Eine Kleine Nichtmusik

How Green Was My Hilltop

2012-02-19T04:26:00.002Z

This site is directly opposite our house (the source of much hooting of tawny owls at night and the occasional fox trotting down the driveway) so we are viewing its redevelopment with some interest. As well as a number of listed buildings the site contains a lot of unspoiled urban woodland: a real green lung. Plus the hill itself (as per the picture) is a grand viewpoint and open space. When Napier University moved in they remodelled the entrance to the site and built a new driveway (across the road from us) but for the most part they left the woodlands alone. They cut down some very large trees - three or four - alongside the main road to put in the new drive, which was a shame visually but not catastrophic for the wildlife as they were a bit too exposed to be nest sites or whatever.

Here is a satellite's-eye view of the site ('A' marks the spot, so to speak). You can see for yourselves how much green space there is. Whatever happens to the site, there is going to be less.

My son, the drummer

2012-02-19T03:47:00.004Z

Second from the right here is my son Ruairidh, drummer with this band (though mostly still a student at Stevenson College). He's having a good year: another band he's involved in is playing for the Scottish Children's Book Awards on Thursday. Here are a couple of articles from local papers:

first, one highlighting the guitarist in the band,

then one featuring Ruairidh.

I know Asperger's is an autistic spectrum disorder, and the article is perfectly accurate about how it has affected Ruairidh, but seeing my son baldly described as "Autistic teenager" makes me feel ever so slightly like Rain Man's Dad. Which of course I'm not, as thirty seconds chatting to my (these days) pretty normal teenaged son would show. But why not spend the thirty seconds listening to one of the recordings on the RRBB website instead?

Here he is in a different student band (from last year), channelling his inner Joe Morello (a recording I like all the more as I've been a big Dave Brubeck fan since I was much younger than Ruairidh). Oh, and drummers come with hats:

Inchworm

2012-02-19T03:17:00.002Z

In that last post I was hoping to include something of Tommy Steele as Hans Christian Andersen, a role which he made very much his own on the British stage (and in which I also saw him). However, as he never did it on TV there are no clips. So here is Danny Kaye, who was there first in any case, doing my favourite song from a musical long overdue for a revival IMHO:

Two clips of Tommy Steele, neither exactly typical

2012-02-19T03:03:00.003Z

I was Googling Tommy Steele recently, looking in fact for something like this:

I vividly remember seeing that production live, in the open air in the defensive ditch - the moat, really - around the Tower of London. Terrific.

But anyway, when I was Googling I found this mash-up which I just had to share with you all.

In America they haven't used it for years

2012-02-07T01:59:00.004Z

Still, Bonni has her uses. In an earlier post she links to this hilarious video, which follows up its informative bits on how to pronounce Arabic-derived words with an awesome punchline (which even if you don't totally agree with its politics is very funny indeed).

Bonni describes the guy as a "grammar Nazi", which tells us that as well as not knowing the difference between Spain and Italy she doesn't know the difference between grammar and phonetics. Maybe while she's back at school learning that the Holocaust really happened, she can take a break to watch My Fair Lady.

BareNakedIslam throws truth to the lions and denies the Holocaust

2012-02-07T01:04:00.011Z

Oh God, this is so funny.

To be fair, Bonni at BareNakedIslam has simply taken her "facts" from the title of the video (from Christian Broadcasting Network, so what do you expect?) But children, what is wrong with this headline?

SPAIN UNDER SEIGE: The second Islamic conquest of Spain is underway.

Muslims want to turn the most famous arena, the Coliseum, into a giant mosque. In fact, some cities in Spain now look more like the Middle East. Muslims, who once ruled most of nation, are returning in large numbers.

Hand up there at the back?.... No, Rebecca, I didn't mean the fact that she can't spell "siege", but well spotted. Yes Kelly?...... That's right, the Coliseum is in Rome. And where is Rome, anybody? .... That's right, in Italy. Yes, darling, the lady is silly to mix up Spain and Italy, even though they are both in Europe and full of funny people who smell of garlic and don't speak English very well.

What's that, Megan? You think funny old Ms Intall smells of garlic and doesn't speak English very well either? Well, you could be right.

Incidentally, any Muslim intending to convert the Coliseum into a mosque would be well advised to install modern amenities such as, well, floors.

MORE:

A couple of posts further down, Bonni links to this hilarious chart supposedly comparing totalitarian ideologies.

Let's pretend for a moment that Islam is a totalitarian ideology and that the boxes purporting to describe it are not wholly fictitious. (The one on dietary restrictions is right, though it that's a sign of totalitarianism then all those folk who describe Israel as a totalitarian state are onto something.) Let's look at how Bonni - and remember she pretends to be a Jew - thinks of Nazism. Apparently under the Nazis you could marry whoever you wanted (only true if neither of you was a Jew, a Slav, disabled or otherwise imperfect). You could wear whatever you liked, so all those Jews with the big yellow stars saying "Jude" were just making fashion statements, like the ones in the stylish striped pyjamas (and I guess the latter might feel that their freedom to eat and drink what they liked was curtailed somewhat as well). And the Nazis tolerated sexual freedom: who knew? Certainly not the thousands of gays who died in the camps, or the thousands more who were castrated.

In Berlin, across the road from the big Holocaust memorial, is a smaller one to all the gays and lesbians murdered by the Nazis.

The person in the picture is looking in at the video screen, which shows a continuous loop of two men kissing.

Yes, children, I think this Holocaust-denying American "Jew" needs to go back to school and learn some European history as well as geography.

Well this is different

2012-02-07T00:35:00.000Z

Also batshit crazy and totally amazing.

It's only a race if that helps me stir up hatred against it

2012-02-05T04:53:00.003Z

Private Eye used to lampoon the frequent U-turns in the opinions proferred by gutter press columnists looking for the next easy target: they did so via their own spoof columnist Glenda Slagg, whose columns typically juxtaposed fawning praise for, and vile criticism of, the same people in adjacent paragraphs.

Here is Bonni, our favourite nigger-bashing, anti-semitic loony, first of all telling us that Islam isn't a race: "Tell me again, what ‘race’ is Islam?". Then only a few weeks later, Muslims are an "ethnic group": "It isn’t the Star’s fault that Muslims are engaged in more anti-British behavior than any other ethnic group".

So bring your witness, love

2012-02-05T03:09:00.002Z

This story reminded me of those cases the Muslim-haters love to cite, where women in Muslim countries complain to the authorities that they've been raped and wind up on trial themselves. You know, this sort of thing. (How convenient that JihadWatch have to provide their own translation. And illicit intercourse does indeed require four witnesses, so how can the rape victim, who lacked such witnesses, have been convicted of it? Don't the professional liars at Jihadwatch read their own copy?)

For what it's worth, allegations of rape in Islamic law, unlike those of fornication, have NO witness requirement: the latter provision being precisely to prevent spurious allegations of fornication against women. Zia ul-Haq, the Pakistani military dictator, did however specify such a requirement when he seized power (murdering Benazir Bhutto's dad in the process) , in which case the introduction of Sharia law into Pakistan would ironically bring a considerable improvement to its treatment of women. And that isn't something you'll ever hear from the Islamophobes, for whom military dictators are always preferable to political Islam. (Well, except in Iraq.)

Which isn't to say that everything is rosy for sexually abused women in Islam, oh dear no. Nor for women in general. But let's keep it real, let's not pretend that laws and practices which explicitly contradict Islamic law are the fault of Islam, and let's not imagine that everything is rosy in the UK or USA either.

Oppression of women and its justification by the lack of witnesses is certainly something that's been part of our culture for a long time:

When the facts contradict the Islamophobic lies, print the Islamophobic lies

2012-02-05T02:21:00.002Z

In Islamophobic circles, fake atrocities never go out of fashion. Take this story. I read it and thought, surely Bonni and BareNakedEndTimes wouldn't have passed up that opportunity to stir up hatred with a little hoodwinking? And of course, she had it last year. To judge fron the comments under her post, some poor idiots are still falling for it.

It's hardly an isolated instance, though. Take the wholly fictitious "celebrations" in Gaza when the family of Israeli settlers was murdered in Itamar. Or this one, still being linked to by BareNakedIslam and still wholly imaginary.

When you run out of fake atrocities, make up fake crime statistics instead. For example, you can claim that all rapes in Norway are committed by Muslim immigrants. (Ignoring the vast majority committed, according to the police, by Norwegian and other European whites.) It's always easy to find things like this, because the government-sponsored Israeli media pump such lies out by the ton. And there you were thinking that Israel didn't innovate and export. Who knows, soon they may be world leaders in hate videos.

Oh, talking of hate videos, I was interested to find, when reading up on our home-grown neo-Nnazi hatemonger Pat Condell, that Richard Dawkins is a big fan. Indeed, the people at his website seem to have been instrumental in actively promoting Condell's hate speech. Any remaining respect I had for Dawkins (I really liked his early books when he wrote about genetics rather than railing against religion) just evaporated.

Whodunnit?

2012-02-05T01:41:00.001Z

And thanks to Persephone for this, which is interesting albeit in a rather nerdy way.

The Bartender Hates You

2012-02-05T01:26:00.001Z

Thanks to Joe for alerting me to this fun series of short videos:

No shit, Sherlock

2012-02-02T01:36:00.002Z

A recent study suggests that not only are right-wing political affilations correlated with prejudiced atttitude, but so is low intelligence.

Personal observation bears out the correlation. The only question left is the direction of causality. is it ignorance that makes people become Republicans/Conservatives/Blairites/swivel-eyed Islamophobes, or is it immersion in one of those cults which stunts the intelligence by systematically replacing facts with dogmas and truth with invention?

Well, duh

2012-02-02T01:23:00.002Z

Good news from the University of East Anglia.

"We will look at how the media talk about 'honour'-based violence, for example. If it's a Middle Eastern woman who happens also to be a Muslim woman it's called an 'honour crime'. But if it's a British woman who was killed because her husband was jealous because she was having an affair with another man, it's called murder."

Well, duh. But some people clearly need the lesson.

I call him Tiny, because he is my newt

2012-02-02T01:07:00.003Z

Here, if one was needed, is sufficient reason for preventing Newt Gingrich from ever entering the White House in any capacity other than as a paying tourist.

And here are a couple of Doonesbury cartoons listing more reasons why that is a probable outcome.

The only Newts I want to see anywhere near powerful elected politicians are Ken Livingstone's pets when he gets elected as London's Mayor.

A mystery wrapped inside a fake wrapped inside a ZioBlairite....

2012-02-02T00:22:00.006Z

Let's return to Jules et Jim, aka BlairSupporter and "Julie". You will remember fom my recent post that they had both been receiving threats, in Julie's case pretty serious ones, from a Twitter-using nutter called Shereef Abdallah. You may also recall that Julie described herself as Julie Anna: her Facebook ID is julieanna87. Hold that thought (noting only that the 87 is consistent with her being a 24-year-old student).

Now, if you Google that Facebook ID her blog comes up, showing that we have the right Julie Anna. Also this interesting page. So Julie Anna lives in Puyallup, in Washington state, USA. Well, that explains her closeness to Jimmy: but supposedly Crazy Abdallah turned up at her university. So is she an American studying over here? her profile suggests otherwise, but maybe it's just incomplete. Perhaps that's how Jimmy gets his news from the UK.

Another point of interest: why has Julie's blog vanished from Jimmy blogroll? It used to be there. And why is KTBFPM not on Julie's? After all, they're clearly friends and fellow Blairites, as well as fellow Americans.

And no, sorry, I can't resist. If Julie Anna lives in Puyanna, WA, does she have a "garlic aroma that could level Tacoma?"

And I am Marie of Roumania

2012-02-02T00:09:00.002Z

Apparently the police don't think this was a hate crime.

