The chronicles of Ruin, continued.
Call me Ishmael said....intelligence is knowing what to do when you don't know what to do.
Anonymous said... When I don't know what to do,I come here.
10 September 2009 22:59
Sunday 1 November 2020
The Sunday Ishmael 1/11/2020
Another incredibly old, incredibly rich ex-pat dies: the world mourns: we will never see his like again.
The late, great Sean Connery on why it is right to slap women, only with an open hand, mind, and only after you have given them due warning not to be so irritating and not keep on wanting the last word. He's one of those actors who didn't do acting as such, just put on different clothes and make-up and then be himself. And never deviate from that strange scots accent, whether he's play-acting his way through the role of a Spanish grandee, an English aristocrat or Schames Bond, licensed to knock women about.
Mr Ishmael on Scotland's greatest export:
The great Scottish bard, Sir Sean Connery, sat on the bonny, bonny
banks of Lake Geneva, where he sat a-sharpening his big magic sword,
awaiting the call to free Scotland from the English vermin who had given
him the knighthood he had craved all his life. If
there was any doubt about the bottomless hypocrisy of showbusiness,
this clip, of professional Scottish patriot and national wife-beating
icon, Sir Sean Connery, should make matters clear. Now that the oil
price has crashed, in disobedience to the FatMan and his wee girl's
orders, Scotch Whisky is probably the nation's only meaningful export;
even though it is owned in London and that's where the profits go, there
are many Scottish jobs attached to the industry. Here is Sir Sean, one of the most famous Scots in the world, advertising Japanese whisky.
Pigs Invade Scotland:
It's just typical, said Ms Nicola Moustache, Scotland's pretend Health
Supremo, in Scotland's pretend parliament, the half-billion pound,
leaking monstrosity, Kirsty Wark House. These fucking pigs, she
continued, they're all up frae England, shitting on decent Jocks going
aboot their business, cross-dressing, wife-beatin' and drinkin'
themselves intae an early grave. It's time we had a Scotch army, shoot
these wee bastards doon, the noo, d'ye ken.
In Switzerland, the Scotch foreign Secretary, Lady Sir Sean Connery, is
said to be raising an army of tax-avoiding Jock ex-patriot luvvies (ie
Annie Lennox of the Dyke Millionaire Buddhists Association.) Unsheathing
his mighty sword, Sir Sean, 82, said I may not be in ma prime but we
Scotcsh are tough old buzzardsh and Ah'll shee theshe pigsh off, sho Ah
will, if itsh the lasht thing I do.
In Westminster, hereditary Labour aristocrat, Ms Harriet Soursister,
dressed for the emergency in her customary giraffe-skin-patterned,
man-deterring camouflage, said, now was not the time to worry, that she
was in charge; these pigs, wicked as they are, must be treated in a
non-gender specific manner, apart from the males who should be hoisted
upside down on an A-Frame and have their throats cut, especially that
swine, Lord Crabs, the business secretary. Mr Deputy Porker, I protest
on a point of order, said the Singing Postman, Alan "Disease" Johnson,
I'm in charge, of the pigs, anyway. (cries of Siddown ya cunt!) A
statement from the prime minister, Gordon Snot:
Thank you Mr Deputy Porker, I'm in charge, nice to see you, to see you
nice. I am pleased to tell the House that I have been in discussions
with my good friend and admirer, young President Obamalamadingdong, and
he agrees with me that we must give the pigs all the money they need to
stay airborne, we simply cannot let them fail. Or fall. It is the right
thing to do, cast the Nation's pearls before swine. Trust me. I'm a
fucking lunatic.
(Shouts outside the House, chanting, Kill The Pigs! Kill The Pigs!)
I think, Mr Deputy Spanker, said Mr Nick Haircut for the LibDems, they
mean us.
Gorbals Mick: Order-order. The Hoose will rise. Honourable and Right
Honourable members should all run for your fucking lives.
Nicola Sturgeon has told Scots not to travel to England unless it is for 'essential purposes'. And that the English are not welcome to travel to Scotland. Just send money instead. The Scottish First Minister made the plea on Saturday as Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a second lockdown for England to curb the recent surge in coronavirus cases. Under the new rules, all non-essential businesses will close, however, schools and universities will remain open.
