It's been cold, here, in the bracing isles.
In
fact, the actors were at risk of expiring from heat exhaustion, as the
majority of the locations were filmed in Spain in 30 degree temperatures and the charge over the frozen lake took place over a cast iron plate laid on a dried river bed covered with marble dust pretend-snow.
I suppose Dr Zhivago has come to mind as hundreds have been arrested this week during rallies across Russia in support of that brave boy, Alexei Navalny, opposition leader, anti-corruption fighter and Putin's sharpest critic, who returned to Moscow upon his recovery from Novichok poisoning, having spent months hospitalised in Germany and was arrested before leaving the airport. His wife, Yulia, joined the Moscow rally, where police sealed off pedestrian access in areas and shut down metro stations. Mrs. Navalny was among the 500 detained. Across the country it is estimated that 3,000 Russians have been detained as they protested to demand Mr Navalny's release. Whatever the uniform, weaponry, or country of employment, it seems a lawnforcement officer is a lawnforcement officer. Do you think they come from central casting? 
have got nothing to do with him.
Here's Britain's finest, being zealous with a young man on his way to work. In Solihull. Which is posh, despite the comedy accent of the arresting officer.
Mr Putin tells us that the pictures of this Black Sea holiday cottage
What else have we got to worry about this week? Mainly Covid, it seems. Will Europe let us have our vaccines? Following Boris' "spicy" conversation with Ursula, in which he accused her of wanting to murder British pensioners, yes, we will have them. The little fracas didn't go down well in Brussels, where diplomats thought it best that she now resign as EU Commission President. Having routed Johnny Foreigner, Boris may have recovered from his bruising charm offensive up North on Thursday, when he attempted to turn his attention to the enemy within the gates. Madam Sturgeon encouraged her followers to reject his overtures of affection, nay, his very presence on the sacred soil of strong, successful Scotland. She tweeted a photograph of Boris stepping down from a plane with the message: "Stay Home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives." That's rude, but that wasn't all. She strongly expressed her disapprobation of this invasion of her country by her Prime Minister. She's only a first minister. Prime trumps First. (see what I did there?). Let us look on the positive side. Perhaps it demonstrates her insecurity if she is so concerned about the effect of Boris' incoherent charm on the voters.
La Sturgeon is also beseiged by the vast numbers of trans people in Scotland who find that the SNP is just not a safe place for them. She has undertaken to introduce yet more legislation to prevent them from flooding out of the SNP in their thousands - I hadn't realised there were so many trans people in Scotland that oor Nickie could feel seriously threatened by their departure to some other party. It is increasingly becoming a bit of a worry, with Nicola committing the SNP to a Unilateral Declaration of Independence if Boris sticks to his line that once in a generation means once every 40 years, so shuttup. Maybe if I self-identified as a British man, Nicola, would, on balance, tolerate me in her Tweed and Tartan Bankrupt Nation? No, seriously, I think, post-independence from the Union, I would be treated as a foreign national. Probably be made to apply for Scottish citizenship and take a citizenry test on Robert the Bruce, Robert Burns, Rob Roy, Robert Wallace and any other Robbin bastards. Or graciously surrender my job to a proper Scottish person, have my goods sequestrated, my bank account frozen, my house sold at a loss and be booted over the Border.
Enough from me and my paranoia. I thought you might like a look at this piece from the draft archive, from the 27th March 2015:
DOWN TO BRASS TAX.
Hard
to be excited about any of this stuff, the doings of the kleptocracy,
hard for me, hard for most here, I should think. It might be news to
the NewPeople, that Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs is a branch of
organised crime, extorting money from us under pain of forfeiture and
abduction and then giving it to their bosses in GlobaCrook. It might
also be news that almost by definition, Ministers of the Crown, like
Jack Torture and Malcolm Shouty, are likely to be more crooked and more
depraved than most. It is not, however, news to anyone who is properly
alive, in the old-fashioned sense - alert, curious, rational and
watchful.
It is a lovely word, watchful, yet so few of us are. Too busy. Messaging.