Uh-HUH. What if it had been a synagogue which had had its windows systematically smashed?

Move along people, nothing to see here, don't you folks have other mosques to vandalise?

Perhaps every word of the Bible is God-breathed: but did he inhale?

2012-02-01T23:22:00.003Z

Next time I hear some numpty mouthing off about how gay marriage is contrary to God's law, or how we should all go back to Bible-based sexual morality, I must pull this chart out and ask which of these Bible-endorsed marital practices the speaker supports.

Oh, this is so true

2012-02-01T03:40:00.000Z

Inventing the inventors

2012-02-01T02:29:00.002Z

The story begins: the Natural History Museum on South Kensington entered into a partnership with Ahava, a cosmetics company based in an illegal West Bank Settlement.A collection of scientists and film-makers wrote a letter to The Independent in protest, leading to a report.

The story was picked up by the Israeli media, who naturally put their own spin on it. They included a story from South Africa of another protest at the sale of Ahava products (which are no more popular on the rest of the world than they are here). They quote at length the response of the CEO of Dis-Chem, the SA pharmacy chain which was selling Ahava products. Which is kind of them, because it's hilarious: clearly South African Israel-Firsters are no less risible than their American buddies. His name, incidentally, is Ivan Saltzman.

"If it is your intention to boycott Israeli products, you need to be consistent if your gesture is to have any meaning. I hope you don’t use an Intel chip in your computer with which you probably wrote your e-mail because it was invented in Israel."

Well, Intel certainly has a design facility in Israel, Also one in Malaysia, one in India, one in Austin, Texas and probably others. I'm sure we'd all do just fine without the Israsli one. But "it was invented in Israel": LOL. Some aspects of the design of some chips were done in Israel. Does this dolt really imagine that Israel invented the chip? (That would be Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor and Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments: both American as apple pie.)

“I hope that you stay in good health because if you need preventative surgery against a heart attack, you will have to boycott the procedure because guess what? The stent was invented in Israel!"

What, the stent invented by Dr Julio Palmaz of the University of Texas in San Antonio?

“Likewise, I hope you are never prescribed any patch for diabetes, to deliver medication and other drugs."

Not even the patch for delivery of insulin, which was invented in Britain?

"If you are an asthmatic you may have to use a new type of inhaler (Spin) invented in Israel. So please check!"

I can't work out which of the literally dozens of types of inhaler he is referring to, but none of the main ones seem to have been developed in Israel.

“Israel has given the world the system of drip irrigation which is being widely adopted in SA with water shortages like many countries. Should you boycott all fruit and vegetables grown by this method?"

Well, we would certainly boycott the ones grown on stolen Palestinian land. In any case, modern drip irrigation was invented in Afghanistan (hah!) in the 19th century; developed further in the University of Colorado; refined in Germany, then in Australia. Finally a little extra tweak was given by two Israelis. So far from Israel giving drip irrigation to the world, the world gave it to Israel. Indeed, while I can't find out when exactly Hannis Thill made the Australian advance, but the three earlier stages of development were complete before Israel even existed!

But the really funny thing is that in his spittle-drenched blurtings of how Israel invented everything of value in the world, he totally fails to notice that the customer was not complaining that he was selling Israeli products. On the contrary, she was complaining that he was selling illegally-produced settlement products: though these may perhaps have been passed off as Israeli (a criminal offense in Europe where we "anti-semites" give Israeli imports reduced tax rates, but perhaps not in South Africa). Maybe he should take another shot at this trick hasbara business. OK, so all his "Israeli inventions" were totally, er, invented, so his credibility is pretty low, but I'm sure we'd all enjoy watching him claim that everything from the wheel to powdered milk was invented in the Occupied West Bank by "Israeli scientists". (Who of course are great at some kinds of invention: computer viruses and machines for murdering people are the main ones that spring to mind.)

Dutch Resistance 1: Nazis 0

2012-02-01T02:08:00.003Z

At last: a police chief with the spine to stand up to the Euronazis.

Amsterdam police chief Bernard Welten has said that his police force will not be arresting women who wear burqas in defiance of the soon-to-be introduced ban demanded by Geert Wilders' Nazi "Freedom" Party as part of a coalition deal (and you think WE have coalition problems....) I suppose partly it's that he has to police a city full of violent drug smugglers and other international criminals, so wasting time on Wilders' Islamophobic obsessions and making women's live miserable because their skin is the wrong colour probably seem counter-productive. But he has described his decision as "a form of civil disobedience", so it's clearly more than that. As the Dutch As-Soenna group said on its website Al-yaqeen.com, “Evidently the Netherlands still has people in prominent positions whom it can be proud of.” As can we all.

Jules et Jim

2012-02-01T01:24:00.004Z

I have been interested in the relationship between Uncle Jimmy's blog and that of his long-time fan Julie ever since this post appeared. Jimmy links to a similar post on Julie's blog, which is fair enough. The strange thing is that when the post first appeared they were totally identical (word for word). After a lengthy period when both blogs were (with a strange simultaneity) hidden behind password-protected firewalls, one or both has been edited so that there are now differences, but at the time I wondered whether Julie was simply an alias of Jimmy.

Despite their both receiving threats of violence from a nutter on Twitter, I no longer think they're one and the same: in the press coverage of Julie's troubles she is described as a 24-year-old student, which hardly fits Jimmy's "ageing American racist" profile. Also here she gives her name as Julie Anna and provides a different, if not much more flattering, picture than the one on her blog (in this one she looks a little weird, but not like a transvestite at least). She attends a university: I very much doubt Jimmy's ability to get into a British university, what with his insistence that all leftists are homosexuals and that Tony Blair's initials are written in the stars. Not even with Michael Gove as Education Secretary (though he might well agree with both propositions).

TB or not TB?

2012-02-01T01:15:00.002Z

Fried Mahooga recently reminded me that Uncle Jimmy is still posting rot over on his blog. The post that caught her attention was the one where Jimmy seems to imagine that the heavens are telling, not the glory of God but that of Toe-Nibbler, insofar as he sees the letter "T" in Canis Major and the letter "B" in Orion.

Tony Blair in Canis Major? No, Tony, you can NOT be Sirius.

(Gets coat....)

Maybe you could make this up: I couldn't

2012-02-01T00:53:00.002Z

I wonder whether all those Americans who fantasize that wicked foreigners wish to impose Sharia law on the USA are equally concerned by Congressman Larry Pittman (R) of North Carolina, who wants to see public hangings brought back for such offenses agains public morals as carrying out abortions.

Expect stoning for adultery to be next on his shopping list: I mean, that's in the Bible so must be good. And if witchcraft trials are good enough for the Israeli government they must be good enough for North Carolina. Why should those Massachusetts liberals get all the fun?

Variations on a Misery Tune

2012-02-01T00:01:00.004Z

From BRICUP:

German conductor Christoph von Dohnányi recently attracted much attention and praise for cancelling his planned appearances with the Hungarian State Opera, saying he did not want to appear in a city ‘whose mayor entrusted the direction of a theatre to two known anti-Semites of the extreme right’.

However von Dohnányi, who is the nephew of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (also grandson of the composer Ernő Dohnányi, hence my post's title), has accepted an invitation to conduct the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in April. BRICUP is appealing to him to match his welcome opposition to anti-Semitism with equal opposition to Israel's oppression of Palestinians.

BRICUP's brilliant letter to von Dohnányi is well worth repeating here.

25 January 2012

AN OPEN LETTER TO CHRISTOPH VON DOHNÁNYI

Dear Christoph von Dohnányi,

We were impressed to read that last October you cancelled several
appearances as conductor with the Hungarian State Opera, in protest at
appointments made by the mayor to the New Theatre in Budapest. You
were quoted as saying that you did not want to appear in a city ‘whose
mayor entrusted the direction of a theatre to two known anti-Semites of the
extreme right’.

We share your alarm at the growing power of racist and authoritarian
parties in the Hungarian state, and we salute you for the stand you have
taken. But we‘re also interested to see that you actively support the
withdrawal of cultural engagement as a means of expressing political and
moral outrage. Please allow us to suggest that moral and political
considerations might therefore argue against your appearances this coming
April as guest conductor with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

Leave aside for the time being the painful fact that between 1947 and 1949
more than half the Palestinian population was driven out of what became
Israel, and has never been allowed to return (many historians, including
Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe, have documented this; and then there is this
old man, Amnon Neumann, describing on film exactly how his Palmach
unit got Palestinians to leave).

Leave aside for the moment the illegal military occupation of remaining
Palestinian land since 1967, even though every day, dunum by dunum, it
removes Palestinians from their land and abuses their rights (for example,
the Guardian newspaper has just reported the systematic mistreatment of
Palestinian children in Israeli prisons).

Please look at one event that has occurred since the start of this year.

On 11 January 2012 the Israeli Supreme Court decided that marriage to an
Israeli citizen does not give Palestinians from the Occupied Territories or
elsewhere the right to reside with their spouses inside Israel. These
people, and their children, are now liable to be expelled. Articulating the court’s majority opinion, Justice Asher Grunis said, ‘Human rights are not
a prescription for national suicide’. Presumably István Csurka, whose role
in the New Theatre in Budapest you understandably object to, might voice
similar ethno-nationalist sentiments in relation to the presence of Jews and
Roma in Hungary (and according to the Anti-Defamation League, he has
done so, many times).

Our argument is that racism is indivisible. If one is outraged by the
presence in power of racists in one place, one has to be outraged by their
exercise of power elsewhere too. Israeli poet Yitzhak Laor says the Israeli
Supreme Court decision is motivated by the desire to ‘maintain a Jewish
majority…The looming expulsion of thousands will be carried out with the
silent agreement of enlightened members of society [for whom]
maintaining a Jewish majority is an ideological common denominator’.

Some of those ‘enlightened’ members of society will be sitting in your
concerts, Christoph von Dohnányi, enjoying your interpretation of
Schumann and Mendelssohn. Meanwhile, says Laor, ‘the expulsion of
women and children from their homes will be carried out by a state that
has never held Arabs to be equal before the law’.

We could suggest further reading – this account of the harassment and
dispossession of the Bedouin in the Negev – Israeli citizens, but not Jews.
This interview with Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli
Knesset, who says: ‘Jewishness here means Zionism, not Judaism. It is
misleading to talk about a Jewish and democratic state; it is a Zionist
state…To choose Zionism at the expense of democracy is now legitimate;
you are defending the Jewish state’.

We applaud the good example you have set by withdrawing from your
concerts at the Hungarian State Opera. We respectfully suggest that
consistency should lead you to do the same with regard to the IPO. Please
don’t let those ‘enlightened’ members of Israeli society continue to believe
that their racism is tolerable and excusable because it’s directed at
Palestinians. Please don’t go.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Haim Bresheeth
Mike Cushman
Professor Adah Kay
Professor David Pegg
Professor Jonathan Rosenhead

London

This one goes down to zero

2012-01-31T04:26:00.002Z

Here is the piece my string quartet is working on at present.

A reminder that Schoenberg not only could write good tunes: when he was young he did. I especially like the variation in the third movement that begins at 3:56, but it's all good.

Michael Gove plays the Holocaust card

2012-01-31T04:10:00.003Z

This story tells how Michael Gove, Education Secretary, awarded millions of pounds from public funds he controlled to an organisation which paid him as a consultant. And what is the response of this principled servant of the public to having his peculation exposed?

On Friday a spokesman for Gove said: "It is unbelievable to attack any politician for funding the protection of Jewish children. It is even more extraordinary and frankly offensive to do it on Holocaust Memorial Day."

That's right. It's unbelievable to attack a boondoggle such as providing security guards for Jewish schools (while other schools have to take their chances with crazies). And it's even more extraordinary and offensive for Michael Gove to hide behind six million dead Jews in an attempt to intimidate the media into ignoring it. Especially on Holocaust Memorial Day.

