The Sunday Ishmael17/07/2022

 The Hustings.

Liz Truss is unpardonably ugly. Not in that accident-of-birth-and-genetic-inheritance ugly, like Rishi Sunak, eyes too close together, jugears, malformed head on skinny little tiny body. No, I daresay Lizzie was a pretty baby, and as a young woman photographs show someone you wouldn't immediately want to hurl a brick at whilst shouting yeuch, get it away from me. Nope, Liz has built her ugliness as her Unique Selling Point, her physical face and body an external manifestation of her inner self. You know how you were told as a kid not to make faces, cos if the wind changed, you'll be stuck like that? Well, the wind must have changed a lot around the aspirant Prime Minister. The white, shiny face evidencing an aversion to sunlight, the hooded eyes disguising her thoughts and over weening ambition, the trap-like mouth the consequence of her perpetual contempt and sneer. And she has starved her body into submission, dressing herself in those narrow little trousers that flatter no-one and seem to have been designed by a woman-hating couturier of the formerly alternative and now main-stream persuasion, paired with spike heels. She's been campaigning for the top job for a year, according to the Spectator, schmoozing in chichi private clubs with her targets, buying them £20-a-throw gin and tonix in an effort to build a fan base. It must have been very uncomfortable for her on the front bench, sitting next to Boris, the bumbling liberal who denies his body nothing, having to support him in public, whilst her maggot thoughts seethed within her: when will I Be Recognised, and her wormlike ambition plotted insurrection and photo opportunities in tanks, wearing a comedy tank-hat.

 We haven't a dog's chance if Tank Girl Truss gets the Leadership. She has no coherent, consistent set of values and principles: she describes her parents as left of Labour, whilst she is right of Attila the Hun and supports whatever policies seem fashionable and popular enough to keep her in power. She used to be a very outspoken Remainer and now she is a committed Brexiteer. 

 

I can't take Sunak seriously. He appears to suffer from advanced hyper-activity, his spider limbs clad in tubes of black cloth and flailing wildly around, barely anchored to the podium, whilst his unfortunately-ugly face is so mobile that one fears that the individual features will leave base and start attacking his opponents - take that, Tugendhat, as an ungroomed very hairy Sunakian eybrow lands on the upper lip of that formerly-military gentleman, whilst the ears flap away to administer a good slapping to the tank Truss and the large and protuberant eyes roll off to up-skirt the Mordaunt. He tells us he knows what he is doing when it comes to managing the money and we've got to pay off the covid-debt that none of us wanted to incur in the first place, so he is sticking to his fiscal policies of sticking it to the poor. He is, we infer, culturally insensitive to the privations of the poor. He is unique amongst the candidates in adopting this bank-manager approach to our money: the rest all want to revert to traditional Conservative low-tax values - Tank Truss wants to borrow us out of debt as Covid was a once in a hundred year phenomenon - really? How does she know? In that she departs from her role-model, Mrs T, who subscribed to the Micawber principle: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery."

 

Penny Mordaunt, who, as you know, I had formerly rated, failed to impress. Large, bovine, slow and dressed for a funeral, her Catherine Deneuve good looks did not compensate for her lack of flash and fury, although I did catch her giving little Kemi that Tory sneery gaze - what are you doing here, my good woman? At least the Mordaunt has gravitas. And doesn't have a Willie.

Kemi Badenoch clearly doesn't think her candidacy is serious enough to warrant expenditure on a funeral suit or pair of black stove-pipe trouserings. She's right. She turned up in a bright yellow outfit and relied on a sort of school-girl eagerness to attack the Mordaunt on her trans credentials. When she attempted to call in aid Tank-Girl, crying tell the truth, Liz, Truss haughtily responded that she's not going around criticising other candidates in what she seems to think is a race, whereas we all know it is Tory in-sack fighting. Twas ever thus.

 Which leaves Tom Tugendhat. Who looks like a Prime Minister of the Conservative persuasion. Average looking bloke, nicely turned out in a conventional suit and military tie - Did I mention I served my country in the military and now I'm willing to serve my country as Prime Minister? White, male, middle-aged, can do persuasive talking. Betcha he gets the job.

 

 “The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

 

 Well; the Tories did what they do - they unseated a sitting Prime Minister, because they thought Boris wouldn't keep them their jobs at the next election, and because they are all as ambitious as fuck. Captain Hindsight and Ginger Growler egged on the process and are now, in all probability, falling about laughing whilst uncorking the brown ale, because they know fine well that Boris was very popular with the people, despite (or because of) his peccadilloes, and that whichever scum-bucket the Tories replace him with, time is now running out for the Tory administration. The only thing that will grant them perpetual control is a declared war and emergency powers.

