Halloween

Beethoven's Ghost

Piano Trio Nº5 in D Major: 'Ghost', Op. 70. II. Largo Assai 

Soloists: Sol Gabetta, Patricia Kopachinsjaka & Henri Sigfridsson 

Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827) 

Recorded Live at Mozartsaal, Schloss Schwetzingen. 2009

 

 

The Sunday Ishmael 30/10/2022

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Phantasm Flying Fucking Fishing Boat of Doom revisited

 

This is the quaintly old-fashioned local newspaper, carrying news of the Russian shenanigans in Orkney waters. In case you missed the story, here's a summary. 

During the week commencing the 10th October 2022, the phone and internet subsea cable between Faroe and Shetland was sliced. It was claimed that this was the work of a dodgy anchor on a fishing vessel. Faroe has been granting Russian fishing vessels licenses to fish for blue whiting in Faroe's waters in exchange for Faroese fishing vessels being given the right to fish for haddock and cod in Russia's Exclusive Economic Zone. So the Phantasm Flying Fucking Fishing Boat of Doom is likely a Russian PFFF Boat engaged in sabotaging undersea cables with its dodgy anchorings.
On the 17th October 2022, the Akademik B. Petrov left her home port of Kalingrad, following the Norwegian coastline towards the North Sea oilfields. On the 20th October the subsea cable carrying internet and phone communications between Orkney and Shetland was severed. The Petrov headed west towards Shetland on Friday 21st October, passing close to the subsea cable. She then charted and re-charted several intended courses, as reported by Marine Traffic. Approaching waters west of the isle of Westray on Friday evening, she then changed course again, to take a route cutting through the heart of Orkney's Northern archipelago. At that point a Danish registered NATO warship turned up in waters south-west of Hoy and the Petrov changed course again, crossing waters close to the convergence of three Atlantic subsea internet cables, the new route taking her away from Orkney and down the west side of the UK.

Akademic B.Petrov, underwater surveillance and intelligence gathering ship.

She briefly rattled Northern Ireland, as reported on the Belfastlive newslink, but is now in the North East Atlantic, heading to the port of Belem, Brazil, at a speed of 8.4 knots and expected to arrive on November 17th. 

Orkney is feeling a tad exposed at present. Orkney Islands Council had a splendid nuclear bunker, equipped with bunks, showers, emergency food supplies, tech, first aid supplies, Geiger counters and a four foot thick door. All Local Authorities had them, intended for the preservation of the lives of those designated essential to the rebuilding of society after a nuclear strike. Over the years, as the cold war grew dim in folk's memories, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed, the bunks and showers were removed, a window was cut into the wall and the food was disposed of to the Food Bank. It was never going to work, anyway. The four foot thick door opened outwards. Imagine forcing that open with the rubble of the building piled up against it. 
 

The Sunday Ishmael 23/10/2022

Comrade Truss -  chapeau, mr mike 

 

 

She's looking remarkably well in her uniform - considerably better than when she dresses herself. Those ghastly skimpy little jersey dresses, so thin you can see the lines of her underwear through them. With an estimated net worth of £8.4 million, she could do a bit better than a Tesco dress and Claire's Accessories earrings. The King evidently thought so, as he muttered "dear, oh dear".

 

Not being sexist, honest. We made quite the fuss about Rishi's tight little rent boy suits - sleeves and trouserings way too short.

 

then there's Boris' failure to wear a waistcoat when it would hugely improve his look:

Now then, mrs ishmael, you pay far too much attention to clothes rather than policies. No, no, it's called Impression Management Theory, devised by Erving Goffman back in 1959 in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It's important if you want people to believe in you as their Alpha - you have to look the part. Maybe this is why the Tories keep trying on new Alphas - none of them know how to dress themselves.

Apart from this one:

I swear, I'm half in love with her myself, and, as all ishmaelites know, I'm just a poor deluded cis socialiste ancienne. 

Beautiful, poised, groomed, appropriately clad, with a good voice, calm hauteur and a spot-on killer punch - remember when she floored Ian Blackford - Penny looks like a Prime Minister. 