It is a lovely word, watchful, yet so few of us are. Too busy. Messaging.
mr
dick the prick was fulminating, recently, about his daily encounters at
Leeds railway station with texting-walkers; clever multi-tasking,
they'd call it, this unique form of self-enslavement, in which all are
now messengers, the i-phone their herald's horn, their wax-sealed
despatch, all compressing their existences into as few characters as
possible, crushing and dehydrating their imaginations into salty little
stock cubes of abbreviation and acronym and firing them off, for
others to glimpse for a moment and forget.
It is odd that language has been so truncated, one would think that with the arrival of Platforms4All it would develop and flower but no, language, like people, just gets uglier.
Miniature, too, is such a lovely word, now eradicated by, of all people, motor car ad-men and fashion designers.
When it was about ten-years old I owned one of the very first Austin Sevens;
it had a solenoid starter-button on the floor and simply refused to drive in the rain, its distributor cap sitting virtually unshielded, just behind the radiator grille and shorting-out at the first sign of rain; by the time I owned it, however, it was called a Mini and so, swiftly, was anything else that was not full-sized, not its previous size or just small; mini now - incorrectly - means small. Now the word miniature is only used by arseholes like this,
referring to small works of art, executed using all the skills of portaiture or joinery but in miniature. Min-ee-ah-tyuhs as the inexpert poseur above, would pompously say, gobbing his ignorance on any number of ersatz antique shows. Miniature can also properly refer to a horse, a flower and a single-measure bottle of spirits; it does not, however, and never did, even truncated, mean small. Except to the NewPeople. Gr8, innit? Worthless cunts.
If somebody said to me, Here is a communication/writing device, only you have to use numbers instead of letters, y'know, to save space, like, make up nonsense words and gibberish, I'd tell them to go and fuck themselves.
Ex is another one that drives me nuts. Not properly a word it is a prefix meaning from, out of - ex officio, ex gratia, ex cathedra; ex does not mean former, well, it didn't used to but now it does, now it's almost a proper noun, people speak of The Ex, meaning the former spouse, my Ex, her Ex and these two little letters somehow come freighted with a universeful of contempt, disdain and regret, are generally delivered with a sigh or a grimace. mr a young anglo-irish catholic, of blessed memory, was in the throes of a bilious parting, Ex-ing, wasn't he, when he was around. I hope he has found some equilibrium.
Now, lemme tell y'all.
My first marriage was an interval so fucking horrid and vile, so troubled and disappointing that my survival of it mystifies me to this day. I have had major surgery these past three summers but none of it, not the knives, the tubes and the stitches; not the anaesthetics, the drips and the pipes; not the bullying, incompetent nurses or the braying consultants; not the pain, the sickness, the fear; not the mad, morphine nightmares; not even the fellow patients chuntering at me endlessly, as though I was their comrade, gibbering, confiding, enlisting my support; none of this entire protracted, humiliating horror show compares for soul shredding agony with one week of my first marriage. Even so, I have never been known to describe my former partner in holy deadlock as my ex-anything. It seems so utterly disrespectful, such a blameworthy term, such a continuance of that better left. One is a wife or a husband, one simply cannot be an Ex-Wife and the Ex-ing of those relationships seems so trite, so detrimental, so trivialising of a love once new, now grown old - and worse. I used to lover her, but it's all over now, that's enough isn't it, do we have to create a nightmare character, an Ex? It will no doubt become a staple useage among Same-Sexers, married now, who will simply adore the idea that now they can get divorced, Oh, my dear, the thrill of it all, the spite, the recriminations, the scandal, the hatred. I think that's the real reason for all this horseshit, they all just wanna be divorced, like proper men. No wonder our children are all fucked-up, we can't be bothered to name the other parent correctly, as former wife, former husband or as, in my case, the-person-to-whom-I-was-first-married. Such a vicious little prefix, ex.
Government, too, since Blair, deliberately and determinedly savages our language. Govament ministers, as they call themselves, say the govament are; pompous Little Orphan Gove, when he was education seckatry, posed as the doughty saviour of learning, language and especially of grammar, even though he was adrift on a raft of solecisms, his cheesily pedantic and didactic speeches littered with examples of his own lazy ignorance - In a speech of one hundred and one paragraphs - on the subject of the teaching of english, I counted thirty-two which opened with So, But or And, verbless sentences.