Which brings me to -

 

Wot's on Telly

The Undeclared Fuck -Up

Was it the Ipcress File without Michael Caine and with a sprinkling of Ethnic Minority characters to bring it bang up to date? We have a Black African Prime Minister, the Muslim heroine and her family from Pakistan and the American spy descended from the slave diaspora to America, before Britain put a stop to the international trafficking of slaves on the high seas. So that's two continents and a sub-continent  covered for the important roles. All the grunts and the Russians look like White Caucasians to me.

It is again acceptable to hate Russia, now that London is not financially supported by oligarchs and Putin looks to be including the Donbass into greater Russia, so this re-working of a theme that had us terrified of total global nuclear war back in the Sixties, when everyone over the age of twenty-something vividly recalled the horror of the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (by the good guys, wanting to test the efficacy of this exciting new weapon - god knows what devastation would be caused should the bad guys decide to unleash nuclear Armageddon), is having an outing dressed up in new clothes with a very manipulative sound track. 

As a concept, it breaks no new ground. Sure, we've got the whole terrified-of-computers thing going on, it's fun to see inside GCHQ, but really - it is old, rotten meat. 

As yet another example, however, of what mr ishmael called the Grooming of the Nation, it is fascinating. What themes are we being groomed into accepting as normal? The sexual thing, of course - the depiction of lesbianism as entirely usual, and that casual lesbian sex by a Muslim girl, who strictly observes the halal dietary laws but doesn't bother with sexual religious constraints (she's also cohabiting and having sex with a white bloke who is her lecturer at "Uni") is nothing to raise an eyebrow about, let alone elevate security concerns. The flouting of sexual boundaries is also just taken for granted - there's a reason that there's a taboo on people not having sex with people that they are in power over, have teaching or supervisory responsibility for or line management duties towards. That reason being that such an imbalanced power relationship might just not be consensual, but, more importantly, will create bias towards your fuck-buddy, thus rendering entirely impossible the impartial marking of their work or correction of their mistakes and management  of their work performance. "Yeah, babe, have a blow job and forget about all that." This is why we despise dapper little Macron - not because his beautiful and glamorous wife is so much older than he is, but because she was his teacher, for fuck's sake. We can only think of him as her little puppet.

The other bit of nudging, which I lampooned in my previous reviews is the thin expectation.

The average British man is 5 foot 10 inches and weighs 13 st. 3 lbs. The average British woman is 5 foot 4 inches and weighs 12st 4 lbs (an increase of one inch and one stone from 2010).

Of course, we know that the average human being has less than two legs, so averages can only take you so far. There'll be skinnies at one end of the data and fatties at the other end. Divide the total of their weight by the number of people you are counting and you arrive at a figure that is fairly useless - less than two legs per human. The bell curve is a more useful tool to chart the distribution of any human attribute, including weight. The bell curve refers to the bell shape that is created when a line  is plotted using the data points under scrutiny:

Using this paradigm, we can conclude that all the actors in The UnDec have been recruited from the bottom 20%. Now why is this?  Does the writer/director Peter Kosminsky have a fat phobia?

 

Or is he a tool of the Government thought manipulators? (I refer you to the SPI-B lot and their paper: SPI-B: Current adherence to behavioural and social interventions in the UK, 22 March 2020)  

Is The Undeclared Fuck Up part of the Government objective to tackle obesity? If so, its on a hiding to nothing. When humans have access to nice food, they eat it. It's an evolutionary hard-wired thing. You eat now, because there might be another famine round the corner. When humans get enough to eat, they get bigger than they were during periods of acute food-deprivation - the Second World War, for example.

Only in comedy are we allowed to see actors looking a bit like you might see on the street:

Community Payback supervisor (far right) in Outlaws season 2

or in the convent:

Sister Michael, Derry Girls

The Grooming of the Nation message is clear - if you don't want to be an under-class comedy character in life, then get yourself into that bottom 20% and lose your bottom.

What did I like about the Undeclared War? Russian characters spoke Russian to other Russian characters and only employed a heavy accent when speaking English. What did I not like? Practically everything else. Re-warmed manipulative Cold War vomit. 

At least The Archers made no bones about its agenda - it was established to educate farmers following the Second World War. Just think of the UnDec as a dystopian, urban The Archers.

all episodes of the Undeclared War are streaming now on All 4 without subtitles.

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Orkney News

The Balfour Hospital, designed to echo the shape of waves and molluscs and sitting with great integrity in the landscape, was opened in June 2019. Three years old, it had its teething problems - sewage pouring out of the ground floor toilets and rolling down the corridors - that was a memorable glitch. Radio Orkney reported this week that the hospital is now so dangerous that if you need to wash your hands you are strenuously advised to use anti-bacterial and anti-viral gel afterwards and on no account to drink the water. Bottled water has been provided in pallets-full. There's a bug in the water that they can't get rid of.