Let's Blame it on the Public
Meanwhile, in the Labour Party:
Eheu, Jeremy, best get on with your reflecting
In May 2019, the Equality and Human Rights Commission began its investigation of allegations of anti-semitism in the Labour Party. It's report was published on Thursday. Jeremy Corbyn's response to the report was deemed to be inadequate.He was immediately suspended and lost the Whip pending a party investigation. The current leader of the Party, Sir Keir Starmer's response was considered to be more appropriate. He told Andrew Marr on his eponymous show on Sunday: "Well I was very clear in my response to the commission
report on Thursday, which found that the Labour Party had acted
unlawfully and there’d been a failure of leadership, that we needed to
accept the findings, accept the recommendations and implement them and
apologise. But
I also went on to say that, under my leadership, we will root out
anti-Semitism and that those that deny or minimise anti-Semitism in the
Labour Party and say it’s just exaggerated or part of a factional fight
are part of the problem."
"There's no need for a civil war in the party, and I’d invite Jeremy just to reflect on what he said on Thursday." Sir Keir continued: "What happened on Thursday was not what I wanted to happen." Oh, yes? Dirty business, politics, but it's a living.
Cookery Corner: mr mike's recipe for Prawns in Garlic and Chili oil.
Take plenty of garlic cloves, red and green chili, small amount of
ginger, flat leaf parsley, salt and black pepper - now its trial and
error until you get the blend that best suits - I like plenty of garlic
and chili, The Memsahib likes less - but there is an easy answer. Put
all in a blender and grind up.
Add to an earthenware pot (in our case 2
pots adding the required amount of paste to taste) and add plenty of
good olive oil. Put in the oven till sizzling, but don't burn.
Take out
of oven and add prepared prawns being careful not to scald the crown
jewels. The prawns will cook in the hot oil.
Serve with crusty bread
and a nice cold pinot grigio.
Based on a dish I've regularly eaten in Seville - across
the Puente de Triana from the centro going west and its immediately the
first side road on the left after the bridge, Especialades Ceveceria.
Only open after 8pm. Prawns in garlic and chili oil. The locals have it
with cerveza, or local beer, I quite like a chilled dry sherry.
.................................................
The anthology of essays by stanislav and ishmael is available from lulu.com. and it is now listed by both Blackwells and theBookDepository.
To buy a copy:
please
register an account with Lulu first. This will save you a couple of
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Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links (to either
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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.
At checkout, try TREAT15in
the coupon box, which takes 15% off the price before
postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try
SPOOKY10 or 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.
Scotland, best part of England, Alec Salmond too fat to vote in the referendum ( Sir Sean Connery extract) drafted 8/12/12
No Laughing Matter undated draft
Pigs Attack Scotland published 29/4/09
26 comments:
Mike
said...
Mrs I: you forgot that Sir Sean was also wanted in Spain for alleged tax evasion relating to a property deal. The Spanish authorities asked him to return from his Bermuda hideaway, but he replied that he was too old to travel.
PS: I highly recommend the prawns (for those with a strong disposition).
The notion unnerves me, mrs i, that I nave hitherto been ignorant of the delicatesse that dwells between hitting a woman with an open hand and thumping her properly. That this had passed me by leaves me unmanned, or perhaps only unmanned in the McBahamas, best part of Scotland.
Tyranny2 starts with the skies low and the days short. It will end in violence. I do not think btw that all of the governments do not know this but they have factored in some mad great reset. BLM/Build-Back-Better/Extinction blah-blah-blah is the culmination of a century of the punishing of dissent. That's what we've really lost. We cannot now disagree without the ad hominem assault and the yelping of the narcissistic wokerati.
Ah well. And the USA burns down on Wednesday morning.
