Sunday 27 September 2020

The Sunday Ishmael 27th September 2020

 Massive Outbreak of Civil Disobedience in Scottish Universities.

Scotland attempts to lock up its student population in a bid to halt the wild-fire spread of coronavirus amongst the student population. Student accommodation provides a significant income source for Universities, in the region of £6000 per year per student for 12 students sharing kitchen and bathrooms in one apartment. Within days of students arriving at University, where their education would be delivered online,  coronavirus outbreaks ensued. Students were instructed to self-isolate in their rooms, and not go home. They weren't keen, as a spokesperson said: " the whole point of going to University is to socialise, make friends and have sex. If I'd wanted to study, I'd have stayed home and enrolled with the Open University". Asked why the isolation time couldn't be used to catch up on pre-semester reading, the spokesperson said: "You're still missing the point, innit. I'm going home. At least I'll get fed there.

Glasgow Hall of Residence

Loise Caie, 20, claimed the experience felt like "prison". She said: “It feels a bit like a prison. Our kitchen is quite small and I’m sharing with 12 people.“I think it’s a crazy expectation to ask us not to go outside and get fresh air. We’ve also seen the police circulating outside a few times because they want to make sure we don’t break any rules.

Barlinnie Prison

                      
I probably would have gone home if it wasn’t for us being ordered to stay by the uni."

Middle-class parents have driven to Halls of Residence in surprisingly large numbers to take darling Hamish and wee Fiona home.  Others have made their own way to railway stations and airports. It's probably the end of the University system as we know it.  

That aint workin' - that's the way ya do it, money for nothing and your chicks for free.

I had a new tumble dryer delivered the other day. The chap installing it had no sympathy for the student plight. "They wanted to go, didn't they? They should stay there and try reading a book."


Rigged up like a Ruritanian Christmas tree, a senior police person with a wholly unlikely name

Look at the medals. Believe the medals. And the white braid thing. Just believe it.

 today promised a full and far-reaching cover- up into why a handcuffed man, under police arrest, was able to draw and shoot a gun - a gun, for fuck's sake, while handcuffed, kill the Custody Officer then inflict life-threatening injuries on himself. This is Britain. We're supposed to be able to keep our prisoners safe. Anyway, even as we speak, police officers are combing South London, searching for a plausible narrative.  Look at the medals. Believe the medals. Dick was the officer in command of the operation which led to the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent man who died in consequence of being riddled with bullets by officers under the mistaken impression he was someone else. Dick was cleared of personal blame in the subsequent criminal trial in 2007. In June 2009, she was promoted to the rank of assistant commissioner. We've covered this ground previously, but it never hurts to remember.

So Andrew Neil is off to pastures new, eh? The 71 year old broadcaster leaves the BBC after 25 years  "with a heavy heart" , and, no doubt, a heavier wallet, to become chairman  of the new TV channel, GB News which will launch early in the new year. How he will be missed. Here's mr ishmael's thoughts on Neil:


Leadenly wise-cracking his way through PBC coverage of Pip Hammond's baptismal statement, young bridegroom,  
Andy Neil, who, as he constantly reminds us,  went to grammar school and university before enabling Mr Murdoch's lifetime of corruption, 
 
child-sexualisation, 'phone tapping, tax evasion,  

 
and corrosion of the national discourse, seemed, this morning,  to have an infection in his throat.

 
Old playboys should wrap-up warm.

Anyone who had seen Andy's  coverage - he would call it - of  political matters, any of them,  could not fail to conclude that we pay him a huge amount of public money for talking out of his  arse;  why is his throat sore?

 

Were this wretched, repugnant old bore the Invigilator he claims to be then obviously the vermin of MediaMinster would not be queueing-up to appear on one of his many shows; he's like the supposed satirist, Tory FatBoy Hislop - also making a fortune from the PBC -  in being just another of Ruin's Licensed Fools.  If Neil was even remotely capable then we wouldn't all be choking on the taste of legislators' shit, would we?

Anyway, despite talking out of his arse, the old boy has a croaky throat this morning. We must wish him  a lengthy  and preferably permanent convalescence on his French estates with his young bride and his NewsCorp shares.
Nightey-night, don't let the anal-laryngitis bugs bite.
Bienvenu au Chateau Vulgaire.
 
Regardez, moi avec mon booze
Ici les pauvres ils ne sont permittez pas,
parce-que Je les deteste. 



BIKER NEWS
Biker Guy Martin  is a  whiskery, grinning, fucking lunatic,  who will surely, through his addiction to being on telly as an intolerable,  supercharged yet stupid  version of the late Fred Dibnah, kill himself, and do so long before he learns to speak properly. In fact he'll probably never sort-out his mouth, which is cruelly unsynchronised with his brain.

For those whose viewing lives are, as yet,  unblemished by his repetitive stuttering, Martin is a kind of secondary modern school Professor Brian Cox, everything is not, well, just amazing, rather, it is well, I'll go t'tfoot of ower stairs, whooda thought it, wind tunnels, eh, flamin' wind tunnels, whooda thought it, flamin' wind tunnels, justa test a flamin' bike  - Mr Guy Martin, is the new go-fast celebrity, who just allus wanned to go faster, I allus wanned to go faster, allus wanned to go faster; an sez everthin' three times, sez everythin' three times, yeah, sez everythin' three times, jobsagoodun. I said, jobsagoodun, job done, like. Yeah, job done. Shouldn't mock his affliction but then he shouldn't go on t'telly, nah, shouldn't go t'telly, like, not if he dunt want people tekkin'  t'piss',  tekkin' t'piss; 'sall them doin, is tekkin' t'piss.