No use talking to the NewPeople about the meaning of words, their potential for corrosion. No use telling them about tax evasion being the sperm of Austerity, no use saying that tax evasion is a polite term for money laundering. They're far too clever to be told about words, hurriedly surrendering all the skills which brought us here to some cunt peddling them a needless application. Sensa direction? WhadooIneedoneathem4? Got an app for that.
Applications?
I have more applications in my little finger than Appleoids ever
dreamed of, stupid fucking bastards. With my little finger I can turn a
chord into a suspended fourth, a minor, a minor seventh, a major seventh
and so on, almost indefinitely
It
is a matter of some sadness to me that the silicon chip, first shown to
me way-back, before-before, by an IT enthusiast - it was tiny and he
said, It's only this big so it can take a connector, otherwise it'd be
even smaller - has become not a liberator but a shackle. The NewPeople
trading their individual consciousnesses for that of a disciplined
collective; the whips and scourges of Totalitarianisme Consumeriste
Nouvelle being the successive launches of each new Apple collar'n'leash.
They queue all night, don't they, to acquire these things, entranced,
there at slavery's cutting-edge.
And
then they offer up to Uncle Sam's NSA their every thought, Goebbelsing
themselves, nothing to hide, nothing to fear. Although what they are
doing is worse than self-enslavement, they are corroding and
short-circuiting their very minds.
I
bought my first Richard Thompson album in the 'nineties, a triple-disc
career compilation, it was called Watching The Dark. Since then, when
anyone questions my late-nightery, my being up all night leaning on the
windowsill, when they say, whyn't you go to bed, just sitting here, on
your own, whaddayadoin' anyway, I say I'm watching. Watching what? I'm
watching the dark. Somebody must. And I don't wanna miss anything. Like
what? Like whatever my quieted thoughts might show me, if I just permit
them, watching the dark. And sometimes writing things down.
Not right, you're not.
No, I guess I'm not. I could be a member of the gaming community, couldn't I, instead of sitting quietly, watching. I could be killing cyberpeople in cyberspace.
Not right, you're not.
No, I guess I'm not. I could be a member of the gaming community, couldn't I, instead of sitting quietly, watching. I could be killing cyberpeople in cyberspace.
Is that, I wonder, the new form of pulling the legs off insects?
But back to Lord Fink and Lord Green and their mates.
Private
Eye is, I know, a minority sport and its editor deeply unwholesome, the
fact, therefore, that for some years the Eye has been reporting on the
criminality of HMRC and its cosy interface with GlobaCrook's bent
accountants - all the top names - has made little difference to the
great British public; who, after all, gives a fuck about a tinyprint,
barely legible, inky little magazine, written by and for a gang of
permanently adolescent public schoolboys? Me and the other 220,000
people who buy the Eye? Well, what's that translate into, a fifth of a
sixty-fifth of the population, nothing.
We wretched middle class oiks, we think we're so clever, so in touch, so fucking cognoscenti ; the total readership of the broadsheets, however, is about 1.23 million - a sixty fifth of all the population, nothing.
Radio Four listenership is claimed to be 10 million a week, 1.3 million a day, nothing. We are all nobodies.
The people who read the Sun and the Mail, who listen to Radios One and Two, they're the real people.
Radio Four is just our own version of AppleTruth, isn't it? Belbin Bagg, arseing away about his idea of High Culture. And what it means, to a working class Lord, like him. As if he'd know, after a lifetime spent MichaelParkinsoning his way around the droppings of showbiz, sniffing a thread, here, a nuance, there, an overarching theme to the entire series of shit-sniffing, stupid cunt.
I read one of Belbin's novels, once, Credo, about the Romanocising of native Christianity in the seventh-century North, Cuthbert and Lindisfarne, that sort of thing, and although it was based on others' researches and was an interesting tale, Lord Bagg peppered it with unspeakable, pornographic, extreme sexual violence. I have read a lot of such stuff, le transgresif, although mr verge is the house consultant on these matters, but I found Belbin's stab at the ouevre sickening and if I might say so, unnecessary.
Having such a highly developed sense of the public good, why doesn't the Eye release some of its undoubtedly worthy revelations and discoveries online, freely, pro bono? Ho-ho, would chortle the grubby little editor, in response, it's a business I'm running here, doncha know, not a campaign.
