to remember why we celebrate at this time.
A happy and Joyful Christmas to all in Ishmaelia

Woman on a Raft said...

P.S Lady Hale is what comes of prioritising genitals over brains. She came up through the family courts, which are barely law at all as they just have to bosh something up and hope for the best, and she has made a long career out of writing waffly stuff about European law. Reports, opinions, briefings, training courses.

This alone should have caused her to be recused for want of impartiality. She has a dog in the fight and has tried to achieve, via the misuse of law, what she could not win for herself at the ballot box. She is the kind of woman who believes her vote should count at least ten times what mine does, on acount of she's special.

call me ishmael said...

I was, just earlier, re-reading your Corbyn-in-Tardis piece, mrs woar; shame he didn't read it, too.
Thank you and have a happy Yorkshire Christmas and if you see Archbishop John, down the Minster, ask him for me if he's finally changed his underpants, now that Bob Mugabe's gone; just don't mention the widespread child abuse in his Diocese because he's busy praying his arse off about it.

call me ishmael said...

And mr inmate, wot you said, right back at you. Happy Christmas.

the noblest prospect said...

Happy Christmas and a heathy New Year, Mr Smith. Fat Eck's trial to look forward to.

tnp

call me ishmael said...

Thank you, mr tnp, and if it were one or two complainants I could see Fatman's expensive brief flooring them but not ten. And then there is the extraordinary state of affairs in which the SNP was allowed to investigate before the police as well as Krankie's dodgy email trail. Oh, Happy New Year, indeed. AND with EarthTurn the days grow longer, Darkness retreats.

Mike said...

Its Christmas day down here; just been for a walk (from 5.15am to 7.30am) along the foreshore - my ethingy says 16000 steps. Despite the forecast its clear blue sky (almost) and sunny. No smoke. Only sadness is my wife's mother died this year, she would have been 90 today. We scattered her ashes on the foreshore and had a little remembrance this morning. Best wishes.

call me ishmael said...

sunrise here in an hour - 9.00am - one degree C so warmish and Harris has just been out for his first tinkle. I expect you will have eaten by now, probably just picked up a roasted Koala from the roadside. Bon apetit, mr mike.

Anonymous said...

Pre-cooked roadkill - one of global warming's little perks. I hadn't thought of that.

Merry (ironic, or not, or both) Christmas, Mr Smith, and all here gathered. Vivat Ishmaelia.

cheers

v./

call me ishmael said...

Yes and how dare there be poets. Thank you, mr verge.

Anonymous said...

Happy Christmas Mr I and all the best for 2020
-richard

Doug Shoulders said...

Merry Christmas to all Ishmaelites. Very sunny Scotland. Best wishes for the New year

call me ishmael said...

Ah, thank you, mr richard, haven't seen you for a while, missed your punchy, sobering, storeman's realism; Happy Christmas to you.

call me ishmael said...

And thanks to you, mr doug; getting a bit overcast now but it was brighter earlier, here in the North. Happy Christmas to your house, I hope things go well.

inmate said...

I see there are a number of vacancies at No 10. Dominic Cummings is looking for inspirational "weirdos" and outside the box thinkers for his new model army of servile serpents.
There must be a places for a number of Ishmaelites to influence policy and communications, to route out the corruption in the commons and lords, to brings back the death penalty for the likes of Satan's spawn Blair, Jack Torture, the dog strangler, the snoteater and Berkowitz.
Just think of the fun we could have, go on Ishmaelia...you know it's the right thing to do, in the national interest.

Hope you are on the mend mr I and this new decade is kinder to you.

inmate said...

Oh and I see the illiberal demophobe, the fragrant but ugly, both inside and out, Layla Moran has 'come out' as a Pansexual, not lesbian, not bi, but will fuck anything apparently. Couldn't let the electorate know before the GE, they might have mistaken her for a fucking idiot.

call me ishmael said...

Happy New Year, mr .inmate and yes, wouldn't it be nice if some oddballs stormed the decks of HMS Ruin, almost anyone from outside the public school, Oxbridge, PPE bubble might rattle the smug bars of MediaMinster. Encouraging at worst. And great to see the civil service's shop steward grunting that he's all for change as long as things stay exactly as he likes them.

Good news, too, on the vegan case; I am not one but I think that with a bit more health and strength I might have been. I never canvass for vegetarianism, well, perhaps tacitly, I think it is something people come to and that more and more are.

I think, though, that vegans have infinitely more on their identicatory side than does Dave the hulking, mutilated lorrydriver who insists on shitting in the ladies and being called Davina. If he comes round here he'll get a quick rub-down with a house-brick.

There has always been a tiny number of pan or polysexuals but the last few Freddie Mercury decades have seen an explosion in risky behaviours for which public health and private fortitude are woefully unprotected.

Anonymous said...

And there's me thinking that pansexuality was something Wor Nigella might get up to with a deep-fat fryer behind closed doors. Live and learn.

Bonne année, M. Smith, et le tout Ishmaelia, aussi.

v./

call me ishmael said...

Dunno where coke-fuelled rough sex and cheesy exhibitionism fit in the grooming of the nation, mr verge, I guess we would need an expert of the stature of Graham Norton, were he ever to withdraw his head from Hillary Clinton's scab, lesion, polyp and haemmorhoid infested anus, although his head may be inextricably jammed against that of wotsisname, that clever chap, Nish Kumar, the bread roll man, both had their heads jammed tight, last time I saw. A singular abomination, sufficient to close the fuckers down.

Happy New Year, tnonetheless, to Yorkshire.

mongoose said...

On a good day, mr inmate, Layla would make about three-quarters of a half-wit. She is next door to us here and seems to be on the local news every day sounding off about something I can never quite understand - except that it is apparently bad. Notwithstanding being a Dogshooter, one of the tedious LGBTIQA+ brigade (no P?), and demonstrably female, she is just dim. The sort of rambling prattle which is permissible in one's daughter's teenage friends - because they're going to be somewhere else ina few minutes - is catastrophic in a politician. Compared to her, the Orange One is Cicero.

I see that WWIII has started. Or perhaps not. ANd that Joe Biden is going to be the Dem candidate. Or perhaps not.

Happy New Year, everyone.

call me ishmael said...

And just when we need someone to say The so-called Free World shouldn't do Murder we have no-one with a credible voice. I saw Lady PissFace virtue carousing for the cameras, flicking her highlights and pouting like some mad coquette ancien and cursed afresh the PLP comedy of errors.