Unfortunately, she doesn't seem to have any policies. On the Laura Kuenssberg show today, she announced that she was half way between one thing and the other, so she was a Unity candidate and she'd been into the Treasury - actually into it, and had a lengthy discussion with Jeremy Cunt. Further than that, she would not stray. She fielded every one of Laura the Nose Kuenssberg's questions with variations on "nice try, but I will not be drawn on the details" . She's only got 23 MPs who have declared for her, so we'd best not waste any more time on Penny I-will-not-be-drawn-on-the-detail-Mordaunt.

Lord Mervyn Peake,  Lord Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England

told the nation today that there  “isn’t enough money there amongst the rich to get it back” when it comes to meeting the “strong case” for extra spending in certain areas to help recover from the lockdown. He said that politicians should explain the consequences of soaring inflation, the reduction of living standards caused by supporting Ukraine, and helping future generations cope with the increased national debt. When Laura The Nose suggested that the Markets ran Britain, not the Government, Lord Mervyn indignantly responded that it was not the Markets, but The Bank of England (pictured above) and the government running Britain.

For those ishmaelites who haven't got their heads round how the Tories have fucked the Eckonomy Stupid, it goes like this:

you know how if you want to buy a house, you get a bank (or building society) to lend you some money and tell them that if you don't pay back the money they can have the house instead. It's called a mortgage, derived from  Old French, literally ‘dead pledge’, from mort (Latin mortuus ‘dead’ and  gage ‘pledge’). Because you've got their money, you have to pay them something called interest. Which is a sum of money calculated as a percentage of the amount borrowed. Back in the eighties, that percentage was around 10%. On the 16th September, 1992, under John Major's Government, the percentage rose to 15% on a day known forever as Black Wednesday, because we were very racially insensitive. This is why persons of a certain age have little sympathy for younger adults who borrowed huge sums of money at 2.96% in 2021, thus forcing up house prices when too much money chased too few houses as every kid expected to buy a house and was not prepared to move to Darlington, (where you can still buy a 3 bed semi for £83,000). So, having survived paying high interest rates by not taking foreign holidays, not having Deliveroo bring cooked food round to the house at midnight, nor walking around carrying take-out coffee to go, when the aforesaid persons of a certain age finally paid off their mortgages and had a little money left over, they received in interest less than 0.05% on their savings. 

So, when the UK Government want to borrow some money to spend on manufacturing drones to fight a war in Ukraine or pay disabled people to loll about at home,  they pay interest to the person kind enough to lend it to them, that interest being set at a rate that reflects the solvency of the Government. When the Government begins to look dodgy, the people holding the Government's promise to pay back the money borrowed, understandably get cold feets and sell the debt. The new owner, recognising this is now dodgy, will expect a higher interest rate to compensate them for the risk  of everything going phooey. When Truss and Kwasi said they would stop raising as much money in tax, but continue to spend as much or more than ever, the people to whom the Government owed money collectively said, oh no, you don't. Then Lord Mervyn's lot at the Bank of Gormenghast bought all the debt, to stop another Black Wednesday. However, because we are now racially sensitive, it would prob'ly be called Grey Wednesday.

Is all that clear, class? Jeremy Cunt has got it all sorted now. Just a question of who he wants to be his Prime Minister.

 

At least the Belligerent Mrs Truss was not escorted from the Chamber, unlike Hu Jintao, 79 year old former president of China.

He put up some slight resistance, and asked his old buds to help him, but it seems the security guards knew he needed a bit of a lie down.

Anyway, moving rapidly on, and taking advantage of Orkney's subsea internet cable not having been attacked by the Phantasm Flying Fucking Fishing Boat of Doom (see comments on the previous thread), here are the autumn photos I promised mr bungalow bill. 

Harris, the blogdog, in the ornamental grasses

Reminds me of Rupert Bear's Nutwood - the trees just on the turn before the gales tear off the crisped leaves. We never have the full reds, oranges and yellows in Orkney - not quite cold enough in autumn to turn them.

