Comedy on TV

After representations from commentator "Weasels did etc., etc." I have to relent and admit that I was a bit harsh in saying, "All television is crap". Perhaps only 95% of TV is crap, and one reason to change my opinion on this, apart from considering the thoughts of my contributor, is the show called "My Name is Earl". There is a nod in the direction of Father Ted, Cheech and Chong, and the Beverly Hillbillies, with a dash of Mighty Boosh. It is funny and charming. And I love the trailer trash humour. Get thee to an AIRSTREAM, open a Bud and improve your Karma.

A little local Difficulty

Who is he? The Man in the Picture? It doesn't matter. At least not to you or me it doesn't. He is some young man who went to war. Perhaps he came back and perhaps he didn't.

Why do people fight wars? I mean Just Wars where there is a moral principle at stake, not the kind we are fighting in Iraq? They fight them to, among other things, preserve the truth, for, all wars are predicated on lies; in WW2 it was the myth of a Master Race, in Iraq it was Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Moral Principles. The phrase is almost a taboo subject, almost as if by saying it you are condemned to the file marked "reactionary and right wing". Our current local political map is littered with moral failure. In the case of the Liberal Democrats, who until recently were considered the "nice, fluffy" party, they have shown how lacking in moral principles they are. We had an alcoholic leader, Charles Kennedy who everyone feels sorry for. I don't. Had he been just another Joe, trying to make his way with the problem of alcoholism, I would not have minded. But he was a political leader, and potentially the Prime Minister. Alcoholics are devious, wreck homes, and cause everyone around them to make excuses and mop up after the wreckage. I think there are obvious dangers having someone like that in charge, particularly someone who could not actually function properly. So his moral failure is deviousness, the implication of others in his lies and subterfuges and the putting of ambition before the national interest.

And then we get to the homosexual scandals. I believe in the case of Mark Oaten, he is mainly guilty of hurting those around him; his wife and children. He paraded himself as a "family man" when his preferences were revealed to be diametrically opposed. The trawling after male prositutes and the attendant health risks, are hardly conducive to family life. And the latest failure is Simon Hughes, who got into Parliament by using homophobic literature entitled, "Simon Hughes, the straight choice". Another hypocrite and liar. I believe that private lives are private lives, but in each of the three cases, these men have publically presented themselves as something they are not. They have all lied and lied to save their miserable skins.

So regardless of who the young man in the picture is, he did join up to fight a war for the good of our country, so that we could enjoy freedom.

Lies pervert choice. Choice is a building block of freedom.

These ghastly people have in their small way eroded that freedom, and that memory, by the cowardly application of dissimulation and outright falsehood in the pursuit of personal ambition. How cheap and tawdry is that?

Late 50's and Early 60's Television

Sitting beside a Radio Set that was bigger than me was my last treat of the day before bedtime. The activity consisted of listening to "The Archers" with a cup of Ovaltine in my little hand.

When the family got a little better off we had the wonders of Black and White television, and I remember the Stars', names that were well known by everyone then;
Russ Conway, Shirley Abicair, Alma Cogan and Hans and Lottie Hass.

In those days you could get away with wearing skimpy speedos and preposterous rubber equipment before the watershed: good old Hans and Lottie. Shirley Abicair looks as if she is having difficulty with her laptop, but I believe it was a Zither. Alma Cogan looked exotic, a sort of domestic version of Carmen Miranda whilst Russ Conway joins the ranks of musicians with fairly crucial body parts missing; in this case a finger. With this plethora of talent, the winter evenings just flew by. There were never any "good old days" of Television. It has always been crap.

Bygones

Aunt Ada Weasel and her particular friend, the Hon. Estella Featherstonehaugh,
Skegness, 1907

A Ramble

Louis Aragon also said something about re-cycled genius.

I am not asking for genius. I am campaigning for a cessation of mass stupidity.

(the Weasel)

Web Wonders - websites of interest

Para Ethos.

Take a look and let me know what you think.
There are all sorts of strange things going on here and a good explore pays off.

go here: http://www.paraethos.com/

Who said that?

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

SIMONE WEIL

Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man? Yes but who said it originally? I was astounded to find that it was a long-time heroine of mine, Simone Weil!

And she also said,

The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation

Which I like.

Extra Bonus Album of the Week!

Procol Harum are another band who have this Albatross around their necks. "A Whiter Shade of Pale" is not bad as Albatrosses go, but they did so much more of merit. Salty Dog is a case in point. Procol had a non touring lyric writer, Keith Reid, who came up with magic like,

The devil came from kansas. where he went to I can’t say Though I teach I’m not a preacher, and I aim to stay that way There’s a monkey riding on my back, been there for some time He says he knows me very well but he’s no friend of mine
They don't write them like that anymore. Gary Brooker's voice is probably one of the best in Rock music and he still sounds pretty good. The Alan Parson's Project thought so and got him to guest on a few of their tracks.