We wretched middle class oiks, we think we're so clever, so in touch, so fucking cognoscenti ; the total readership of the broadsheets, however, is about 1.23 million - a sixty fifth of all the population, nothing.
Radio Four listenership is claimed to be 10 million a week, 1.3 million a day, nothing. We are all nobodies.
The people who read the Sun and the Mail, who listen to Radios One and Two, they're the real people.
Radio Four is just our own version of AppleTruth, isn't it? Belbin Bagg, arseing away about his idea of High Culture. And what it means, to a working class Lord, like him. As if he'd know, after a lifetime spent MichaelParkinsoning his way around the droppings of showbiz, sniffing a thread, here, a nuance, there, an overarching theme to the entire series of shit-sniffing, stupid cunt.
I read one of Belbin's novels, once, Credo, about the Romanocising of native Christianity in the seventh-century North, Cuthbert and Lindisfarne, that sort of thing, and although it was based on others' researches and was an interesting tale, Lord Bagg peppered it with unspeakable, pornographic, extreme sexual violence. I have read a lot of such stuff, le transgresif, although mr verge is the house consultant on these matters, but I found Belbin's stab at the ouevre sickening and if I might say so, unnecessary.
Having such a highly developed sense of the public good, why doesn't the Eye release some of its undoubtedly worthy revelations and discoveries online, freely, pro bono? Ho-ho, would chortle the grubby little editor, in response, it's a business I'm running here, doncha know, not a campaign.
If I, as a long-time subscriber, so dismiss the fortnightly Eye, then why should some braindead texting-walker pay it any mind, not that he has a mind to start with, just a pair of over-developed infothumbs, through which he interacts with Creation, in its digitised, pseudo-reality.
Did
anyone else read and love Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, Tom Robbins'
hilariously profound diagnosis of the Modern Illness? It was the
lightest, laugh-out-loudest example of American popular philosophy, a
canon originating with Jack Kerouac and passing through Alan Watts,
Richard Brautigan, Robert Persig and Robbins, himself, among others;
funny Zen.
..........................................................
And there it ends - I think he was going to develop the theme of the over-developed thumb, as a terrific adjunct to hitch-hiking, as
introduced by Tom Robbins, but I can't find any more of it. Instead, here's John Cooper Clarke on why he doesn't have a computer. It fits rather neatly with mr ishmael's diatribe.
introduced by Tom Robbins, but I can't find any more of it. Instead, here's John Cooper Clarke on why he doesn't have a computer. It fits rather neatly with mr ishmael's diatribe.
mr ishmael's essay today was :
Down to Brass Tax incomplete draft 27/3/2015
please
register an account with Lulu first. This will save you a couple of
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paypal think it's ok to charge in dollars, and apply their own
conversion rate, which will put the price up slightly for a UK buyer.
Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links (to either
paperback or hardback) or type "Honest, Not Invent" into the Lulu
Bookstore search box. If you follow a link, a pop-up box asks for age
confirmation - simply set the date to (say) 1 January 1960, and
proceed. If you type the title, the anthology will not appear as a
search result until the "show explicit content" box (found at the bottom
left by scrolling down) has been checked. You may also see the age
verification box, as above, at this point.
Honest, Not Invent is available in paperback or hardback.Link for Hard Back :
Link for Paper Back :
There may be a 15% discount try the voucher code = TREAT15 in
the coupon box, which takes 15% off the price before
postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try
a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.
31 comments:
Gnasher`s careerist, entitlement lust to lead an independent Scotland, even as the batflu still rages, is fuelled by her terror of what her former friend and mentor, the toadish bloater Salmond might reveal about her backstabbing.
This is what it`s all about, the greed for another referendum, so she may sit on a throne of the skulls of the Covid dead and glory that she`s the first person to lead an independent Scotland since the Master of Clackmacfuckery in 1707 or some pissed up, useless layabout French ponce called James Stuart.
But Gnasher, or if he topples her, MacMugabe will find the EU reluctant to fund their meal tickets. A visit to Bad Vlad to crawl for a loan ? You may yet see Russian warships dropping anchor in the Flow, Mrs Ishmael.
'Evening, mr yardarm; my only hope is with the toadish bloater Salmond and Bo-Jo the Ho-Ho.
