It's been cold, here, in the bracing isles.
In
fact, the actors were at risk of expiring from heat exhaustion, as the
majority of the locations were filmed in Spain in 30 degree temperatures and the charge over the frozen lake took place over a cast iron plate laid on a dried river bed covered with marble dust pretend-snow.
I suppose Dr Zhivago has come to mind as hundreds have been arrested this week during rallies across Russia in support of that brave boy, Alexei Navalny, opposition leader, anti-corruption fighter and Putin's sharpest critic, who returned to Moscow upon his recovery from Novichok poisoning, having spent months hospitalised in Germany and was arrested before leaving the airport. His wife, Yulia, joined the Moscow rally, where police sealed off pedestrian access in areas and shut down metro stations. Mrs. Navalny was among the 500 detained. Across the country it is estimated that 3,000 Russians have been detained as they protested to demand Mr Navalny's release. Whatever the uniform, weaponry, or country of employment, it seems a lawnforcement officer is a lawnforcement officer. Do you think they come from central casting? 
have got nothing to do with him.
Here's Britain's finest, being zealous with a young man on his way to work. In Solihull. Which is posh, despite the comedy accent of the arresting officer.
Mr Putin tells us that the pictures of this Black Sea holiday cottage
What else have we got to worry about this week? Mainly Covid, it seems. Will Europe let us have our vaccines? Following Boris' "spicy" conversation with Ursula, in which he accused her of wanting to murder British pensioners, yes, we will have them. The little fracas didn't go down well in Brussels, where diplomats thought it best that she now resign as EU Commission President. Having routed Johnny Foreigner, Boris may have recovered from his bruising charm offensive up North on Thursday, when he attempted to turn his attention to the enemy within the gates. Madam Sturgeon encouraged her followers to reject his overtures of affection, nay, his very presence on the sacred soil of strong, successful Scotland. She tweeted a photograph of Boris stepping down from a plane with the message: "Stay Home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives." That's rude, but that wasn't all. She strongly expressed her disapprobation of this invasion of her country by her Prime Minister. She's only a first minister. Prime trumps First. (see what I did there?). Let us look on the positive side. Perhaps it demonstrates her insecurity if she is so concerned about the effect of Boris' incoherent charm on the voters.
La Sturgeon is also beseiged by the vast numbers of trans people in Scotland who find that the SNP is just not a safe place for them. She has undertaken to introduce yet more legislation to prevent them from flooding out of the SNP in their thousands - I hadn't realised there were so many trans people in Scotland that oor Nickie could feel seriously threatened by their departure to some other party. It is increasingly becoming a bit of a worry, with Nicola committing the SNP to a Unilateral Declaration of Independence if Boris sticks to his line that once in a generation means once every 40 years, so shuttup. Maybe if I self-identified as a British man, Nicola, would, on balance, tolerate me in her Tweed and Tartan Bankrupt Nation? No, seriously, I think, post-independence from the Union, I would be treated as a foreign national. Probably be made to apply for Scottish citizenship and take a citizenry test on Robert the Bruce, Robert Burns, Rob Roy, Robert Wallace and any other Robbin bastards. Or graciously surrender my job to a proper Scottish person, have my goods sequestrated, my bank account frozen, my house sold at a loss and be booted over the Border.
Enough from me and my paranoia. I thought you might like a look at this piece from the draft archive, from the 27th March 2015:
DOWN TO BRASS TAX.
Hard
to be excited about any of this stuff, the doings of the kleptocracy,
hard for me, hard for most here, I should think. It might be news to
the NewPeople, that Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs is a branch of
organised crime, extorting money from us under pain of forfeiture and
abduction and then giving it to their bosses in GlobaCrook. It might
also be news that almost by definition, Ministers of the Crown, like
Jack Torture and Malcolm Shouty, are likely to be more crooked and more
depraved than most. It is not, however, news to anyone who is properly
alive, in the old-fashioned sense - alert, curious, rational and
watchful.
