The Sunday Ishmael 1/08/2021

  In the last thread, mr mike said:  "As normal men in the street, enjoying a game of cricket and a pint, one could take the view that politics and Westminster is far removed and irrelevant to us, way out in the West country. However, I've seen Government on the inside, and its clear to me that sooner rather than later it has a fundamental effect on our way of life....."

I'm currently reading A State of Fear, by Laura Dodsworth, which sets out to demonstrate how Government weaponised fear, supposedly in our best interests, until we were the most frightened country in Europe.

The blurb says: "In one of the most extraordinary documents ever revealed to the British public, the behavioural scientists advising the government said that a substantial number of people did not feel threatened enough by Covid-19 to follow the rules. They advised the government to increase our sense of "personal threat" to scare us into submission."

As a strategy to keep the population safe, it misfired - it increased the fear of those who were already afraid, and slid off the backs of the refuseniks. I think I've mentioned George Square in Glasgow and the Tartan Army at Wembley. Will the British addiction to sport be the death of us? 

As a strategy to create the climate to increase legal powers to control and coerce the population, it was amazingly successful. I've mentioned  the Coronavirus Act 2020 Coronavirus Act 2020 (legislation.gov.uk) which was swiftly passed, at pace, as they say nowadays, without let, hindrance or demur - the most sweeping removal of civil liberties ever in this country. 

Good to know that the 57 year old GrandFather of our Nation has been at it again, and another little Ho-Ho will be bred up on the playing fields of Eton. Did you know that one of his middle names is de Pfeffel? Mrs Johnson (33 years old and already a miscarriage survivor) is a strong competitor in the brood mare voting stakes previously graced by Mrs. Blair, Mrs Hague, Mrs. Cameron and Mrs Brown - their husbands, all compromised by age or other difficulties, all clinging to the belief that this will prove their masculinity, their ability to lead the nation by virtue of their thrusting priapism, that this will increase their vote worthiness. Bo Jo is intent on out-babying his predecessors - where will it end? Does the man not realise there's a population crisis - or there is until his covid-cull yields substantial rewards? Why isn't he getting on with saving the Nation? If you would like to remind yourself of stanislav's views on this undignified prime  ministerial procreative Olympics, glance at More Dead Baby Shit, posthumously published in the Sunday Ishmael 29/11/20. Speculating on the viability of the latest Primeministerial foetus, he concluded with the withering indictment: "Is very nasty business, politics. Dead baby or no dead baby. But dead baby is probably worse.  Best thing is that old blokes don't bother."

mr ishmael, as you might imagine, held very similar views: 

