‘So she was considering,in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!”‘
By the way, if you needed proof that old Lewis Carroll was just a eeny-meeny-minuscule strange, I’d suggest that the writer having a little girl ask herself if being part of a daisy-chain ‘would be worth the trouble’ might serve as part of any case for the prosecution.
Anyway, like that poor rabbit, I am late – and shall be much too late, if I don’t put this column to bed, tout de suite.
So, I will have to leave you with this small but utterly delightful quote from one of Marina Hyde’s columns.
I’m with her, all the way – meaning me, Marina and the rabbit are off, right now. Here’s that quote, and a link to her column, of course:
(Perhaps so but politicians remain the cheapest sell-by-dates on the calendar…)
You know, you read about modern-day parliamentarians and their feeble expenses scams and you can’t help but compare their behaviour rather unfavourably with the much more entertainingly lurid corruption of the old Roman empire.
Sure, our present Masters of the Universe also consider themselves above the law but they translate this into moats, duck floats and the odd exaggerated gardening bill – which isn’t quite in the same category as emperor’s Caligula elevating his horse to the position of senator and marrying & killing (& deifying) his pregnant sister.
Which may be true enough but they sure as Hell don’t make leaders like they used to anymore. As the following example shows: “Lord Horatio Nelson was giving orders 30 minutes after his arm was amputated, according to journals in the National Archive that illustrate the importance of medical skill in securing Britain’s naval might.”
These days, politicians prefer to hang on the coat tails of those who genuinely go out and do stuff, casting themselves as heroes in a shadow theatre – even contorting those genuine shadows into ludicrous self-aggrandising figures on the wall.
Enter Hillary Clinton:
“Mr Clinton’s claim that Hillary was named in honour ofSir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who conquered Mount Everest, has created more interest here than the former president’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Hillary herself has attributed her moniker to the mountaineer. But the story has a fundamental problem: Edmund Hillary reached Everest’s peak on May 29, 1953, nearly seven years after the infant Hillary arrived in the world.”
It’s probably safe to say that after that debacle (and her false assertion of having been under sniper fire in Sarajevo) Mrs Clinton will stay away from historic figures for a bit.
Which is rather a pity, since there is one particular guy she might well have wanted to emulate, more than once.
What with dubious cigars & intern stories, she might have wished to do with one of her chubby hubby’s cigar clipper what a certain priest did to the dying Napoleon:
“The owner of Napoleon’s penis died last Thursdayin Englewood, N.J. John K. Lattimer, who’d been a Columbia University professor and a collector of military (and some macabre) relics, also possessed Lincoln’s blood-stained collar and Hermann Göring’s cyanide ampoule. But the penis, which supposedly had been severed by a priest who administered last rites to Napoleon and overstepped clerical boundaries, stood out (sorry) from the professor’s collection of medieval armor, Civil War rifles and Hitler drawings.”
You have to admit that ‘administering last rites’ sounds ever so much classier than ‘Doing a Bobbit.’
(’As candles to wanton cakes are we to the gods’ - or something…)
I’m sure none of those who read this have any particular wish to go inside the toilet with me.
If they did so, they would see – at least in my home – that I keep a small number of books there. One of those, at this time, is a copy of ‘Just what I always wanted’, written by Robin Laurance, which holds ‘A calendrical collection of curious gifts – birthday presents and other offerings – given to the rich, the famous and infamous’.
Which includes a watch given to John F. Kennedy by Marilyn Monroe, a pair of Scottish terriers given to Eva Braun by Hitler, a solid gold mousetrap given to the owner of the McDonald’s chain by his wife, et cetera.
It also reports on a birthday present given to Marxist historian and writer Eric Hobsbawn by his mother. Something Hobsbawn described as ‘a very cheap second-hand bike’, which, Laurance suggests ‘was apparently a cause of considerable shame [proving that] despite his later political beliefs, as a teenager Hobsbawn was clearly as status-conscious and materialistic as any boy his age.’
That entrance had me thinking about the way politicians and commentators talk about their political enemies.
