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 24 April 2022
The Sunday Ishmael 24/04/2022
Was it genuine indignation do you suppose, driving Headgirl Sophie's truculent pout, this morning when Oliver Dowden firmly told her that Boris would be leading the Conservative Party into the next election? She had been firing a round of hard fucks into him about Partygate, Fines and Lies, but he was not one to be easily swayed by the lash of the Head Girl's whip.
Oliver Dowden, chairman of the Conservative Party - proof that politics is showbiz for ugly people.
Or was her disappointment, as I'm beginning to suspect, a reflection of the Beeb's game plan to have Boris replaced by a Remainer? Is there any likely successor to Bo-Jo who isn't now, or has sometime been, a firm advocate of Britain staying in Europe? Boris won the Redwall seats on the back of his Brexit credentials - which went down very well with the industrial, northern working class, who had seen pay and conditions plummeting under the willingness of employers to keep their labour costs low by the "free movement" of European labour, and had no hope of redress from the Labour Party, which, with its preoccupation with identity politics, had abandoned the interests of its traditional electorate.
The Beeb, an undemocratic, unaccountable spender of public money, made little attempt to project itself as objective about the European issue at the time and seems to still be hamstering away at its own agenda to rejoin Europe. Wiki defines "Fifth Column" as: "any group of people who undermine a larger group from within." Just saying.
And then there's the one-sided presentation by an army of Beeb reporters based in Ukrainia, seemingly determined to whip up British sentiment into an irresistible demand to declare war on Russia. Andrew Marr walked away from the Sunday morning job because, he said, he was sick of having to present the Beeb's party line. The Headgirl seems comfortable with it. She had a sprightly go at Fatty Blackford today, mocking the SNP non-nucula policy.
"We just heard about Putin's nuclear arsenal and the threat from that.
Is it really the time right now to be talking about removing the Trident nuclear deterrent from an independent Scotland?"
Whoa, Sophe - although I applaud any attempt to persuade the Tribesmen to do thinking, Sophe seems to be escalating us into Nucula War.
Fatty Blackford - further proof that politics is showbiz for ugly people
The Religious Musings Page.
I am reliably informed that, in Wales, a conversion to the Holy Mother Church of Rome is described as going up the candle. The Church, is of course, keen on conversions, and I had the educative experience once of attending, with mr ishmael, a Catholic baptismal service conducted by a black missionary priest - on conversion mission from Africa to Birmingham, and finding his congregation sadly lacking in faith and decorum. Here's mr ishmael's description of the event:
No Retreat Baby, No Surrender - (mr ishmael.1st May 2013)
I
went to a Roman Catholic christening, oh, fifteen, sixteen years ago;
it was the grand-daughter of a friend, being christened, and her father -
my friend's son - had been an altar boy, you'd think he'd know the
form - and my friend, the grandfather, the nephew of
countless nuns and priests - would know that this was a solemn occasion
and if you're not going to do it solemnly, you shouldn't fucking do it
at all. But no, it was a lovely day and all the young women were
half-naked and bare-headed, and the adults not much better. Mrs ishmael,
alone, had a shawl around her head and shoulders - everybody was there
to BeThere4 the young parents and the christenee and then go and get
pissed.
There was a new priest, however, a mean-looking little black guy, just in from Africa, and he was having none of this
BeThere4U shit. He'd obviously cast his eye over the congregation and
decided, as I had, that this was a bunch of GodlessHeathenBastards,
that, effectively, they
were wasting his fucking time. He launched into one, fired a round of
fucks into the putative Godparents and the parents. Have you got the
first idea of what it means to be a Godparent, he thundered? No, you don't, it's obvious, you need to choose people who will aid the child's path to God, who will, lifelong, stand-up
for the child, guide her and support her in the ways of the Lord;
these, he said, gesturing at the BeThere4Us, these are just people you
met in a nightclub. You can't make Godparents of people you meet in a
nightclub. But, bless him, the wee black priest, he finished the
service and everyone got into a hotel down the Hagley Roadas quick as possible and got blootered, in a very real BeingThere4U sense...