 

You remember the mv Alfred disaster on July 5th? The 84 passengers aboard have been reporting tales of mayhem and confusion aboard the stricken vessel, as they scrambled for safety on the lifeboats. There was some elbowing aside, apparently, by the English. Those left behind on the ferry, as it disengaged itself from the rocks and resumed its journey to St Margaret's Hope were fearfully wondering if it had been holed below the water line and would sink in the Pentland Firth. The Marine Accident Investigation Branch is all over it and have deployed a team of inspectors. All Pentland Ferries sailings have been suspended until tomorrow.

Further maritime matters - we've had a Second World War Mark Eight torpedo blow up in Scapa Flow. The mv Athena, whilst surveying the seabed in preparation for cable-laying found it in a very degraded condition only 210 metres from an oil pipeline. The Royal Navy  came up and removed it, despite a sea-state two-three and wind gusting at 20 knots, then carried out a controlled explosion.

 

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Here's a Treat: summer cooking with stanislav, first posted August 2009.

COOK WITH STANISLAV

This weekend, celebrate Gordon Brown bringing about the end of the recession and winning of the war on terror by making some garlic-infused oil, for frying steak and chop and sausage and bacon for butty and other healthy dinners up. Also can mix-up with Balsamic vinegar and serve with chopped up baguette and butter as hors d’ouevre, if pate and prawn cocktail cannot afford, or even Brown Windsor soup. Oh, fuck me, do try some oils and breads, is very sophisticated. And cheap, too, for miserable jumped-up dinner partying sonsoffuckingbitches. Have some bread and dip in oil.

Can buy in TESCO but is shitty little bottle with two eggcupsfull of oil and not last five minute and cost too much, best to make few litres at home and shove in front of dinner guests.

Here is stanislav method of preparation.

Tools required:

BIG FUCK OFF KNIFE IS ALSO GOOD FOR JEHOVAH'S WITNESS, MORMON AND LIB DEM PPC. (NEVER COME FUCKING BACK.)

Go in garden, taking dog, Buster, for piss at same time, have to go on lead because naughty old dog is and run back in house for piss instead of do in garden, like good boy does; is only sometimes but pain in arse is. Old bloke now, Buster, and gets confused.

Go down in garden admiring last of Lupin and Highland daisy, pulled up from A9 and spread now, like fear and loathing in cabinet.

Locate some garlic among weeds and maverick potato and not worry, is not so bad as it looks

Pull up garlic from ground. n.b. is easy thing to grow garlic, just break big bulb in little clove and stuff in raised-up bed and forget about while writing blog and doing plumbing, come back in few months and pull up by neck. Can leave longer and bigger will be, but nice and young is sweetest and best, like this.

Take up in house, chop from stem with big fuck off knife and wash off from dirt, taking good care to put waste bits in compost bin.

Split in cloves and crush a little with big fuck off knife and drop precisely good handful in bottle of olive oil, any sort will do and leave for ten days, infusing to do.

 

ROSEMARY INFUSED OIL AND GARLIC ONE, TOO

Can do exact same process – Go down garden, pull-up from ground etc with Thyme, for frying or roasting chicken and stanislav favouritest of all is Rosemary, just do exact same with handful of fresh picked Rosemary and is good for Roast Potato a la Cardiac Arrest, Roast Lamb and almost any white or oily fish, only not smoked, can use any herb-infuse oil for oil-an-bread and for dressing-up salad leaf, either alone or in combination with other stuff. Can pour in mashed potato and fry up cabbage and stuff like that, cover with black pepper, ground up in mill, like Dago waiter does and say Enjoy, cheeky fucking bastard, get punch in fucking mouth off stanislav, enjoy or not enjoy is stanislav business and not oily fucking Dago in apron.

If not garden has just buy stuff from TESCO and make up as before. But garden is best and anyone herbs can grow, on windowsill even, only not hemp or Old Bill come in will bashing down fucking door and retrieve few grammes of weed with street value of ten billion pounds. All that shit. Fucking wankers.

Anyway good happy cooking from stanislav. Herbs are best medicine, look good, taste good and by Golly, does you good. Granma’s pharmacy was hedgerow, innit.

Later this weekend, Zen in the art of the Kilner Jar.

Author: Stanislav, a young Polish plumber

 Now Available

If the above essay has whetted your appetite for more from the originator of Call me Ishmael,  look no further than  Ishmael’s Blues - which is now published, in both paperback and hardback editions; both editions are immediately available from lulu.com.  The paperback is also listed on amazon. Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack, the first two books in the sequence are also available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps :

 Unless you’ve done this already, please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box.  Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed. 

The book’s full title is "Ishmael’s Blues – further Chronicles of Ruin", and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of blogdog Buster retiring from the fray, cat gloating from a safe distance. The cover is the same for both editions.

Link for Hardcover :  https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

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.  

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

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The nightmare outcome of a bizarre mating experiment between Chucky and Gnasher

 

God help us all.