It is a lovely word, watchful, yet so few of us are. Too busy. Messaging.
It is a lovely word, watchful, yet so few of us are. Too busy. Messaging.
mr
dick the prick was fulminating, recently, about his daily encounters at
Leeds railway station with texting-walkers; clever multi-tasking,
they'd call it, this unique form of self-enslavement, in which all are
now messengers, the i-phone their herald's horn, their wax-sealed
despatch, all compressing their existences into as few characters as
possible, crushing and dehydrating their imaginations into salty little
stock cubes of abbreviation and acronym and firing them off, for
others to glimpse for a moment and forget.
It is odd that language has been so truncated, one would think that with the arrival of Platforms4All it would develop and flower but no, language, like people, just gets uglier.
Miniature, too, is such a lovely word, now eradicated by, of all people, motor car ad-men and fashion designers.
When it was about ten-years old I owned one of the very first Austin Sevens;
it had a solenoid starter-button on the floor and simply refused to drive in the rain, its distributor cap sitting virtually unshielded, just behind the radiator grille and shorting-out at the first sign of rain; by the time I owned it, however, it was called a Mini and so, swiftly, was anything else that was not full-sized, not its previous size or just small; mini now - incorrectly - means small. Now the word miniature is only used by arseholes like this,
referring to small works of art, executed using all the skills of portaiture or joinery but in miniature. Min-ee-ah-tyuhs as the inexpert poseur above, would pompously say, gobbing his ignorance on any number of ersatz antique shows. Miniature can also properly refer to a horse, a flower and a single-measure bottle of spirits; it does not, however, and never did, even truncated, mean small. Except to the NewPeople. Gr8, innit? Worthless cunts.
If somebody said to me, Here is a communication/writing device, only you have to use numbers instead of letters, y'know, to save space, like, make up nonsense words and gibberish, I'd tell them to go and fuck themselves.
Ex is another one that drives me nuts. Not properly a word it is a prefix meaning from, out of - ex officio, ex gratia, ex cathedra; ex does not mean former, well, it didn't used to but now it does, now it's almost a proper noun, people speak of The Ex, meaning the former spouse, my Ex, her Ex and these two little letters somehow come freighted with a universeful of contempt, disdain and regret, are generally delivered with a sigh or a grimace. mr a young anglo-irish catholic, of blessed memory, was in the throes of a bilious parting, Ex-ing, wasn't he, when he was around. I hope he has found some equilibrium.
Now, lemme tell y'all.
My first marriage was an interval so fucking horrid and vile, so troubled and disappointing that my survival of it mystifies me to this day. I have had major surgery these past three summers but none of it, not the knives, the tubes and the stitches; not the anaesthetics, the drips and the pipes; not the bullying, incompetent nurses or the braying consultants; not the pain, the sickness, the fear; not the mad, morphine nightmares; not even the fellow patients chuntering at me endlessly, as though I was their comrade, gibbering, confiding, enlisting my support; none of this entire protracted, humiliating horror show compares for soul shredding agony with one week of my first marriage. Even so, I have never been known to describe my former partner in holy deadlock as my ex-anything. It seems so utterly disrespectful, such a blameworthy term, such a continuance of that better left. One is a wife or a husband, one simply cannot be an Ex-Wife and the Ex-ing of those relationships seems so trite, so detrimental, so trivialising of a love once new, now grown old - and worse. I used to lover her, but it's all over now, that's enough isn't it, do we have to create a nightmare character, an Ex? It will no doubt become a staple useage among Same-Sexers, married now, who will simply adore the idea that now they can get divorced, Oh, my dear, the thrill of it all, the spite, the recriminations, the scandal, the hatred. I think that's the real reason for all this horseshit, they all just wanna be divorced, like proper men. No wonder our children are all fucked-up, we can't be bothered to name the other parent correctly, as former wife, former husband or as, in my case, the-person-to-whom-I-was-first-married. Such a vicious little prefix, ex.