And so it came to pass, within only a handful of years, that young mother and father put themselves asunder and nary a one of the BeThere4Users,
did any BeingThere4Anybastard. The wee priest was right, we had all
been, all of us, non-believers like me, partial-believers and washed in the blood of Christ,
cast-iron believers; had all been mocking God, taking the piss. Oh,
the wee girl still sees her Dad, who is on his second or third partner,
whilst living with her mother, who is - tu-tut - on her sixth.
Enraged
by Archbishop Beard and his GodlessHeathenBastard cronies proclaiming
Britain a secular/multifaith/post-Christian society I felt determined
to prove him wrong and cast around for some Christian sect or other, in
whose box I might be ticked, come census time; whose name I might tender
when being admitted to hospital. The
Quakers, I thought, were worth a look and I e-mailed Friends House,
requesting their information pack. It was a big disappointment - their
services, ostensibly the worship of Jesus Christ, are a silenced
version of happy-clappyness. Although I despise organised religion, I value the idea of a people
coming-together in worship, by arrangement or spontaneously and like
even the most uneducated, the most defiantly agnostic, I am steeped in
the art, architecture, literature, music and jurisprudence of
Christianity, I could not be otherwise, even were I Richard Dawkins,
Bishop of the Holy Church of Show Business. I
try to go to church at Easter and Christmas, preferably in a big,
fuck-off cathedral; I try to listen to Choral Evensong on Radio Three
and I go to the odd Christian drama, like the recent Mystery Plays in
York Minster, and although I would hang, draw and quarter most prelates
and priests, I love the King James Bible as though it was the Granny I
never had; the psalms, the proverbs, the lamentations and the gospels. I
am a cultural Christian, a Zen-Presbyterian-Marxist.
I
never knew any grandparents. Obviously I had some, it's just that they
were all dead before I was born. One grandfather was a Glasgow
shoemaker, the other a clarinettist for the BBC; that's as much as I
know and I think it's as much as I want to know, despite the entreaties
of that chirpy, little blonde woman on the FindMyAncestors adverts -
FindMyAncestors? TraceMyPast? something like that, something aimed at
the self-obsessive in us all.
It simply doesn't matter to me whether or not my ancestors fought at
Waterloo or Agincourt and there's absolutely no way of knowing what
they did in the last Ice Age; all I need to know is that my ancestors,
like yours, got pissed-off with swimming around in the seas, crawled up
the beach, up into the trees, down into the caves, out onto the planes,
into the cities and with any luck out to the stars, that's my genetic
inheritance, my great aunt being a missionary in Africa is neither here
nor there.
Back when he was an engaging young singer-satirist, before he became an
awful, grimacing, prowling, buffoon-like parody of himself, Loudon
Wainwright used to sing I'm a son and I'm a father, I am just ay middle
man. It's a good line, for him, anyway. That's all there is to it, for
most of us, those of us not connected to thieving, murderous, venal
royalty and aristocracy - or to GoodFamilies, as the nation's filth call
themselves; that's all there has been for most of humantime, one's
parents might glimpse one's own children before dying themselves.
You read about loving couples who truly deeply want a family because
they truly deeply believe that it is right for them and that she just
knows that he would be a wonderful father and he knows that a family
would be just howsorightisthat for her - don't they just make you
fucking heave and puke these couples - and so they make love
considerately, thoughtful of each others' needs, and, if they are
family-hungry, in just the right position and at just the right time of
her cycle and on and on and fucking on they go, about the perfection of
their shitty little consumer lives, even their copulation benchmarked
against some Which Report on ProCreation. The rest of us just do
fucking, as we have since we came out of the ocean and our children,
rightly, in my judgement are Lust's remembrances of itself.
How could it or should it be otherwise? These are urges at work, forces
way beyond rationalisation, try as we might, we and the priests.
Y'know? In the beginning was the word and the word was LetsFuck. Says
so in the Bible.
Many thanks to mr mongoose for the Easter Crossword. For those who may not have entirely got there, or want to confirm their answers are correct - here's the Sol-u-shon.
Honest Not Invent
and Vent Stack - anthologies of the work of mr ishmael and stanislav, the young Polish plumber - can be purchased from
Amazon or from Lulu.
At checkout, try PROWRITINGAID15, WELCOME15 or 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.