I never could stomach that wifeswapping skankhead, Clapton and have tended to shut my ears to the name Layla, I know nothing or less of this one, mr mongoose, only so much a poor boy can take.

inmate said...

Yes mr. Mongoose, miss pansexual ‘allegedly’ gave her ex- husband? Boyfriend? Partner? a slapping. Perhaps he/she/it/they weren’t perverted enough for her tastes. Still takes all sorts, probably a Vegan, sex with veg, her new squeeze looks to be more of a man/Zhe/it/thing than most of today’s bearded, tattooed, soy-boy, new people.
Orange -man-bad has lowered himself to the level of those he seeks to destroy. Is there no end to their death and destruction? I thought Trump was all for negotiation and sanctions, just a cunt like all the rest.
Lady Nugee now a front runner along with Kier SturmerFuerher the bent former chief prosecutor, I was hoping for Mathematics Diane, always presuming her privileged, nose biting, privately educated son doesn’t cause too many upsets. ‘Tis all down to the anointed one, if Mong Bailey decides to stand, all bets are off. She’s a firm believer in the ideology from 150 years ago that won all the arguments at the GE, and like St. Jeremy, not a fan of the hebe influence.

mongoose said...

Yes, mr i and mr I, I thought that killing people was wrong too but what do we know, eh? The bastard doesn't seem to have been a great loss to humanity but that's not the point - or a great many places of power would be silent save for the tumbleweed rustling about. The Tommies in their day would have blown the bugger to bits but kept their traps shut. Better to be a silent murderous thug than to confirm it on Twitter.

I didn't mean to be rude to Layla except to say that she is a) dim, and b) vacuously virtue-signalling to the point of some mad re-entrant parody of herself.

And why the fuck is it that nobody but the bastard Tories and the great Orange Donald understand that you do not attract voters by insulting or belittling them? Even if they are ten years out, stop now and learn some manners. And Kier Starmer? Please, please, can I not be spared?

call me ishmael said...

Maybe a pandemic of untreatable MegaSyph is the true Eco-writing on the wall; these polyperversions are global, 'snot just New York and Frisco, this time, where the holy, blessed fisters will drop like flies. Life is hard and short enough without the arbitrary curtailment of such pleasures as present themselves but the current, barrierless and wantonly promiscuous and ranpreoccupations seem inherently both emotionally and physically dangerous; the global antibiotic crisis is as real as pain.

The failure of the PLP, although blithely unacknowledged, is so complete, so irrecoverable that the identity of its leader is important only to the Mythmakers of Pretend Journalism, to superannuated, job-for-life slags like Yasmin Alibhai Muslim, Polly Toynbee, fighting for the Northern poor from her Majorcan home or the piss and vomit stained Toilets Maguire, dribbling and snivelling all over Skymadeupnewsandfilth like he still knew a working class oik or two. We should pay them no mind.

Be interesting to see what DomCum has in mind for the gossiping jackals of the Lobby. Cutting their tongues out'd be a promising start.

SG said...

“Cutting their tongues out’d be a promising start”.

Indeed Mr I! I have a very strong candidate for that sort of work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria

With his strength in mathematics and sciences, I think he would soon prove to be a valuable member of the DC ‘team’.

That said, he did experience early ‘retirement’ some years ago and therefore may no longer be ‘available’ - alas!

mongoose said...

Apparently the breakeven point is 39 years, Mr I. After that more folk vote for the right than vote for the left. This means that in a three-score-and-ten world, the left gets 21 years and the right gets 31. Add in the greater tendency of the older to turnout and vote and you begin to see the reason why only one Labour leader born this last hundred years has won a GE. Alas, we are now into over a four-score world. That's now 21 years plays 41+. And it is why the constituency-building has shifted to identity and grievance. It is a losing battle. Fuck with the voting age threshold by a couple of years if you must but it won't butter any parsnips. You win +2; they lose nowt. Flood London with immigrants and you will still only win what you are already winning.

I believe (indeed I hope that I believe) that the answer may be found in Old Liberalism. Dump the rules and the PC-shite. Let's be fair to people but let them off the leash. Let's help people to learn, educate everyone to a sensible standard like they manage to do in Finland and Vietnam, and plenty elsewhere. Stop fucking whining about imagined drivel and those terrors for children - Y2k, foot-and-mouth, nasty-isms, climate emergency, non-standard shagging - and build a sensible sentient world fit for rampant AI and the electronic supremacy of delivery.

Begin as soon as you like.

mongoose said...

Oh, no, aaarghhh. I am going to have to dig a hole. And not to shelter from WWIII.

Mike said...

No worries, Mr Mongoose. The war has ended. The US lost.

Meanwhile I read that the ginger fuckwit is eschewing all royal privileges and will be earning his own living?

call me ishmael said...

Yes and they've declared UDI without running it past the brooding, hobgoblin presence of the ancient playboy, Andrew Neil. The world's truly gone to fuck, with ginger psycho moron parasites like Harry Hooligan dissing the Greatest Living Gossipist.

call me ishmael said...

Time passed, mr mongoose, 'n now it seems, everybody's having them dreams, everybody sees th'selves walkin' round with no-one else....

mongoose said...

Lost, Mr Mike? Donny tweeted me personally to say that he'd won. And it only took the weekend.

And there now seems to have been some coincidental plane falling out of the sky unpleasantness. The world has gone fucking mad.

Try as I might to find some shred of interest in the Ginger Uprising, I find that I do not give a monkey's. I have had enough of it already and it has only been twelve hours - for nine of which I was asleep. Just fuck off to Canada if that's what you want to do. Silently. Just go, and take whatshername with you.

call me ishmael said...

Rumours circulate about IRG downing Ukrainian jet but then they would, wouldn't they; even so, a rum coincidence.


The sacking of Ginge'n'Smeg is potentially massive, mr mike. The Ruritanians're fucked if they do and fucked if they don't (sack them)

I was hoping a couple of years back that she'd leave the Groom waiting at the altar but this makes an ever bigger cunt of him, if that's possible. On top of Andy the kiddy-fucker, now Harry the pussy-whipped half-wit, well, they make for a Happy Republican New Year.

mongoose said...

Rumour has it, Mr Ishmael, that they launched their branded website at the same time. I have not the strength to go see.

It has set the shit newspapers off like Roman Candles. They haven't had such a story since Wallis Simpson was knobing her royal pikey. I cannot bear it. I may take me O'Paddy passport and fuck off for the rest of me natural to the wilds of Clare.

call me ishmael said...