Look, chaps, these are but quibbles. The gusto with which Lady Sir Sean laid into his female co-workers in those interminable, boring-but-nasty Bond films, and, of course, his first wife, has been much admired as an attribute of the true Scot. A disconcertingly loud lobby has sprung into existence, overnight, to rename Edinburgh Airport the Sir Sean Connery Airport. So travellers from Allovertheworld will see how the Scots venerate a tax-evading, woman-beating,Japanese whisky advertising, filthy-rich actor in a kilt with a dodgy accent - and can take appropriate defensive action. Especially women. Not confined to Scotland, of course. The frequency with which women are depicted on film and TV as victims of savage male violence reflects or feeds the appetite for seeing women with blood, bruises, knife and gunshot wounds. The most dangerous place for a man is the street, for a woman it is her home, the place she should feel safest. In 2002 the Independent newspaper reported that one third of all murders in England and Wales were classified as domestic and the Crown Prosecution Service dealt with 13,000 domestic violence cases a year - which was probably an under-reporting, given women's fear of the consequences of reporting their abuse. The following year, the Independent reported that more than one quarter of murder victims are women killed by their parner or former partner. The "rule of thumb", that is, it is okay to beat your wife with a stick if it is no thicker than your thumb, is no longer a defence. However, the courts remain reluctant to convict a man of murdering his wife, so when the wife unreasonably dies in consequence of the latest beating, many men are convicted of manslaughter rather than murder, which usually attracts a prison sentence of between 2 and 10 years, rather than a life sentence. As Sir Sean says, women can be so irritating, always wanting the last word, and they simply won't be warned, eh?
I don't know if its made the news around your parts, but a bombshell Govt report is about to be released down here, It appears our Australian SAS have been nothing more than torturing, civilian killing psychos for the last decade and more in Afghanistan. Their only defence is that the Brits and Yanks were worse. Seems like all our childhood heroes were made of clay.
mr mike, I believe casting Bond as a woman has already been mooted as the next development in the Bond franchise. Re-gendering of essentially macho parts has been a thing for a long time now - presumably as a sop to the increasing feminist awareness of the money-spending public. The Royal Shakespeare Company has been at it for years, often making logical mince out of Shakespeare's plot lines. The remake of Battlestar Galactica regendered the picaresque, cigar smoking hot-shot pilot Apollo as a woman, and we have had a female Doctor Who for a while now - I wonder what River Song makes of that? Gosh, some surprise about your Australian SAS! Taken everyone aback, has it? The clue is in the title, I suspect.
mr mongoose, totally agree with you. Here's a link to an article by Jonathon Sumption, that scholarly and thoughtful academic and lawyer: https://www.spectator.co.uk/writer/jonathan-sumption
As for the return to normality from this wilderness - unlikely that the state will relinquish the powers that it has assumed by decree: the Emergency Powers conferred on the Government at the start of the Second World War, to remain in place only until such time as His Majesty should declare by Order in Council that the war had ended, were still being used in the 1970's and 1980's, presumably on the basis that the Second World War was still in progress. Power is seldom voluntarily or willingly surrendered by those with a vested interest in wielding it.
The prawns in chili and garlic are just incredible, by the way. They are so good you want to be eating them for ever, and mopping up the oil with your crusty bread until you burst. Chili is addictive, as mr mike and Jamie attest - not least because it releases feel-good endorphins in the brain. And this recipe of mr mike's does not seem to have posterieur flambe consequences.
It is all a bit nasty, is it not, mrs i? A man who can finesse in his noggin the beating of a woman ain't much of a man in the first place, I fear.
Sumption is a much better man now that he has retired. It's as if he suddenly free.
I do not mind all this artifying with gender and colour of characters in traditional roles. Some of it is silly but silliness is part of the gig and it is harmless larking about for the most part.
Mr mongoose: I assume the Anne Boleyn series is documentary; there will be kids growing up thinking she was black. Also, bound to be all the usual virtue bullshitting. I'm old enough to remember the excellent BBC series on Henry V111 with Keith Michell.
There does seem to be an increasingly colour-blind approach to casting - maybe because there aren't many roles requiring a black actor: after Othello, and possibly Cleopatra, that's about it for Shakespeare. But to cast a black actor in a historically white role - not historic by custom and practice, but because there was a woman called Anne Boleyn and she was white, can only give rise to the sort of confusion that mr mike suggests, especially amongst those who learn their "history" from the telly. And isn't this some sort of reverse cultural appropriation, as mr verge outlines. Harmless larking about, mr mongoose? High Art, darling, High Art.