So, on the left, people are forever talking about the ‘politics of greed’…
… while, on the right, le mot juste is the ‘politics of envy’.
As we saw with Hobsbawn, it might well be that, whatever the merits of the systems they attack or champion, certain people come to certain political views because they are envious.
In that sense, Hobsbawn may have been inspired as much by a sense of childhood humiliation as Karl marx was inspired and incensed when he witnessed the foul business of child labour in England’s ’satanic mills.’
From small – and sometimes bitter – acorns, mighty oaks may grow, and all of that.
Anyway, people being people, both political camps are probably right. Envy and greed are to us what feathers are to birds and scales to fish.
The world economy might, as of yet, be rather sickly but the world’s doom sayers are still doing a brisk trade – even though some of it is the equivalent of flogging cheap souvenirs to the Lourdes couch crowd:
“Football players have been warned against spitting on the pitch,since it could increase the risk spreading swine flu - as two Premier League clubs have been hit by the virus. The Health Protection Agency (HPA) cautioned that spitting - which is commonplace in football games - could see infections being passed on from one player to another.”
As bleak warnings go, ‘Don’t spit on the grass’ is what the Titanic’s music programme would have been to that never-quite-raised warning, ‘I thought I thaw an itheberg.’
Just the tiniest bit irrelevant, I mean.
I’m sure this is just a tiny hiccup in the inner workings of the sturdy doom sayer’s machine but it would appear to be one of those days that nothing seems to go quite right for the end-is-nigh crowd. As the following story shows: “News is spreading quickly here that scientistswriting in a popular science periodical (Dutch) have debunked the 2012 date (google translation linked) featuring so prominently in doomsday predictions/speculation across the web.”
The reports of the planet’s death are greatly exaggerated, and all that.
Still, a mere delay ain’t that bad. At the very least it will give the doom trade eight more years to flog their ‘We’re so fucked!’ T-shirts.
Mind you, if the end of the world comes with the kind of portents Iceland’s most famous blogger Alda Sigmundsdóttir reports, I’m all for it:
“Like many other Icelanders, I did a sharp double-takeat yesterday’s headlines: McDonald’s – that bastion of American fast food glory – had decided to pack up its golden arches and wave bye-bye. So long Iceland. Have a nice time piecing your country back together! According to Sky News, “The withdrawal of the golden arches symbolises a sharp fall from economic grace for a nation.” Meanwhile, the Consumerist proclaimed: “Iceland is so messed up McDonald’s is giving up and going home.””
Two-and-a-half years ago, I started with an online diary, for this blog. This was one of the entrances:
Monday, April 30th, 2007
And so, it was that time again that all men good and true picked up their swords and cross-bows and went to (re)conquer the Holy Land – or more to the point: time for me to throw a few T-shirts in a bag and hop on a plane to Prague.
Every calendar year I spend at least three (sometimes four) months in that most majestic and beautiful of cities. I used to live there, many years ago – I met the girlfriend there – and, through an old friend, I still have two rooms in the Žižkov area that are mine whenever I want to come to Prague.
Prague has always been good to me. I like its relaxed attitude, its beautiful, old stones, its many parks and countless little bars and restaurants, its suicidal trams and cabs, its wonderful beer and incredibly beautiful women. The only drawback I could think of would be the millions of tourists that also flock to Prague but then, they stick mostly to the centre, so you hardly ever see that many of them anyway.
Of course, one of the most wonderful aspects of life in my Prague rooms is a complete absence of a certain animal. I pay my Dutch neighbour’s early teen daughter a minor king’s ransom to feed the bloody cat in my absence. She claims the job is even harder than it would be to baby-sit Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes fame) and I know that that’s most likely true, so I pay her without complaining all that much. Any options other than killing the little pest would be much, much worse.
So, I suffered through the indignities of modern travel. Paying through the nose to get a ticket on the plane, with less free legroom that galley slaves enjoyed – after hanging around for almost two hours at Schiphol airport for security reasons. Then a rattling Prague bus, a boring underground journey and one tram stop later I was back home again.