The BBC, at any rate, is playing the nutter card, suggesting that the Ginger psycho has mental elf issues on account of his old Mum being barking mad. Or murdered. Or both. He is obviously a fuckwit, thick as two short planks, which was fine as long as he was pretending that half his mates had no legs and they all crawled to the North Pole once a month and got pissed. Now that he is recognised as a braindead, idle snowflake he is probably seen as fair game for untempered abuse. I love it, mr mongoose, can't get enough of it. Andy, Harry, who's next?

SG said...

They’re going ‘forward’, in a ‘progressive new role’, Mr I. With talk like that, it’s only a matter of time before your wee Kranky woman offers them the throne of an independent, anti-austerity, progressive Scotland... In the meantime, cue up much ‘progressive’ virtue signalling with various ‘celbs’, ‘The Squad’, Saint Greta et al whilst leveraging the ‘Sussex Royal’ brand merchandising opportunities to the max - that £7m inheritance and £3m trust fund ain’t nearly enough... Brings out the inner Cromwell in me Mr I - so it does!

Mike said...

I'm no fan of that "comedian" Gervais but he gave it to the luvvies at that ceremony the other night with both barrels. Worth a watch just for the look on their faces. Even managed to get a dig in at St Greta.

Caratacus said...

Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, had something to say about the likes of Harry and his doxy: "Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and maiden, meeting by chance or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness before had concealed; they wear out life in altercations, and charge Nature with cruelty."

I think we are about to enter the charging Nature with cruelty phase ...

SG said...

Re: St Greta, Mr Mike - you may enjoy this - clearly the folks at BBC Scotland must have mislaid their political correctness chip for a wee while:

https://www.facebook.com/BBCScotland/videos/at-home-with-the-thunbergs-only-an-excuse/550606562449954/

mongoose said...

It is too much for me. I don't care about any of them but must I be made to listen to it all?

Apparently there has been a conference call between the eegit, Chas and Madge. Each from its own palace or castle - spending the extended holiday, as one does, with one's loved ones but electronically from all ends of the nation. Perhaps HM was skyping from an ipad perched on her tweedy knee.

SG said...

Mr Mongoose, Layla Moron, your MP, I seem to recall, and for the West Bank and now Provincetown, is being interviewed by Ian Dale on LBC just now - explaining her ‘pan-sexuality’ - whatever the fuck that is...

call me ishmael said...

Well, all the palaces have ordered their staffsTo Make This Happen For The Sussexes; I guess that means they're gonna kill them.

call me ishmael said...

I did see her/him, Layla, during the Brexit debate and among the Tribesmen LibDems and Ulster Undertakers she just looked like the average escaped lunatic.

mongoose said...

Now that is not kind, Mr SG, given my weakened condition. Nobody cares, Layla. Just get on with it whatever it is without telling us. Good grief. A perfect recruit for the sleaze-fest which is the one true Wholly-rotten Dogshooters Party.

SG said...

Apologies Mr Mongoose, I had not picked up on your condition - otherwise I would surely have spared you! From the fragments of the interview that I listened to, I had to switch it off periodically - like a child in the 60s and 70s - hiding from Dr Who - when it was a proper scary programme, Layla appeared to be excessively full of herself and lacking in any form of self-awareness. Also the strange staccato manner in which she unleashed her word-hoard reminded me of a former, now very rich, Prime Minister and, clearly, successful peace envoy to the Middle East...

Mike said...

I think the die was cast for the Ginger One when he married the American mulatto re-tread. It upset the high society salons. He had no option left but to clear off, awash with hypocrisy, wanting his cake etc.

Re Layla - this has passed me by, thankfully, but I get the drift. Here we are in two minds - the metrosexual large cities like to trumpet their liberal credentials, but a large section of true blue Aussie life likes nothing more than a good punch up between real blokes in a footie match.

mongoose said...

I just don't know about Layla. The woman read Physics at Imperial College. FFS! That indicates a woman way out over on the very, very clever side of us all. These sort of folk clluster around an IQ of 150 rather than 100. So she's really, and I mean really-really, bright.

Perhaps she's one of those women who have had to hide how clever they are because men are such pigs. Maybe she thinks longer than she is allowed to speak. Something is up. I noticed and liked her actually at the last election (2015?) but noww shespeaks in these banal yet twisted idiocies.

In fact, I just looked up and watched the pansexual bit of her Dale interview and I thought that she did it very well. Layla is granted a stay of execution.

mongoose said...

Also, if you want an armed guard to stand by your side 24x7 that is 21 shifts per week, plus holidays and sickness etc, and that is a minimum of 5 full-time staff plus on-costs of a third or so. And that's going to conservatively - oh lets be mad and kind and cut it in half - a third of a million pounds per body you see. So if there are three or four - because there are three of you already and houses have at least two doors. Oops, two houses. One on the Windsor estate... Pay his way? Arsehole.

The ginger prat is a tit. Sussexroyal hoodies and socks. You should forebear, Mr Ishmael, from making sport of him. It is too easy.

Doug Shoulders said...

Reading physics at Imperial college doesn’t hold as much water as in ye olde days Mr Mongoose.
You just need to recant want is put before you and if failure looms just play up and use the race/gender/sexual orientation card.
Anyone here could scoosh a degree in a year such is the paucity of education these days….wasn’t prince ginger Harry Simpson at Eton or summat?
I’ve seen presentations of subject matter that these people have studied…take the new folk presenting on teevee for instance…a history programme say.. Some privileged bint describing how awful it was of the white working class to have built those slave trading ships, while neglecting to divulge who owned them.
Mrs Meg’n Simpson..now that’s a different kettle of.. Sharp as a tack while being just demure enough to appease those confused by her light brown appearance.
I see the strong independent woman you go girl wummin, supporting her inadequate husband, angle emerging here. He’s playing the poor fool put before us for our entertainment.
So they are to settle in Canadia eh?
I can’t watch Gervais. Some indiscernible thing about him gives me the heebees. Might be the glower he uses to make a point. Like that Thunberg girl when she’s condemning us for using carbon.
They’re both actors and anything they say and do is scripted, but they’ve got that look on their face and you know it’s real. Quite alarming.

call me ishmael said...