Yes, mrs i and mr mike, all of that is true. And when it is tokenism, it is just stupid. But there is somewhere a Hamlet with Maxine Peake as the Prince. It is interesting and a different take on the psychology of the P of D. There was also somewhat furhter back - and it is probably now buried with a stake through it's heart an Othello with black and white reversed. That was truly interesting. I am sure that it is banned. Just a sec... It was Patrick Stewart (Of course it was. Ed.) Anyway, it is less harmful than medically altering primary school children because it's cool to have a right-on offspring.
You're right though. But if kid's are learnign history from the telly we are fucked for a more fundamental reason.
I have just read some of those Sumption Speccy articles, mrs i, thank-you. The social distancing one shouts out to me. My old mum is 90 and it is likely that she hasn't actually touched another human being since March. What does that do to an aged lady? At least five grandchildren within an hour's drive, nieces and nephews and their offspring too many to count within less than that. It is wicked. And it is a criminal offence by statutory instrument for me to go against it. It is time to start breaking the law.
Hardback book arrived today. I must say the quality of the physical product is excellent - never mind the content. Congratulations Editor Verge and Mrs I.
There was a chap on PBS-something saying that if Biden succeeds in stealing the Election - and we will win now, regardless of what can be proved or disproved - then Trump will resign on the spot so that Pence can blanket pardon him of all and any previous sins from the Creation until today. It was said that this would free Trump to create merry hell. Now that would be entertaining. Merry hell with what was not specified.
Francis de Latour (famous for playing Miss Jones to Leonard Rossiter's Rigby in the fabulous Rising Damp) played Hamlet in 1979, the first woman to play Hamlet since Sarah Bernhardt, some 90 years earlier. Not a regendered Hamlet, as that idea hadn't been invented, (oh, gods, now I've said it, some director in stratford will be busily conceptualising Hamlet, Princess of Denmark, who is involved in a lesbian relationship with Ophelia) but a woman pretending to be a man, unlike the Elizabethan convention of males playing females. So Maxine Peake was following in the steps of giants. I'm sure she did a jolly good job of it, as she is rather brilliant. And that voice! I'm sure I saw a race-reversed Othello somewhere down the line: it hammers into our blunted awareness Othello's isolation as the only black guy in a senior position in the Venetian Court, his amazing achievement won by his strategy and bloodthirstiness in defeating the state's enemies, so that he becomes an unusual and favoured pet, allowed to survive his seduction of Desdemona. Because our cultural mores are so different from those of the first Elizabethans, the transposition of settings, times, religions and cultures can sometimes cast amazing light upon our understanding of Shakespeare, so that we reel back, saying - yeah, I really get it, now. Once such was the RSC's production of Much Ado About Curry, as mr ishmael dubbed it. Sex outwith marriage and one's own class, reputation, honour killings and blood debts are all fairly distant from our own dissolute modern awareness, but set the play in early-twentieth century Bombay and it begins to make the sort of sense that mr shakespeare would have taken for granted when he set his stage.
The Donald is looking tired and sounding croaky. Born on June 14, 1946, he is 74, not much younger than the worryingly confused Joe Biden. Just recovered from an encounter with Covid-19, contracted because of his belief that a leader needs to be visible and present, he has had a gruelling time of it, trying to secure the election. He's been fun, unpredictably irreverent, breaking the mould of the American political class, unwarlike, pro the American working class. Given all that, he's got no chance, really.
Mrs i, you'd like mrs m. I still remember the night that my soon-to-be-a-lawyer friend started to bully her about literature. (I had had my being gently put straight very early on.) She was 21 summers young. Polite, restrained, pleasant but he kept on picking at her. And then whoosh, "I think you'll find if you look a little deeper that..." About twenty seconds worth. He slunk away in the middle of the night. We haven't seen him since. The next generatioon is on the way too - and she has an engineer's toolbag in her kit too.
Don't you just love Maxine Peake?
Poor old Donald has won his battle. It as 4 years ago. And even though they will succeed in nicking this from him, the Senate and the House will stop Sleepy Joe doing anything - which is what conservative goevernemnt is much about. Everybody knows this was dishonest and that might just be a place to clean the gig up. Maybe Donny will even get Crazy Nancy's scalp for his spear.