Album of the Week

Here are two albums by the same band, the amazing, unique, Family. Music in a Doll's House is not an easy album but it is full of inventiveness and vigour. It is in some ways psychedelic, but also very hard and heavy. Roger Chapman's warbling voice is rightly foregrounded.

They had a couple of hits, Weaver's Answer and In My Own Time, but they were primarily an Album band. Rich Grech once belonged in the line-up but left to join Blind Faith (see review) so there is a bit of family tree going on.

Sadly they sort of futtered out creatively, but Roger Chapman still gurgles his way through the oldies from time to time.

It gets **** for inventiveness and an intriguing back sleeve photo that i have been unable to locate, of a doll on a toy bicycle.

BOOK LIST (another one)

Here are some books that I read way back then. Some have been mentioned before, but here is a list dedicated to my friend Sam. They all entertained me, made me think or both. Click on the pic to make it bigger.

The Unequivocal Anal Bleaching Test

The internet is wonderful isn't it? You can find anything from wierd pornography to ...well other weird pornography. If you like your partner to be fat...no let's call a spade a spade, you are a FEEDER!, you can find that gal who will let you supersize her. And so on. You may have accidentally(yeah) stumbled upon it yourself.

Now, the big question is, are you more important than anal bleaching? You see, Google it and there are currently about 191,000 entries on the subject. Well, 191,001 if you count this one.

The problem is this. One of my favourite poets, John Clare, someone who devoted his life and his sanity to poetry, barely scrapes ahead with 197,000 references. Just 6000 more than Anal bleaching. Lets take artists who have made a significant contribution to our wealth of culture; Stanley Spencer, Edward Burra and Patrick Heron, all artists of note, and they suffer badly against the test.

What lessons are we to draw from this? I don't know, but it does not bode well for the future of cyberspace.

Shaken or Stirred, it is THE Cocktail

My Martini:

put the glass in the freezer
write a History of the Visigoths (concise if you must)
50cl of Gin - Gordon's, Plymouth or Greenall's
25cl of Vermouth - Martini or Noilly Prat
droplets of lemon
one green olive
lots of ice

Shake or stir as the mood takes you
surgically remove your fingers from the now frozen glass
pour into glass from shaker (you did bring the shaker?)

(in emergencies, Stolichnaya Vodka may be substituted for Gin)

Another Book List

Since the last list was deliberately heavy and the criteria for choice was based on a book's impact on me intellectually, I have since thought that there is another list, equally important of books I have enjoyed. Here they are:

The Wind in the Willows - A beautiful book with fabulous characters and chapter names like "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn", which served the 'Floyd well enough

The Shipping News - much much more broadly drawn than the film. Life affirming and funny

The Dice Man - This made me cry with laughter when i first read it, but i was 18 at the time


Food for Free - the first book that ispired me to look around at things natural and go yomping off into the Lincolnshire countryside, in wind rain and blizzard (and the occasional sunny day). Had i listened to my inner thoughts at the time, or paid heed to how i connected with Richard Mabey's thoughts, I may have found my current, preferred way of life sooner.

The Famous Five - this has turned out to be the Harry Potter of its era. It's not literature, and it repeats the formula endlessly, but it got me reading when i was ten years old.

The Growth of the Soil - had to include a Hamsun book again and this is the first one I read. It is a kind of precursor to Independent People by Halldór Laxness, though i found the former highly readable and the latter somewhat depressing and miserable.

The Aubrey/Maturin series from Patrick O'Brian - a wonderful evocation of the wooden world of HM Navy at the turn of the 18th century, and an engaging study of a friendship.

Richard Ellman's biography of Oscar Wilde - without which i would not have been moved to write my final dissertation on dear Oscar. Apart from anything else it is a beautifully written book.

Curse of the Weasel

My confident prediction, in mid december, (see below) that Charles Kennedy will be gone by the end of January, was not quite as wreckless as I thought.

As i write, he has probably got hours left as leader of the Lib Dems, following yesterdays confession that he is an alchoholic. Not many people were surprised to hear this.

All I can say at the moment is that even if Simon Hughes runs for the leadership, he won't win.

I like Vince Cable personally but he is not exactly televisual, despite having a name sounding like a fifties rock star.