Martin's first TeeVee outing was with a mate, with a mate, like, he's me mate, an' a right good lad, and they were toddling around the Midlands canals, kinda like refurbicating the narrowboat as them went, like, as them went along, d'ya know warramean, like;  doin' it up as them wen' along.  They stopped underneath  Spaghetti Junction, where them figgered-out how to make a shower, no, a proper Victorian one, so's them could get clean, and doing all t'weldin', weldin' an brazin', like, so the shower when it were made, were a pukka job, like, a pukka job, 'ot water comin' out, at right good pressure, right good pressure, aye, it were comin out at right good pressure, were the 'ot water.  They stopped, too, in the Potteries, where, Martin learned, like, warra right clever fella, a right clever fella, were that bloke Jo-siyah Wedgewood. Right clever fella, he were, built t'canals an' all, so's he could get 'is pots to market, achelly built the flamin' canals, himself.  he did

It was an entertaining device, an engineer naif, goin' round't place on a canal boat and staging little events, mechanical sideshows,  to demonstrate  how inventive were the Victorians, for those not already imbued with that knowledge by Professor Fred and dozens of others, and Martin's lack of presenters' artifice quite refreshing.
A little of that, however, goes a long way, and now I want to beat his grinning, idiot savant head against a wall and then run him over with a steam roller, scrape up his flattened corpse and throw it in a Bessemer Converter.

His second stab at telly greatness was when ChannelSnow followed him around the Isle of Man TT Races, where he reached  nearly two hundred miles an hour on that frightful, deadman's course.  He claimed to be self-funded, taking time out from his dayjob as a truck mechanic and being at odds with the race organisers up until the last moment.  In this show the naivety seemed a bit far-fetched, a bit laboured, nobody quite as stupid as Martin claims to be could ride that course at that speed and despite his increasingly irritating gob, Martin 



and all the TT riders show  what a horrid ninny this bloke is

 
and this one


Uuuurgh, uuuurgh, doh, doh, doh, ohh, m'game this,  doh doh, m'game that, .......uurgh.........uuuurgh.
Fucking repulsive, this prat.

and this one

  

Oh, yeah, well, I'm like changing my job and it's just such a national tragedy, for me but mainly for the fans, I just love 'em, ya knowharramean?

 Autumn Reflection - mr ishmael 1/12/2014

 The mice come in every Autumn;  this is the countryside and no matter what we do they come indoors. Professional mice eliminators say that we must pay someone - someone like them - to mortar-up every external crack and fissure; d'you know, they say, that a mouse can crawl through a space the diameter of a Biro tube. And whatever, you are under siege from them,  even if your house is  absolutely impregnable, we need to come and mouse-proof the grounds, the paths, the lanes, the hedges. Oh, just a coupla hundred pounds a year, the contract.  Yeah, but it's peace of mind, innit.  And that's priceless.

I have never engaged these people,  the pest controllers.  I tried traps, one year, until I found a little mouse trapped by his mangled leg and had to take him outside and crush him with a rock.  Another time I installed some of those ultra-sonic plugs, just plug 'em into a socket and they emit a high-frequency squeal which either kills or terrifies the mice. Worked for a while.

This year, they've been running around between the walls on three floors and so we put the bait down everywhere.  We have smelt decaying bodies for some time and assumed them all dead,  the poison, we understood, was pretty quick. Only it's not.

Today we had a leak, splashing down from the first floor and when the plumber came he showed me these push-on, plastic corner-joints which he had found in the central heating pipes.

What happens, he said, is that the mice take the poison and  are driven mad with thirst and, hearing the water in the pipes, try to get some for themselves.  Fair gave me the horrors, it did;  poor little bastards.  But then they're vermin, that's what they are, gotta get rid of 'em.  I mean, it's just like the Jews, isn't it?  Or is it, in Farageland, the Somalis, now, who have become our vermin?   

Enough people called them vermin and then they were treated like vermin.  If they were pet mice or creative, artistic Jews, well that'd be different, wouldn't it?
................................................................................................................

Honest, Not Invent
- an anthology of writing by stanislav and mr ishmael, is now available. For reviews, go to The Sunday Ishmael: Publication Announcement: Honest, Not Invent:13/09/20
 
The book is available as either paperback or hardback; we've had proof copies of both and the production quality is very good.  Cover design is the same for both.  340 pages, each chapter dated in the list of contents; we have stanislav from as long ago as 2007, and some of the finest ishmael essays from the present blog.  For now (there are still a few hoops to go through before it appears elsewhere, at the same price) the book is only available from lulu.com.   No one's billing or delivery address, nor any payment info, will be available or disclosed to the creator of the book; all this is securely handled by the publishing platform. Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy should follow these steps:

Please register an account with them first.  This will save you a couple of quid, as going straight into the links 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 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.

The full title is "Honest, Not Invent - the best of stanislav, a young polish plumber", and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of Buster the Blog Dog.  

Link for Hard Back : 


Link for Paper Back : 


At checkout, try  WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) 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.  (ORDER10 might also work, for a 10% discount, if the 15% has expired.)
With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £14.35; HB £23.74. 