To the right of me football stadium FK Viktoria Žižkovand one of this city’s many parks; to the left of me a pub with a very nice, enclosed back garden - what rested of the journey just a two minutes’ walk to my apartment, taking me past two other bars, three restaurants, one wine cellar and two small evening shops. I was back in Prague indeed.
On the third step of the four-step entry of the building where I lived sat something unspeakably vile. It was cleaning its nails and looked at me with an air of proprietorial disgust:
“What took you so bloody long?” it asked.
I’ll be returning to Prague in two weeks time. I thought it would only be fair to give fair warning that I plan to pick up the diary writing again…
You know how they say that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put an omelette together and serve it between them…
… which goes a long way explaining how that king’s head, in the end, came a-tumbling down, Humpty Dumpty style.
Ah yes, those good old nursery rhymes.
Such a pity they are disappearing fast from the communally shared aural landscape. Chances are most young children will know the lyrics from a Lady Gaga or Snoop Dogg song before they will ever get the chance to hear of Humpty Dumpty, Georgie Porgie and the others.
(Probably also because their parents are too busy humming ABBA and Meatloaf tunes to sing the real classics to their kids.)
As most people know, a lot of those old nursery rhymes had hidden and quite often political agendas. As I already hinted at in the first two alineas, Humpty Dumpty was, supposedly, a cannon that went all ‘Challenger’ during a siege in the English Civil War. Many other nursery rhymes have similar, rather cryptic references.
Take that other one, ‘Ride a Cock Horse’:
“Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
She shall have music wherever she goes.”
Which (supposedly) had everything to do with Lady Godiva, who rode naked through the town of Coventry, as part of a widespread tax protest that puts shame to any lukewarm Tea Party.
Anyway, it is a pity that we don’t do nursery rhymes anymore – especially with the kind of political issues and leaders that we now have.
From the aforementioned Challenger fiasco to the Afghan war; from George Bush’s pretzels to Bill Clinton’s hard-on. From Gordon Brown’s glass eye, through Putin’s bare-chested holiday snaps, to fully naked prostitutes at Berlusconi’s summer parties.
So many lurid and silly stories – and so little time for nursery rhymes, these days…
Maybe I should try to write some new ones, in the coming days and weeks. it would make for a rather nifty, new category on this blog, next to the sport/sex/politics/satire/etc options.
We’ll see how that one will work out. Time for me now to make one last pot of tea, before I have to leave for work again.
Yes, Robert Crumb, the man who gave us Fritz the Cat, Devil Girl and other undergroundish delights, has gone Biblical – with a vengeance, you might almost add.
This is not about that, however – but the story did have my mind wander down other pastures green & garish.
So, what I was thinking was, If you can make a comic strip out of Genesis, you could use other popular mediums as well. Messrs Webber & Rice already gave us their excruciating Jesus Christ Superstar, so why not do a slightly more up to date version of that – but a bit more Tarantino than Cecil B. Demille, if you like?
A karaoke version of the Bible, anyone?
I mean, no disrespect to the leading man of Ecclesiastes but he is a bit dull, isn’t he?
Yes, you know who I mean. The guy with the ‘Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt’ attitude:
“All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
Wouldn’t that sound ever so much nicer if the prophet would exchange his white robes for a sleek little black number, don a wig and do a cover of Grace Jones’s old classic, ‘I’ve seen this face before‘?
Talking of which…
Karaoke, I mean – and that dreadful feeling of having seen and heard it all before, many more times than even a coke head on speed dial can SMS ‘Groundhog Day’.
Here’s a truly nightmarish story for you:
“Hide Saito winces slightly and returns to his glowing console.With the help of The Times, a strange and terrible milestone has been reached: perhaps uniquely in the world, Mr Saito has now heard My Way sung badly a total of 25,000 times. His tears, as always, are wept on the inside. Watching customers indulging the delusion that they can sing like Frank Sinatra, Shirley Bassey or Liam Gallagher, says the owner of Smash Hits, is the price to be paid for running Tokyo’s most famous karaoke bar.”