I think he comes, Gervaise, from fifty generations, on one side, of male prostitutes and fifty, on the other side, of inquisitors, hangmen and disembowellers, maybe some of those prison warders who played cards with the condemned man, to help him pass the time. I simply cannot watch him, he is of Man's Dark side, knowing and wicked. If he comes round here I'll drown him in hot, liquid caustic soda, the horrible fucking bastard. I dunno why some luvvie at these award shows doesn't jump up and kick his teeth in.

Mike said...

Ginger-n-Smeg are getting a pasting right-left-n'centre. Even from the usual arse-lickers. As you say, Mr I, could be an imminent automobile accident in a French tunnel, sort of thing.

mongoose said...

A boy forgets his father's name at his peril.

Gervais is about as funny as the flu.

Layla OTOH must have soemthing about her. And having read a few things about her, it is there to be understood. I may move house a few hundred yards so that I can vote for the loon.

I see that the Orange One has been sharing his relational insights and understandings. How pleased Madge must be that she has so respectful an admirer.

call me ishmael said...

It's Tangham de BobbleTop interests me,mt mongoose, one of the former Labour party's front bench Remainers, and a Tamil, to boot, every intervention she makes is like a desperate audition for Doctor Who, subordinate clause stumbling over subordinate clause, never concluding and performed to an empty room, and then there's Geraint Davis, a stuttering, backward cousin from the Kinnock Fringe, like some bogus socialist Messiah, recently released from thirty years being walled-up inside the Blaenauffestinniog slate quarry, now free to stalk the Earth in his red tie, covered in slate dust and howling at the moon. Then there's that solitary, jetsetting Green bint having the hysterics at every opportunity, must delight her gay constituents, Caroline lower lipping and stamping her little feet, so Judy Garland. And there are no words for the Tribesmen, they must be the laughing stock of global parliamentary TeeVee, skriking fish wives and blundering union thugs, snared, trapped, tripped and caged by any Tory frontbencher but especially by Jake Mogg. The league against cruel sports should intervene.

call me ishmael said...

Well, mr mike, they could fit her up with Class As, everybody'd believe it, say she was unfit; they could leak/manufacture porno, everybody'd believe it, say she was unfit and they could throw a nutterblanket around Ginger until he came to his senses. The Kid, as far as I understand, remains the property of the monarch, Brenda or Brian and although that would be a hard card to play these days it was deployed against Poor Mad Diana during her days of devout muslim cock worship, Allah Akhbar. A suicide should be easy enough, Christ if they can get away with Epstein they can certainly manage this noisy little scrubber. Bury her in Westminster Abbey, job's a good 'un.

mongoose said...

Barry Gardiner is the one for me, Mr Ishmael. "But you see, Andrew, if I may, if rather than X meaning X but in fact X meaning not Y then Jeremy's statement, and if viewed from a persepctive of 180 degrees, can be understood to be an adequate representation of a viable position. I learned to speak like this, since you ask, concentrtaing on the nub, Andrew, the effable, while trying to distract myself by gargling with marbles and juggling soup plates. I was, and indeed used to be, a touring member of Mr Kinnock's Circus of Illumination. That is where, it could be said, I learned my trade."

Barry, I think, if I may say, has decided to stand for the leadership. This should be good for a few laughs - but not from him.

I see the Ayatollah has discovered - after four days - that it was him wot loosed off WWIII. The Acronym woman however says that it was Donny's fault for provoking him into shooting down his own aircraft. Even Barry wouldn't have tried to get that one past us.

yardarm said...

I too always enjoyed seeing Barry in the impossible task of trying to explain Labour`s position on Brexit, burbling his inanities like some Alan Bennet character. And it seems he`s on the payroll of some Anglo Chinese law firm; Barry Gardiner ? Barry Bribes, more like. Just like a proper politician.

mongoose said...

Sorry, mr yardarm, Barry was a delusion, a false alarm. I must be smoking too much weed. It's a disappointment though.

Mike said...

Looks like Ginger-n-Smeg are off to Canada; thank God they didn't choose Australia. I'd have to emigrate, again. Serves him right for marrying a feminist mulatto re-tread. It won't last. But she's got the kid, so it will be messy.

mongoose said...

Sick-making, Mr Mike. We want to be independent but to use the R-word to flog ski kit and coffee mugs to entitled louts and the loathsome offspring of the self-appointed Ubermenschen. Can you be either in, lad, or out? Out is independent. Half out is an idle, cashing-in, fucking layabout bastard fit only for kindling.

Mike said...

They didn't learn their lesson with Fergie.

Woman on a Raft said...

Cathedrals, mentioned back down the road.

Durham ought to be on the list because it still has both of them: Cuthbert and Bede, and also a beautiful pair of windows which are relatively new, near Cuthbert's shrine.

One, on the Western side, is the Resurrection Window, commissioned for the Millenium. Warm, orange and so rich that it seems to move, it is at its best at sunset.

The new window, to the memory of young Sara Pilkington, has become, at its base, a point of memory for students. It is on the Eastern side and is brightest as the sun rises.

If you sit on the seats for contemplation by Cuthbert's tomb, you can see both windows and how the light from the Resurrection falls across his place and her window, reenacting a circle of life every single day.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x75xmbk

This video does not do justice to the experience of standing between these windows.




Johnny said...

Thank you, WOAR, for your recommendation. What a fantastic tribute.

call me ishmael said...

Can you, please, email me, mrs woar. williammakepeace1@icloud.com ?

call me ishmael said...

I have missed Barry but have now identified mr mongoose's Layla, not a patch on last night's QT Shami Watsaname, funny how the leaders of NCCL and whatever it became under Shami, Liberty, was it - Harriet, Patricia Hewitt and Shami herself become such totalitarians. Keep up with the sacred herb, mr mongoose; Christ, I wish I had some. I think Jake Mogg and most of the Tory front bench are stoned out of their gourds

Woman on a Raft said...

Somebody called her Lisa Meringues and, improbably, google was able to find her immediately under that name.

The really odd thing this week is that IF - big IF - Johnson is serious about farming and soil conservation, then he may even be doing the right thing. Have to see how it works out.

Woman on a Raft said...

Have emailed, Mr Ishmael.

mongoose said...