We must wait and see, mr mongoose. And it might be a long wait now that Donald has gone to the lawyers. I'm quite in favour of causing maximum fuss and maximum disruption. No smooth transmission of power for Donald, no gemtleman's agreement - unless immunity from prosecution sweetens the deal. And I'm sure I'd like mrs m. Argumentative, knowledgeable and routs the lawyers. What's not to like? Good to know that the loss of a friend was a price worth paying.
Although the bit of business at the end is quite funny, I think it's misjudged. In the thumbnail menu at the right of the youtube page you should see the Richard E Grant version from the end of Withnail & I. Unimprovable.
Thank you, mr verge. I like Maxine Peake's Hamlet and now I shall try and find the whole thing, after seeing the clip you so kindly linked to. The same speech by Richard E Grant is masterly, almost unbearable in his depression, solidly emphasised by the cinematography and the endless curtain of grey rain.
The day before the end of his term, mrs i, Donald could resign. Pence would be President for a day and he could pardon the Orange Giant of "any and all crimes from the beginning of the universe until the second my pen hits this document".
Crazy Nancy would form her own black hole and suck the energy out all of DC.
26 comments:
Mrs I: you forgot that Sir Sean was also wanted in Spain for alleged tax evasion relating to a property deal. The Spanish authorities asked him to return from his Bermuda hideaway, but he replied that he was too old to travel.
PS: I highly recommend the prawns (for those with a strong disposition).
The notion unnerves me, mrs i, that I nave hitherto been ignorant of the delicatesse that dwells between hitting a woman with an open hand and thumping her properly. That this had passed me by leaves me unmanned, or perhaps only unmanned in the McBahamas, best part of Scotland.
Tyranny2 starts with the skies low and the days short. It will end in violence. I do not think btw that all of the governments do not know this but they have factored in some mad great reset. BLM/Build-Back-Better/Extinction blah-blah-blah is the culmination of a century of the punishing of dissent. That's what we've really lost. We cannot now disagree without the ad hominem assault and the yelping of the narcissistic wokerati.
Ah well. And the USA burns down on Wednesday morning.
Look, chaps, these are but quibbles. The gusto with which Lady Sir Sean laid into his female co-workers in those interminable, boring-but-nasty Bond films, and, of course, his first wife, has been much admired as an attribute of the true Scot. A disconcertingly loud lobby has sprung into existence, overnight, to rename Edinburgh Airport the Sir Sean Connery Airport. So travellers from Allovertheworld will see how the Scots venerate a tax-evading, woman-beating,Japanese whisky advertising, filthy-rich actor in a kilt with a dodgy accent - and can take appropriate defensive action. Especially women.
Not confined to Scotland, of course. The frequency with which women are depicted on film and TV as victims of savage male violence reflects or feeds the appetite for seeing women with blood, bruises, knife and gunshot wounds. The most dangerous place for a man is the street, for a woman it is her home, the place she should feel safest. In 2002 the Independent newspaper reported that one third of all murders in England and Wales were classified as domestic and the Crown Prosecution Service dealt with 13,000 domestic violence cases a year - which was probably an under-reporting, given women's fear of the consequences of reporting their abuse. The following year, the Independent reported that more than one quarter of murder victims are women killed by their parner or former partner. The "rule of thumb", that is, it is okay to beat your wife with a stick if it is no thicker than your thumb, is no longer a defence. However, the courts remain reluctant to convict a man of murdering his wife, so when the wife unreasonably dies in consequence of the latest beating, many men are convicted of manslaughter rather than murder, which usually attracts a prison sentence of between 2 and 10 years, rather than a life sentence. As Sir Sean says, women can be so irritating, always wanting the last word, and they simply won't be warned, eh?
Maybe, then, Mrs I, its time for 007 to be re-incarnated as as a woman, so she can get her own back?
I don't know if its made the news around your parts, but a bombshell Govt report is about to be released down here, It appears our Australian SAS have been nothing more than torturing, civilian killing psychos for the last decade and more in Afghanistan. Their only defence is that the Brits and Yanks were worse. Seems like all our childhood heroes were made of clay.
mr mike, I believe casting Bond as a woman has already been mooted as the next development in the Bond franchise. Re-gendering of essentially macho parts has been a thing for a long time now - presumably as a sop to the increasing feminist awareness of the money-spending public. The Royal Shakespeare Company has been at it for years, often making logical mince out of Shakespeare's plot lines. The remake of Battlestar Galactica regendered the picaresque, cigar smoking hot-shot pilot Apollo as a woman, and we have had a female Doctor Who for a while now - I wonder what River Song makes of that?