Mr ishmael's essays today are:

Arse to Mouth Disease strikes Greatest Living Journalist   Published 23rd November 2016

Biker News                                                                           drafted 8th June 2015

Autumn Reflection                                                               drafted 1st December 2014



Sunday 20 September 2020

The Sunday Ishmael 20th September 2020

 
Gorgeous, pouting Sasha Swire has written a  book. Apparently, she is Lady Swire, a title that is an affectation of Ruritania. As my dear departed dad - a Yorkshireman - would have said:
That one? Tha's no lady - Tha's no bettern' she should be 
a puzzling phrase, which should be interpreted as condemnation of sexual incontinence. Apparently just bursting with barely contained sexuality, setting afire Oxbridge graduates with her looks, charm, sexual effrontery and perfume

(either typical journalistic exageration or a sad commentary on  the totty available to Oxbridge graduates - okay, just taking my bitch for a walk), this book gaily breaches confidences and conventions and is designed to produce sufficient publicity to get the Lady's back catalogue of unpublished novels onto the printing presses. Enough of that - the interesting thing is that today on Broadcastimg House, gorgeous pouting Edwina Currie,
 
former mistress of former Prime Minister John Major and herself a diarist, was  wheeled out to support the intelligence, probity, responsibility and general seriousness of the Conservatives, in particular her chum, David Cameron, who would never have been so inflamed by a Lady's perfume that he threatened to drag her into the bushes for the purposes of fragrant delight (or flagrante delicto, as we say in Court). Further, this David, a man of towering intellect, who, together with his Cabinet, could have earned mega-billions as City Bankers, which, of course, is their right, having attended the Right Schools and Universities, are so imbued with the spirit of Public Service, that they prefer to exist on relatively small MP's salaries in order to serve their country. Aye, right. It's all in that "relatively" word. £24,000 is the average salary for a care worker. An MP's salary is £81,932 plus allowances and expenses. The Prime Minister's salary is £158,754. Boris is reported as worrying about money, his salary having shrunk from £350,000, as he sacrificed his newspaper column and speaking arrangements to run the country at our time of national crisis. Gary Linekar, by the way, the crisp man, has a BBC salary of a mere £1.35 million.
Braodcasting House's Paddy O'Connell somehow slid Edwina onto the topic of  Michael Gove and Boris Johnson. Delightfully, her opinion of the current Tory leadership? "They are two ducks off the back of which water will always slip."
 

Looking good, boys




 
 
 
 
So, today we'll read mr ishmael's opinion of Gove and Johnson -
 

As for the cock-waving cokehead, bicycling BoJo, he simply trusts that his fourth-form bluster will carry all before him - as it has, so far - and that the sclerotic, redneck, masturbating horde at the Filth-O-Graph will annoint him Tory leader anytime he feels like it, anytime he grows fed-up with his part-time job as Mayor of Londonistan. He should, actually, read the responses to his hugely lucrative schoolboy rants in the Filth-O-Graph, where  readers are cunt-calling him by a ratio of a hundred-to-one, cursing his hanged-by-the-neck Turkish grand-dad, cursing his gobby dad  and calling Bojo, himself, an anti-British, foreign-devil wog, a walking miscarriage who disgraces the office of Mayor, selling us out to his bosses in Europastan.  Anybody but Livingstone would've seen BorisKen's vanity, of course, wouldn't be  bicycling back, wobbling,  to Rich CokeHead Paradise.  A fence post would've beaten BoJo; Livingstone, however, was just ahead of him in the Oh-fer-fucks-sake-not-this-cunt-again stakes. Ken's vanity, of course, was insurmountable;  had he been concerned more with keeping Boris out than he was with getting Ken in he would've stood down, in favour of the fence post, or a paving slab;  typically, what used to be the Labour Party, a gang of warring shitbags,  was too frightened to tackle Livingstone. And now BoJo, the man Labour should've beaten, wants to be prime minister.  I read somewhere that we are two heartbeats away from having White Powders Johnson as prime minister and Harry Ginger as King. Would that make shit  any worse than it already is? Probably, I suppose; things always get worse.       

GOVE CAMPAIGN PLEDGE 
 

Author of the Bible,  former education supremo, Murdoch slag and submissive gimp,  Michael Spit, has vowed massive reform if he and his Tory masters are returned to power.  With my master, the prime minister's permission, we will put an end to cabinet ministers' wives not being able to read and write by the age of fifty, said Mr Spit. It is simply not good enough, in the twenty-first century, for cabinet ministers to be married to cabinet ministers' wives who can't string together a fucking sentence, even for the readership of the Daily fucking Mail,
is it, fatso?

Speaking at the Toby Young Free Scool for the brats of greedy, pushy arsehole parents.

Tory pin-up and Gove praise-singer struts his stuff.

My children are rather special, like myself, really; that's why the govament takes money from ordinary schools, for ordinary children, and gives it to mine, and other ghastly spoiled brats.
One nation Toryism, we call it.

 
 LONG  AGO I HEARD SOMEONE SAY SOMETHING ABOUT EVERYMAN
 
 SPITTING STRICTLY PROHIBITED.
I used to watch Micky Gove, Oh, I think it may have been in the last century; before he was an MP he did a late-night discussion show with people's Tribune, Dame Polyp Toynbee of Majorca. It was called a discussion show,  between so-called Left and so-called Right but it was a rant, Gove, visibly entranced by the sound of his own voice, captivated by the erudition, conviction and persuasion of his arguments - generally on the delights of  usury and the unregulated market -  couldn't stop himself, Yes, I know Polly, but it is very important that I finish this point which, I assure you, will deal, rather more than adequately, with the one you are hinting at and which will, I am confident, demonstrate, even to you,  that the bankruptcy, indeed the vacuity of your position is indicative of the failure of intellectual rigour of those on what we call the Left but which is in fact something entirely different, something truly iniquitous and as a matter of fact much more ignoble even than that archaic and oppressive denial of the human spirit which characterises all attempts at a state-regulated economy, such as those of Chairman Mao Tse Tung or the successive elderly oligarchs in the Soviet Praesideum, now defunct thanks to Mrs Thatcher's far-sighted and valiant  demolition of the Berlin Wall but as even Marx himself said, many are  cold but few are frozen and it is only radical, radical but compassionate, compassionate but determinedly free market economics mediated by the truly and precisely calibrated compassionate conservatism which offers not just this country but indeed, if I may so boldly  vouchsafe, the whole, polyglot tide of humanity the opportunity to ameliorate its ills and reach its true potential. But forgive me the digression, Polly, and to return to the properly intended  burden of my subject.......