TALES FROM RUIN, 24/2/10

It’s the new craze and it’s sweeping the political capitals of the world, well, London anyway; it’s called the Dead Baby Jive. You just go on telly with some grinning prat and jive-talk about your dead baby. Y’know, milk it for all it’s worth and all the time keep on saying I keep my private life private and wouldn’t dream of mentioning family shit but did I tell you about the time my baby died? In my arms?
Well, readers, once upon a time, a young married couple, Kirk and Sally - he talented and kind and handsome, and she, well, athletic and forthright - fell in love and had a fairytale Presbyterian wedding, which means a very long sermon and no dancing and some miserable-bastard least-you-can-get-away-with wedding gifts. Oh, fuck me, says hubby, look, now that I’m over fifty, maybe now’s the time I should think about having a family. And you, too, darling, if you like. Oooh, yes, please, says Sally, let’s be bright, young parents, like everyone else our age. (Most people Kirk’s age are having grandchildren and some of them, Mr Prescott’s Underclass, living on his sink estates and not, like him, in vulgar Jacobethan palaces, are even having great grandchildren but Kirk’s a slow starter with normal things.)
Okay, then, darling, says Kirk, how do we do it? Do we send someone out to get them, to a baby shop? Young Milipond gets his in America, or Mexico, I believe, and I like America, I go there every year for my holidays. What? No, of course you can’t come, you wouldn’t like it. Shall we buy an American baby, preferably a Ken-nedy one? But Sally bashfully whispered in Kirk’s ear…You fucking what, exploded Kirk, you fucking put what where? That’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard…almost, anyway, I mean there was that thing about George Robertson. Oh, never mind…but I’m not doing any of that shit, you can forget that. Isn’t there some other way?
And so it came to pass that a consignment of tartan turkey basters arrived from John Lewis in plain brown paper at the young couple’s home in London, where the Queen lives and all the Russian gangsters who don’t pay any tax and are friends of Lord Crabs, and in due course the happy young couple had three children, one of whom died, another of whom was born with a cruel disability and one of whom was alright, at least so far. And Kirk and Sally felt that, to all the world and his brother, they had demonstrated their love and, most importantly, that they were normal, just like the people they wanted to vote for them, even though everybody knew that Kirk was a frightened, angry, thuggish, pasty old creep, terrified of being thought a member of the Greville Janner fanclub - but Kirk thought that having children, even if most of them proved he shouldna, not at his age, would put the matter, so to speak, straight; the stream of true self- love, however, seldom runs clear, and in Kirk’s case it’s always been murky.
It’s not as though Sally was gay, herself; how could she be, married to Kirk, the sportsman, who had been the most eligible bachelor since Cliff Richard? It’s just that she was a keen supporter of the Gay Pride rallies, where aggressive bald men with iron bars in their foreskins dress up as nuns and wave dildos around and, therefore, need, no, deserve, proper respect from us all and, come to think of it, she was a bit on the manly side herself; no reason, of course, for her not to love her big messy man. But not everybody loved Kirk as Sally loved him. As a matter of fact, people were either indifferent to the brusque manly charms which swept Sally quite off her flat shoes or they hated his fucking guts with a passion unrivalled anywhere, anytime, since we spluttered out from the sea and up the shores, to the caves, the trees, the plains and eventually the cities. No one was ever so detested as was Kirk, the incompetent, shouty fuckwit.
Things were getting so bad, in fact, on the We Hate Kirk And Want Him Gone front that it was time to play the dead baby card. And that’s just what he did. Look, he said, I may look like a revolting, stuttering mutant, a filthy degenerate who pours shit on his cornflakes, the sort of person who if he said he was going to take your children camping you’d rather put them to death and a man you wouldn’t trust to blow out a fucking candle for fear he’d burn the house down but actually, look, I’m just like you, my babies drop like flies. And that was the nigger in the ointment, the baby in the woodpile, because most people don’t lose their children - well, not yet anyway; give this lot another five years in charge of the NHS and we’ll get there…I can see him, flailing at the dispatch box with his bloody, snot-encrusted fingers : And so I say, Mr Speaker, a record, a record, a record number of still-births, across-the-board rises in miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, post-parturition spontaneous infant combustion, all across the board, Mr Speaker, across the board, only under a Labour government can this happen…
Everybody squirmed when he did the dead baby thing. And the more arch and contrived were he and his happy bride, the worse it looked. And as for the Dead-Eye Dick dimension, a sporting accident, well, fuck me, half the people in Iraq are wandering around eyeless, legless, armless, speechless, skin burned off. And if you don’t have a dead  baby, it’s easy, just contact a couple of smart young doctors and they’ll disappear your baby for you and blame the police and get you lotsa lovely money into the bargain. You’ll be a hero and people will pay off your mortgage while you develop a career lecturing in Disappearing Baby Studies.
 

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Olympic News

 

 I'm sports-averse. Maybe even allergic. The commentator's artificial triumphalist inflection, rising to the screamed "It's a GOAL!"  has me running for the off switch, as it physically hurts, tearing through my head, down my Eustachian tubes into my brain, firing off fear synapses. 

And they are such a disgusting lot, sportspersons: strutting, narcissistic, arrogant, skimpily dressed, tanked up on testosterone and other substances, incapable of stringing two sensible words together, far too thin and over-sexed (160,000 condoms have been supplied to the Olympic village for the use of competitors). 