Your analysis is spot on. What is in it for Europe? Nikita Sturgeon assumes grandparent rights to a seat at the European table - but she's a mile off. As part of the United Kingdom, Scotland has a little clout in matters European; as a former client state without a currency, banking system or visible means of support, she is an unlikely new entrant to Europe. I do wish people would pay attention and stop thinking with their amygdalas. I suppose, however, Scotland might be of some use to Greater Germany - oops, Europe, as a weapons base against perfidious Albion.
The Flow was magnificent this afternoon, yardarm my dear - tide going out, miles of Scapa beach exposed for dogs and humans to run on, useful ships in the offing, sun slanting low. A period of peace and prosperity. For now.
The US is doing its best to foment trouble in Russia. Don't be taken in by the Western propaganda. The crowds were tiny - estimated at 4000 in Moscow (a city of over 20 million). Many were underage kids offered free iphones to turn up. Navalny is clearly a western stooge - he has at best 1% support in Russia (like Guido in Venezuela); he was arrested on his return because he violated the terms of his suspended sentence. The demonstrations are being organised out of the US embassy in Moscow. They are illegal under Russian law, hence police action, which has been extremely mild by Russian standards.
As Putin said a couple of weeks ago re Navalny: "if we wanted him dead he would be dead".
Re Putin's palace, this has been comprehensively rubbished: see https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/01/navalny-scam-sells-empty-concrete-shell-as-putins-luxurious-palace.html#more
The reality is that this is all pointless. Russia has a very cohesive society and a strong Christian Orthodox faith. Oh, and a family with a mother and father is written into the Constitution. The West only wants to get its hands on its resources, which will not happen.
What, my friends, are the pressing problems of our times?
Politics is ever about triangulation. Quadrangulation being a complexity too far. Politics does not understand that my children are more important to me than your children. Politics doesn't understand that my babies have to eat and that means money - because I am not a state slave and furlough didn't reach me. Politics means that you join in conspiracy against me and yet you expect me to listen even to a syllable while you ignore the earlier sentences of this paragraph. Also, I have more scientific and technological knowledge in my spats than you have in all your fat heads moiling together and censoring dissent via the twittering of twats. (If I was a yank, you could add a stolen election in th Landd of the Free.)
This is going to end very badly.
Gnasher? Done. Fucked for sure.
Keep n the dry and the warm, m'lady. Here, the crick rises higher than but once before.
The EU MO is to invite a struggling economy to join, throw a few quid at their economic problems, then lord it all over them until their really under the cosh and introduce the new normal.
Imagine the what’s going on in Greece right now.
Putin seems to anti-all that and the scum media are in the pay of their EU paymasters to paint him as a despot.
What Mike said….and Mongoose..
Quadrangulation, mr mongoose? Isn't that when some dusty old don turns up dead in an episode of Inspector Morse?
v./
If David Lean in 1965 could convincingly portray Spanish locations filmed in temperatures of 30 degrees as sub-zero Russian winters, how much further have the arts of dissimulation, disinformation and fake news progressed in the intervening 56 years? Especially now that computer generated images, photoshopping and the like are available to anyone with a little technical expertise. Thanks for the link to the moon of alabama article, mr mike.
And I do hope you are right about Gnasher, mr mongoose - thank you for your robust view. Best of luck with your rising damp.
Thank-you, mrs i, the river is now but a foot and a bit below the level of the floor. However, vast acres of Bandit Country need to be filled before those few inches see my toes wet. Still, it is the highest I have ever seen it bar once.
Quadrangulation I made up, mr verge, while the balance of my mind was disturbed but, yes, it does conjure the vison of Dons plummetting from windows. Morse, eh? Now there is a binge watch for lockdown.
And I think, mrs i, that Wee Eck has decided to apply the stiletto to Gnasher. Perhaps he fancies another turn at the helm - get himself another pension.
Defenestration's too good for a lot of that lot, mr mongoose, though to be fair it was a long time ago and not the Oxford version. Glad to hear you're sanguine about the water-levels.
v./
Hmm, lost about 4 of my fourteen inches overnight, mr v, but it will still be fine.