The long, fruiting stems of New Zealand flax

Pink hydrangea, the papery seed discs of honesty and a cow parsley skeleton. Also known as Queen Anne's lace and hedge parsley, this pretty umbellifer is poisonous - I was told if you pick it and present it to your mother, she will die - hence its other names of mother die and stepmother's glory.

I don't know the name of this plant - anyone?

Blue hydrangea. Hydrangeas can be blue, red, pink, light purple, or dark purple. Color change occurs due to the presence of aluminum ions which are available or tied up depending upon the soil pH. They say you can change the colour of your hydrangea by burying some tin cans near its roots. I tried it once, but nothing happened.

Candy pink nerine - to be found in gardens across Orkney in September and October. It has huge bulbs that must be planted proud of the soil, as it likes to bake in the sun. Masses of strap-shaped leaves through summer die back in September, giving way to tall erect stems bearing umbels of lily-like  pink flowers 6 to 8 cms. in width. It is from South Africa, and the story goes that a ship with a cargo of nerine bulbs was ship wrecked in Orkney and the bulbs were distributed across the island. It does well here and also in Cornwall and Guernsey, hence its other names of the Cornish lily or the Guernsey lily.

Another plant that does really well here is rosa rugosa - proper sweet rose scent, vigorous habit, makes a great burglar-deterrent hedge as it is woody and thorny and impenetrable - but it is very invasive, needs cutting back with a big fuck-off hedge-trimmer and you need to run your lawn mower over the suckers, or before you know it there'll be nothing but rosa rugosa in your garden. These are the hips - big, red and shiny, full of vitamin C. During the second world war, kids were paid to collect bucketsfull of hips to be turned into Delrosa rosehip syrup, because there was no orange juice to be had. I've got a big bag of them in my freezer, as I'm going to have a go at natural dyeing. Or make rose hip syrup, should the current war necessitate it.

Now Available

 
Now that we have clearly reached the End of Days, should you need something  to cheer you up, 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.

So, what are you waiting for, Fat Boy?

Phantasm Fishing Fleet commits Acts Of War

 Yesterday, the sub-sea internet cable from Orkney to Shetland was cut, causing internet outage to the Shetland Isles. This was a few days after the sub-sea internet cable from Shetland to the Faroe Isles was similarly cut. What a coincidence, we cry! A very rare juxtaposition of events, declared officialdom. Caused by fishing vessels dragging their anchor cables across the heavily-armoured sub-sea cables. That's alright, then, we reply. We understand. Accidents do happen. Lightning does strike twice in the same place.

 

Until Rear Admiral Chris Parry (ret'd), C.B.E.,  former Director Operational Capability in the Ministry of Defence  and former Commander Amphibious Task Group, spilled the beans on Radio Orkney this morning. Radio Orkney is great - everything from a swan flew into the windscreen of the school bus in Burray to Mrs. Flett, a wifey from Birsay, won the best in show marmalade and dahlia award to yes, didn't you know, we're at war with Russia.

 

Rear Admiral Chris scoffed at the suggestion of the phantasm fishing fleet with dodgy anchors. Ho ho, he said, these sub-sea internet cables are like, armoured, man, armature built to withstand the stresses of the North Sea. Some random anchor isn't going to slice them in half. And beside, satellite images don't show any boats in the vicinity of either event. Nah, he went on, its the Russians. They've got specialised undersea cable attack vessels. They were doing it to the Scandies a while back, but they dropped depth charges on 'em, so they've fucked off to Britain.

But why, manfully asked the Radio Orkney interviewer, aware he'd either got the scoop of the year or a loony by the tail, would the Russians want to cut the internet cables of Shetland and the Faroe Isles?

Because they don't like us, confided Rear Admiral Chris. They don't like our support for Ukraine. Britain is supplying drone weaponry to Ukraine manufactured in Northern Ireland. Why wouldn't Russia chip away at Britain, exploiting weaknesses, picking off easy targets, creating pockets of isolation, costing resources and man hours to fix the damage? We need to adopt a Scandie defence strategy, drop some depth charges and coat them cables with concrete.