The man has no shame.

Because Wondermark is just as awesome as xkcd

2012-01-31T04:03:00.002Z

Here.

And here.

Also here, because sometimes surrealism is the only answer.

It's Etymology Man!

2012-01-31T04:01:00.000Z

Courtesy of xkcd.

Empty bookshelves, empty minds

2012-01-31T03:46:00.003Z

The banning of books has been in the news recently, with the enforced cancellation of Salman Rushdie's video address to the Jaipur Literary Festival (The Satanic Verses is still banned in India, and Rushdie evidently touches nerves there, perhaps because he is an Indian himself).

Anyway, this story reminds us that the banning of books is not confined to India, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia. I gather that Arizona bans more books than any other state on the USA. I bet they don't put that in their blurbs for tourists.

The picture above, incidentally, is of the "Empty Library", a memorial in Berlin to an infamous book-burning by the Nazis. the memorial is an underground chamber with a small window in its ceiling) full of bookshelves, but empty of books. Ingenious and thought-provoking, if surprisingly easy to overlook as a tourist.

All feedback gratefully received

2012-01-31T03:08:00.004Z

I just received a lovely email:

Hello Rob,

I'm from Austin, Texas USA, and my students performed After Juliet at the 2010 Fringe. One of my students' parents recently reminded me of your review of our first performance. I just wanted to thank you for the kind words. Our students were so excited to see the review when we returned from Scotland. It meant a lot to them. I was going to email you way back then, but the school year had already started when we returned, and we were off and running with rehearsals for the next show! I forgot, and time got away from me.

The trip to Edinburgh was truly amazing! From the friendly people to the gorgeous city (make that gorgeous Scotland), to the history and culture, we all just fell in love with your city and country. It is my hope that I will return some day.

Anyway, while I was thinking of it, I wanted to write this long overdue email to say thanks for attending our performance and for making a group of Austin teenagers feel appreciated.

Patty MacMullen

It was Don Marquis, of Archy and Mehitabel fame (and if you're not familiar with those books, I recommend you give them a shot) who likened authors who waited eagerly for reaction from their readers to someone dropping a pebble into the Grand Canyon and listening for an echo. The same is largely true of blogging, especially when writing reviews, so a reminder that one's work is both read and valued is especially welcome.

It may even inspire me (or shame me enough) to complete my reviews of the 2011 Edinburgh Festivals.

Cromarty - more than just a bit of the Shipping Forecast

2012-01-31T02:45:00.006Z

I liked this article on the BBC website.

Hilary and I visited Cromarty last year: it contains, among other attractions, a delightful restored church.

...which contains some wonderful old box pews

with marvellous decoration

A hidden gem. Hidden in plain sight, but in a place people tend to zoom past on their way to other places.

Israeli "Democracy" hard at work threatening and intimidating any hint of opposition to the regime

2012-01-31T02:36:00.003Z

Ah, democracy. In a country that never fails to remind the world that it's a democracy, even though it's clearly nothing of the kind.

BareNakedEndTimes loves it, of course.

"What did Israel think would happen when they allowed Muslims to serve in the Knesset?" I imagine they thought they might fool people into mistaking Israel for a modern democracy rather than the bolthole of a backward bunch of theocratic racists.

It didn't work, though.

Glorious

2012-01-27T03:52:00.000Z

You know what? I'm a trade unionist too. Deal with it.

2012-01-27T03:36:00.002Z

Also my thoughts exactly: though of course in Britain "Liberal" refers to the old Liberal party, now the Liberal Democrats, the heartily-despised junior partner in the ConDem coalition government. So while in US terms I consider "Liberal" a badge of honour, I would find the term more alarming here. Though in the days before mergers and coalitions I regularly voted Liberal as a student - and I had plenty of opportunities to do so, as in the days of snap elections my first year of enfranchisement contained two general elections. Since the coalition sellout, though, when the LibDems moved from the upper to the lower half of the poster, I have happily done whatever it takes to hasten the permanent demise of the Liberal Democrats. (In Scotland it's pretty much a done deal already.)

My thoughts exactly

2012-01-27T03:31:00.002Z

Pa-ru-pa-pum-pum

2012-01-27T03:07:00.002Z

My very first thought on reading this story was of the episode "In Excelsis Deo" from Series One of The West Wing, where a homeless Korean war veteran dies and Toby Ziegler is contacted because the guy is wearing a coat Toby had given to a charity shop which had one of his business cards in it. Toby arranges a military funeral.

President Bartlett: Toby, if we start pulling strings like this don't you think every homeless veteran is going to come out of the woodwork?

Toby Ziegler: I can only hope, Sir.

Where Toby could only hope, some organisations are making it happen.

ButtNakedIntall - no atrocity too vile to be applauded

2012-01-27T01:08:00.005Z

We've all seen Bonni Intall, aka BareNakedEndTimes, calling on her site for the beheading of leftists and the genital mutilation of female political opponents. We've seen her describing the murder of a Muslim baby as a "public service". She celebrates when 270 Muslim refugees drown, and cries "Hallelujah" when a further 600 die. Well, this week she cheers at the torture and disfigurement of a Canadian Muslim prisoner by a psycho. "Who cares?" that he has 50-70% burns over his body. And the comments from her bottom-feeding chums are for once even worse.

Oh, and one commenter accuses Saddam of having boiled opponents alive. Although this nbever happened, she knows it's true - presumably she can't tell the difference between Saddam and islam Karimov, Uzbek dictator and America's regional pal, who very definitely DID boil folk alive. All Bonni, credulous and ignorant as well as eager to watch anything showing Muslims being murdered, wants to know is where she can get hold of the videos.

How The West Was Ridiculed - and hilarious lies from an Israel-First nutjob

2012-01-27T00:16:00.004Z

This is a fantastic piece on Allen West, or as we prefer to call him here, "unindicted war criminal Allen West".

The comments are also great, though the last one, from Robert Kunst, brought me to an abrupt halt. I'd read almost all of it before I realised it wasn't a Daily Onion-style parody but a genuine example of utter gibberish from an Israel-firster.

I especially like Mr Kunst's claim to have visited 31 of the Nazi death camps. That would be the 6 real death camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor) and 25 imaginary ones (staffed perhaps by Barack Obama and George Soros?) Doesn't this moron realise that it is exactly this kind of witless exaggeration - terming any kind of prison camp a "death camp" - that fuels Holocaust denial? I have personally visited one Nazi concentration camp, the one at Dachau near Munich. God knows it is a grim place redolent of suffering, and people certainly died there, but that isn't what it was built for. Dachau was fitted with a gas chamber near the end of the war but fortunately the opportunity for its use was denied by the Allied invasion. (It was apparently tested, and I'm not naive enough to imagine the Nazis would test it on canaries or mice: but the gas chamber in any California prison will have killed hundreds of times more people, and we don't refer to the California State Penitentiaries as "death camps". FWIW, standing in even that relatively pristine room is as creepy as fuck, and reduced my wife to tears.)

But where to begin with his comment? The Palestinians in the Intifadas were "aligned with Hitler"? (Who died half a century earlier.) Arabs deny the Holocaust existed: well, apart from the inconvenient fact that many thousands of them died in it. The "holyland" is 5000 years old, apparently. I'm not sure whether this is a Young Earth Creationist's idea of the region's geology: it can hardly be anything to do with the state of Israel, which will soon celebrate its 64th birthday. Clearly, as with "death camps", counting isn't Mr Kunst's strong point. (From his comment, neither is English, but then he IS a Floridian.) "Obama wants the Jewish holy sights (sic) to be under the control of the U.N." Actually, when Israel was founded it was stipulated in the text that Jerusalem would be a U.N. protectorate. That lasted precisely as long as it took for the Israelis to grab it, of course: so strictly speaking it isn't only East Jerusalem which is illegally occupied, but the whole city. A little less whingeing about a place to which you have no right whatsoever might be in order, but then the President of Shalom International is hardly going to cease whining as long as breath remains in his body.

"Those Jews who sold out their fellow Jews then were called 'Judenrats'." Er, no, actually that isn't what "Judenrat" means at all. Wow, such a Holocaust expert: understands no German and scarcely any English, denies the deaths of non-Jews in the Holocaust, claims to have visited camps that never existed. All he knows is that Israel had a right to the whole Middle East thousands of years before it was even invented, and that HIS President Barack Obama is a Muslim. Really, if creeps like this hate America so much and love Israel so much more, who the hell is detaining them? I'm sure there are flights from Orlando to Tel Aviv. Perhaps in November when Allen West loses his seat (as he is expected to do) and Pres. Obama is re-elected, Kunst will do the decent thing and head off to where his religious fascism will be better received.

A little night music

2012-01-26T02:18:00.003Z

A few tracks which I've either been playing in the car or which have come to mind for some reason.

First of all, a wonderful song from the 1970s, from Mr Fox. Bob and Carole Pegg had a stormy relationship but artistically a very productive one while it lasted. I don't know how much of this was Bob and how much Carole, but both music and lyrics hold up very well forty-odd years on. The final verse always brings a lump to my throat: less really is more.

Richard Digance was a folk club stalwart who briefly hit the limelight on radio and TV in the mid 1970s. This song is extraordinary to listen to nowadays: while not remotely earnest or po-faced, for its time it was a remarkably sympathetic portrayal of transvestism. OK, it sounds a bit cliched now, and the ending is a cop-out, but apart from the Kinks' "Lola" it stood alone: and pretty much still does.

I tried to find a clip of Phil Harris doing "Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens", but failed. So here are a couple of other favourites:

and I owned this very 78 as a teenager - the band are just awesome:

And I haven't heard this one for years, but loved it when it was briefly a minor hit in Scotland:

I first encountered the sadly under-rated Peter Nardini via this gem, which really is a dig-out-of-the-archives job:

And this one I have just found for the first time. Clearly Mr N is quietly going from strength to strength, though sadly his subject did not:

Let's end with something more upbeat - good for sitting in traffic queues with:

A long line of Farquhars.....

2012-01-26T02:11:00.002Z

In view of Joe's trouble with the Doric in my previous post, I thought this (found in the Youtube sidebar) might help to ease him into it. As you can tell from the audience reaction, a Scottish audience knows instantly how the various names are spelled so are always a step ahead. There are various ways the chap could have spelled his first name: the spelling in the sketch as the same as that of my son. And I've been to Finzean....

No...it disnae hae a trunk.....

2012-01-25T03:57:00.003Z

That last post reminded me of the sketch at 40:46 here.

And then of course I had to post this one. The Ballater toyshop sketch (beginning at 8:06) is a particular favourite in our family, the toyshop in question being close to our Ballater flat.

Don't worry: when I first moved to Scotland I had trouble with the accent too.... Though of course the difficult words such as "futret" are spelled out.

Great chieftain o' the pudden race

2012-01-25T03:43:00.004Z

Tonight is Burns Night, celebrated around the globe with haggis, neeps, tatties, whisky, and "an admixture of ceremony" as the Oxford Companion to Food puts it.

The Saunders family will be doing its bit, albeit with a vegetarian haggis. Also the opart of the mash will be played in this production by large potato croquettes still cluttering up our freezer from Christmas. The neeps, OTOH, will be neeps: so genuinely swedelike as to require restraint from bursting into "Dancing Queen" while being cooked.

Hands up those who think Frank Wuterich will redeem himself at the end like Darth Vader or Gollum. Anyone?

