Tuesday 16 November 2010

BLOGGING A DEAD HORSE

Just because it's online doesn't mean it's not tabloid bullshit.


The Ancients, gathered here, will recall with fondness the teachings of stage Paddy, Guido, Colonel O'Fawkes, just a few summers back, that the Free State, Eire, the Republic of Ireland was not actually a superstitious, floating pigsty, in thrall to repulsive gangster politicians and crooked financiers, it's children buggered, still,  around the twenty-six counties by noncing monsignors; it's diasporic migrants not a joyless horde of red-faced. spud-gulping, Guinness-swigging, melancholy, repressed-homosexual Mummy'sboys, feasting sorrowfully   on homesick bacon and cabbage, labouring on holes in the road, exploited by their own countrymen in Birmingham and New York;  no, Ireland, according to the great political scientist, Mr O'Fawkes of the PizzaHouseOfBlood,  himself, was the very overnight model of a modern economic powerhouse, so it was, a beacon to we, benighted in poor England,  wasn't the Irish fiscal policy just the very broth of a t'ing, her shifty, simpering ministers the very boys with  the know-how, and weren't we all stupid, not to be, like Guido, himself, pretending to be living in Ireland?

We must hope that the great tabloid newsman now contributes some of his advertising revenue to the exchequer of his adopted country, now that, despite  all his nonsense, Ireland is fucked, mainly by the very tax-dodging, wealth-creating irresponsible entre-fucking-preneurs to whom he, along with the riff-raff now squatting in Downing Street, unfailingly kowtows. We must hope, also, that Chancellor Spunkface, preaching an Irish sermon of  low corporation taxes and massive public sector cuts, lifts his head from Money's groin and sees what's going on in the country whose approach he so admires, even though he won't.

Guido, of course,  should stick to what he does best, and for what he is best loved, racism and sexism, but then he generally does.

17 comments:

PT Barnum said...

The PizzaHouse now seems to have turned itself into a recruitment agency for bounty hunters. £1000 for the the fire extinguisher dropper, dead or alive. Given the incontinent tendencies of some of his readers, one fears for the shaggy-haired chap.

So the teeth-suckers have repaired you, Mr. I? I trust they made predictable noises about what you had done to generate the fault. Some things in life must remain reliable, after all.

call me ishmael said...

Bad for your health, mr ptb, going there. And it only encourages them. Yes, back online,thanks, connected to the whole world and it to me, a problem at the other end. It' an Eyetie company, staffed by Aussies. If only those immigrants'd fuck off back where they come from, eh, and we wouldn't have none of these problems.

mongoose said...

The Irish, bless their wee green ears, are completely and utterly screwed. My kids could buy the country with their pocket money. I, for my sins, Father, still have plenty of relatives over there - some of them even have gas and electricity now. "Sure, it just comes out of the ground without ye doing anyt'ing." One such works, one would have thought, at a task that would be among the last to face the paring knife - arranging the transport of handicapped kids and young adults to get to schools and day centres. Alas, not. The onward march of civilisation in Ireland lasted a decade and now she slips back into the abyss. Ah well. At least it'ill fill the churches of a Sunday. "Will you have a taste of tea, Father?"

mrs narcolept said...

What if Ireland just said no, sorry, we're broke and you're not getting your money back, what would actually happen? Do bailiffs go in and take away everyone's car or does China end up owning Galway?

One of my great-great grandads left Boherbue to go and live in Merthyr Tydfil. I suppose it must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

Some of us owe to Guido our first acquaintance with the Saga of Gordon the Ruiner and the life and times of young Polish plumber, Stanislav, Mrs, and dog, Buster. My dear mr narcolept drew him to my attention after reading the Saga for the first time, nearly choking in the process, and from then on looking for more Stan became the only reason to read the blog.

I hope mr Buster is doing well, mr ishmael, and if he would accept a respectful kiss on the top of the head from mrs narcolept, please do the honours on my behalf.

jgm2 said...

Sorry Mr Ishmael, posted this over at the Pizza House a couple of days ago but is entirely apt here...