Being a bit Scandinavian

Must have some Viking blood in me somewhere. My Classical music grab bag has to include the entire works of Jean Sibelius, or at a pinch Syphony no.2 and the Karelia Suite. These are lighter in mood than many of his works. for introspection, while you are writing the suicide note, it has to be Symphony no.4. I enjoyed a visit to Finland years ago.

Both Dr Pants and I have visited Helsinki. The surrounding country, the lakes and forests, the arhcitecture and the quiet, alabaster people... it all asks you to slow down and enjoy the silence.

more Rupert

Fantastic

Welcome to the wonderful world of Carl and Karin Larsson and Rupert the Bear

Rupert annuals. Every year I used to get Rupert Annuals. The pictures were the best part for me; the stories had these lush, Narnia-Like landscapes full of faerie woodlands, snow drifted bowers and sunny skies.



Bit of a surprise, then, when I discovered Carl Larsson years later and thought, "hang on a minute!". Well, there are similarities with Larsson and Bestall, perhaps superficial, but i like both for their ability to create a world full of calm memories, a world with magical possibilities. A world with bears in outrageous yellow trews.


There will always be a space in my imagination for Rupert!

Books that you must read!

I have tried not to sound insufferably hip in my choice of books, but there you are: it's my blog, my choice and at the end of the day, i stick by them. They are chosen on the basis that they had some kind of profound effect on the way I think.

• Anything by Herman Hesse, but particularly Narziss and Goldmund
• On the Road - Jack Kerouac
• Travels with Charlie - John Steinbeck (I just liked this one)
• Against Nature - J K Huysmans
• 1984 - George Orwell
• Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
• The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
• Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
• 
  
• Anything by Knut Hamsun; Women at the Pump, Growth of the Soil, Hunger etc.
• Father and Son- Edmund Gosse
• The Karamazov Brothers - Dostoevsky
• Strindberg - various
• Kafka - various
• Thoreau -Walden
• Beowulf
• The Icelandic Sagas
• The Bible
• The Pedagogy of the Opressed - see article below
• Almost any Biography
• poetry by Oscar Wilde, John Clare, WB Yeats, Baudelaire, Emily Dickinson.

A strange book, "The Old Straight Track" written by Alfred Watkins, back in 1925 introduced to the public the theory of ley lines. And it is not quite as easy to dismiss as you might think, when you read his thesis. It is a little bit like climbing Glastonbury Tor. There is something mystical going on there....

One of the Greats

I dont tend to have static lists of things, but always, somewhere near the top of my album list will be an early Jethro Tull Album. Stand Up was one of their finest, followed closely by Benefit. These days the band still ploughs a furrow in the section marked "Tribute Acts" in that, apart from Ian Anderson, their are no founder members left in it and Ian's voice is really not that good any more. Nevertheless, Stand Up hit the top of the charts in 1969, along with Clapton, The Beatles and the Stones. This success was due in no small part to Clive Bunker, an energetic crazed looking drummer and Glenn Cornick whose mischievous, melodic bass playing gave Tull something that sounded like jazz, classical folk and rock all at the same time. But I am a little biased on the latter because these days I am proud to be able to call Glenn and his family my friends.
Fans should certainly visit http://www.cornick.org/
and see Glenn's extensive collection of Tull memorabilia and Galleries.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

Fifties American paranoia, Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal and a hulking tin Robot called "Gort", combined with a handful of big metaphors and a routine flying saucer plot. These elements make a charming saturday morning cinema tale packed with suspense and pathos. Always a big favourite with me, it gets *****

A light dusting of snow around the Weasel's place.
Christmas came and went. Hey, the Easter eggs will be in the Supermarkets soon. How about that?

Album of the week - Blind Faith

This rather unpreposessing album cover does no justice to what is an incisive cut through the blancmange that was the tail-end of the hippie era.

In fact, the original cover has a photo of a topless pubescent girl, of about 12. She is holding a rather nice model aircraft.

You can't show that any more

With a line-up consisting of Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Ginger Baker and Rick Grech, you would have expected something good, and you would not be disappointed.
It is an album you should make time for and listen to in its entirety, as you pine for the good old days. I suppose i am being only partially ironic. It is raw and unaffected, despite Ginger's drum solo. There is a cover of a Buddy Holly track that works, over and above the original, which is almost sacriligious to say, but true. my favourite is Sea Of Joy written by Steve Winwood.

It is true to say that here were a band of musicians at a crossroads; they came together for a moment, did something that any rock journeymen would be proud of, and went on to other things.

gorgeous

This is Joan Fontaine, star of "Rebbecca". Not the eponymous of course, but merely "the second Mrs De Winter" Amazingly she is still alive and well, and I have an autographed photo, going back to the days when she looked like this.