 

So, if you don't hear from me for a while, it will be because they pesky Rooskies have sliced the Orkney sub-sea cable.

We need a North Sea Fleet, parked up in Scapa Flow, just as in the First and Second World Wars. Handy for defending Britain's Island Counties and positioned to keep an eye on the North and Baltic Seas. Bit of a threat, like.

See where Orkney is? The first archipelago off the north coast of Scotland. Track your eyes eastward, past Norway, Sweden, Estonia, and there you go - Russia. No point in parking the boats in Portsmouth.  Track your eyes northwards - see those little things, look like dog droppings to the north of the mainland - so far and so small they are usually popped into a little box on the telly weather maps - first they came for Faroe. Then they came for Shetland. Then they'll come for Orkney. 

Then there's the electricity sub-sea cables. You know all that green-speak about Orkney being self-sufficient in electricity? That we generate more than we could ever use if we left the lights and heating on 24/7, ran washing machines and dryers continuously? Fucking rubbish. The electricity is generated on the Island Counties, sent down the cables to the National Grid, then sent back up again to be sold in expensive little units, just like for the rest of you. If the Russian cable cutters get busy on those sub-sea cables it really will be a long dark winter.

This is where all that gung-ho gets you.

The Sunday Ishmael 16/10/2022: "There may or may not have been trees."

 

The Tory Wild Hunt

Another fun week in politics. You really couldn't make it up - there was Kwasi, a thin sheen of sweat on his not-inconsiderable dome-piece, assuring the American TV viewers that he wasn't going anywhere - when bish, bash, bosh, he suddenly was going anywhere, summoned back to Downing Street to be encouraged to fall on his sword. 

and now we have a new Chancellor - Jeremy Cunt,

who assured Laura Whatsername this morning that he'd been enjoying himself on the back benches, doing the odd stint as Santa's love interest, but he was prepared to step up to save the country from the shitstorm that Kwasi summoned up. Jeremy Cunt - fuck me sideways - him again.

 

 'Twas Radio 4's Today programme that gave Jeremy his nickname - Justin Webb and James Naughtie both referred to him as Cunt, as did Andrew Marr on his Start the Week programme. They all subsequently claimed it was a slip of the old lingua, but the fact is that Cunty is a bit of a dodgy bastard. "Don't confront me with my failures", he might say, "I have not forgotten them." Indeed, not - how could he?

Jeremy's recipe for saving Britain for the Tories is the tried and trusted one of squeezing the poor and reducing public sector expenditure: drink up your bitter medicine.
Head of School at Charterhouse, Cunty went on to read PPE at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became Conservative MP for South West Surrey in 2005. He got into a bit of a muddle about his expenses, being investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner in 2009, who found that he was in breach of the rules and that "his office arrangements were at best disorganised."   Hunt paid back £9,558.50, and a further £1,996 wrongly claimed for household expenses. Expenses and other scandals are so much a part of Parliamentary life that none of this got in the way of Hunt's career and  following the 2010 general election, Hunt was appointed Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport in Cameron's coalition government. Given the quasi-judicial power to adjudicate over the News Corporation takeover bid for BSkyB, Hunt chose not to refer the deal to the Competition Commission, announcing on 3 March 2011 that he intended to accept a series of undertakings given by News Corporation, paving the way for the deal to be approved. Following a series of scandals concerning phone hacking, a House of Commons motion was planned that called on News Corporation to abandon the bid. The bid was eventually dropped. Hunt was alleged to have had improper contact with News Corp. Emails released to the Leveson Inquiry detailed contacts between Hunt's special advisor Adam Smith and Frédéric Michel, News Corp's director of public affairs and therefore a lobbyist for James Murdoch. The revelations led to calls for Hunt's resignation, but Smith, Hunt's special adviser, took the bullet for the boss, resigning on 25 April just before Hunt made an emergency parliamentary statement in which he said that Smith's contact with Michel was "clearly not appropriate".

