I was reading yet another Guardian live blog about yet another Republican debate while I was reminded of John Berendt’s old book – the one depicted above…
… and yes, it would not need much of a tweak to make a perfect Republican Debate Poster:
MittNewt In The Garden of Good and Evil
(I can’t believe I’m losing the Smurf vote…!!!)
You’d think that Putin would have enough on his plate already, what with mass demonstrations by disgruntled middle class folks…
… and now even Smurf sized protest…:
‘Russian police don’t take kindly to opposition protesters – even if they’re 5cm high and made of plastic.’
… but the once and future Russian president can outblair Blair, when it comes to Tony worthy performances of the ‘Is my face bovvered?’ kind.
So, here’s our kind uncle Vlad, telling patriotic bedtime stories to the masses:
‘Vladimir Putin has laid out his plans to compile a canon of 100 Russian books “that every Russian school leaver will be required to read” in an attempt to preserve the “dominance of Russian culture”.’
Which is cool.
Kind of.
In a desperately uncool way, of course.
Still, when it comes to torture the former head of the KGB has seen and done far worse things than inflicting books on unwilling school children.
A hundred books though?
Perhaps Putin should reconsider – or at the very least consider this observation, made by one of the main characters in Kate Atkinson’s splendid book, “Started early, took my dog”:
‘What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three thing – death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.’
Oscar Wilde once famously stated, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
I was thinking of that while reading the Guardian’s live report of the Republican debate in Florida, which had this cheap but still quite funny joke:
’9.39pm: This debate is turning into a battle to be the evil of two lessers.’
Not quite there with Oscar but then Wilde would probably not have cared to comment on the Republican primary – nor would he have been welcomed and embraced by the loving Christian arms of Rick Santorum:
‘In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality.’
Anyway, nobody reading the live report or watching it on NBC would be in much doubt that Tampa, Florida was now definitely gutter Götterdämmerung territory…
… but no-one would have been under the illusion that they were looking at the stars.
In fact, you’d have to cross the mighty ocean and then travel a fair bit further to the East, before you’d come to Poland, where the good citizens of Koscierzyna might be less bon motary than dear old Oscar but would have been perfectly able to paint a pretty perfect primary picture, based on their own experience:
‘Residents of a small Polish town called in the police and ambulance service to investigate after blood began streaming out from under manhole covers.’
As they say, there’s no accounting for taste…
… though it’s hard to see how the following remark can be seen as anything less than the crassest & stupidest remark this side of a cover of a gun magazine stating ‘Happiness is a warm gun’:
‘Eddie Redmayne, the star of the BBC First World War drama Birdsong, says the trenches were surprisingly ‘nice’.’
Those who want to wipe the foul taste of this idiotic statement from their brain cells could do worse than brush up their Owen:
Dulce et decorum est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Sorry. No time at all to write today.
I’m off to the shops and then I’ll be in the kitchen for a while.
Yes, and after that it’s dinner, Sherlock.
If you want to know, this is what I’ll be making, with some personal tweaks & twists:
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1387/chicory-and-orange-salad-with-ginger-dressing
http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1466/baked-chicory-with-chicken-in-a-sage-and-mustard-sauce-recipe
Nice one…:
‘A man has survived firing a nailgun into his own brain – in what surgeons worryingly said was not an unheard-of occurrence.’
Worryingly, yes – but unexpectedly, no.
Look at all the idiots maiming and killing themselves with regular guns. So, why should we suppose people won’t be in the same Darwin Award frame of mind while handling nail guns?
Anyway, more about this DIY brainiac:
‘Dante Autullo of Chicago thought doctors were joking, feeling sure he had only been grazed by the nail when it flew past as he was building a shed. Even when hospital medics produced an X-ray he was sceptical.’
What’s in a name, eh, as some scribbler once wrote? Dante, no less.
Well, when our sharpshooter leaves the hospital, with or without the nail, and goes straight to his local, his mates must surely forgive him if he goes al dante on them and mutters stuff like:
‘Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within an A&E,
For the straightforward nailgun had been shot.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this savage nail, rough, and stern,
Which in the very brain now locked I fear.’
Lovely piece in the Guardian about (and with) Leonard Cohen.
With some nice links too. Check it out.
Here’s Cohen on writing songs:
‘I think you work out something. I wouldn’t call them ideas. I think ideas are what you want to get rid of. I don’t really like songs with ideas. They tend to become slogans. They tend to be on the right side of things: ecology or vegetarianism or antiwar. All these are wonderful ideas but I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart. I never set out to write a didactic song. It’s just my experience. All I’ve got to put in a song is my own experience.’
(Same longings…)
(The summit of beauty and love it ain’t…)
I read the following in one of Jon Carroll’s columns in the SF Chronicle:
‘[...]I have no desire to meet politicians. Reading about them is fine, but I do not want to be the backdrop of a photo op. No right-thinking person does, really, and yet there they all are, grinning like crazy or looking appropriately somber, in the fine tradition of backdrops everywhere.’
I was reminded of that column when I read the following bit of news:
‘A new space chamber that recreates the toxic conditions on Venus has been constructed by Nasa, in a new series of climate change experiments.’
I mean, everyone who has been following the Republican Presidential Tour (and whenever politicians do these ‘on the road’ shows) and has been exposed to its poisonous gas bags, must, like me, have shaken his or her head and muttered something like:
‘What a perfect waste of NASA’s money to create such a new space chamber: why not send your scientists and astronauts to Washington DC instead?’
(I read the news today, oh boy…)
Two things:
a) Would it be too black and white to state that Liverpudlians are the stupidest people on the planet?
b) Words fail me:
“A cinema in Liverpool has been forced to offer refunds after filmgoers complained that they had not realised the movie [The Artist] was silent and in black and white”
(Worst selling record ever in Liverpool…?)