I used to sit open-mouthed, watching  Gove; he simply wouldn't allow Toynbee a word in-edgeways;  he was a bizarrely seeming-courteous gabshite, a pseudo-polite bully who spoke so fervently that the spit gathered in the corners of his mouth, a site which must have distressed any who witnessed it - those people who now, these days, I guess, sit glued, ashamed of themselves,  to the sneery, torpid ennui of Andy Neil and his bumsuckers, Portillo and Co. I found myself doing it for a moment last night, until I realised that I was watching and listening to the cultural and ethical desert which is called Alan Johnson. God help his poor, errant wife, faced with a lifetime of evenings spent with this smug, empty-headed, semi-literate hypocrite, rehearsing his wasteland repertoire of gossip, spite and IKnowBestism.  Christ, you would forgive  her infidelity with the entire Metropolitan Police Force, wouldn't you, the maddest Sharia court in the world would order Alan Johnson stoned, not his poor Mrs.   There is, among my generation, anyway,  a dark appetite for a late-night, political junky fix but like smoking and drinking and meat-eating it is an appetite which grows duller the more it is fed.  I don't think the NewPeople have it at all. It afflicts just we lonesome insomniacs, up all night, leaning on the windowsill, muttering.
 
 For most of my life I have staunchly advocated the rights of people to fuck and fondle  as they choose or are impelled to do by events and influences far beyond their ken. Life is brief and hard enough without having lawnforcement in the bedroom, I've always thought, just as long as people are acting within whatever is the current law. 
I am mindful that such a posture can be seen as endorsing an over-reach of the criminal law, already pernicious and invasive, and that the NewPeople urge us to  assume goodness on the part of all and leave people to do as they please;  there is, however, a host of reasons for us policing sexual conduct and behaviours, we need only look to the Harriet Harman paedophile scandal, a time in recent memory when cynical men found - were given - opportunity to romanticise and dignify cruel perversion, to bring it under the Rights banner, to have its cause championed by a squalid elite,  that there should have been permitted to exist an organisation called the Paedophile Information Exchange is now almost unbelieveable - but that it now seems monstrous is not due to legislators, some - at least some - of whom were and remain fellow-travellers but to victims and campaigners on their behalf;  Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt, then head of what was grandly-titled the National Council for Civil Liberties - later Ms Chakrawotsit's Liberty -  would both have seen all the children buggered, the ghastly, hideous Leon Brittan would lose the evidence; Margaret Thatcher and the Prince of Wales would cuddle the perpetrators;  the Churches would - and still do - protect the culprit and slander the victim.

I mention this recent, mind-boggling, national, institutionalised criminality because that's what I voted against, the other day.(2016 EU referendum) I voted against Filth, historical and current; so, too, I suspect, did millions of others.   From over-censorious hypocrisy, from  police entrapment,  blackmail and queer-bashing we have moved, in a generation, almost full-circle,  to a sustained, vengeful attack on heterosexuality, marriage and the family - never as ideal as protrayed, of course, but comforting and rewarding for many, sacred for some and conducive to a progressive, rights-based society, to self-sacrifice, self-denial and co-operation.  Now we see men, dressed as nuns, brandishing dildos on the streets and call it Pride. I simply cannot abide all that fag women-hating that goes on in the name of Freedom, nor will I ever, purely on rational grounds,  call man woman

I don't give a fuck about Europe, I rarely go and even when I do I live in a land where I am no longer citizen but citizen-suspect and  so my travel to anywhere is an ordeal of suspicion and bullying and hostility at the hands of yellow-jacketed, smirking, shiny-headed unemployables, minimum-waged stormtroopers, insufficiently bright to be police constables or prison officers, drowning me in halitosis whilst they manhandle me within a millimetre of an explosive punch.  Oh but mr ishmael, it's for security. No, it fucking isn't, don't be stupid; jailing Tony Blair and George Dubya Chimp,  that would do something for security. They must love this, those who jet around,unhassled,  above our daily humiliation.   In or out of Europe my masters presume me guilty of something, to keep me in my place. Well, me and seventeen million others, we just found them guilty, in return.

The same people - the Harmans, the Straws - those who embraced the Paedophile Information Exchange - now make not just my person  suspect but my thoughts, too.  Be it Jacqui Schmidt or Tracey May, Satan's cocksuckers  demand that I relinquish my privacy to them, my thoughts, my correspondence, only that they might protect me.  The same people who nourished alien child-grooming gangs, people like Mr Jack Bribes'n'Torture and Mr Dennis the Crook McShane and the contemptible  Nick Clegg; call me reactionary and ill-informed, insist that if I have nothing to hide I have nothing to fear;  the  truth is that I have plenty to hide - what's that old, bardic line, If my thought dreams could be seen they'd probably put my head in a guillotine - and I will hide it the better outside of an inquisitorial EuroPolice state, all of its teeming magistrates able to instigate my arrest and rendition and imprisonment. I voted against that, too;  who, in their right mind wouldn't?