Hunt appeared before the Leveson inquiry on 31 May 2012, when it emerged that Hunt had himself been in text and private email contact with James Murdoch. Journalist Iain Martin claimed that at a 2010 event held at UCL he saw Hunt hide behind a tree to avoid being seen by journalists. Hunt later told the Leveson Inquiry that "I thought, this is not the time to have an impromptu interview, so I moved to a different part of the quadrangle... there may or may not have been trees!"

Onwards and upwards for Cunty and in 2012 he was appointed Secretary of State for Health. He has long held certain views about the NHS, having co-authored a policy pamphlet in 2005: Direct Democracy: An Agenda For A New Model Party which advocated denationalising the NHS to replace it with "a new system of health provision in which people would pay money into personal health accounts, which they could then use to shop around for care from public and private providers. Those who could not afford to save enough would be funded by the state". Hunt later denied that the policy pamphlet expresses his views  - but, by their actions shall ye know them, and under his stewardship, an estimated 10% of the NHS entire budget was diverted to a private healthcare bureaucracy and more than £3bn of contracts were awarded to private firms. Amusingly, Virgin Care sued the NHS in Surrey after it awarded an NHS contract to NHS providers, and ended 2017 with a £1bn haul of NHS contracts.

As Health Secretary, Hunt was criticised for controversial reforms, manipulating figures and increased privatisation. He declared patient choice was not key to improving NHS performance.
A few career high spots:

• The reduction of NHS beds by 15,000, reducing capacity in hospitals across England by five million patients a year, thus nicely positioning Britain to deal with the global pandemic which had been regularly predicted by analysts and eventually hit Britain in 2020.
•  Cuts of £22 billion in the guise of savings.
• Dropping funding levels to 1950s levels. 
•  In February 2016 he was polled as the most disliked frontline British politician.
• The closure, amongst others, of 31 hospital units, nine GP surgeries, seven mental health units, six A&E departments, six walk-in centres, and four maternity units.
• Staff reductions: in consequence of real-term pay cuts and the scrapping of nursing bursaries, the NHS is currently short of 40,000 nurses, and there has been a 10% increase in unfilled vacancies across the whole of the service, whilst under his stewardship, there were 1,200 fewer GPs than when he took office. Under the crazy remuneration system, it pays G.P.s to reduce their working hours and to retire early. In consequence of understaffing, at the height of the Covid crisis, it was impossible to staff the Nightingale hospitals thrown up in a hurry and at great expense in 2020, some two years after he left office, yielding the post to the unfortunate crying Matt Hancock.

To top it all, in 2022 he had the cheek to publish  a book with the catchy title: Zero: Eliminating Unnecessary Deaths in a Post-Pandemic NHS. (See Sunday Ishmael passim 15/05/2022) Interviewed by Sophie Raworth, he said:  “It was not about rogue staff or a rogue hospital. It was about a rogue system. A rogue system that I, as health secretary, sat at the top of.” His  book sought to explain how and why he was not able to turn the NHS into an efficient, transparent, affordable health care system. It was everyone else's fault, of course. I particularly liked this quotation: “Too often managers who had failed were recycled to jobs in a different part of the country, where they continued to make the same mistakes. ” That probably explains the phenomenon of Ministers of State fucking up one job after another, as they flit about, hither and yon, in each Cabinet re-shuffle. 

 

And now he's back. A proper Tory. A safe pair of hands. Yeah, right.

I really don't approve of this. Nor do I approve of the lax security at the National Gallery that allowed these two muddle-headed girls and a phalanx of reporters/photographers (clearly seen in the picture) anywhere near the painting.  Why target Van Gogh's Sunflowers? The national flower of Ukraine, a country enjoying much popular support in its struggles to resist attempts to fold it back into the embrace of Mother Russia. Was it a pun? Being an oil painting? Just Stop Oil, indeed! What will we do instead, girls?

.............................................................

 

Now Available

 
Now that we have clearly reached the End of Days, should you need something  to cheer you up, 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.

I simply don't believe I'm having to do this again.