2012-01-25T02:37:00.009Z

The main news story tonight was the end of the trial of USMC Sgt Frank Wuterich, the sole member of the Haditha death squad (which slaughtered 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in a revenge attack, including old men, women and children) to stand trial. (The other seven claimed they were only obeying orders, or some such clear mitigating factor). Wuterich admitted ordering the massacre, but was allowed to plea-bargain his charge down from crimes against humanity....murder.....manslaughter....criminal negligence.....to "dereliction of duty". You know, as though he'd turned up late for parade, rather than pulling an Anakin Skywalker on the people he was supposed to be in Iraq protecting. So this piece of filth, facing a MAXIMUM sentence of three months -roughly four days per corpse - is likely to serve no jail time at all. Oh, but he gets busted back to private and will have his pay docked. (And let's remember when considering his cruel and unusual punishment for doing nothing more than erase a couple of dozen Ay-rabs, that none of the seven brave Americans who joined him in the orgy of kid-killing will serve a single day, suffer any loss of status, nor have their pay docked by a cent. They won't even have to pay for the bullets and grenades they misused.)

What signal does this send to the world about America's armed forces? That they can commit war crimes and get away with it? That once they've invaded your country they can murder you if they feel like it, without fear of retribution?

Wuterich doesn't deserve to die - Gandalf was right - and maybe like Gollum and Vader he really will play a part for good in the future. But I fear that the lesson he will take away from his trial and ludicrous sentence is that he did nothing really bad. Darth Vader at least knew that he had gone over to the dark side.

Bonni Intall of BareNakedEndTimes naturally thinks it's dreadful that these poor dear heroes were victimised just for rubbing out a few "muslimes". Not surprisingly, she also supported the desecration of corpses by Marines in Afghanistan. (Interestingly, unindicted war criminal Allen West described their offense as "minor", which compared with his own staging of a mock execution perhaps it was.) And only last Sunday she described the murder of a three-month-old Pakistani baby as "kind of like a public service". (With many supportive comments from her coterie of knuckle-dragging survivalists.) What would we do without such folk to show us the superiority of Western values over those of the bloodthirsty Muslims, eh?

Always fun to watch Islamophobic nutters fighting among themselves

2012-01-25T01:48:00.002Z

BareNakedIslam (or as it should now be called BareNakedEndTimes) is no stranger to giving offense. However, "Bonni" needs to learn that when she gives offense to bigger islamophobes with sharper teeth and many more readers she does so at her own risk.

Debbie Schlussel is a renowned Muslim-hating nut who reckons that Anders Breivik's victims got what they deserved for being leftists, and that Lara Logan deserved to be raped while reporting from Egypt. However, she doesn't like BareNakedIslam, no sirree. partly because as a Jew she finds BNI's relentless antisemitism irritating, but also because when CAIR (the Council for American-Islamic Relations, an organisation BNI purports to hate) mounted a successful lawsuit against her (for attempting to set up a company using CAIR's name) BNI supported them. Hoo boy. Ms Schlussel is well known for her take-no-prisoners approach to those she dislikes, so her glee when BNI was given its marching orders from Wordpress (for publishing the emails and IP addresses of critical commenters, and for incitement to genocide) her reaction was predictable.

What makes this interesting is the details she posted about "Bonni". As she posts so much antisemitic filth, and so many woman-hating posts, I had grave doubts as to whether "Bonni" was either Jewish or female. And "Bonni" seemed suspiciously close to "BNI" so I was unconvinced that it was her real name. But Debbie puts us right: apprently BNI (now BNET) is "New York based Bonni Benstock Intall, a complete nutjob and antisemite of Jewish heritage". As for those who complained about her eradication from Wordpress and banishment to the crazy-fringe of a Jesus-in-a-flying-saucer website, she says " Yup, this is the garbage that the ignoramuses and morons are whining over–a 60-something crotchety, low-class, old, hypocritical bigot who hates Christians and Jews about as much as Muslims and is quite clearly in need of medication."

From little acorns grow modest oaks, and armed with this basic information I can announce that Bonni Bemstock Intall exists, is 61 years old, and lives at 1 BAY CLUB DR 19A, BAYSIDE, NY 11360. (Well, mine was one of the email addresses she was kind enough to publish so I felt I should return the favour. And no, I'm not stupid enough to have used any of my normal email addresses: I created one specially for use on her site.) If I'm ever in NYC maybe I should look her up: I always imagine her as being like Pink Floyd's "bus stop rat bag....hot stuff with a hat-pin, and good fun with a hand-gun". This is the person, after all, who takes pride in insulting Muslim shopworkers when out shopping, and who creeps round her apartment block in the middle of the night with a torch to find out where the horrible brown-skinned people she glimpsed in the elevator are living.

Keep watching the skies, Bonni.....

Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

2012-01-23T02:40:00.002Z

I liked this story. In it, Nigel Ely is described as a "former SAS soldier", though the article doesn't make clear whether that means he was formerly a Who-Dares-Wins member of the Special Air Services, or simply a Saddam's-Arse-Stealing soldier.

Either way, Thorpe and Ely reckon it's a bum rap.

Names Have Been Changed To Protect Wittier Stuff

2012-01-23T02:18:00.003Z

A lot of attention has been drawn to SOPA and PIPA by the recent 2-hour blackout of many much-frequented web pages in protest.

Among all the information about the bills, a wonderful nugget has been largely buried. PIPA ia also known as the Protect IP Act. But it has now been renamed the Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation Act. Why the name change? Well, American lawmakers can no more resist a good acrostic than could Lewis Carroll: it spells out EPARASITES.

Len McCLuskey is right on the money over Ed Balls, and Milliband's support for him

2012-01-23T02:05:00.001Z

Here.

What he said......

It is becoming clear that we only scorched the Blairite snake.....

The Parable of the Good Survivalist

2012-01-23T01:11:00.004Z

I recently posted on the video of the unconscious guy in Israel shown at BareNakedIslam, and BNI's approving comments on how nobody was paying any attention.

Now BNI's regular commenters are a bunch who mostly seem to have skipped their medication for a while. Several of them talk tough about the need to overthrow the wicked liberal President they didn't elect (damn this democracy!) and about the caches of weaponry, food and survival gear they're building up. One such is "Ret. Marine", whose handle I have always imagined was an abbreviation of "Retarded Marine", and who certainly shows no support for the current armed forces of the USA. No matter: as BNI remarks in another recent post, even a stopped clock is right twice a day (if only that were still true in the digital age....), and Ret. Marine puts Bonni to shame in a comment:

Ret Marine January 17, 2012 at 5:46 am

Pretty sad when one thinks about it, this person could be suffering from anything, and who would know if they ignore him, and who would want that on their conscience knowing if they were to inquire and assist with getting him the help required, or chose to ignore, if he were to turn up graveyeard dead and they chose to do nothing, Damn people, I am just stunned at the inactivity of those around him. Are we loosing our humanity right in front of our eyes? I shutter to think of the possibility of having anything happening to me, and you chose to just walk routinly by as if, I see nothing, I see nothing. God forgive us all.

And how does Her BareNakedness respond to this display of humanity?

barenakedislam January 17, 2012 at 11:08 am

RM, as you know, I live in NYC, where before Mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned up the streets, I would walk past homeless bums and crazies sleeping on the sidewalk all the time. Never once thought about stopping to see if they were OK, most likely because they stunk so bad.

So there you have Bonni's worldview in a nutshell. Her hatred and inhumanity have nothing to do with Muslims: just a right-wing elitist New Yorker who hates having to share the place with (yecch) poor people.

Hmmm. If the end times really did come today, as BNI's new backers proclaim, I suspect the spaceship would be leaving without Bonni on board.....

Swoosh

2012-01-17T03:06:00.002Z

From the New Statesman, on Ed Balls' recent declaration that Labour would continue wth all the ConDems' spending and tax cuts.

Why would anyone vote Labour when they're now more than ever indistinguishable from the ConDems? It's not just one maverick: Ed Milliband has come out in support of Balls. See, THIS is what so many Scots want independence from: a political system run by the well-off to ensure nothing changes. Johann Lamont must be seething as Scottish Labour's chances of survival, never mind electoral gains, just went down the pan with a loud flushing sound.

So now I've got a hole in my sweater......

2012-01-17T02:27:00.000Z

Yes we can

2012-01-17T02:21:00.003Z

From here

A blog so dumb it spends several posts whining about an organisation while continuing to give it free advertising

2012-01-17T01:29:00.004Z

You may recall I had my doubts about the proposed removal of the BareNakedIslam white supremacist blog from Wordpress, following its stay of execution.

Well, it has indeed been given the bum's rush, albeit after yet another delay to avoid hurting the poor dears' feelings. The blog is now being hosted on a server which "Bonni" tells us is in Israel, which will be interesting when she starts in on her liberal-Jews-control-the-world-and-were-responsible-for-the-Holocaust shtick. Actually the web address of the blog is now www.endtimestoday.com, in other words one of those sites which tolerates the Jews only because they will all convert to Christianity just before the world ends. I suppose it's difficult for open neofascists to find willing hosts: the intersection of Zionist terrorism and the lunatic fringe of Christianity is all they have left.

But Bonni is trying to be nice to her new hosts. Posting a video showing the shockingly uncaring attitude of Jerusalem residents to a homeless man lying in the street in sub-zero temperatures (though to be fair such behaviour could probably be found in many Western countries) she merely wonders whether the Israelis are avoiding him because he's a Muslim and they're scared he might blow up.

Her assumption that Muslims are all probable terrorists is hardly surprising, nor her ignorant belief that she could tell a Muslim from a Jew on sight. Her assumption that all those "passing by on the other side" (yup, Jesus ran this story a couple of thousand years back) are non-Muslims is interesting though. Perhaps she realises in her heart that no decent Muslim would behave in that way...... (:-))

Funnily enough, despite plenty of evidence that Wordpress's termination of BNI had nothing to do with pressure from CAIR or other Muslim groups but resulted from (a) incitements to murder posted on the site and (b) repeated publication of commenters' email addresses and IP addresses in contravention of Wordpress rules, "Bonni" insists that it's all the fault of the Muslims. In fact now she has invented "death threats" against Wordpress staffers (funny how she didn't mention those at the outset and Wordpress seem unaware of them). Oh, and it's all got something to do with Michelle Obama's campaign against obesity (no, me neither).

You know the funniest thing about all this? "Bonni" whinges and whines about Wordpress and its hypocrisy, and has had to move her blog to a different site (losing its lurid banner heading in the process), but the moron still proclaims "Proudly powered by wordpress.org" at the foot of every page. I wonder how many months it will be before one of the site's semi-literate regulars notices and alerts "Bonni". Start your clocks now.....

Of fifteen steps he has made but three

2012-01-13T02:33:00.003Z

I found myself humming this at work today. Not sure why, but it's good to share.

God, I bought that record back in 1973? 74? It still sounds great.

Steve Ashley is accompanied here by the first incarnation of the Albion Country Band: Ashley Hutchings bass, Sue Draheim fiddle, Simon Nicol electric guitar, Dave Mattacks drums, harmonium, Royston Wood, tambourine

The images on this video are pretty dumb, but whenever I hear this song I get a really vivid picture of Lord Bateman's porter taking the message to his master in a state of utter confusion. Also of Lord Bateman's precipitate descent to greet his visitor.

Enjoy. You can ponder how much is traditional and how big a contribution was made by William Makepeace Thackeray who supposedly "collected" it. Not that it matters.

Contains crunchy raw unboned real dead mouse....

2012-01-11T02:37:00.002Z

Where else but America would a soft drinks company defend itself against an accusation of a dead mouse in its product by claiming that the stuff is so corrosive the mouse would have been turned to goo? (Butch to Sundance: Are you kidding? The fall'd probably kill you!)

Non-UK readers can ignore this one

2012-01-11T02:34:00.002Z

This survey is worth responding to. Maybe we can get the law changed to make it easier for teenagers in violent relationships to access refuges for battered women (or men). Maybe we can get the law to recognise that there are other kinds of abuse than just physical (husbands destroying their wives' possessions, for example). Get involved. Be heard.