I don't give a fuck about trade, either. I know about trade, I have traded, I know how to make a profit;  people will do it, they always have, when its prohibited, for fuck's sake,  people smuggle.  People want goods and services, other people want to provide them, in that process value is added, taxation raised, services provided.  If the Sultans of Brussels restrict UK trade with member states, if they impede the exporting of BMWs to the UK, they'll be hung from the lamp posts, their balls in their mouths.  

Here's a thought.  I will change my car in a few months and have been considering a BMW 3 series Touring, a C Class Mercedes Wagon, an Audi Avant estate and a Volvo SUV.  Now, no, seriously, now I will go for a Mazda, a Nissan  or a Honda, maybe a Ford.  Fuck 'em, the Europeans, as individuals we should sanction them.

Trade is civilisation, now unelected bureaucrats and buffoons like Obama sternly threaten that very civilisation, threaten livelihoods and public services, cheeky cunts. Obama can't stop hundreds of tonnes of cocaine being shipped-in to America's rich, thousands of tonnes of hash coming over the border or being grown  at home, can't restrict Americans'  fondness for self-massacre, can't even close a torture camp in his jurisdiction and yet the  useless impertinent nincompoop  wants to punish somebody who makes widgets in West Bromwich;  somebody should punch him in his stupid, stuttering gob, kick his scrawny arse up and down Pennsylvania Avenue.  I voted against Obama, the other day, too. 

I recently  read a comment thread in the Guardian, about fragrance, they didn't call it fragrance, just perfumes and deodorant.  The NewPeople, it seems, are incensed by perfumes on the tube, in which, daily, they go about their angry lives. It's gonna kill them all, they say, people wearing scent. It should be made illegal. Walking through airport perfume retailers just quite ruins their experience.  They really were raging and drooling. (Me, I try them all, at the airport, I love fragrances, light ones, heavy ones. I like the good, old ones the most - Chanel, Guerlain, Dior - but I like some of the newer ones, too, Calvin Klein and Boss, all the various Obsessions and Poisons, quite makes my journey, it does, once I have been police-stated airside,  sniffing and testing nice smells. Not so these joyless, prohibitive bastards who read the Guardian, y'know, thinking it still is the Guardian.)  

Recently, in Aberdeen Hospital, an older, lady phlebologist came to take a blood sample, I knew her of old, I think she may be a bit deaf, has a minor speech impediment, like deaf people sometimes do,  not quite fully making her words, and I really, really like her. Gosh, I said, tentatively, that perfume's  nice, what is it?  She laughed to herself and eventually said - It's one of my husband's aftershaves, it's an expensive one, but he doesn't like it,  doesn't wear it, so I do. It's alright for pushing this trolley up and down hospital corridors.  I laughed out-loud, saying, that's the sorta thing I'd do, too, and it is.  Although I have  lots of good stuff I very rarely wear any man cologne, coupla times a year, maybe, that's it, charity shop'll get an olfactory bonanza when I die,  but I always like it when I do, nothing erotic about it, nothing seductive, I just like the smell, and the craft of the parfumier, lifts me up where I belong and if I'm there when mrs ishmael is putting some on I may have a dab on my wrists, sniff it, through the day.  Guardian readers, by a hundred to one, want perfumes banned in public places,  their train journeys are made miserable by scent.  Now, if I had to travel daily on one of those fucking diabolical subterranean cattle trains  beloved of BoJo and Kahn the Kunt then other people's perfumes would be way down my list of grievances, overcrowding, unreliability, safety and cost being of much more concern.
I am nowhere near as clever as the average Guardian reader, even so, I am hundreds of miles from the nearest subway train system and if people can't stand the trains they should move to the country and live off their wits, only they haven't got any and thus, witless,  prefer to find something which others enjoy and prohibit it. I voted against the Guardian, too, the other day, too, anyone who writes for it, anyone who supports it by occasional purchase or by subscription. Polly Toynbee, defender of the poor?  Gimme fucking  strength.

 Something happened, with the post-war expansion of the public sector and the upsurge of grammar school alumni rising through its ranks.  People who had virtually no trade skills and none of the wit derived from scratching a living in the real world found themselves in positions from which they could decide what was best for others and lecture them accordingly, others such as tenants, passengers, patients, pupils and customers.  It was the dawn of I-Know-Bestism, now a ruinous plague.

But I didn't come to talk about the Eurendum.  mr bob doney offered his thanks for the  endless commentary, here,  of discouragement to our enemies and I thought I should say something about that because, inasmuch as my opinion matters more than another's - which it doesn't - that is not how I see it, this cyber streetcorner.

mr tdg sometimes obliquely challenges my assertions about and support for the people. Worlds, he reminds us, they rise and fall, this is all a speck in Time's eye; art, thought and culture, that is the stuff which matters, not tribal squabbles over who bestrides the dungheap, the people, should not be my preoccupation   and I am rightly reproved, even though I do hymn, often, those other things.   

What the people want, according to any objective analysis of how Want is expressed and satisfied, is tat and pornography, bling and boobs;  the best-selling newspaper in the country succeeded because of its daily portrayal of teenage tits, the younger the better, and lies, filthy, disgusting lies, about everything, not just about Hillsbro.  Rupert Murdoch and his McKenzie sluts - Trevor Kavanagh, Larry Lamb, Adam Lard, Kay Burley, Toilets Maguire, Andrew Pierce, Cameron's playmates, Jerry Clarkson and Bekkah Brooks and notably the redneck playboy ancien, Andy Neil, have  grotesquely disfigured the nation, coarsened the public discourse, corrupted the police and ensnared the legislature. All this happened, though, because of and not despite the  people, whose rights we have sought to strengthen and protect. Why do we bother, why do we celebrate the Eurendum result when, tomorrow, those who voted for departure would also vote for hanging, for castration, will genuflect before some braindead, crooked bullyboy foreign  football manager? 