Gosh, some surprise about your Australian SAS! Taken everyone aback, has it? The clue is in the title, I suspect.
mr mongoose, totally agree with you. Here's a link to an article by Jonathon Sumption, that scholarly and thoughtful academic and lawyer: https://www.spectator.co.uk/writer/jonathan-sumption
As for the return to normality from this wilderness - unlikely that the state will relinquish the powers that it has assumed by decree: the Emergency Powers conferred on the Government at the start of the Second World War, to remain in place only until such time as His Majesty should declare by Order in Council that the war had ended, were still being used in the 1970's and 1980's, presumably on the basis that the Second World War was still in progress. Power is seldom voluntarily or willingly surrendered by those with a vested interest in wielding it.
The prawns in chili and garlic are just incredible, by the way. They are so good you want to be eating them for ever, and mopping up the oil with your crusty bread until you burst. Chili is addictive, as mr mike and Jamie attest - not least because it releases feel-good endorphins in the brain. And this recipe of mr mike's does not seem to have posterieur flambe consequences.
Correction - sorry, the re-gendered charcter in Battlestar Gallactica was Starbuck, not Apollo.
I see Channel 5 have cast a black woman as Anne Boleyn surprised they didn't go the whole way and make it a black man.
Missed that one, Mr Mike - you can imagine the fuss if Tom Hardy played Shaka Zulu.
v./
It is all a bit nasty, is it not, mrs i? A man who can finesse in his noggin the beating of a woman ain't much of a man in the first place, I fear.
Sumption is a much better man now that he has retired. It's as if he suddenly free.
I do not mind all this artifying with gender and colour of characters in traditional roles. Some of it is silly but silliness is part of the gig and it is harmless larking about for the most part.
Mr mongoose: I assume the Anne Boleyn series is documentary; there will be kids growing up thinking she was black. Also, bound to be all the usual virtue bullshitting. I'm old enough to remember the excellent BBC series on Henry V111 with Keith Michell.
There does seem to be an increasingly colour-blind approach to casting - maybe because there aren't many roles requiring a black actor: after Othello, and possibly Cleopatra, that's about it for Shakespeare. But to cast a black actor in a historically white role - not historic by custom and practice, but because there was a woman called Anne Boleyn and she was white, can only give rise to the sort of confusion that mr mike suggests, especially amongst those who learn their "history" from the telly. And isn't this some sort of reverse cultural appropriation, as mr verge outlines.
Harmless larking about, mr mongoose? High Art, darling, High Art.
Yes, mrs i and mr mike, all of that is true. And when it is tokenism, it is just stupid. But there is somewhere a Hamlet with Maxine Peake as the Prince. It is interesting and a different take on the psychology of the P of D. There was also somewhat furhter back - and it is probably now buried with a stake through it's heart an Othello with black and white reversed. That was truly interesting. I am sure that it is banned. Just a sec... It was Patrick Stewart (Of course it was. Ed.) Anyway, it is less harmful than medically altering primary school children because it's cool to have a right-on offspring.
You're right though. But if kid's are learnign history from the telly we are fucked for a more fundamental reason.
I have just read some of those Sumption Speccy articles, mrs i, thank-you. The social distancing one shouts out to me. My old mum is 90 and it is likely that she hasn't actually touched another human being since March. What does that do to an aged lady? At least five grandchildren within an hour's drive, nieces and nephews and their offspring too many to count within less than that. It is wicked. And it is a criminal offence by statutory instrument for me to go against it. It is time to start breaking the law.
Hardback book arrived today. I must say the quality of the physical product is excellent - never mind the content. Congratulations Editor Verge and Mrs I.
Thanks, Mr Mike. That's very good to hear.
cheers
v./
Well, that was drearily obvious.
There was a chap on PBS-something saying that if Biden succeeds in stealing the Election - and we will win now, regardless of what can be proved or disproved - then Trump will resign on the spot so that Pence can blanket pardon him of all and any previous sins from the Creation until today. It was said that this would free Trump to create merry hell. Now that would be entertaining. Merry hell with what was not specified.