A Whole New World

2012-01-11T02:29:00.002Z

A lovely blog post drawn to my attention by Chip Clark.

I didn't see my first live opera until I was 16 (Magic Flute, and yes, it did knock me out). This little girl is very lucky to be starting early.

LHC Rap

2012-01-11T02:23:00.001Z

You have to love Scotland

2012-01-11T02:17:00.001Z

We had some gales recently, resulting in bridges closures and restrictions. Including this:

Busy, busy, busy

2012-01-11T01:53:00.002Z

Various things going on:

- building work at home (odd exterior repairs)

- getting my car fixed after a crazy Dutch lorry driver tried to take a number of tight corners in the industrial estate where I usually park and dented not only my car but two others

- preparing for the next concert of Edinburgh Symphony Orchestra: we're doing this

and this

- sorting out rehearsals for my string quartet, which has a new cellist whom we;re trying not to scare off! While we don't have any performances planned right now, we're working for our own edification on this:

and this:

with occasional excursions into this, just to frighten passers-by (and no, we haven't yet managed it with a straight face - it's the bit just after 6:30 that always kills us):

This aid isn't helping

2012-01-04T02:13:00.003Z

A fascinating documentary on how European aid to Palestine - in its present form - is doing more harm than good to the Palestinian economy. Not to mention the way in which it underpins and perpetuates the Israeli occupation.

If Tony Blair were really serious about improving the Palestinian economy (the job for which, after all, he draws a gigantic salary) you would think he might have at least attempted to deal with some of these problems. Clearly he has other priorities.

The Palestinians desperately need help to restore their crippled economy. Allowing the illegal invaders who crippled it to control how donor aid is spent is never going to work. Paying to keep the Palestinians alive and unable to rebuild their self-sufficiency is never going to work. And unless the aid is spent on creating jobs rather than causing structural distortions which prevent job creation, most Palestinians are never going to work either.

R.I.P. Ronald Searle

2012-01-04T02:10:00.003Z

Ronald Searle, cartoonist and creator of St Trinian's, has died. His surreal wit will be missed.

Not holding my breath for the good news

2012-01-03T02:25:00.002Z

I was looking forward to posting the excellent news that the BareNakedIslam white supremacist site had been closed down by Wordpress for violating its terms of service (something to do with posting calls for the extermination of Muslims and the destruction of mosques). As regulars here will know, BNI her/itself frequently expresses the desire to see leftists beheaded or mutilated on Youtube, and despite a fiercely enforced gatekeeping policy for comments the odd few thousand calls for genocide of Muslims, Jews, gays and socialists (not to mention the violent overthrow of the elected US government) seem to slip through.

Well, the site is back up for now, though apparently "Bonni" has been given until 6th January to tidy the blog up and piss off. I'll believe it when I see it: if Wordpress has had no problem with the site's content for all these years, I don't believe it will suddenly have a change of heart. The resurrection of the site at all after its closure suggests that pressure has been applied from rich right-wingers.

Another Israeli who believes laws are for lesser people

2012-01-03T01:56:00.003Z

I suppose when you believe you are racially superior to the rest of the world the planet divides neatly into two parts: countries which provide Israel with its vital drip-feed of welfare payments, and the rest which form a sort of enormous trashcan to be bombed, despoiled or whatever.

This Roten Singer imbecile admits that he set fire to 11,500 hectares of Chilean national park by igniting his toilet paper (maybe he was trying to light his farts). Fair enough, and nobody is suggesting it was deliberate, merely hugely negligent (can he not read signs about lighting fires?) But for his family back in Israel this is irrelevant, and he's being made a scapegoat (yawn....). After all, he can't possibly do anything wrong, ever, anywhere in the world, because he serves in a combat unit of the IDF. Gosh, if only he'd made that clear at the outset. I'm sure the Chileans would have been grateful that he only destroyed a few thousand acres of pristine woodland rather than machine-gunning a school or destroying a village's water supply. But hey, he's on holiday.

I had to smile, though at this comment from Accion Ecologica's spokesman:

"It would have been great to see a government as gifted at throwing water on the flames consuming our natural heritage, as they are (at shooting water at Chilean) citizens defending their rights," said activist Luis Mariano Rendon.

He's not wrong there....

Israelis Celebrate Dress-Your-Children-In-Stripes-And-Pretend-To-Be-Persecuted Day

2012-01-03T01:23:00.004Z

It's ironic that in one of the world's most vicious theocracies there should be a highly visible demonstration complaining that the government is insufficiently religious. But there you are. Israel's ultra-Orthodox Haredi community (currently around 10% of the population but expected to grow to around 20% over the next twenty years because of its huge birthrate) protested against the "secularisation" of Israeli society. Basically the protest was a complaint about Haredim's being expected to obey the same laws as less devout Jews, and specifically against the arrest of Shmuel Weisfish, who could after all hardly be expected not to assault shopworkers selling MP4 players which were capable of playing non-religious materials. There was also another nutter arrested recently for verbally abusing a female Israeli soldier who refused to move to the back of the bus away from the men (and no, her name was not Rosa Parks). These persecuted dears, on the rare occasions when the Israeli authorities give a shit, consider themselves to be the victims of a new Holocaust, hence their fancy dress.

While Tzipi Livni, the leader of the opposition, spoke out against the demonstrators, as did the leading ultra-orthodox rabbi. But from the "secular" government? Only Ehud Barak seems to have had the courage to stand up to the religious crazies. After all, as one of the protestors said, “We didn’t come to demonstrate, we came to show our power, and that our power is forever.”

And of course much of the anger has not been at the ludicrous nature of the protest itself, but at its use of imagery from the Holocaust (TM) which has proved so valuable over the years to the Israeli state and its supporters.

Hungary hasn't tried this - yet

2012-01-03T01:16:00.002Z

Barack Obama will be re-elected in 2012 simply because there is no credible alternative. While this is a good thing given the toxic state of the Republican Party right now, let's not kid ourselves. If there were any doubt before that he is the worst Democrat to occupy the Oval Office since before WW2, this new law of his permitting the indefinite military detention of practically anyone, anywhere, would remove it.

The Magyar for "jackboot" is "lovaglócsizma". This may come in handy.

2012-01-03T00:48:00.002Z

Hungary's new constitution sounds deeply worrying. A purge of judges, government control of the formerly independent central bank, constitutional outlawing of abortion and same-sex marriage, increased media control, and moves which appear to be a prelude to the banning of the main opposition (Socialist) party altogether. Many religious denominations have also been outlawed.

I hope the EU will ignore Hungary's calls for financial support for its economy for as long as this disastrous constitution remains in force. For this is the first domino to fall in the resurgence of European fascism.

Happy New Year Everybody!

2012-01-03T00:14:00.006Z

Saw in the New Year with friends in Braemar, then on 1st January went for a walk with them near the Quoich (getting only slightly wet but passing various patches of remaining snow). Yesterday (2nd) we got up fairly early to listen to a programme on Radio Scotland all about the writing/recording/etc of Fairytale of New York (entitled Behind The Fairytale). Then we went for a walk in Glen Tanar during which we were actually caught in our first snow of 2012 (very light).

On 1st we watched To Sir With Love in the evening, and last night we watched 9 to 5. Today is Dabney Coleman's 80th birthday: hard to believe. Here he is being ably supported by Dolly Parton (who in turn....(:-)) )

Cleavage

Nine to Five

— MOVIECLIPS.com

A couple of great cartoons from the Economist's KAL

2011-12-30T03:17:00.003Z

Germany Calling

2011-12-28T00:13:00.007Z

Back at the start of December I paid a visit to the former East Germany. I had a week's holiday to use up, and my nephew and his wife in Leipzig had just made me a great-uncle by having a daughter Clara. So I spent a few nights in a hostel in Berlin (Generator Hostel, highly recommended BTW), and a couple in a B&B in Leipzig which enabled me to combine touristy things there (and in Dresden on the way back) with some great-uncleish doting. Or maybe dotage...

So here is Clara:

and here she is with her parents, my nephew Gideon and his wife Gabi:

Here are Gideon and Gabi (Clara asleep out of shot) after a delightful lunch in the Auerbachskeller, a restaurant and wine bar which features in a scene in Goethe's Faust.

I had a great time, both by myself and with G&G, and I look forward to going back some time.

Oh, and still in Leipzig, here is the world's biggest outdoor Advent calendar.

Can I visit as a tourist if pretend not to be a Christian and promise to disinfect anything I touch?

2011-12-27T23:41:00.006Z

It must be wonderful to live in a democracy where being of the wrong religion doesn't make you an impurity who defiles the ground you stand on.

Where Christians aren't spat on in the street.

(Well, you can hardly expect a backward theocracy to have the same standards of hygiene as, say, Jordan or Syria.)

Where women's rights organisations are closed by the military authorities (because obviously women have no rights.)

Where "tourists" belonging to the state religion are permitted to carry automatic weapons and vandalise property as part of state-organised "religious tours"? Anywhere else it would be called terrorism: in Israel it's encouraged by the government.

We can only dream of the day when Israelis are freed from the theocratic yoke under which they labour.

Here are two pictures of walls built to keep freedom out and dissidents in:

Israeli troops find an imaginative way to murder unarmed demonstrators

2011-12-27T23:38:00.002Z

Not content with chemically torturing its own unarmed protestors, the USA exports the tear gas used against them in Egypt. It also exports tear gas to Israel, where the IDF have found clever ways to use it not just as a harassing agent but as a way to kill of maim, by firing the canisters directly at protestors.

Here is another example.

The Daily Mail deliberately misleads its readers so as to fan racism. And oh, how it does.....

2011-12-27T23:06:00.002Z

A fascinating piece from Islamophobia Watch on the Daily Mail's irresponsible manipulation of facts to serve its racist and Islamophobic agenda.

The article links to a post at BareNakedIslam, this blog's favourite neo-Nazi survivalists, which is just chock-full of delightful comments from all those defenders of democracy and Christian values.

Sarastro says: December 6, 2011 at 2:45 PM

What does it take to get this poor excuse of a judge defrocked or debenched or deported? Where are the vigilantes to bring such ill-begotten, Muzzie-loving, brain-manipulated, incompetent traitors to justice — I mean a kangaroo court, yes, with real masked lawyers sentencing him for dereliction of duty to 100 strokes of flogging and then castration?

(Wow, aren't we lucky that the free world has folk like "Sarastro" protecting it from the excesses of Sharia law?)

NativeGladius says: December 6, 2011 at 2:59 PM

How can four sub humans who are in Britain as asylum seekers be allowed to cause such grievous violence to a person without being punished whilst a white woman, obviously pushed to the edge by the destruction of her culture be arrested and put through our criminal justice system for stating the obvious that there were all foreigners on a tram with her?

("Asylum seekers"? And your evidence for that would be? Oh, of course, they're black.)

pinkcadlac says: December 6, 2011 at 3:44 PM

The alcohol excuse? That is laughable. They should have just used the excuse that they are dirty, filthy, somali, skanky, mohamedan, bitches. That is much more believable.

(Thank heavens we have folk like "pinkcadlac" protecting women from being degraded by Muslims by doing the job themselves.)

A contribution from one of the rare commenters who can actually read:

Careful now says: December 6, 2011 at 5:24 PM

Shocking attack. It annoys me that the headline implies that the verdict was reached because of the fact they were Muslim and not drinkers. Which was part of the defence but it wasn’t mentioned by the judge. Strange that the article doesn’t elaborate on injuries caused/sustained by the boyfriend like it might provide some context to the verdict or something. Probably still too lenient but not PC gone mad or any of that.