Well, my response to my episodic self-scourging is to remind myself that things, for Everyman,  at home and abroad, have grown much better than they were when I was born - people live longer and in greater comfort, the opportunities for  self-improvement are staggering, that is even said to be the case in those parts of the world which we used to call Third; maybe the urge to hang people will diminish as a result of wider access to information but I don't know how a referendum on capital punishment would pan-out, held tomorrow; maybe we would need the Europhiles to prevent us breaking, again, the necks of the guilty and the innocent.

I am fairly sure that among my fellow-leavers will be a significant number who consider their children their best friends, luv'em2bits, woulddoennyfin4'em, read the Sun,  hate and fear Otherness and are generally completely worthless arseholes, a waste of oxygen, a pollution.  I am cautious about the idea of family, even, its cruel wastelands;  I feel absolutely no kinship, fellowship or comradeship with other Leavers, present company excepted, not exactly a Man of the People, me;  the idea of the people, though, that's another thing entirely and I am overjoyed at the idea that large numbers of people, finally given the opportunity, have, acting collectively, ignoring their traditional masters, upset Greed's applecart, flung a spanner in Vice's works, put a fly in Ambition's ointment and generally pissed on Order's brogues. It is a delight to me, the idea of Everyman; he doesn't have to exist.

I take everyone's strictures, here, to heart, no point in coming, otherwise; I am grateful, content to be censured and reproved, amended and corrected and so I can embrace the suggestion that the people are not as I idealise them.  This is not, therefore, the endless commentary of discouragement noted by mr bob doney, rather,  it is as much an enquiry as a polemic
The people, therefore, their rights and needs, it is, all of it, a moot point.
There was a headline, from the Guardian, appeared, somehow, on my screen:  "Why your pet doesn't love you, but is just trapped by you." It was red mist time, again.  I didn't read it.   
.........................................................................................

Honest, Not Invent
- an anthology of writing by stanislav and mr ishmael, is now available. For reviews, go to The Sunday Ishmael: Publication Announcement: Honest, Not Invent:13/09/20
 
The book is available as either paperback or hardback; we've had proof copies of both and the production quality is very good.  Cover design is the same for both.  340 pages, each chapter dated in the list of contents; we have stanislav from as long ago as 2007, and some of the finest ishmael essays from the present blog.  For now (there are still a few hoops to go through before it appears elsewhere, at the same price) the book is only available from lulu.com.   No one's billing or delivery address, nor any payment info, will be available or disclosed to the creator of the book; all this is securely handled by the publishing platform. Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy should follow these steps:

Please register an account with them first.  This will save you a couple of quid, as going straight into the links 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 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.

The full title is "Honest, Not Invent - the best of stanislav, a young polish plumber", and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of Buster the Blog Dog.  

Link for Hard Back : 


Link for Paper Back : 


At checkout, try READ15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) 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.  (ORDER10 might also work, for a 10% discount, if the 15% has expired.)
With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £14.35; HB £23.74.  

Today's essays by mr ishmael are: 
What the Papers say (an extract)                                             - drafted   2/11/13
Gove Campaign Pledge                                                           - drafted 18/04/2015
Long Ago I heard someone say something about Everyman  - drafted  6/08/16

 

Sunday 13 September 2020

The Sunday Ishmael: Publication Announcement: Honest, Not Invent:13/09/20

Honest Not Invent


A brilliantly vivid reading experience. Bizarre, exaggerated, visceral, profane and wildly funny. Here it is - Honest, Not Invent.... the best of stanislav (and other voices)

mr ishmael was always a writer. He couldn’t help it, he didn’t force it, and it flowed out of him, as though he was a conduit, onto any handy scrap of paper. In the Blogosphere, both as a commentator and as the host of Call Me Ishmael, he found his metier. This was a world without the intervention of publishers, with an instant audience, who would immediately tell him what they thought of his latest offering, for the reward of engaging with a fine mind delighted to be talking to them, and, occasionally, receiving a damn good blogging. mr ishmael made not a penny from his writing: his reward was the give and take, the ebb and flow of the conversations that sprawled and bloomed from the comments box.

He was very particular about how his blog should look in order to be accessible, consistent and instantly recognisable. It was, of course, lavishly and colourfully illustrated with grotesques. It has not been possible to adhere to mr ishmael’s rules of presentation in this book, given its very different formatting requirements, but the many friends who first encountered these essays on the blog will find, through editor verge’s deft compilation and presentation, the voice of a true moralist, deeply compassionate, warmly human and utterly indignant about corruption, avarice and the abuse of office, both sexual and financial: the voice of the Zen-Marxist-Presbyterian, as he always described himself. And, somehow, without the eye-catching illustrations, the essays have yielded a deeper meaning.

For the political junkie; the charlatans, poseurs and chancers who inhabit these pages will be instantly recognisable, their foibles, misdemeanours and crimes against humanity well known. For those with less of an addiction, rest assured - honest, not invent. Well, maybe a little bit.