It's another example, isn't it? The Fox chap on QT being brave enough not to toe the line. The tide is turning just a bit. Enough drivel and nonsense; we'll make up our own minds, thank-you. Just the Greta Emergency now to be got into prespective and then we might all be able to calm down for a decade or two and rebuild some libraries. Speaking of which, at Christmas one of the mongoslings set up the thingy/app/whatever for mrs mongoose to access Project Gutenberg on her Kindle. We've not had a moment's toil out of her since. Curled on the end of the sofa cruising through "the ones I missed out". Perhaps then it's electric libraries that we should be building. I still have a thought to myself that the turning of a paper page in a paper book is something we should not give up on just yet. A book doesn't beep at you mid-sentence to tell you that spuds are 10% off at Tesco.

I'll get some in, Mr I, and send it via a pigeon. Or a raven, perhaps, to reach you lot up there beyond the wall.

call me ishmael said...

It has been lamented, here, constantly, mr mongoose, that doubleyou, doubleyou, doubleyou was a unique opportunity for the levelling-up of Knowlege and Language, instead, they invented text babytalk, emojicons and the global display of teenaged cock pictures. It's like we have boiled-alive Wisdom's missionaries.
Dunno where I stand on continued reverence for Guthenberg's invention. Certainly, in these pre-apocalypsean times; i'd much rather pack my i-thing than twenty-six big volumes of the Cambridge History of English History.

call me ishmael said...

Literature not history

mongoose said...

Just because some of us are phantom engineers, mr i, that does not mean that we know everything about everything. Indeed knowing that you don't know is the start of getting it right sometimes. And I tend to look in big fat books when I want to be sure of something. My mouse-mat is 4 inches thick. It's the 58th edition of the CRC "Handbook of Chemisty and Physics", 1977-78. But that last bit doesn't matter - anthing between those covers is likely to be right - "the science is settled" - or as right and settled as science gets, which is not very much at all except for some data, properties and constanty sorts of things. And that was 4 inches thick in 1977. I last used it to look up some absorption wavelengths - for esoteric reasons which need not trouble us here. This is what books are for.

The great troubles we currently have about the web and truth and fake news and other such are those of bad faith. They are ones which Herr Goebbels would have recognised. I used to swap arcane thoughts about an innocent sport, God's Own Game, on one of the newspaper websites. Then a chap got dropped, a crusade occurred, and the entire place was inundated with swinehood and the repetion of a trolling tediousness that destroyed all hope of a trustable truthful exchange - and thereby any hope of continuing community. And it died dead on the electronic spot.

This we now see writ everywhere. People can even earn a living by posting and reposting "opinions" and stifling attacks in what is presented as the ordinary discourse of ordinary people. Tactic 1 is to meet a mild reference with a passive aggressive demand for a source. Such fatuous piggery. The papers are now useless. Little islands of civility and honour, truth, still shine but they are fucking few and far between.

Mike said...

Mr mongoose: It looks like Ginger-n-Smeg have been shown the door. The only remaining detail is how much it will cost you taxpayers.

call me ishmael said...

I only said ai was unsre about where I stood. There are volumes too precious to contemplate being without, just not that many.

call me ishmael said...

What fresh madness takes voice, here, mr mike?

Woman on a Raft said...

Stand by for months of chosing a new Director General for the BBC. It's going to be worse than when they have to find a Dr Who.

call me ishmael said...

I hope we have secured for Lord Hall, mrs woar, a retirement package commensurate with his talents, he did, after all, identify mr tony blackburn as the villain of the Savile piece, honest, not invent.

In hospital the noo, the NHS being a refugee camp for the stupid and mentally infirm, the patient wifi works on the net but not for emails, typical of the national religion that we have allowed quite well paid public sector employment to become. Imagine a private hospital saying Oh, you can't send emails, wotcha think this is?

Woman on a Raft said...

I was pleased to hear Blackburn's idiotic babble on a r'kerd programme, like listening to half a century of spaghetti hoops.

I went to see Carrie Gracie talk about her book about the fight she had with Lord Hall over her pay. She said it is awkward to explain why a privileged princess should be supported in this dispute, but her argument is that if it is happening to her, it must be going on all over. Essentially, she took the China job on the strict condition that she would be paid the same as the others in her cohort; notably Jon Sopel in America and whoever was doing Russia. She learned to speak Mandarin and put up with being shadowed by the Chinese police, who have robust attitude to journalism.

She was on holiday when she found out that a) there was a high-paid list which was not strictly about who can deliver an audience ('talent' as it is known) and b) she wasn't on it because she was being paid up to half as much as the comparators.

When it came to explain this, the negotiating team just couldn't understand her position. She wanted equal pay and had already decided she would donate it; it wasn't about the money, it was about being paid the same rate for the same job.

Personal circumstances should not come in to it, but they do. She was shocked that the place she had spent her working career defending had bloody well lied to her, smiled in her face and told her that yes, she was equal. It was mind-bending betrayal. They also knew she was coping with breast cancer. They actually tried to out-live her by playing silly bugger games.

It's not about the money, money, money. It's about the sheer indecency of Lord Hall. At the very least, I hope they give Gracie seat in the Lords, just to annoy him.

On a cheerier note, I keep listening to Chuck Berry's phrasing of C'est La Vie and hearing how delicately he packs in all the syllables. So different from rotten rappers who think rhythm is just a regular drumming.

mongoose said...

Yes, sorry, Mr Ishmael, a proxy rant. The balance of my mind was disturbed. Not for the first time, alas. Some fucking people just cannot behave. But the point is fair - the medium (and, yes, the message) has been fucked over.

Hall, Mrs Raft, just doesn't want his useless fingerprints on the Fall. Useless. The conceit of the discrimination - and discrimination there was - is not that the females were worth as much as the preening Vine et al, although they were, but that they are all worth so much less. And the argument that they are in a market is bollocks. The Beeb is the establishment AmDram Society.

Mr Mike, there is only so much that a man can bear to hear about something so tedious. Imagine if you will that thye are apparently hiding in Canada until the Orange One is history. I think that they will find that in five years nobody will even know they had ever existed. I hear BTW that the seven plagues continue to rain onto your heretical climate-denying heads.

Mike said...

Mr mongoose: nice balmy 27Deg this morning at 7am on the golf course here in Sydney; blue sky, sun, light breeze. Perfecto.

PS I've been walking on the harbour foreshore from Manly to the Spit (15kms) for over 25 years; I can categorically say the sea levels have not changed; if anything, summers seem a bit cooler - we haven't had a hot stinker (40+) for quite a few years. Last one I remember was about 15 years ago - so hot me and my wife had to spend the day in the pool. Its a bit different here; when it hasn't rained for a couple of months, everyone welcomes rain.