You should have been over there (Oirland) about five years ago when my cousins wife (Oi speak Gaelic so I do – I’m bilingual you know) was patiently explaining to the thick British guest (me) how Ireland’s ‘economic miracle’ was entirely due to the great strides forward in education over the last 20 years.

So not all the insane borrowing on the back of insane pr*pe*ty pr*ces then? I asked.

Fuck no, you ignorant English fool, she patiently explained. It’s because our young are so well educated you see and so all these foreign companies want to come here and employ our educated youth!

So, they’re not here for the 10% Corporation Tax then? I naively enquired.

What do fuck do you know you ignorant English fool she asked.

If anybody ever wanted to know what pity and contempt looked like you’d needed to have had a CCTV camera in that room.

They just had no fucking idea what was going on. Utter fucking morons repeating the government and press mantras unthinkingly.

And we, in the UK, under the Maximum Imbecile, were little better.

call me ishmael said...

It's ok, mr jgm2, here in the quality press we are used to being an afterthought.

Mr O'Fawkes's grasp of reality was ever suspect. Habitual drunkenness not all that it's devotees crack it up to be. I am not sure that he put Ireland's miracle down to education or simply to the fact that he, himself, visited occasionally; whichever, it was a crock of shit, as we romantics say.

The corporation tax is the real bugbear, I think, it's as though business doesn't use the roads or the streetlights or the hospitals, just operates outside the infrastructure which proper people pay for. I think, further, that the proprietor of the PizzaHouseOfBlood must be advising Chancellor Spunkface, he, too, is as thick as they come; even Mr Tiny Speaker grows weary of his horsehit.

PT Barnum said...

I visit the PizzaHouse in the same spirit in which I watch Jeremy Kyle - know thine enemy, or at least to appreciate just how vicious, venal and illiterate folk can be given the wrong encouragement. Cultural tourism, that is.

yardarm said...

Even as we speak the clerk puppets of Westminster will be planning to transfer more of our taxpayer billions away from, well, us and use it to preserve the careers of their beloved tax dodging, pocket lining, dosh juggling, City suit fillers, overexposed in the latest fuck up.

Wisteria will shimmy away leaving Patsy Clegg to announce the bad news, Osborne will dance with glee at the prospect of more cuts before waking Merv up and telling him what to say " Yes, Merv, there`s been another crisis, Ireland this time. Just make this supportive statement and go back to sleep " and the media will have been squared " Blame ? Oh, the workshy of course ".

There is no lack of what Mr Mongoose called cabin boys to eat. I can hear the sharpening of the knives.

call me ishmael said...

That's my reason, too, for reading the Filth-O-Graph and the rest, but I feel that order-order is a betrayal of a greater potential - that Lebanon business, shameful, and shame on all - as per mrs n's post - who inadvertently cultivated an audience for that shit.

mongoose said...

That's more or less what they have done, mrs narcolept, except they couched it in terms of "we're about not having any more money, so we haven't, so will yous Germans pay, please?" The poor old paddies will be bankrupt for a couple of generations at least. Even inflation - which will be used to hose everyone else's debt down the drain - even that will not save them.

Holiday home in the Woild West anyone? In about 18 months you can start buying the place with beads.

yardarm said...

And Labour won`t be able to utter a squeak of protest because of their complicity and incompetence in City shenanigans since `97.

Apropos of what Mr Barnum says: I go over to the Pizza House and read some of the more blowhard fuck you Jack comments but it never gets more than a smile or shake of the head from me.

Those poor deluded bastards, they just don`t realize what the wyrd has in store for them; illness, bereavement, redundancy. That`s the thing about recessions, there tends to be a lot of collateral damage.

They do not profit from imagination: their education will be bitter.

call me ishmael said...

Y'see mr radish, I told you, another example of 'sixties Bob Dylan being now part of the language. From Mr mongoose:


"....In about 18 months you can start buying the place with beads."