You know, there I thought that there couldn’t be a more Hellish job than that of parliamentary secretary…
Talking of politics, though – and old Ecclesiastes (sans Grace Jones outfit, alas): Even that grumpiest of characters in the grouch fest more commonly referred to as the Old Testament would have to admit that you don’t see the following each day.
I mean, a celebrity who talks sense about political issues? What next? An actual politician who talks sense?
Okay, maybe that would be expecting entirely too much.
Anyway, let’s dispel all these rather disturbing images of prophets in drag and drunks doing Sinatra and parliamentary secretaries being forced to write out all those dreadful platitudes with Brad Pitt’s rather surprising words of wisdom and common sense.
Enjoy:
“You shouldn’t speak until you know what you’re talking about. That’s why I get uncomfortable with interviews. Reporters ask me what I feel China should do about Tibet. Who cares what I think China should do? I’m a fucking actor! They hand me a script. I act. I’m here for entertainment. Basically, when you whittle everything away, I’m a grown man who puts on makeup.”
Today, I’ll give you four quotes: Three directly lifted from as many different newspapers, and the last one by one of our more sensible celebs.
None of these quotes are related. If you want to play, you could try and think of something funny and/or interesting to say about any one of them – or you could try and link two, three or all of them together into a juicy mess.
Tomorrow, I will try and do the same.
I promise that I will play fare. In other words, I haven’t rigged the game: I truly have no idea, as of yet, what to do with any of these quotes. They just caught my fancy – and whenever I read something that interests me, I copy-paste it into my (seriously overcrowded) ‘COLUMNS.odt’ file.
Anyway, here goes. The first one comes from a Times article; the second is the first paragraph of today’s column by Charlie Brooker in the Guardian; the third is something I found on a ‘hostednews’ site; the fourth is a rather splendid comment made by Brad Pitt:
1) “Hide Saito winces slightlyand returns to his glowing console. With the help of The Times, a strange and terrible milestone has been reached: perhaps uniquely in the world, Mr Saito has now heard My Way sung badly a total of 25,000 times. His tears, as always, are wept on the inside. Watching customers indulging the delusion that they can sing like Frank Sinatra, Shirley Bassey or Liam Gallagher, says the owner of Smash Hits, is the price to be paid for running Tokyo’s most famous karaoke bar.”
2) “Skin is rubbish. What is skin anyway?Just a stretchy bag for keeping yourself in. A badly designed bag at that: it gets torn too easily and breaks out in pimples at inopportune moments. The one good thing about skin is that it’s available in different colours – and even that’s a disadvantage, because a) you can’t choose the colour yourself yet b) people judge you by it anyway, as though skin is directly attached to your soul by tiny cables and functions as a handy visual indicator of your overall human worth.”
3) “ BERLIN — Germany’s newly elected coalition got set for governmenton Saturday after adopting a common programme in a late-night meeting aimed at guiding the country out of its worst recession since World War II. Chancellor Angela Merkel won a second term in elections on September 27, managing also to ditch her previous coalition partners, the centre-left Social Democrats, in favour of the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP).”
4) “You shouldn’t speak until you know what you’re talking about. That’s why I get uncomfortable with interviews. Reporters ask me what I feel China should do about Tibet. Who cares what I think China should do? I’m a fucking actor! They hand me a script. I act. I’m here for entertainment. Basically, when you whittle everything away, I’m a grown man who puts on makeup.”
I’m never really sure about that whole ‘the good old days’ schmeer.
Because complaining about the present is something that’s been done since one rapidly accelerating particle complained to another that he’d never before had such a Mother of All Headaches, approximately 0,000000000001 seconds after the Big Bang, we can safely assume there never were any ‘good old days’, since the people who lived through those days were always complaining about the present, in the same manner as we do today.
Still, some ‘todays’ are crummier than others, which means that some of those olden days must be slightly less irritating than others.
When it comes to bureaucratic annoyances, for instance, most of the past must have been slightly less awful than today. Just think about our current tax systems.