Re climate change and all that: on the day Australia signed the Paris accord, the Govt also gave the go ahead to a 30 billion coal mine. Can't dig the stuff up fast enough.

Swiss Bob said...

Good morning Mr Ishmael, re your wifi email problem. Have you tried using a browser based email. You can do this with Hotmail, Gmail and others. Probably not but it's worth a try, especially if you are using something a little obscure that they may not have blocked.

I thought I'd give you a preview of this morning's article from someone in your neck of the woods in the hope it might cheer you up. Split into two comments due to the comment character limit.

Ah mind aboot a yeer ago gettin' sackondet tae Balmoaral coaz hoff tha royal prateckshun c**ts were aff fer a hale week wi' tha wild s**tes they goat fae a roatten chinky they ordahed in fae Aberdeen.

It wis f**kin' wursh than dealin' wi' weans, ah tell yeez.

Fursht that prence Philip c**t comes creepin' roon tha sideae tha hoose while ah'm oan patrol.

"Thass me away tae tha gamekeepah's coattage fer a wee drenk," he says. "If anywan asks yeez didnae see me, right?"

"Nae bovvah yah royal highneshnesh", I says, hinkin' f**k aw ov et.

Then five meenuts latah tha Queen f**kin' tears oot tha front door in her goonie an her curlahs pure shouten oan him.

"Philip, Philip!" She's yellin'. "Ah swear doon ah'll get tha jail fer youse ya fly wee bastert."

Then she clocks me.

"Haw you. Ya seen that Philip c**t oot here?" she asks.

"Naw ah hovnae m'aam", ah says.

She jist gies me that f**kin' broken pay packet look.

"Lissen tae me ya wee toerag," she says, merchen up tae me an' waggin' her fingah. "Ah've been tha Queen fer sixty five yeers. D'ye no hink ah can tell when somewan's talken pure s**te tae me? Dinnae take tha piss."

F**k's sake, ah'm hinkin'. She's right up oan her tiptoes in mah coupon noo an aw.

"Youse polismen hov got tae swear an oathae allegiance tae me, no Philip," she says. "Hink aboot et. Yer stonden there lying tae tha Queen. Who tha f**k even daes that?"

"Tae be fair, ah'm in an impoashable sityashun here m'aam," ah says. "Ah'll get et pure tight aff prence Philip if ah grass him en and get peltahs aff yeez if ah dinnae. Ah'll be tellin' tha Sco'ish Polis Fedarashun aboot thess cos ish proally a breachae mah yuman rice."

"Aw f**k, soarry pal," she says. "Jiss agnore me. Iss no your fault. Iss juss that Philip's pure f**ked aff an left me alane tae deal wi' Harry an' Meghan."

"Wis that tha gingah c**t an' tha wee hoff caste burd whit wis dae'in yoga oan tha lawn thess mornen, m'aam?," ah says.

"Aye, thass the c**ts," she says. "Pure woke me up at hoff five bangin' doors. Nae f**kin' coashiderashun at aw fer othah people."

"Thass pure pish m'aam," ah says.

Swiss Bob said...

"Aye, an thass no even tha worshtae et eetha," she says. "They're in there tha noo damanden' ethically sourced scrombled eggs fer their breakfashts an' makin' sly commentsh aboot there bein' nae portraits ae derkies up oan tha walls. Iss a f**kin' nightmare."

"F**k's sake m'aam," ah says. "Ah nevah reealised prence Philip hod f**ked aff an left yeez tae deal wi' that loadae s**te. Thass no oan."

"Ah mean, why ah'm ah gettin' left tae deal wi' they c**ts?," she says. "Ah'm f**kin' ninteh twa yeers auld. Ah'm sappaised tae be up hear rallaxen."

So ah says tae her: "If we hod a polisman wurken wi' us who wis bein' a pure pain in tha reng talken pish aboot eggs and pickshahsae derkies wid jiss hov tha c**t transhferred tae anutha stashun os fer away as poashable, m'aam."

She sterts rubbin her wee chin an hinkin'.

"Thass no a bad idea ackshully," she says. "Gettin' them baith tae pure f**k somewhere oot tha way, like Canada or somethin'."

"Bathgate's yooshally fer away enuff but ah take yer point, m'aam."

"Aye, mebbe. Right, ah'm away for a fag roond tha backae tha stables bafore they twa' annoyen wee fannies find me," she says. "Thanks fer tha advishe oaffacer. An' if that wee c**t Harry comes oot looken fer me, tell him tae take a runnin' f**k tae hissel'."

Five meeunts latah prence Harry sticks his heid oot tha windae an' shouts tae mah: "Haw you - ya seen mah gran onywere? Ah wis in tha middleae showen her aw tha photies ae me an' Meghan looken aw senshatev wi' wee black babies in Efrica. She said she was awa' fer a pish but iss bin aboot hoff an oor noo."

"You get yerself tae f**k ya wee gingah c**t, ya royal highneshnesh" ah says. "Yer pure breaken that poor wumman's hert wi' aw yer pish."

He didnae get a chonce tae say f**k aw back tae me coas his missus wis shouten' oan him.

"HAAAAARRRRRYYYY," she wis bawlen'. "Why don't yeez move yer granny ootae this hoose? Iss too big fer her. It cuid get turned intae a school fer disadvantaged teenagahas ae cullah or sumthin'."

Then he goat dragged away fae tha windae an' ah nevah saw him again.

Onyway, ah've nevah bin oshked back tae Balmoaral., whish is fine by me coas there's no a Greggs fer fowerty f**kin' miles an' tae be hoanasht they're aw' a pure pain en tha reng apert fae tha Queen.

call me ishmael said...

Last night's Newsnight paraded the national broadcaster, Dimbleby, Lord Mick Porno Grade and some brilliant diversity creative, reassuring us that Our BBC was deeply loved and that the yeoman MoneyBox listeners of Old England would rise as one to defend the Corporation. It was like a chimps' teaparty. You should look it up, even presenter, Anorexia Bigfeet, struggling not to throw up all over Dimbleby, yes, even Maitless, herself, aghast at his entitlementista snobbery.

call me ishmael said...

Sounds like a proper balmy inferno paradise, down there, mr mike, with the common politicians' conceit that we can and must have UnlimtedGrowth, FullMployment and stringent EnvironmentalControls enacted by some point in the future. On my local coast I see higher tides, fiercer gales, greater erosion, Orcadians will soon be making common cause with those nice, brown islanders, down your way.

call me ishmael said...