Government, too, since Blair, deliberately and determinedly savages our language. Govament ministers, as they call themselves, say the govament are; pompous Little Orphan Gove, when he was education seckatry, posed as the doughty saviour of learning, language and especially of grammar, even though he was adrift on a raft of solecisms, his cheesily pedantic and didactic speeches littered with examples of his own lazy ignorance - In a speech of one hundred and one paragraphs - on the subject of the teaching of english, I counted thirty-two which opened with So, But or And, verbless sentences.
No use talking to the NewPeople about the meaning of words, their potential for corrosion. No use telling them about tax evasion being the sperm of Austerity, no use saying that tax evasion is a polite term for money laundering. They're far too clever to be told about words, hurriedly surrendering all the skills which brought us here to some cunt peddling them a needless application. Sensa direction? WhadooIneedoneathem4? Got an app for that.
Applications?
I have more applications in my little finger than Appleoids ever
dreamed of, stupid fucking bastards. With my little finger I can turn a
chord into a suspended fourth, a minor, a minor seventh, a major seventh
and so on, almost indefinitely
It
is a matter of some sadness to me that the silicon chip, first shown to
me way-back, before-before, by an IT enthusiast - it was tiny and he
said, It's only this big so it can take a connector, otherwise it'd be
even smaller - has become not a liberator but a shackle. The NewPeople
trading their individual consciousnesses for that of a disciplined
collective; the whips and scourges of Totalitarianisme Consumeriste
Nouvelle being the successive launches of each new Apple collar'n'leash.
They queue all night, don't they, to acquire these things, entranced,
there at slavery's cutting-edge.
And
then they offer up to Uncle Sam's NSA their every thought, Goebbelsing
themselves, nothing to hide, nothing to fear. Although what they are
doing is worse than self-enslavement, they are corroding and
short-circuiting their very minds.
I
bought my first Richard Thompson album in the 'nineties, a triple-disc
career compilation, it was called Watching The Dark. Since then, when
anyone questions my late-nightery, my being up all night leaning on the
windowsill, when they say, whyn't you go to bed, just sitting here, on
your own, whaddayadoin' anyway, I say I'm watching. Watching what? I'm
watching the dark. Somebody must. And I don't wanna miss anything. Like
what? Like whatever my quieted thoughts might show me, if I just permit
them, watching the dark. And sometimes writing things down.
Not right, you're not.
No, I guess I'm not. I could be a member of the gaming community, couldn't I, instead of sitting quietly, watching. I could be killing cyberpeople in cyberspace.
Not right, you're not.
No, I guess I'm not. I could be a member of the gaming community, couldn't I, instead of sitting quietly, watching. I could be killing cyberpeople in cyberspace.
Is that, I wonder, the new form of pulling the legs off insects?
But back to Lord Fink and Lord Green and their mates.
Private
Eye is, I know, a minority sport and its editor deeply unwholesome, the
fact, therefore, that for some years the Eye has been reporting on the
criminality of HMRC and its cosy interface with GlobaCrook's bent
accountants - all the top names - has made little difference to the
great British public; who, after all, gives a fuck about a tinyprint,
barely legible, inky little magazine, written by and for a gang of
permanently adolescent public schoolboys? Me and the other 220,000
people who buy the Eye? Well, what's that translate into, a fifth of a
sixty-fifth of the population, nothing.
We wretched middle class oiks, we think we're so clever, so in touch, so fucking cognoscenti ; the total readership of the broadsheets, however, is about 1.23 million - a sixty fifth of all the population, nothing.
Radio Four listenership is claimed to be 10 million a week, 1.3 million a day, nothing. We are all nobodies.
The people who read the Sun and the Mail, who listen to Radios One and Two, they're the real people.