It's from;

“I think I’ll call it America”
I said as we hit land
I took a deep breath
I fell down, I could not stand
Captain Arab he started
Writing up some deeds
He said, “Let’s set up a fort
And start buying the place with beads”

in Bob Dylan's 115th Dream, from 1965, a typical piece of traincrash rock 'n'roll insanity merging the Founding Fathers with Herman Melville's Moby Dick. A piece of nonsense, really, and the weakest track on Bringing It All Back Home but BobHeads, like DeadHeads, are notoriously uncritical.

Mr mongoose's application of the line, however, even if unconscious, is apposite, given the theatre of the absurd which is modern Ireland. So there.

call me ishmael said...

It's just tabloid without restraint, mr yardarm, and actually a corruption of tabloid, which meant, once, tablet-like, concise, easy to swallow, effective news reportage but now means filth and bilge and order-order.

mongoose said...

You see, Mr Ishmael, I liked that stuff. When it was "traincrash" streams of honour-informed consciousness - with wit and things-to-be-wondered at. (As the babies say, a tragic thing to say in these days of the X Factor.) It is odd that The Bob said in his mad memoir that he wrote most of his stuff thereafter to piss people off. Being Bob, of course, this may be a triple bluff.

call me ishmael said...

I like that stuff, too, mr mongoose, I just think that Dream is not of the same, timeless calibre as Subterranean Homesick Blues, She Belongs to Me, Maggie's Farm,Love Minus Zero/No Limit, Outlaw Blues, On the Road Again, Gates of Eden, It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), It's All Over Now, Baby Blue and that none of them are in the same medium, are the same art form as Mr Tambourine Man.

It is a pain in the arse that the YouTube official Dylan recordings have been pulled, as if he hadn't made enough money, as if any reasonable person or human being would not be flattered, pleased, attentive to and co-operative with the fact that in his lifetime his work was deemed art, worthy of comparison and study. No business like showbusiness. It's one of Life's peculiarities, the people who use libraries the most are the same people who buy the most books. I don't know how much money I've spent on Bob Dylan product in my short, sweet life, but there won't ever be a penny more.

See that silly old fucker Neil Diamond on the BBC Electric Proms, playing Cliff Richard to a horde of drooling grannies and grandads, Jesus, make the fucking flesh creep. And Lulu, shaking her facelifted pensioner arse, singing The Boat That I Row. God help us.

mongoose said...

There were several songs like that in those first few albums - is one still allowed to say "album"? - and they are all of a piece. Informed, literate, arch almost. The young lad showing off how well read and clever he was but in a way he didn't quite realise himself. We are, of course, all of us, younger than that now.

It is a sadness about the grasping for the last few dollars from one's labours of long ago. Van the Man's stuff has been removed too. One does begin to wonder just how much money these bastards need. I put my faith in accountants and lawyers doing stuff without their masters even knowing what Youtube is.

call me ishmael said...

All of it, mr m, they need all of it. I have a theory which your remark provoked. We all know people who are too good, too gifted for work, artistic, creative, call them what you will, I generally call them good for fuck all.

Occasionally, though, the dice fall for them and recording or publishing contracts result, sometimes with the attendant adoration of the planet. Never having had any money, or more saliently, earned any money, they become, many of them, money-grubbing fuckpigs - the Beatles, for instance, graceless, grubby Scousers, heedless that he had made their seemingly eternal careers, never forgave Brian Epstein for missing out on the merchandising opportunities in the States, not as though they needed the money desperately and Eppy had loved them, promoted them, re-imagined them, dressed them, got them a deal, got them George Martin, yet, as surprised as anyone by Beatlemania, he'd missed out on a few quid along the way, that was the rub, that and the characteristic treachery of the artistic.

Dylan of course, and the odious Morrison, without their own good fortune - and so much of it is luck - would be no more than dirty scuffers, plagiarising the work of the nigger, up their own arses, pickpocketing licks and riffs they would later market as exclusively their own - in their case, when you have nothing, you have everything to lose.

Greed and drugs and rock 'n' roll, I keep meaning to do a post. Any day now.