This anthology, constructed by editor verge from mr ishmael’s writings, contains several voices, but showcases stanislav, the young Polish plumber. Back in the day, I would beg stanislav’s creator for more stanislav. I wish I could, he would regretfully tell me -  I channelled him for a while, but he’s not here anymore. Just  as Voltaire’s creation, Candide, contended with the problem of evil, so does stanislav, albeit more directly and humorously, ridiculing religion, governments, politicians, television celebrities, the great and the good, all hidden under a thin veil of naïveté. You think I know fuck nothing, he rants - but me, I know fuck all.

So there we are with the fuck word, which brings me to Lenny Bruce, a major influence on mr ishmael. Lenny was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, and satirist, whose comedy spoke truth to power, which responded by relentless persecution and prosecution for obscenity. During one of Lenny Bruce’s performances in 1966, he said he’d been arrested for saying nine words, and then said them in alphabetical order: ass, balls, cocksucker, cunt, fuck, motherfucker, piss, shit, tits. There are no dirty words, both he and mr ishmael said, only dirty minds. mr ishmael far exceeded nine - or, at least, he put them together in new and fascinatingly-repellent combinations. How about: “shit splattering onto their faces from the Great Latrine of State”? And you just have to be sorry for Ming, sitting gingerly on his pile of cushions, with his back firmly against the wall, having been thoroughly (er, metaphorically – Ed.) fucked up the arse by his entire Party. Once over the schoolboy fascination with forbidden words or prudish revulsion - twin cheeks of the same poxy arse as mr ishmael might have said - we might consider the impact of this powerful language as intensifier of the expressed thought. Melissa Mohr, in her scholarly and accessible book, Holy Sh*t, tells us everything we need to know about the function of swearing. Swearwords kidnap our attention and force us to consider their unpleasant connotations. Swearwords occupy a different part of the brain. Most speech is a higher brain function - the cerebral cortex, controlling rational thought. Swearwords are stored in the lower brain - the limbic system, responsible for emotion and the fight-or-flight response. Them’s fighting words, and mr ishmael could certainly talk a good fight. His sustained, creative, absurd, poetic, scatological streams of inventive invective were fuelled by outrage.


For all the ishmaelites, who appreciated, provoked and entertained mr ishmael through the Comments box over the years, many, many thanks. It is impossible to give every one a name-check - some notable contributors in the early years seem not to be with us any more, but they are not forgotten. Notable are messrs mongoose and mike, bungalow bill, dick the prick, the dyer’s garden, caratacus, swiss bob, doug shoulders, inmate, the noblest prospect, SG, oldrightie, yardarm, and mr ishmael’s ladies - mrs narcolept, agatha, lilith, and woman on a raft. Then there are all those readers across the English-speaking world who never got around to joining the comment streams - mr ishmael, although not a statistics jihadist, knew you were there, because Blogger reported to him the numbers of his readers in Australia, America, and Europe. Bloody hell, he told me one day, there’s a bloke been logged on to Call Me Ishmael for eighteen hours - 18 bloody hours - then slunk off without leaving a comment. 
And thank you to our two reviewers, messrs mike and caratacus, whose reviews follow below. 

My deepest thanks go to mr verge, an experienced and talented writer himself, who has brought this book together.  mr ishmael awarded mr verge the special status of house filthster and court jester, and his trust has been amply fulfilled through mr verge's dedicated and selfless work in producing this anthology. The task was no easy one, involving reading the prolific outpouring of twelve years of posts and comments, exercising judgement in the selection of the essays, providing discreet editorial revisions and footnoting as necessary. editor mr verge has produced a fine memorial to the memory of ishmael smith. Thank you, v./ 

Thank you all for your outpouring of grief and condolences after mr ishmael’s death in January 2020. Many ishmaelites will want to paraphrase Bob Dylan - mr ishmael is dead. He’s the brother I never had. 


Three score years and ten, and a good death - there’s a lot to be thankful for.


mrs ishmael : September 13th 2020

 Reviews
mr caratacus:

Having been greatly humbled to be invited to proof-read the splendid 'Ishmael Project' I confess to have been a little daunted in the initial stages, not least because my ability to read the document was made difficult by the tears of laughter running down my cheeks. To return to the innermost thoughts of young Stanislav was a joy and I was reminded of something P.G. Wodehouse said when he first read the 'Flashman' tales by George MacDonald Fraser; "If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet stuff', it was when I read the first Flashman". Thus it was for me when I read of Gordon the Ruiner, written by Stanislav, a young Polish plumber. I will not tarry over long here, suffice to say that I envy those lucky folk who have yet to read mr. ishmael's writings - boy, do they have a treat in store. For those of us who have followed his blog over the years, you will - as I did - find yourself laughing helplessly as mr. ishmael jaunts effortlessly from one tussock to another, weaving words about him like the storyteller he was. Thank you, finally, mrs. ishmael, for making all this possible. We are forever in your debt.  