Sure, the bubonic plague wasn’t awfully nice. The Crusades must have been the kind of picnic where ants and wasps would have been welcomed as more than a bit of light relief. The Flood would not have been very helpful in terms of damp (or athlete’s foot.) I also assume that Jesus on His cross would have been in an excellent position to observe and comment upon the greener grass on the other side.
Talking of which…
In the time of the Son of Man there were also taxes. The Romans were at it, for instance – which led to that famous line about giving Caesar what Caesar was due – but in those days a tax collector could still be a mensch. Hell, one of them even went so far as to pull his own metaphorical pitbull teeth and to become a disciple of the Man who told His followers not to worry about material shit…
… and you wouldn’t find many taxmen today who’d be willing to “Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
No, these days the tax crowd is much too busy finding ever new ways of fucking with us.
All of which idle ramblings being inspired by something that happened here in Holland, a few weeks back. When one branch of the tax industry announced that, from now on, everybody who would use music clips on the Internet, should pay tax over it. 130 euro per six embedded files, to be precise – excluding VAT, of course…
… and even lowly bloggers, like me, would have to pay this tax.
Meaning that I spent the following weekend removing YouTube clips from all my old posts – all 1560 or so posts, at that particular point in time…
… which wasn’t much fun…
… only to hear last week that those fucking maniacs had changed their minds again and would not be introducing such a tax after all…
… which was a truly annoying moment indeed.
I’m not saying I would have preferred to hang out with Jesus on Golgotha instead but it did have me think wistfully of those good old days when there was a fighting chance that a taxman would find Jesus before he found yet another way to ruin my day.
Anyway, so now I’m back to posting the ocasional music link – and I have to admit that all of the above was just my way of introducing the next clip, which I stumbled upon yesterday.
It’s part of a concept album by The Collectors – and it really is the ultimate hippy experience, in terms of music.
Granted, that whole period is vastly overrated and a prime example of the ‘good old days’ syndrome in action – and yet, there was some pretty nice music made them days as well.
In yet another excellent column, titled ‘Western export of the ballot box elixir is pure hubris’ Guardian writer Simon Jenkins, mentioning American pundit Richard Haass, writes:
“Surveying the wreckage of the Clinton/Bush/Blair years last summer,[Haass] asked why the west had squandered the legacy of its victory over communism. It had shifted Russia from humiliating defeat to chauvinist belligerence. It had antagonised half the Muslim world. It had left Europe squabbling and protectionist. China had risen to astonishing commercial power. America had beggared itself with military spending. In sum, the architects of victory had shot themselves in the foot. The west is not under any threat that remotely justifies this wreckage. Instead, weak politicians, bored by domestic ills, have seized on any passing threat to boost their standing at home by fighting small wars abroad and making them big.”
You should read the rest of the column: It really is quite good (and before you start your partisan moaning: The successors of Messrs Bush & Blair are also mentioned as being part of this problem.)
It also left me wondering why it is that all our politicians turn out to be so useless. Are all human beings this stupid, arrogant, corruptible and hypocritical as the lot that always end up wriggling their way into the seats of power?
Is it like the fallacy that all victims are good? That a small nation or a person is ethical, simply because they get invaded or enslaved by others – forgetting that, if these nations and persons had been more powerful themselves, they might very well have been agressors too?
In other words, do we – who watch the news and comment on it – think that our leaders are more stupid, arrogant et cetera than us, while the only real difference between them and us is that they managed to end up lording it over us, while we were merely too feeble to prevent this from happening?
I think there is a lot of truth in that, I’m afraid.
Though I also think, like those old Athenians who first tried out this very flawed system of ours, that the fact that someone wants to become a leader should automatically disqualify him or her from ever becoming one.
I won’t pretend I have any real answers but I suspect that most of our leaders have the same kind of flaws as all the rest of us. It might just be that the only thing that, in practical terms, separates them from us, this one particular, political ambition, is what enhances all these (shared) negatives.
I know: It’s not the most original or brilliant idea – but it will have to do for today.