The Hancock bastard is the one we want defenestrated first.
sorry mr m, but unfortunately, being an individual unflinchingly led by the science - and also one afflicted from birth by an acutely artistic nature - i must most respectfully disagree with your sentiment vis-à-vis the primary defenestration of splat mancrock...
no, sir, in my own socio-economically untinted mind, it is, i have to confess, axiologically - and indeed ethico-politically - clear that urgent clinical priority for receiving 'the jog' must - with all due consideration as to this question's metaphysical impact - be granted exclusively to that big fat bastard-of-a-blob boris...
if only for aesthetic reasons of aural satisfaction.
@sid chamois - sound engineer - 3 february 2021 at 12:54
i must apologize profusely for the monstrous and yobbish syntax corrupting the latter section of the above comment - which, instead of reading thus:
"...with all due consideration as to this question's metaphysical impact..."
should be more urbanely framed as follows:
"...with accordance of all due consideration to this question's metaphysical impact..."
i also humbly propose that the word "aural" should, for reasons of implicit idiom, be replaced by the term "auricular" - and sincerely hope that no serious or lasting offence has been caused by this afore-mentioned clutch of unpardonable errors.
regarding other recent news, i hear that holy medical emperor whitty has been caught streaking shamelessly down westminster's strutton ground market.
what a lad, eh?
Here's a difficult one: why is life worth living now? I enquire seriously. The world engineered for us through the Covid fantasy is one of slavery in some form or another, is it not? That is, literal slavery of body and soul. Any conceivable exit is no exit at all, rather it is a portal to a hideous parody of human life.
Mine is an intellectual question for the time being but I am not sure that any rational person with self-respect and a memory of how we once were should wish to carry on and abase themselves.
Who wants to persist in a world of lies and degradation presented to us as though it were a future?
I am asking because I want an answer, desperately.
Mr BB : I used to think Camus' "il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux" was sophomore cant, but now I'm not so sure. It might turn out to be our best bet after all.
cheers
v./
yes indeed mr verge...
absurdly, a jolly genuine giant's "joie de vivre" very much depends upon what, or whom, his boulder crushes on its way down the mountain...
but essentially, bertie cameltoe - if sometimes a bit left - was in this case absolutely right:
"it's all balls, just keep on rolling and be happy"
by-the-way, it may not surprise you to learn that my all-time favourite song is "rockin' all over the world" by status quo - a trio of sonically serendipitous troubadours who always appeared notoriously angst-free, despite suffering an almost career-ending harmonic sequestration which tragically diminished their performance-potential to a punitive permutation of only three basic chords.
of course, for those readers unfamiliar with "the quo" as an aesthetic existential entity, i should add that, in terms of chromatic expression, its sound actually represented an artistically authentic post-minimalist pastiche of that flamboyant glam-rock jamboree which, in a furious fit of bad faith evolution, developed into the dopey dodecaphony of t. rex - which, despite achieving far greater melodic progression, successfully evoking the primordial polyrhythmic musical soul, and ethereally encapsulating deeper epistemological and spiritual development, ultimately proved to be a band of not so happy bunnies.
mr ishmael declared a soft spot for the quo:
https://mrishmael.blogspot.com/search?q=status+quo
v./
@6 february 2021 at 13:16
sorry, the last paragraph of the above comment ought to read:
"of course, for those readers unfamiliar with "the quo" as an aesthetic existential entity, i should add that, in terms of chromatic expression, its artistically authentic sound actually represented a post-minimalist pastiche of that flamboyant glam-rock jamboree which, in a funky fit of bad faith development, eventually degenerated into the dopey dodecaphony of t. rex - whose more multi-culturally mellowed members, despite achieving far greater melodic progression, sublimely evoking the primordial polyrhythmic musical soul, and encapsulating in their ethereal exposition a deeper epistemological and spiritual experience, ultimately proved to be a band of not so happy bunnies."
shit, these bloody boulders never seem to get any lighter, do they?
ah, really, mr verge?
mr ishmael a closet head-banger...?
well-i-never...
i can't say i ever partook in ritual head-banging - certainly not without donning adequate head-gear, anyway...
but i once knew two irish girls who did - right up against the amps, for an entire motörhead-gig in the circus krone, munich.
they pulled out the exact same performance when ac/dc came to town...
and when rainbow toured there too.
hailing from letterkenny, donegal, these friends, both called mary, were high-spirited chambermaids who were my former colleagues at a hotel in another part of bavaria - and who went on to work next to the hauptbahnhof, münchen, during the time i had a job as hausmann at the hotel penta.
back then, the truth of life as a british gastarbeiter in germany was almost as strange as the fiction of the 80s comedy-drama auf wiedersehen, pet.
back then though, the world has real characters in it.