Well spotted. And what does BNI have to say to that?

barenakedislam says: December 6, 2011 at 6:46 PM

Careful, it WAS reached because they were muslims who always get off easy in the UK.

(LOL.... )

The ever-reliable fascist "randy63ism" has this to say:

randy63ism says: December 6, 2011 at 7:13 PM

CAREFUL NOW: WTF? YOU are living proof that leftists have no moral compass, not to mention objective judgement. Who the hell cares about the extent of the Somali bitches’ injuries. They were the ones who got themselves into that fix to begin with. They deserved far worse than they got. Frankly I’m surprised you haven’t as of yet, called us racists, but I suppose you’ll get around to it since that is the liberal’s standard default setting (never mind that islam is not a race). You are correct about one thing though, this isn’t P/C gone mad, this is P/C gone viral, pandemic proportions here, and YOU and your MARXIST ASS along with it!

Well golly gosh, why on Earth would anyone think the following exchange was racist, for heaven's sake?

Sarah says: December 6, 2011 at 7:51 PM

WHAT THE HELL ARE SOMALIAN RAG HEADS DOING IN THE UK TO BEGIN WITH?
Europeans have absolutely no human rights what so ever and do nothing to defend their own people it’s time to wake up!

barenakedislam says: December 6, 2011 at 8:06 PM

Sarah, the US is getting flooded with Somali garbage now too thanks to Obama.

Elsewhere, I love "ADHD" wittering on about how intention to commit a crime should be treated the same way as a crime, and telling us all the enhanced sentencing options he'd favour, and then rounds off by announcing that he intends to invest in some "Mace or tear gas". So if he's caught carrying that, by his own logic he should be charged with going equipped to commit GBH and attempted murder, and banged up for twenty years or so. Heh! As for "Mr BNI" and all the other fantasy "have-a-go heroes", no doubt if a real Somali woman went "Boo!" to any of them they'd wet themselves.....

Sexist comment of the year from this painfully misogynistic site must be this one (sad to say it's from an Australian):

ALLAN P. IVARSSON / NSW AUSTRALIA says: December 6, 2011 at 8:39 PM

pinkcadlac,
You are right that is a problem, I taught my sons not to ever hit women- to always walk away. But now that Governments are demanding that women be allowed to join the military and fight in wars; an additional amendment must be added to that teaching.
Any woman that bears arms against men, or participates in pack rage street violence, ceases to be recognised as a woman and is masculine thinking by their behaviour, and thus loses all rights to be treated like a lady. In such cases men have the right to use whatever degree of force is necessary against such violent behaving females.

("...Governments are demanding that women be allowed to join the military..." ???"
...loses all rights to be treated like a lady...."???)

BNI is fine with that, of course: "Bonni" doesn't think women should be allowed to vote. And obviously an openly sexist military must be good, because Israel has one.

pinkcadlac says: December 6, 2011 at 9:17 PM

We have been accustomed to living in a civil society. Who would ever have thought that we would have the raw, untreated, sewage of the earth, defiling our beautiful countries?

And re Emma West (the woman convicted of using foul racist language on public transport and locked up for her own protection), we have:

enough already says: December 7, 2011 at 2:29 PM

Doesn’t Emma West have any rights at all? I mean she was recorded without her consent and possibly without her knowledge, and the video was uploaded to youtube without her consent or knowledge. Also, the HATEFUL BITCH who put it up on youtube seems to be delighting over this whole thing and seems to enjoy all the attention that she herself has received from this – almost as if she’s some kind of hero for exposing this white woman as a racist or something. This horrible woman who put the video up SHOULD have used more discretion. If she had any heart at all regardless of her race, she would have known the consequences of doing so. She should have known she was putting West and her child in danger. Can West sue her over this? I don’t think that’s far fetched to even ask. Seems like West should have some recourse. And the bitch won’t take the video down, either, I guess. To me, she’s really the one at fault. She should have know these were just words and that West was obviously very troubled.

Awww...poor ickle racist crudbucket, filmed without her consent.

But for turning Nazis into poor innocent victims one can't better:

Mr friendly cares!!! says: December 9, 2011 at 6:19 PM

No wonder the far right in Europe and Russia have become nazi type people who go around killing. When you have worthless judges and a system that throws white people in jail for burning a paper book or saying something that hurts some inbreeding freaks feelings. What do they expect, the system failed this white girl now it’s up to the people to make it right. The people always come through one way or another…
See this video on youtube for an example of what can happen when the government fails it’s people…

“Russian Neo-Nazi Murder Squads Kill 71 In 2009″

Yes, that's right, these poor folk have no choice but to turn to terrorism and Nazism because their wicked governments refuse to shoulder the burden of persecuting blacks, Muslims, gays, Jews and leftists.

Of course BNI blames leftists for provoking the Oslo massacre, and knows that the Holocaust was the fault of "liberal" Jews.

See, Daily Mail hacks, you start out with a few teeny-weeny lies about an altercation in the street, and you wind up encouraging apologists for Anders Breivik. You must be so proud of your journalistic courage.

Sudden Klan Syndrome?

2011-12-25T01:14:00.002Z

I can't shake the suspicion that the terrorist wannabes who frequent the comment threads of BareNakedIslam and other US-based hate sites are all clones of this guy: just badly-integrated losers desperately searching for someone to hurt.

But hey, if Christmas means anything it means that God became man to save people like that.

Happy Christmas to all EKN readers

2011-12-25T01:02:00.002Z

Last night I watched Miracle on 34th Street for the first time.

On 26th the Saunders family plans to visit Edinburgh Zoo to see the newly-arrived Giant Pandas.

And in between, as Noddy Holder said, "IT'S CHRISTMAS!!!"

Peace and goodwill to all, even the racist loons at BarenakedIslam. Even Uncle Jimmy. Even the Israeli Government.

Even the crazies who are the subject of this hilarious and seasonal piece.

A little Christmas cheer from Snopes.com

2011-12-24T01:47:00.002Z

When the legend contradicts the facts...print the legend.

Because Jesus, after all, was Jewish

2011-12-24T01:43:00.003Z

I should have included this in my seasonal musical selection for my Jewish friends and readers:

Happy Hannukah!

xkcd goes country at Christmas....

2011-12-24T01:01:00.003Z

A couple of gems (aren't they all?) from xkcd.

The really funny thing about this one is the hover text.

And I love the mnemonic for the sequence of the planets in this one: it's even appropriate for Christmas!

Sing, choirs of angels

2011-12-23T23:28:00.004Z

Lisa (Our Lady of the Stripes) was very complementary about my recent musical post, and it wasn't even Christmassy. So here are a few rather more seasonal offerings from the weird classical music cupboard:

Weihnachtsmusik isn't just an arrangement of Es ist ein Ros' entsprungen (for 2 violins, cello, piano and harmonium!) The arrangement also works in Stille Nacht, though I suppose you do have to listen out for it. Mostly the piano has it, first at 3:44. A lovely piece anyway.

Now, I have a CD by Anne Sofie von Otter entitled Home For Christmas, on which she sings a wonderful song called Koppången. She sings two versions, one on Swedish and one in English, and I prefer the Swedish one, probably because the English lyrics are quite sentimental (like a lot of Christmas songs, I suppose). No doubt so are the Swedish ones, but I wouldn't know as my Swedish is, er, patchy. The lyrics are by Py Bäckman who was the lyricist for Nordman in their original incarnation. Music and lyrics (in both languages) can be found here (thanks to a fellow fan for the link).

Anyway, I had trouble finding a link for the von Otter recording: I found one of her singing the English version in a different arrangement, but was dissatisfied. and then I found this even more magical version by Helen Sjöholm. Helen works a lot with Benny Andersson (ex-Abba), including taking the lead in the Andersson/Ulvaeus musical Kristina från Duvemåla, and the Swedish-language version of Chess. Here she is:

(And if you follow the lyrics, yes, she sings two verses and repeats the second half of the first. If it bothers you, download the von Otter version from Amazon.)

OK, we've had Austrian and Swedish Christmas music. Here (no embedding) is the quintessentially English King's College Choir singing the equally English Peter Warlock's Bethlehem Down, one of my favourite carols for choirs.

Last weekend I played for a carol concert in which the choir sang this arrangement (no embedding) of Adolphe Adam's O Holy Night (another wonderful carol). We weren't as good (nor as many). What the choirmaster described as the full "Hollywood Bowl" treatment.

And we surely have to finish with the most joyful Christmas music ever written: Nun seid ihr wohl gerochen, the finale from J S Bach's Christmas Oratorio. Who else could use the same chorale tune for one of the saddest pieces of music ever (O Haupt von Blut und Wunden, or Oh Sacred Head Sore Wounded, in the St Matthew Passion) and one of the most cheerful? Not only good theology, great art.

link

Sometimes it must be great to play the trumpet.

And that performance is from the Frauenkirche in Dresden, which I recently visited. It's the one that was largely destroyed between 13-15 February 1945. It was rebuilt only recently, and they Germans did a good job as you will observe from the video. the picture below shows the largest remaining fragment from 1945 incorporated into the new structure.

What better place to celebrate the new beginning that is Christmas?

Oh what fun

2011-12-23T23:21:00.003Z

Wonderful Wondermark at Christmas.

Please hold: here is some music

2011-12-22T01:28:00.002Z

Apologies for my sporadic blogging lately. Busy with music, busy with Christmas, bla bla. No excuse really. Tonight I've been making a start on the heap of commercial spam appended as comments to some of my old posts. I have a list of stuff to post but I'll come back to it. Not least, I still have reviews from the Festival to post (if I don't do them soon they'll be omitted, which would be tedious).

Meanwhile, here is a piece of music that's been earworming itself into my head this week.

Never mind turkeys and Christmas, penguins don't vote for pandas either

2011-12-22T00:21:00.004Z

This penguin seems to be displaying very human behaviour: like a petulant "celebrity" whose ratings have begun to slip.

Zappa plays Zappa - HMV Picturehouse, Edinburgh, 19 November 2011

2011-12-02T23:49:00.000Z

ZPZ were - once again - great. Their setlist wasn't as full of crowd-pleasers as last time but none the worse for that. They did the whole of the Apostrophe(') album to start with. It goes without saying that Dweezil and all the rest of the band played their socks off. A new innovation was the use of live video footage of FZ himself on three numbers so that he could provide guitar solos (and in the case of Cosmik Debris, vocals). The idea sounds a little tacky, but its first use in Cosmik Debris was the best: not only because nobody could sing that lyric like Frank, but because in the video footage they used there was a big space left while someone off camera did a solo. In the live performance of course Dweezil took that. There was about 20 seconds of overlap while DZ and FZ duetted, then FZ cut loose with his own solo. Beautiful for all kinds of reasons: Dweezil's evident pride in his Dad, and joy at being able to play with his electronic ghost every night; DZ's own brilliant solo; and Frank's extraordinary one, not so much on a higher plane as on a different planet.

All that, and I got a T-shirt with a ferocious-looking bar of Frank's music on it.

Here's the setlist:

1 Heavy Duty Judy
2 Don't Eat The Yellow Snow
3 Nanook Rubs It
4 St Alfonzo's Pancake Breakfast
5 Father O'blivion
6 Cosmik Debris - FZ Video
7 Excentrifugal Forz
8 Apostrophe
9 Uncle Remus
10 Stink-foot
11 What's The Ugliest Part Of Your Body?
12 Chunga's Revenge
13 Cheepnis
14 Inca Roads - FZ Video
15 Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?
16 Honey Don't You Want A Man Like Me?
17 Pojama People
18 City Of Tiny Lites
19 Rollo
Encores:
20 Dancin'Fool
21 Baby Snakes
22 Muffin Man - FZ Video

Unkind cuts

2011-12-01T21:58:00.002Z

I couldn't help smiling at this. Not simply at the mind-boggling thought of inter-Amish hate crime; nor at the idea of someone carrying out such a crime with scissors and clippers. No, it's the fact that four of those arrested are named Mullet, which to English readers suggests not only a kind of fish but a bouuffant hairstyle much in vogue at one time with footballers.