THanks, mr swiss bob, too complicated for me, I am just trying to get home from this torturers' Hellhole, where comms are good and where and mrs ishmael are.

Yes,goodstuff, that, reminds me of an old friend.

call me ishmael said...

Harris and mrs ishmael are

call me ishmael said...

mr mike will surely be plagued upon by Celebrity Virtue, mr mongoose, at the very least a morrain of flash-roasted frogs.

I think that the earnings of Duke and Duchess Merkle will be in proportion to the amount of Ruritanian scandal they can reveal, it is a risky strategy, to say the least, the poor darlings could be Mountbattened by some disgruntled group. Outrage on the Great Lakes! Or some dreadful cocaine tragedy. Is Lady Sir Elton John her best pal, yet, - I betcha he's in a right, royal state about all this, screeching and hissying - because he could supply her, as they sculpt a modern, progressive, mediaeval Centre for Serfdom. Cunts. I hate them, would love to see them all dangling from that balcony at Buckingham Palace, all in their fake uniforms and bogus medals; do them all, start with Brenda and her brood, then doing the Kents and the Gloucester and all the other dukebastards, talking of which we should revive the Royal Armouries, to run-up a suit for Harry; we have one from the Black Prince, we need one for the Ginger Prince,'sonly fair.

mongoose said...

It's a panto. As happy as larry out walking her dogs and kid in the park - like a proper mum, except for the tooled-up bodyguards - I wonder if they pick up the dog-shit - and some bounder has sold a snap to the redragtops. Fresh-fasce, cat-walk queen beaming into the lens. My heart bleeds, so it doesn't.

The oceans rise glacially slowly, Mr I, and also the land rises and sinks too. But it's been pretty steady for as long as we have been able to measure it. (Orkney may be, is probably, more complicated.) But nobody should deny that it is getting warmer and it will continue to do so - but cyclically - mostly because it is almost always warmer than this in an inter-glacial period.

call me ishmael said...

The Canuck experience, like our own, is also prismed through the Redtops -we, for instance are kept utterly unaware of France's regularly riotous boulevardiers - and I wonder what is the real public opinion over there, in Eskimo Nell's land; might it really be Brexitist or Trumpist equivalent, the adoration of these two grubby shitheads being merely an elitists' pipedream. I haven't paid much attention to the grinning chimp,Trudeau but he is clearly a playboy politician and I wouldn't be surprised if he, like M. Macron, was naughtily married to his schoolteacher, n'est ce pas, ooh la la, vive l'amour, he certainly approaches his meetings with his mighty, Southern opposite number as though he was a fourth-former, showing off. I think were a Canadian referendum on Royalty - as soon there must be - we will see not just Ginger and his slattern but also Brian and FagAsh Lil being subjected to the Bums' Rush, in favour of a duly elected, Quinn the Eskimo head of state.

Why not send me an email to
williammakepeace1@icloud.com

I guess that spiritually at least I am a natural born Ecclesiastican - to everything, turn, turn, there is a season and a time to every purpose under Heaven. If flood and famine come then they will come, Twisted Child Greta notwithstanding. Her parents, in my view, warrant a serious Social Services investigation.

mongoose said...

Agreed on that, Mr Ishmael. Apparently St Greta's facebook musings have been traced back to her dad and some IPCC-droid. They are using her up. It is just child abuse and is quite wicked.

I have just set down my trials for a half hour to have a slice of toast and a cup of tea, and, yay, PMQs is on. So dispiriting. I have lived all this before - and at some length. The Tories still banging on about banging people up, and Grandpa dribbling his line by line pedantry about Universal Credit. If you substituted "a short, sharp shock" and "Poll Tax", it could be the mid 80s again. Must we have a whole decade of this? And the SNP oaf, dear me. It's just Braveheart Bullshit. "McScotland has said Noooo!" Oh well, back to work.

Woman on a Raft said...

A couple of years ago I met two people from Canada. One was an Albanian who had managed to get refuge there and had what can only be described as the hots for Trudeau. He wrote him long Homeric poems of praise, stuff about his flowing hair and manly shoulders. Made us listen to them, and sent them too. Normally that would be embarrassing but I think Justin may have liked them.

I asked the other person - a real Canadian - whether this was an extreme response, only I couldn't tell from the papers, and he blushed and said that, regretfully, this was all too common. It is a genuine case of hysteria in response to charisma. If it works on you, then you are spell-bound, and if not, you remain baffled as to what the others see in him.

But the numbers didn't lie: the effect was huge and it shows no sign of wearing off.

Mike said...

I spoke too soon. Its over 40 deg today. Greta, if your listening, I'm sorry, I've been blogging with false Gods; I'll kiss your ring if you forgive me.

Mrs Ishmael said...

Mr Ishmael is unwell at present. I hope that he will be able to get back to you soon.

Anonymous said...

So do we all, Mrs Ishmael, so do we all. Thank you for telling us.

verge.//

SG said...

Thank you Mrs Ishmael, it is most kind of you, and well beyond call of duty, to inform us of Mr Ishmael’s condition - I hope it improves and wish you both well.

mongoose said...

Thank-you, Mrs I. My best wishes to him, and to you too.

Mike said...

Best wishes Mr I. Looking forward to a speedy recovery. Thank you Mrs I for keeping us informed.

Bungalow Bill said...

Gracious, of course, Mrs I. Wishing strength to you both.

Mrs Ishmael said...

Thank you for your kind thoughts and wishes, Ishmaelites.
It is my sad duty to inform you that Mr ishmael passed away on Thursday night at 10:00 p.m., at home in bed, holding my hand and with Harris close by, just as he wanted.At his specific instructions, there will be no funeral or service, just a simple cremation in Inverness.
It is a great comfort to know that despite dreadful illness and pain, his mind was as sharp and clear as ever and that he was still writing to you almost until the end. He was preparing a final post for you, which I will put on the blog when I am able.
I wish you well, Ishmaelites, and hope that you will continue to cluster here, telling tales of Ruin, under the good stewardship of Mrs woman on a raft.
We all know that it has been a pleasure and a privilege to have known that great man. He never thought he was a great man - he was far too humble for that.

inmate said...

Condolences Mrs Ishmael, indeed he was a great man.

Anonymous said...

Thank you, Mrs Ishmael, for taking the time to share this heartbreaking news. The humility you mention was both admirable and misplaced. If his posts here were top-notch (and they were) the Stanislav papers are touched with genius.