Radio Four is just our own version of AppleTruth, isn't it? Belbin Bagg, arseing away about his idea of High Culture. And what it means, to a working class Lord, like him. As if he'd know, after a lifetime spent MichaelParkinsoning his way around the droppings of showbiz, sniffing a thread, here, a nuance, there, an overarching theme to the entire series of shit-sniffing, stupid cunt.
I read one of Belbin's novels, once, Credo, about the Romanocising of native Christianity in the seventh-century North, Cuthbert and Lindisfarne, that sort of thing, and although it was based on others' researches and was an interesting tale, Lord Bagg peppered it with unspeakable, pornographic, extreme sexual violence. I have read a lot of such stuff, le transgresif, although mr verge is the house consultant on these matters, but I found Belbin's stab at the ouevre sickening and if I might say so, unnecessary.
Having such a highly developed sense of the public good, why doesn't the Eye release some of its undoubtedly worthy revelations and discoveries online, freely, pro bono? Ho-ho, would chortle the grubby little editor, in response, it's a business I'm running here, doncha know, not a campaign.
We wretched middle class oiks, we think we're so clever, so in touch, so fucking cognoscenti ; the total readership of the broadsheets, however, is about 1.23 million - a sixty fifth of all the population, nothing.
Radio Four listenership is claimed to be 10 million a week, 1.3 million a day, nothing. We are all nobodies.
The people who read the Sun and the Mail, who listen to Radios One and Two, they're the real people.
Radio Four is just our own version of AppleTruth, isn't it? Belbin Bagg, arseing away about his idea of High Culture. And what it means, to a working class Lord, like him. As if he'd know, after a lifetime spent MichaelParkinsoning his way around the droppings of showbiz, sniffing a thread, here, a nuance, there, an overarching theme to the entire series of shit-sniffing, stupid cunt.
I read one of Belbin's novels, once, Credo, about the Romanocising of native Christianity in the seventh-century North, Cuthbert and Lindisfarne, that sort of thing, and although it was based on others' researches and was an interesting tale, Lord Bagg peppered it with unspeakable, pornographic, extreme sexual violence. I have read a lot of such stuff, le transgresif, although mr verge is the house consultant on these matters, but I found Belbin's stab at the ouevre sickening and if I might say so, unnecessary.
Having such a highly developed sense of the public good, why doesn't the Eye release some of its undoubtedly worthy revelations and discoveries online, freely, pro bono? Ho-ho, would chortle the grubby little editor, in response, it's a business I'm running here, doncha know, not a campaign.
If I, as a long-time subscriber, so dismiss the fortnightly Eye, then why should some braindead texting-walker pay it any mind, not that he has a mind to start with, just a pair of over-developed infothumbs, through which he interacts with Creation, in its digitised, pseudo-reality.
Did
anyone else read and love Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, Tom Robbins'
hilariously profound diagnosis of the Modern Illness? It was the
lightest, laugh-out-loudest example of American popular philosophy, a
canon originating with Jack Kerouac and passing through Alan Watts,
Richard Brautigan, Robert Persig and Robbins, himself, among others;
funny Zen.
..........................................................
And there it ends - I think he was going to develop the theme of the over-developed thumb, as a terrific adjunct to hitch-hiking, as
introduced by Tom Robbins, but I can't find any more of it. Instead, here's John Cooper Clarke on why he doesn't have a computer. It fits rather neatly with mr ishmael's diatribe.
introduced by Tom Robbins, but I can't find any more of it. Instead, here's John Cooper Clarke on why he doesn't have a computer. It fits rather neatly with mr ishmael's diatribe.
mr ishmael's essay today was :
Down to Brass Tax incomplete draft 27/3/2015
please
register an account with Lulu first. This will save you a couple of
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.
Honest, Not Invent is available in paperback or hardback.Link for Hard Back :
Link for Paper Back :
There may be a 15% discount try the voucher code = TREAT15 in
the coupon box, which takes 15% off the price before
postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try
a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.