Francis de Latour (famous for playing Miss Jones to Leonard Rossiter's Rigby in the fabulous Rising Damp) played Hamlet in 1979, the first woman to play Hamlet since Sarah Bernhardt, some 90 years earlier. Not a regendered Hamlet, as that idea hadn't been invented, (oh, gods, now I've said it, some director in stratford will be busily conceptualising Hamlet, Princess of Denmark, who is involved in a lesbian relationship with Ophelia) but a woman pretending to be a man, unlike the Elizabethan convention of males playing females. So Maxine Peake was following in the steps of giants. I'm sure she did a jolly good job of it, as she is rather brilliant. And that voice!
I'm sure I saw a race-reversed Othello somewhere down the line: it hammers into our blunted awareness Othello's isolation as the only black guy in a senior position in the Venetian Court, his amazing achievement won by his strategy and bloodthirstiness in defeating the state's enemies, so that he becomes an unusual and favoured pet, allowed to survive his seduction of Desdemona.
Because our cultural mores are so different from those of the first Elizabethans, the transposition of settings, times, religions and cultures can sometimes cast amazing light upon our understanding of Shakespeare, so that we reel back, saying - yeah, I really get it, now. Once such was the RSC's production of Much Ado About Curry, as mr ishmael dubbed it. Sex outwith marriage and one's own class, reputation, honour killings and blood debts are all fairly distant from our own dissolute modern awareness, but set the play in early-twentieth century Bombay and it begins to make the sort of sense that mr shakespeare would have taken for granted when he set his stage.
The Donald is looking tired and sounding croaky. Born on June 14, 1946, he is 74, not much younger than the worryingly confused Joe Biden. Just recovered from an encounter with Covid-19, contracted because of his belief that a leader needs to be visible and present, he has had a gruelling time of it, trying to secure the election. He's been fun, unpredictably irreverent, breaking the mould of the American political class, unwarlike, pro the American working class. Given all that, he's got no chance, really.
Mrs i, you'd like mrs m. I still remember the night that my soon-to-be-a-lawyer friend started to bully her about literature. (I had had my being gently put straight very early on.) She was 21 summers young. Polite, restrained, pleasant but he kept on picking at her. And then whoosh, "I think you'll find if you look a little deeper that..." About twenty seconds worth. He slunk away in the middle of the night. We haven't seen him since. The next generatioon is on the way too - and she has an engineer's toolbag in her kit too.
Don't you just love Maxine Peake?
Poor old Donald has won his battle. It as 4 years ago. And even though they will succeed in nicking this from him, the Senate and the House will stop Sleepy Joe doing anything - which is what conservative goevernemnt is much about. Everybody knows this was dishonest and that might just be a place to clean the gig up. Maybe Donny will even get Crazy Nancy's scalp for his spear.
We must wait and see, mr mongoose. And it might be a long wait now that Donald has gone to the lawyers. I'm quite in favour of causing maximum fuss and maximum disruption. No smooth transmission of power for Donald, no gemtleman's agreement - unless immunity from prosecution sweetens the deal.
And I'm sure I'd like mrs m. Argumentative, knowledgeable and routs the lawyers. What's not to like? Good to know that the loss of a friend was a price worth paying.
With the usual apologies for breaching blog protocol and pasting a link, but this is a clip of Maxine Peake as Hamlet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaHiEtmmsuM&ab_channel=SarahLoverly
Although the bit of business at the end is quite funny, I think it's misjudged. In the thumbnail menu at the right of the youtube page you should see the Richard E Grant version from the end of Withnail & I. Unimprovable.
cheers
v./
Thank you, mr verge. I like Maxine Peake's Hamlet and now I shall try and find the whole thing, after seeing the clip you so kindly linked to. The same speech by Richard E Grant is masterly, almost unbearable in his depression, solidly emphasised by the cinematography and the endless curtain of grey rain.
The day before the end of his term, mrs i, Donald could resign. Pence would be President for a day and he could pardon the Orange Giant of "any and all crimes from the beginning of the universe until the second my pen hits this document".
Crazy Nancy would form her own black hole and suck the energy out all of DC.
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