John Mayall, Perth Concert Hall 14 November 2011

2011-11-24T01:31:00.003Z

At the start of the 1970s I bought (from a second-hand record stall at Shudehill Market in Manchester) an LP by John Mayall called Looking Back. This was a retrospective of the already impressive career of the man whose Bluesbreakers band had given early opportunities to Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Peter Green, John McVie, Henry Lowther and many other great British musicians. Mayall was old enough to have served in the Korean War, for heaven's sake.

So when I saw a tour by John Mayall announced my first thought was "Mayall's ALIVE?" (you have to imagine it in a Brian Blessed voice). Followed rapidly by "Where do I get a ticket?"

I am pleased to announce that, only a couple of weeks short of his 78th birthday, John Mayall was not only alive but very definitely kicking. You would never guess his age to look at him: the grey hair would lead you to think he was in his sixties, maybe, and very well-preserved (lean, fit, and full of vigour).

First up were the support band, a very good guitar/bass/drums trio called the Oli Brown Band. OB was the guitarist, and very competent he was too. I thought they were interesting rather than gripping, but they certainly showed that British blues playing has a secure future.

After the break Mayall and his band (no longer the Bluesbreakers - he retired that name several years back) came on. His band is all-American: Rocky Athas from Texas on guitar, Jay Davenport from Chicago on drums, and the extraordinary Greg Rzab - also from Chicago - on bass. First of all, John came on by himself and played a harmonica solo, in case we'd forgotten what his main instrument was (after all, on The Blues Alone he played a wide variety of them). In the course of the evening he would play plenty more harmonica, along with keyboard (mostly configured as piano rather than organ) and guitar. And of course he sang. His voice isn't quite as powerful as it was in his youth, but his playing skills are undiminished. I was a little sorry we didn't really get to hear him on organ, on which he was always a master.

I couldn't tell you all the numbers he did in his set, though I did note Nature's Disappearing, Mail Order Mystics and a stonking version of Room To Move. The entire band was terrific: I suspect getting into any of Mayall's bands is as much a badge of achievement as making it into the Magic Band or the Mothers of Invention. To think they were being (brilliantly) led by a guy who was already 21 when I was born beggars belief. Sometimes when you see legends they disappoint, sometimes they donlt. And sometimes they exceed expectations: this was one of those times. The audience may have been fairly small, and mostly of my generation, but it made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in numbers and youth.

Oh, and when Mayall and his band came back on for an encore, they brought Oli Brown back on with them to trade solos with Rocky Athas. I thought that summed up the generous spirit of the one and only father of British Blues.

Let There be Light

2011-11-24T01:15:00.004Z

Durham Lumiere is a festival I(I think it's annual) of lighting installations mounted in the city of Durham (where I was once a student).

Here is a link to a lot of photographs of this year's Lumiere. I must say it does look amazing.

The projections inspired by the Lindisfarne Gospels which were thrown onto the exterior of the cathedral reminded me of the amazing work that has been done at Amiens Cathedral, where a similar kind of projection recreates the original polychromatic appearance of the Western Facade:

Maybe this is what he's trying to hide

2011-11-24T00:49:00.002Z

Take a look at this from the guy now heading up the British Freedom Party.

Hmm. where have we seen that equation of white UK citizens with "the indigenous race" before? Who else believes that the country is (or indeed has been at any time since the 1970s) run by socialists? That we are being "over-run" by scrounging immigrants? That it's all the fault of left-wing intellectuals and the EU?

Why do you NEVER complain about the lies THESE people say about our police and our soldiers? Why do you never defend the British indigenous people? Why are you so pro these creatures – these debased inhuman ANIMALS (in my opinion)?

Yes, it's good old BlairSupporter (Uncle Jimmy) in a post on last year's Remembrance Day protest by Muslims Against Crusades.

And here he is in 2008:

We watched as little was done to force the incomers to conform. In fact the incomers had their umpteen languages catered for in order that they could claim our benefits.

=============
Aside: in that same post Jimmy says "Right now in the USA presidential race there is a debate as to whether Barak Obama is still a Muslim (12% of both Democrats and Republicans think he still is)."

"Still" a Muslim? So to Jimmy it goes without saying that he was born a Muslim? Fruitcake alert.....

And he also says

"...individuals have to seek their own guidance on the validity of The Covenant (the WHAT? We do not use that kind of language in modern secular states. Send it back to the 7th century.)..."

which would come as a surprise to the Jerusalem Post (though of course Israel is neither secular nor modern: the country may be less than seventy years old but its theocratic code was old and tired in Jesus's time, let alone Muhammad's).

==============

Sorry - where was I? Oh yes, Jimmy and our being over-run by (foreign - because WE ALL KNOW they can't be British) Muslims:

An issue which all the main political parties, shamefully, dare not mention, AT ALL. The growing, creeping Islamistisation of Britain (and the world) If it features at all, it will be obliquely, in the perennial Tory “tighten up the borders” plea, or the “stop immigration” calls of the British Nationalist Party or the “withdraw from the EU” mantra of the UK Independence Party. And even in these cases it is unlikely to be as prominent as the Guilty (political) Parties might wish it to be, if they were brave enough. All of these issues, policing borders, immigration, the EU are emblematic of the REAL and UNMENTIONABLE fears of many in this country. But, the BNP apart, possibly, you won’t hear it mentioned in local election leaflets.

....Muslim Sharia law already exists here in Great Britain, and is supported by state benefits....

So there you are: only UKIP and the BNP tell it like it is. Or now, evidently, the BFP. How long before Jimmy comes out and publicly begins to campaign for the BFP? Is that what he's trying to hide behind his brand-new initiates-only firewall?

Seven Little Girls and One Little Bikini

2011-11-22T03:40:00.002Z

You may have noticed that Lee Pockriss died this week. He was responsible for the tune of Itsy-Bitsy Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini. (Incidentally, the story behind the lyrics of that song is amusing: see here.) Neil Diamond's first time in a recording studio was when he was hauled in to sing backing vocals on it.

But Pockriss also write the tunes for other big hits. One of the first songs I remember from my youth is Perry Como's Catch A Falling Star: another of Pockriss's tunes. But surely the ear-wormiest of them all is this gem. When I posted it on Facebook recently I had a load of comments from friends (not all of them as old as me...) who remembered it fondly.

R.I.P. Lee Pockriss.

The Ten Unguessed First Lines

2011-11-22T02:26:00.005Z

OK, now we're one month on from when I posted my Twenty-Five First Lines quiz, and ten of the songs remain unguessed. I've posted the answers and video clips on the original post. Go and kick yourselves.

I'm not surprised nobody got Decameron: that was always going to be a bit out of the way. t.A.t.U? Well, I thought with the hint somebody might get them, but I suppose I'm not too amazed that nobody did. Janis Ian I think Lisa nearly got, but then she chickened out. (And my clue about typography was that if you Google "Janis Ian at 17" as opposed to "At Seventeen", up comes this video clip).

But Kylie? Robbie Williams? Iron Maiden? Dire Straits? The Darkness? Jon and Vangelis? Sandy Denny? Not exactly obscure, surely? And not even obscure tracks.

Oh well.....

There are some fun videos though. Justin Hawkins hams up the miming on TOTP. The Janis Ian one is a treat. "Gomenasai" is a beautiful song, and t.A.t.U. demonstrate that they can sing perfectly well when not dressed as schoolgirls. And the Kylie video is wonderful.

Enjoy.

Somebody should tell CERN at once

2011-11-22T01:31:00.004Z

Ludicrous American Nazi site BareNakedIslam has a shock horror story from the Daily Mail (so you know it's true, right?) about the Red Cross "banning Christmas" from its shops.

There are three problems with the story.

First of all, in the report it clearly states that "Items currently on sale include Christmas cards featuring angels and wise men and Advent calendars with nativity scenes." Uh-huh. Some ban then.

Secondly, it isn't true, as the Red Cross point out here.

And thirdly, the Daily Mail published the story in 2002.

Wow. I always knew these hillbilly survivalist types were behind the times, with the way they go on about how terrible it is to have gays in the military, votes for women, a black man in the White House and all that, but I hadn't realised it took nine years for news from the civilised world to reach them. Maybe they live in some strange dimensional warp whose flip side is what causes neutrinos to go faster than light. Hmm. Let's see. A neutrino arrives 10 nanoseconds early in Italy, while in Texas a Daily Mail news report arrives nine years late. As a neutrino carries 28,401,840 billion times more information than a Daily Mail report, yup, this balances precisely.

Now, at this point I have deliberately not looked at the comments on the BNI post. My guess is that nobody will have pointed out the date discrepancy. My second guess is that if anyone did, BNI will find some way of rationalising it as though it were current. But I'm going to plump for total failure of reading skills. OK, let's go look.....

It's funny. There are 100 comments. The first 15 are standard rug-chewing stuff. #16 points out that the story is an outdated rumour that started last year (OK, eight years off, but on the right lines). BNI itself responds in comment #24 that "Where there's smoke there's fire. Give it a few years and you'll see more." So my second guess was pretty much spot on, then. Then comment #29 nails the story as a 2002 one already shown up as a fake. Commenter #42 believes the story but notes that the Red Cross have denied it. In comment #51 BNI admits to doubts over the story. Comment #63 reckons it doesn't matter that it's an old fake, the Red Cross are Muslim-lovers, innit? (#63 is an EDL supporter.) At comment #99 we get another acknowledgement that the story may be a fake, and bringing up the rear at #100 the sole sensible comment which I reproduce in full:

Lisa Stacey I lived in the middle east for 3 years and I have heaps of Muslim friends. Not one of them would even conceive of being offended by Xmas. Non Muslim people are scared of Islamic extremist reaction to non Islamic things, but that in itself is not islamic and the very nature of anything extreme, especially religious extremism, is based on a lack of understanding and interpretation of the very thing you’re pretending to believe in. Sadly, the minority, the extremists, of any sort always create a bad name for the majority.

Christmas is not celebrated in Arabic countries (obviously!) but I and my ‘Christian’ (mostly non practising) colleagues were always given time off to celebrate it. We were frowned upon if we said we were happy to come to work with everyone else.

I think it’s really sad that people react to the minority simply because the majority doesn’t make a fuss….no just in this, but in everything.

Sadly, I suspect Lisa Stacey is in for a great deal of abuse shortly on that comment thread.

But what is most gratifying for those of us enjoying a good laugh is the huge number of commenters who ploughed on with their "Boycott the Red Cross" comments even after it was pointed out that the story is a nine-year-old fake. Maybe that nine-year time lag applies to their reading of comments too, and we'll start getting sensible ones posted by the hillbillies in 2020.

Meanwhile, a Merry Christmas 2002 to all you American Nazis out there.

Look, we've seen this kind of thing before

2011-11-18T04:08:00.003Z

Oh great. just what we need: a new "British" Nazi party.

Policies in its constitution include discrimination against Jews, Muslims, the disabled and trade unionists, introduction of the death penalty for a host of new offences as well as the old ones, censorship, banning of charities not party-approved, and the promotion of smoking (eh?) All this and Kinder, Küche und Kirche too.

Next up: annexation of the Sudetenland.

As my employers would say: for the Journey

2011-11-18T01:30:00.003Z

I recently bought One Night Stand by Therapy (on good solid 1970s vinyl). Listening to it for the first time in a few decades, I was struck by a song I remembered but couldn't for the life of me identify. It turned out to be a cover of Duncan Browne's Journey. Which raises the question, why did Duncan Browne never cross my radar before?