They've been making a fuss about some athletes using performance-enhancing drugs. As usual. They've been making this fuss, like, forever, man. They keep testing people and disqualifying a few scapegoats and some athletes, who claim not to take performance enhancing drugs, not even a little extra toke on their Ventolin, say it is just not fair. So I had this idea. Athlete A  is cross because Athlete B is not as good as him at running about, jumping over things, swimming, whatever, and yet won the heat because he took performance-enhancing drugs. So, make all the damn athletes take them. That way, everybody's performance will be enhanced, but not to the same level, as there is a difference in ability between them in the first place. Good idea, huh? What's not to like?  

 

Here's mr ishmael on sport:  

 

SPORTS NEWS.  IT'S ALL SHIT.
 

 Once, before before, it was OK,  sport,  even if you didn't like it.  It was in the back pages of the 'papers and confined to Saturday afternoon and a night in the week on telly-  a quarter or a third of every news bulletin being devoted to sport was unthinkable. But as Mr Murdoch increased the channels available to skymadeupnewsandfilth, his minions, people like Andy Neil and  Kelvin McKenzie, had to raise the profile, as we call it, of every fucking sporting activity under the sun, anything even remotely strenuous spawned stars and championships and pundits.  It wasn't just the Dirty Digger creating more and more platforms for  more and more advertising and more and more unnecessary and unsatisfying consumption of junk,  the real corrosion kicked-off - forgive the sporting  metaphor - with the BBC's cowardly adoration of the Babydriver,  McEnroe,  a spoilt prat and gabshite, a nasty, otherwise worthless man who almost singlehandedly trashed the notion of sportspersonship and introduced, to my generation, the maxim that it didn't matter how you played the game, it's whether  you win or lose that counts.

Pot Black,  the early and surprising televising of the mind-numbing tedium of professional snooker, hypnotised large parts of a generation enchanted by then-new colour television and sport - or what passes, now, for sport; darts, for instance and for fuck's sake,  became a large section of the broadcasters' schedules. The school playing fields, meanwhile, were sold off by and to Thatcherite spivs;  PE or PT, call it what you will, declined, in and outside of the school, obnoxious little jerks being ferried  about by stupid parents smugly doing what they called the School Run. Fuck it, you could go on forever about how we have a nation of idle, braindead, overweight children who can neither read nor write and who think multiplication is something David Attenborough talks about.  Still, can't have them walking to school, the Paedos might get 'em. LoveMyKidsToBits,Me, DoAnyfin4Em.  

Lewis Hamilton, walking billboard


Stop calling it sport and call it what it is: Monetised Entertainment.

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stanislav and  mr ishmael's essays today are:

More Dead Baby Shit                        Drafted  26/3/2010

Tales from Ruin                          Drafted 24/2/2010

Sports News. It's all Shit                   Drafted 31/1/2012

Both anthologies of the work  of mr ishmael and his young Polish friend, Stanislav, Plumb Cheap for You:  Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack - are available to purchase for mere money at Lulu or Amazon. It is cheaper to buy from Lulu. Here's how to buy your own copies: 

Please register an account with them first. This will save you a couple of quid, as going straight into the link provided below seems to make 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 our 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.) 

 The full title is "Vent Stack love from stanislav" by ishmael smith, and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of Buster the Previous Blog Dog having a green thought in a green shade. 

Link for the paperback:

 https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/vent-stack/paperback/product-q8jzk2.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Or...

shorter link, which might make it easier if you wish to paste it into an email and tell a friend:

 https://tinyurl.com/naajavmu

 Honest, Not Invent is available in paperback or hardback.

Link for Hard Back : 

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/honest-not-invent/hardcover/product-njr7vg.html

Link for Paper Back : 

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/honest-not-invent/paperback/product-wq2kpg.html

At checkout, enter 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.  With the 15% voucher, the book (including delivery to a UK address) should cost £10.89

Floating petri dish - Anthem of the Seas - Orkney's first cruise liner of the summer. For perspective - the tiny red and white boat nuzzling up to it is a massive car ferry.