@6 february 2021 at 15:48
oh dear:
"back then though, the world had real characters in it"
but somehow, i keep putting wrong-uns in my sentences.
I've been having some IT issues, which are not entirely resolved, so apologies for being an absentee landlord.
mr bungalow bill enquires:"Here's a difficult one: why is life worth living now?"
Back to Camus: “The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.”
Should the cost/benefit analysis come down in favour of not killing oneself, then we keep on keeping on. The human spirit persists in more dreadful times than these, mr bb. We may have learned truths that were formerly veiled, the world may not be what we thought it, but much remains of beauty and creativity. Friendship counts, too. I'd much rather you keep on keeping on, mr bb.
mr sillyfuss - no, really, mr ishmael was not a headbanger, whatever that is. He was a musicologist and musician, amongst his many other talents.
Thanks Mrs I and others. Brandy and the silly dark hours lay behind that but the question holds. As do we.
Mt BB: the truth is that our life and freedoms have been progressively taken away from us for decades, we just haven't really noticed so much (creeping incrementalism) until now. I can't imagine life in the UK right now; here in Aus, at least we have almost zero community transmission and almost no restrictions (apart from overseas travel - which is not high on anyone's discretionary agenda right now). But the other virtue signalling and bending over for Uncle Sam exist - thankfully not quite to UK levels (for example, there was a call yesterday to make friends with China again in the MSM).
What I find particularly pernicious is the curtailing of freedom of speech, which I first remember being aware of in the days of Enoch Powell. That allied to a lack of a free press has allowed the politicians the freedom of a combine harvester to mow through our quality of life.
It seems a distant time ago in the halcyon days of the 70s. With my young (18) and beautiful wife we would jump in my MGB and travel all over southern Europe without a care in the world. Happy days.
As I said in a previous post, I have 2 objectives left: complete my walks of the Camino routes, and see the Sagrada Familia completed. Both are receding out of sight at present.
I have recently had an injury in my wrist, which caused weakness in my hand so it wouldn't open fully. I went to the GP. He said it could be a stroke and sent me immediately to A&E. Nearly 5 hours later on an ECG monitor, having had a brain scan, blood tests, neurological tests etc, they declared simple nerve damage in the wrist (which after a week fixed itself). Well my GP couldn't accept he had made a wrong diagnosis (understandable though, and he erred on the side of caution), but now he has sent me for all manner of other tests determined to find something wrong. So far blood tests have returned and he admitted the results were better than for any GP in the practice. But he doubled down and referred me for a "Stress ECG" and caratoid scans and tests. Eventually the doctor bastard will kill me.
Anonymous = Mike
@sillyfuss - 6 february 2021 at 13:16
blimey, although dangerously near to morphing into stanley kubrick's perfection-questing doppelgänger, i present you with the final paragraph of the above comment - take three:
"of course, for those readers unfamiliar with "the quo" as an aesthetic existential entity, i should add that, in terms of chromatic expression, its artistically authentic sound actually represented a post-minimalist pastiche of that flamboyant glam-rock jamboree t. rex - whose more multi-culturally mellowed members, despite achieving far greater melodic progression, sublimely evoking the primordial polyrhythmic musical soul, and encapsulating in their ethereal exposition a deeper epistemological and spiritual experience, ultimately proved to be a band of not so happy bunnies."
yes, mr mike, foreign travel now sadly requires all manner of fake vaccinations against various 'mutant' strains of the phantom plague, however i'll bet a penny-to-the-pound that we'd be granted a complementary pass on the corona-jab should we expediently submit to having our brains wired up to a playstation - or to undergoing induced hibernation in preparation for being fired off on an 'open-return' trip to mars.
freedom's always had to be won, but it's sure gonna take some funny forms in the future.
it's all just going over-the-top, in my humble opinion.
sorry to hear about the grip-problem, better to be safe than sorry, i suppose...
just try to resist any attempts by the men in white hazmat-suits to re-engineer your dna-structure whilst you're visiting the hospital.
when i was under general anaesthetic the other month, the sneaky bastards shaved my legs, re-styled my fuzz, and then most likely stuck a camera up me arse...
purely for the fun of it.
you just can't be too careful, you know.