"Mourned by friends you've never met" - amen to that.

v./

Mrs Ishmael said...

Thank you, Mr inmate and Mr verge. Yes, the Stanislav papers were touched with genius - and incredibly funny.He did regret losing the Stanislav voice, but he poured himself into Ishmael.

mongoose said...

Sad news indeed, Mrs I. My condolences to you all - family and friends alike

Bungalow Bill said...

Mrs Ishmael, he was superb. It is extraordinarily generous that you have taken time so soon to come on here. What a refuge this place was and will, I also hope, continue to be. I add my condolences to those above.

Mike said...

Sincere condolences, Mrs I. It was one of the pleasures of the day to see a new blog post and to contribute to the ensuing lively discussion. He was indeed a great man who chronicled with acute insight the madness of the world. This will be greatly missed. If there is anyway to generate a "complete works of..." I would certainly value it.

Doug Shoulders said...

Condolences to you Mrs Ishmael and your family and all Ishmaelites. Truly a sad day. I'll miss his writing which was always something to look forward to. Thanks for taking the time to tell us and I have an inkling that that would have a wish of Mr Ishmael that we should be informed,

Anonymous said...

I've been thinking the same thing, Mr Mike. I think I tentatively mentioned the idea of a "Best of Stanislav" once, back down the road, and our host characteristically dismissed the very notion, but I wonder...suffice to say, for now, that writers are not always the best judges of their own work, and if Mr Ishmael thought his words ephemeral, we must respectfully demur.


v./

Mr SG said...

Dear Mrs Ishmael, I am truly sorry to hear this sad news and to know that he endured so much pain and discomfort towards the end, albeit that I am sure that he bore it with great fortitude. I shall miss his company and, in many ways, he was a good friend and wise counsel to those of us who have travelled along this road with him over the years. I suspect that you have been steeling yourself for this moment for some time, but even so, that will not have mitigated the shock and pain of loss. In time it will subside and I think that you have a very rich hinterland from which to draw solace from. In the meantime, I have tried to find an epitaph that Mr Ishmael himself might have enjoyed - from Marcus Aurelius’ ‘Meditations’:

“Don’t let yourself forget how many doctors have died, furrowing their brows over how many deathbeds. How many astrologers, after pompous forecasts about others’ ends. How many philosophers, after endless disquisitions on death and immortality. How many warriors, after inflicting thousands of casualties themselves. How many tyrants, after abusing the power of life and death atrociously, as if they were themselves immortal.

How many whole cities have met their end: Helike, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and countless others.

And all the ones you know yourself, one after another. One who laid out another for burial, and was buried himself, and then the man who buried him - all in the same short space of time.

In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.

To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint.

Like an olive that ripens and falls.

Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on.”

My condolences and Best Wishes to you, Harris and your wider family.

Stuart

yardarm said...

Thank you, Mrs Ishmael for telling us, at a time when you are suffering.

Mr Ishmael was a lighthouse of sanity and humanity, he certainly changed the way I saw and thought about things and I am deeply grateful that I has his acquaintance. I shall visit this site as a spring of his decency, wrath and utterly original humour.

The world is a poorer place tonight and am raising a glass to the old boy.

Bungalow Bill said...

In memoriam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoFEy1-fyuc

Mike said...

Mr Verge: yes we should respect the author's wishes. And the temporal nature of the internet and a lot of the material. But I still feel there is a body of work here which should not disappear down a hole. Its just too good.

Woman on a Raft said...

It has been a pleasure, a privilege and an education to read Mr Ishmael.

Thank you so much for sharing him so generously with us.





SG said...

Agreed Mr Mike - much of his material is priceless - it has kept me going through some very dark times. That said, anything placed on the Web is, I suspect, there for all time...

Anonymous said...

Actually we are on the same page, Mr Mike, torn between respect for Mr Ishmael's reluctance and archivist enthusiasm. All I can find at present, Mr SG, is an old meta-blog someone pulled together ("Stanislav's Rants" on a blogspot called aplumberslogic) which seems to collect an array of posts from order-order between 2007 and 2009, roughly. Nothing else. I hedged against webloss about 10 years ago and printed out what ended up as 2 crammed ring-binders' worth, hundreds of pages, so I can only assume the plumberslogic selection is a small percentage of what was available. I dipped in last night and laughed indecently hard at a couple of random pages (Gordon Brown's visit to the Vatican, and the visit to Schloss Stanislav of old friends with a camper van.) Speaking of Gordon Bruin, just the phrase "drywank jawdrop" is enough to set me off.

And thank you, Mrs WOAR, for agreeing to help keep this circle unclosed.

v./

Woman on a Raft said...

Amongst many things, I owe Mr Ishmael for his account of The Visit of the Piano Tuner. Mr Raft was rolling on the floor, weeping with laughter, assuring me that yes, piano tuners all turn up and more or less accuse the householder of being tone-deaf piano abusers. And then they charge for it.

I do think that his writing - and he was always experimenting with odd voices in other platforms - is a unique and complex body which could only emerge in the electrical cabaret of the internet.

SG said...

Mr Verge, it is probably there, somewhere in the sub-structure, to be exhumed by digital archeologists in the distant future. God knows what they will make of us and our time...

mongoose said...

I think, folks, that most of stanislav appeared on the Fawkes House of Ruin, and very possibly before the comments were migrated to disqus. It might be possible to search disqus - indeed, I am pretty sure that it would be - but we (probably) need to know the commenting engine used before the change if the task is to be properly addressed. Alas, I do not recall very clearly but I am pretty sure that it went 'stanislav, a young polish plumber [-] said'. And this indicates the normal blogspot engine that we use here (but don't hold my feet to the fire on that). I am happy to look into it; it won;t take but a minute or two to know where we are.

It might even be possible to ask Mr Fawkes to help. The otherwise useless bastard should made to be good for something.

Mike said...

Good idea Mr mongoose. Stan was the reason many of us went the Fawkes' site, and he owes a debt to Stan.

So long as this blog remains up we have the Mr I canon, but the Stanislav work needs to be preserved for history, as well as literature.

mongoose said...

Evensong for Mr Ishmael: from back up the road, Segovia plays Bach

https://youtu.be/CyPvr8AKVJQ

Unknown said...

I'm very sorry he's no longer with us. His postings as Stanislav were superb and I still use his wonderful term 'sofa cunts' to describe the likes of Andrew Marr and his pathetic fully domesticated 'guests'.