5 comments:
Mike
said...
Congratulation on the crossword, Mt mongoose. I can believe how hard this must have been. Unfortunately, I failed to complete. I used to be good at crosswords - used to do the Filth-o-graph one every day before starting work in the City; it sometime took me till 11am, but the world kept turning. But now I am finding it harder to concentrate for lengthy periods. I used to be able to go to sleep with a problem and wake with the answer, but not now. I think I'm tuning out of the world.
The mean little priest piece is firmly penciled in for Ishmael's Blues (coming along nicely, software and that lengthy concentration mr mike mentions permitting.)
And begging your umble pardon, mr mongoose, but though I gottem all I still can't parse 5 across, or 19 & 23 down.
5a Old PC problem is responsible. AT FAULT Back in the days of the old king, mr v, IBM launched its PC, and then a faster one called an XT (rumoured to stand for eXtended Technology), and then an even shinier one called an AT (similarly rumoured Advanced Technology). And so "old PC" = AT + problem = FAULT, = is responsible.
19 Cat's weights. OUNCES The snow leopard is also called the ounce. (Well not discuss the apostrophe but just assume that there was one in the answer.)
23 One will never get on. AHEAD Well, this is not my best work tbf. A head being a consumer of illicit pharmaceuticals one assumes that such do not fare well against the more tedious of life's yardsticks and as such do not get on, or even, ahem, ahead.
It is hayfever time, mr mike, I am dfown 20 or 30 IQ points every year at this time. I just want it all to go away. Just spent two hours of my life buying (and taking back) clearly the wrong blades for my little multi tool. It's not difficult, is it, to put the old one in your pocket to ake to the shop. Not clever enough to think of that today.
Has Elon bought Twatter today? What larks. EVery head in Califrutopia will explode.
Thanks, mr mongoose. No complaints here about the head clue - I think I was a bit of a head myself, for a couple of years, long ago, but the old memory, you know... Anyway, I should have spotted it, s'what I'm trying to say.
5 comments:
Congratulation on the crossword, Mt mongoose. I can believe how hard this must have been. Unfortunately, I failed to complete. I used to be good at crosswords - used to do the Filth-o-graph one every day before starting work in the City; it sometime took me till 11am, but the world kept turning. But now I am finding it harder to concentrate for lengthy periods. I used to be able to go to sleep with a problem and wake with the answer, but not now. I think I'm tuning out of the world.
The mean little priest piece is firmly penciled in for Ishmael's Blues (coming along nicely, software and that lengthy concentration mr mike mentions permitting.)
And begging your umble pardon, mr mongoose, but though I gottem all I still can't parse 5 across, or 19 & 23 down.
thanks
v./
5a Old PC problem is responsible. AT FAULT
Back in the days of the old king, mr v, IBM launched its PC, and then a faster one called an XT (rumoured to stand for eXtended Technology), and then an even shinier one called an AT (similarly rumoured Advanced Technology). And so "old PC" = AT + problem = FAULT, = is responsible.
19 Cat's weights. OUNCES
The snow leopard is also called the ounce. (Well not discuss the apostrophe but just assume that there was one in the answer.)
23 One will never get on. AHEAD
Well, this is not my best work tbf. A head being a consumer of illicit pharmaceuticals one assumes that such do not fare well against the more tedious of life's yardsticks and as such do not get on, or even, ahem, ahead.
It is hayfever time, mr mike, I am dfown 20 or 30 IQ points every year at this time. I just want it all to go away. Just spent two hours of my life buying (and taking back) clearly the wrong blades for my little multi tool. It's not difficult, is it, to put the old one in your pocket to ake to the shop. Not clever enough to think of that today.
Has Elon bought Twatter today? What larks. EVery head in Califrutopia will explode.
Thanks, mr mongoose. No complaints here about the head clue - I think I was a bit of a head myself, for a couple of years, long ago, but the old memory, you know... Anyway, I should have spotted it, s'what I'm trying to say.
cheers
v./
I think that I might have served a day or two myself, mr v. Glad it was fun.
FEC BTW was meant for the fecal clue one over and was properly scatalogical. Let the idea sink and I'll spring it on you in a few xwords time.
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