mr mike:
Editor Verge (peace and blessings be upon him) kindly sent me a final draft of this anthology and graciously asked if I would write a review. It was a challenge, almost a duty, I readily accepted and I hope I do the collection, and its author, justice - although I will roam a little further through Ishmaelia. Reading this anthology I have been through the gamut of emotions, there were tears of laughter and also sadness; only one keyboard was harmed during the production of this review (nasal red wine snort).
I first met stan at the blog order-order, maybe fifteen or more years ago. In those days blogging was like the Wild West; unmoderated and uncensored; not the milquetoast troll infested stuff of today. In between the metaphorical bar-fights, the snippets of information, and the pub-conversations between regulars, one contributor stood head and shoulders above the rest. It was like finding a gold nugget in a dry river bed. Stanislav – a young Polish plumber. Soon he gathered a cult following, and although it can’t be quantified, I would bet that many visitors at order-order came to read stan.
In the voice of a Scotch-Polish plumber, stan laid waste to frauds and incompetents. Brilliantly written – without a gift from God it would have been impossible to generate such style and power. But, as time moved on, stan grew tired of the editorship at order-order and a new child was born - Call Me Ishmael (the chronicles of ruin). In this blog, Mr Ishmael could spread his wings, although his young friend Stanislav appeared from time to time. The content was eclectic – everything from machine tools, gardening, cooking, dogs and cats, Victorian and Edwardian furniture – but mostly topical political commentary. The loyal readership was polite and informed. After an opening piece from our host a thread could go in any direction, unfailingly interesting and often very amusing. Conversations would spontaneously erupt – despite my being on the other side of the world, with eleven hours time difference, I would often get an instant reply from Mr Ishmael in what must have been the wee hours of the morning in Scotland, best part of England. Although we never met, I feel, I hope, I knew him, and the other regulars, well.
Of course, Mr Ishmael was incredibly lucky that public life was festooned with a large cast of miscreants at which to take aim – bigger than the cast of a Verdi opera. All manner of degenerates, liars, thieves, cheats, incompetents, hypocrites; the warmongers; the serial shaggers, cuckolds, and adulterers; the shirt-lifters, shit-eaters, snot-eaters, all knowing what’s best for you and me, but not themselves. The noncing monsignors; the be-jewelled and be-medalled of modern Ruritania; the vacuous celebs prepared to flash their knickers for a picture in the Sun, happy to be insulted on TeeVee. They were all in the cross-hairs, and regularly skewered with facts and wit, and then had a 4WD SUV driven over them and reversed for good measure. Mr Ishmael was always fair and factual - if they got a good rub down with a verbal housebrick, then you can be assured the subject in question truly deserved it.
Mr Ishmael wrote in many voices, not just Scotch-Polish, as befitted the subject. In one exchange I was recounting the travails of The Memsahib; Mr Ishmael counterblasted in the voice of Sir Henry Simmerson of the South Essex Regiment (Sharpe’s Regiment): “Heavens to blazes, Mr mike, ....”. Pure poetry. I’m sure I wasn’t the only reader who read his pieces with the appropriate accent, so good was the caricature. And Stanislavian, and other, phrases and idioms have inevitably encroached on the vocabulary. He could conjure up imagery with a few well chosen words; it’s probably lost in the mists of the blogosphere but I suspect it was stan who first described Gordon Snot wearing a nappy on his rocking horse. (He hints at this himself on p.50 of the anthology ).
It was very clear that Mr Ishmael was not just a prolific writer, but also an avid reader and watcher. He had an uncanny eye for detail which eluded many others, and this allied to an incredible capacity for mimicry in his writings gave birth to the many voices that enriched his work.
Over the years there were several occasions when his readers suggested he publish a book. I always felt his three part series on Ruin would make a book, a play, or film – or all three. I can just hear Dame Judi Dench saying: “throw another shitcake on the fire”. But he always resisted, for reasons not entirely clear to me. After his sad and untimely death, it was only natural that his readers would again take up the call. Mrs Ishmael readily agreed. And Mr Verge volunteered to take on the challenge of selecting pieces for an anthology.
To my reading the anthology starts serenely, quickly rises like a volcano, then rises even higher, and latterly becomes melancholic. Like the seven ages of man. The language can be a little fruity for some, excoriating at times, but this is explained early on in Mind Your Language – the reply to Jonny W and Mr Anonymous also shows also that stan (mr ishmael) did not suffer fools. “There are no dirty words, only dirty minds”.
The archive is vast. It must have been difficult to decide what to include. I gather from mr verge that some incendiary pieces were left out – lest the usual suspects placed a call to me learned friend. We knew Mr Ishmael had health problems, but we learn for the first time the extent of those problems, and his jousting with the National Health Service. Difficult reading, although hilarious. The piece on the death of Buster was particularly heart rending, and although I’m no wuss, I don’t mind admitting it reduced me to tears.
This book is not for everyone: if you are stupid, illiterate, woke, put soy milk in your coffee, then it may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you have two functioning brain cells and are fed up with the propaganda and bias daily doled out by the MSM and the PBC, and the increasing censorship that lets the powerful and connected escape scrutiny, and need an antidote, then this is it. It deserves to be widely read; in a sensible world it would be on the reading list for A-Level and Open University students, if only as an exemplar on how to write. It probably won’t because people are now increasingly afraid to voice their true opinions, except sotto voce to trusted colleagues, lest they be criticised or arrested.
Vale Mr Ishmael; bravo Editor Verge and Mrs Ishmael.
 .................................................................................
The book is available as either paperback or hardback; we've had proof copies of both and the production quality is very good.  Cover design is the same for both.  340 pages, each chapter dated in the list of contents; we have stanislav from as long ago as 2007, and some of the finest ishmael essays from the present blog.  For now (there are still a few hoops to go through before it appears elsewhere, at the same price) the book is only available from lulu.com.   No one's billing or delivery address, nor any payment info, will be available or disclosed to the creator of the book; all this is securely handled by the publishing platform. Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy should follow these steps:

Please register an account with them first.  This will save you a couple of quid, as going straight into the links provided below seems to make paypal think it's ok to charge in dollars, and apply their own conversion rate, which seems to 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.
The full title is "Honest, Not Invent - the best of stanislav, a young polish plumber", and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of Buster the Blog Dog.  
At checkout, try LULUFAM15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) 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, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £14.35; HB £23.74.