When you need the sneaky bastards with razors and knives, then it is best to submit and be grateful for the anaesthetic,Mr sillyfuss. The subconscious remains aware, however, throughout the procedure, and will probably seek to make sense of it by rewarding you with nightmares of alien 👽 invasion and anal probing. What is it with these aliens and their obsession with botties?
And as for your conscientious doctor, mr mike, is he on piece-work, like our British lot?
Late night brandy always seems like a good idea at the time, mr bungalow bill, my dear. Opens the doors of perception and all that. Survival in this universe, though, is generally rendered easier by keeping those doors slammed shut and firmly bolted.
Yup, Mrs I, and yet I keep opening them.
Mr Mike, I pray to the vanished God that you may get to fulfil your objectives. If you do, it will be a big win against the enemy.
@sillyfuss
oddly enough, i too worked in german hotels during the auf wiedersehen, pet era - as spüler and abräumer - and indeed, due to high-levels of domestic unemployment in the uk and eire, so did many other on-yer-biked youngsters from the de-industrialized wastelands of these monetarily thatched islands - yes, glaswegian, scouse, geordie, brummie, cockney, irish, scottish, english, christian, muslim, male, female, white, black, gay, and welsh, we were all uppity untermenschen united in highly imperfect harmony against the cruel common enemy, the slave-driving kraut, who actually paid and fed us far better than would have any british employer, for work which might seem more like a picnic in today's hot-housed hot-desked environment of the neo-liberal gig-economy.
ah, how much simpler life seemed in those carefree and innocent times when brussels had not yet sprouted the gluttonous globalist euro-monster.
@8 february 2021 at 21:05
well, i should rather have written:
"...the common enemy, the cruel slave-driving kraut..."
alles klar?
@sillyfuss - 6 february 2021 at 13:16
oh dear, here we go up the mythical mountain again - the last paragraph of the above comment might better read:
"of course, for those readers unfamiliar with "the quo" as an aesthetic existential entity, i should add that, in terms of chromatic expression, the group's artistically authentic sound actually represented a post-minimalist pastiche of that flamboyant glam-rock jamboree which, in a funky fit of delusionary bad faith development, subsequently degenerated into the dopey dodecaphony of t. rex - whose more multi-culturally mellowed members, despite achieving far greater melodic progression, sublimely evoking the primordial polyrhythmic musical soul, and encapsulating in their ethereal exposition a deeper epistemological and spiritual experience, ultimately proved to be a band of not so happy bunnies."
whatever did i do to deserve this punishment...?
and what crime did sean connery commit in order to deserve his sisyphean punishment in sidney lumet's film the hill?
@sillyfuss - 6 february 2021 at 13:16
i'm ashamed to admit that the final two paragraphs of the above comment would be more sensitively expressed thus:
"by-the-way, it may not surprise you to learn that my all-time favourite song is in fact "rockin' all over the world" by status quo, a trope of sonically serendipitous troubadours who, in celebrity's narcotic neverland of narcissism-amplified nothingness, somehow always appeared notoriously angst-free - and managed to do so, it must be said, despite suffering the nasally candied trauma of an almost career-ending harmonic sequestration, which tragically, for such highly experimental artistes, left their creative potential cruelly diminished to a performatively punitive permutation of only three basic chords.
of course, for those readers unfamiliar with "the quo" as an aesthetic existential entity, i should add that, in terms of chromatic expression, the group's artistically authentic sound actually represented a post-minimalist pastiche of that flamboyantly fluid glam-rock jamboree which, in a facetiously funky fit of delusionary bad faith development, subsequently degenerated into the dopey dodecaphony of t. rex, a psychedelically enhanced electro-rock ensemble whose more multi-culturally mellowed members - despite achieving far greater melodic progression, sublimely evoking the primordial polyrhythmic musical soul, and encapsulating in their ethereal exposition a deeper epistemological and spiritual experience - ultimately proved to be a band of not so happy bunnies."
and i hope to fuckety funkadelia that i've not made any typos.
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