Here is the original, which starts well but gets rather over-produced by Mickie Most later on. I think I shall be seeking out some more Duncan Browne, though. A singer-songwriter even more neglected than Jackson C Frank? How can I resist?

Here Comes The Sun

2011-11-17T22:38:00.002Z

Somebody just pointed out that today is the 42nd anniversary of the first appearance of a Page three girl in The Sun newspaper.

So it is.

It's also the 41st anniversary of the first topless Page Three girl.

Which prompts the question, why did it take them a year to work out what their readership really wanted?

Time to get a glass of wine...

2011-11-17T22:18:00.001Z

Revisionist history from BlairSupporter

2011-11-17T21:47:00.003Z

By chance (actually when Googling to try to find out whether my outbound flight from Glasgow to Berlin would be likely to be delayed much by the 30th November strike: apparently not, as I suspected) I encountered an old post of Uncle Jimmy's from 18 November 2008. As the poor dear is now hiding his posts from the view of lesser mortals, it seems only fair to give an airing to another of his pieces of utter idiocy. In a piece on the guy who tried to car-bomb Glasgow airport, he wrote:

Here in Britain we do not attack, bomb, shoot, injure or attempt to kill in any way political leaders or anyone else because of differences of opinions on foreign, or indeed ANY policy. That’s freedom and democracy for you. We vote them out of power. We do not blow them to kingdom come.

Ahem.

Cough....

And this can't have happened, because Jimmy says so.

Hint for the American fool: those of us who actually lived in Britain during the IRA's bombing campaign will never forget it, nor are we likely to fall for the lies of those like yourself who try to pretend that terrorism is wholly, or even mostly, a Muslim phenomenon. While you were living in a country that had hardly had a terrorist attack (Tim McVeigh was still in the future) we were living with regular bombings.

The American tradition is to shoot political opponents rather than bombing them, of course. That's freedom and democracy for you.

What I Tell You Three Times Is Surely Pretty Damned Easy

2011-11-15T02:55:00.003Z

OK, so entries have stopped arriving for the 25 First Lines quiz despite my post of hints.

So here's the deal. This post will be the final set of extra clues. After this, if nobody makes any more guesses I'll post the answers. What I'll do here is provide three further levels of hint:

1) I'll specify which of my clues from last time goes with which unguessed song

2) I'll give more of the lyrics to each song

3) I'll give a crossword-type word/letter count for each of the titles

OK, here we go.

Number 5 (3,3,7,2,4)

This is the one by the Canadian national treasure.

It's so nice to meet an old friend and pass the time of day
And talk about the home town a million miles away
Is the ice still on the river, are the old folks still the same
And by the way, did she mention my name
Did she mention my name just in passing
And when the morning came, do you remember if she dropped a name or two
Is the home team still on fire, do they still win all the games
And by the way,......

Number 9 (6,6)

The classic British folk-rock track I thought Phil would get quickly.

The young man rose his pretty face,
All for to feel the salty spray.
When storms are mustering they say
I'll come and take you all away.

I am a traveller by trade,
I only have what I have made.
A fortune teller too they say,
And I can take you all away.

Number 11 (6,2,4)

"One from a classic album by a great British band. It was the next but one album that would move them from stardom to superstardom, though."

Getting crazy on the waltzers but it's the life that I choose.
Sing about the sixblade, sing about the switchback and a torture tattoo.
And I been riding on a ghost train where the cars they scream and slam
And I don't know where I'll be tonight, but I'd always tell you where I am.

In a screaming ring of faces I seen her standing in the light;
She had a ticket for the races: just like me, she was a victim of the night.
I put a hand upon the lever, said "Let it rock and let it roll"
I had the one arm bandit fever, there was an arrow through my heart and my soul.

Number 13 (3,4,2,3,4)

"A collaboration by two giants of progressive rock, one of whom was once memorably described by a Capital Radio DJ as having the biggest electricity bill in the EU. This track probably racked up a few kWh for him."

You ask me where to begin? - Am I so lost in my sin?
You ask me where did I fall? - I'll say I can't tell you when.
But if my spirit is lost, how will I find what is near?
Don't question - I'm not alone.....

Number 14 (7,7)

This is the obscure one: "The title track from a 1970s album by a British folk-rock group one of whose members was a member of a family famous for confectionery (and he really was, it wasn't just a coincidence of names)."

They could see there was something special about the man in white,
The ladies there were careful to treat him right.
Everyone was running around at his beck and call,
But when they handed him the menu, it was everyone against the wall

Number 15 (7,5)

This is the one Lisa thought she had the artist of. "An American singer-songwriter, also with a long career, whose songs inspired a book of science fiction stories (which I own but haven't yet read). Her best-known song is very well-known indeed, and came right at the start of her career (which must be frustrating)."

Do me a favor, kid,
Tell me what is was I did,
To make you wanna live without me?
You're not being fair,
Let down your hair,
Make it clear why you doubt me.
Don't really know
What you think I done, or why.
But all you gotta do is tell me.
I'll apologize.
And I don't want anything much if you'll just....

Number 17 (4,2,4)

This is one of the songs by a female artist famous for part of her anatomy. And both the song, and the anatomy, are very well-known indeed.

Tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen;
pour myself a cup of ambition,
and yawn, and stretch, and try to come to life.
Jump in the shower, and the blood starts pumping;
out on the street, the traffic starts jumping,
with folks like me on the job.......

Number 18 (5,4,8,2,3,9)

A track by a British heavy metal band

Honey it's getting close to midnight
And all the myths are still in town
True love and lipstick on your linen
Bite the pillow, make no sound
If there's some living to be done
Before your life becomes your tomb
You'd better know I'm the one
Unchain your back door, invite me around

Number 19 (8)

This is the one by the British band probably best summed up as "glam metal".

Oh lord, I'm so bored
Living on my own
You're devilish and dirty
They say you're pushing thirty
Well pushing thirty stone

Oh Christ, I'm enticed
I want you in my sack
You're potty-mouthed and brassy
You're anything but classy
I've just got to get you back

It's been a while since I've seen that smile
But the old magic's still there.....

Number 21 (3,2,5)

The other female singer famous for a bit of her anatomy (though not such a byword as the other lady).

Clever girl
Think you are but you think too much
Shut down turn around
Don't look that way any more

Clever girl
Think you know but you don't know much
Try to make a move
Go to a different door

You know it's all in your head
You better put that business to bed
By your fair hands of design you met with
The monster in your mind

Number 22 (4,8)

"A British singer-songwriter who seems to have been around for ever. This was one of his comparatively few songs to make it into the charts, sufficiently at least to get some airplay."

It was late in December, the sky turned to snow
All round the day was going down slow
Night like a river beginning to flow
I felt the beat of my mind go
Drifting into.....

Number 23 (9,4,6)

A song by a male singer who had a big hit duetting with the singer of Number 21.

You said I was northern scum
I was wounded baby
That's fighting talk where I'm from
And I'm not moving baby
Spent my life dancing with shadows in strobe lights
It's alright, everything mellows in sunlight

And now London's got its gimmicks
And New York's had its minute....

Number 24 (9)

"One hit by a foreign duo who might have fitted effortlessly into the Daz Sampson video." Because of how they dressed in their early days, perhaps? The song is in English, though the title is not:

What I thought wasn't mine
In the light wasn't one of a kind,
A precious pearl
When I wanted to cry I couldn't,
'Cos I wasn't allowed

And that, said Rob, is that.

BareNakedIslam: hates Jews, loves terrorists

2011-11-15T02:23:00.002Z

There's no pleasing some folk. Our favourite Nazi faux-Jewess at BareNakedIslam is saddened that a hundred-year-old Polish/Jewish bakery in Detroit is to close because nobody wants to buy its produce. This, apparently, shows that the "islamiization" of Detroit is nearly complete. Actually it just shows market forces at work: if you make stuff nobody wants, you go broke, even if you're Jewish. (Ain't reality a bitch?)

So when a similar Jewish bakery in Brooklyn is saved from going out of business, BNI will be pleased, right? DUH...of course not, because the people saving it are Muslims. BNI would rather a Jewish business went under than that an ex-employee who happens to be Muslim should save it. Jews who support keeping the business open are wicked "liberal Jews" (ie real Jews rather than fakes like BNI). Some of BNI's commenters (the ones who don't simply assume this is a wicked Mooslim plot to poison decent New York Jews) reckon Muslims are not allowed to eat kosher food. LOL! - the Q'uran explicitly permits it.

Still, maybe BNI was in a rush. After all, it had ads to run for a terrorist organisation (according to the FBI) as well as calling for the President of the USA to be tortured.

Sometimes a picture isn't worth a thousand words

2011-11-15T01:59:00.002Z

Procul, procul, o este profani

2011-11-14T03:14:00.006Z

My regular readers will be familiar with my occasional posts on the more egregious pieces of rubbish posted by "Uncle Jimmy", the American racist whose blog Keep Tony Blair For PM gives rise to such hilarity and mirth.

Jimmy has for a long time now banned comment on his blog from those deemed insufficiently worthy: not Aryan enough, perhaps, or insufficiently in thrall to the resistible charms of the lying pocket-liner who once disgraced Downing Street. Now as you will see if you follow the link above, Jimmy has decided that we profane ones cannot be trusted even to read his pearls of wisdom without being vetted and approved first.

Well, of course, thanks to the magic of Google's cache those of us who take an interest in the "enemy within" can continue to watch what he's doing, so if he imagines that he can continue to pump out his Islamophobic blood libels and his hatred against non-white Britons unobserved, he has a rude awakening ahead of him. Just key the words from the now-blocked URL into Google and click on "cached". Et voila.

At least he hasn't yet seen fit to unburden himself of another diatribe on Remembrance day. Last year, you may recall, he posted a piece in which he accused the BBC of anti-British bias (pretty good coming from an American) because they considered that an EDL thug smashing a policeman's face in with a club was worthy of coverage along with a bunch of Muslim protestors burning paper poppies. Jimmy of course just had to add his own tuppence (sorry, two cents') worth: "OUR poppy, you dullard, is not about the Middle East". Well, that's all those grieving widows of soldiers killed in Iraq given a telling, Jimmy. Nothing like respecting our heroic armed forces on Remembrance Day, eh? Maybe the "death threats" Jimmy claims to have received have come from angry squaddies who don't like being told their dead mates don't matter by a Yankee creep sitting on his arse cheerleading for terrorists.

At least this year the police took a firm line against the armed thugs who planned to disrupt the commemorations. I await Jimmy's howls of protest at the arrest of these poor white darlings who wanted to do nothing more sinister than beat up some leftists and burn down their tents. Committing arson and assault on Church of England property while normal people commemorated dead soldiers: what a wonderful defence of English values from the EDL.

Jimmy's mates over at barenakedislam are furious about this, of course, so no doubt Jimmy will soon be following their lead as in everything else. Of course, the white supremacists at BNI believe that it was the EDL who caused the government to ban Muslims Against Crusades a few days ago (Earth to morons: the British government isn't run by fascist mobs yet however much you might wish it).

Nemo eas impune lacessit

2011-11-14T03:01:00.005Z

Let's not forget the women of Yemen, one of whom shared the Nobel Peace prize this year. They have been burning their veils: not in any kind of anti-Islamic or feminist protest (there are thousands of Yemeni women who have never worn a veil in their lives) but as a piece of tribal symbolism, calling on fellow tribesmen for help to stop the vicious attacks on protestors by forces loyal to the beleagured President.

Remember that Yemen was home to one of the feistier women in the Bible/Torah/Q'uran, to wit Bilqis, Queen of Sheba. Ali Abdullah Saleh had better watch his step.