How Things Work - Part 327

Here are two stories from yesterday’s news. See if you can spot the connection -

[1] Network Rail fined £14m

Network Rail has been hit with the biggest fine in the industry’s history. The company was ordered to pay a £14 million penalty for the chaos it inflicted on 300,000 passengers over the New Year.

The fine imposed by the rail regulator for the failure to complete three sets of engineering works nearly double the previous highest, £7.6 million which was paid by Railtrack in August 1999. The money will go to the Treasury, leading opposition politicians to dismiss the move as “pointless”.

Network Rail, which runs the country’s track and signalling, has been fined for failing to complete work at Liverpool Street Station, Glasgow and Rugby on time. Passengers also face the prospect of even more disruption than previously expected with Network Rail admitting it needs an extra 13 days to complete the upgrade of the West Coast Main Line by the end of the year.

This could mean even more weekends when passengers will have to use buses to complete part of their journey between London and north west England or Scotland.

Network Rail was the subject of a coruscating report following the Office of Rail Regulation’s investigation into the holiday shambles.

“What happened over the New Year was totally unacceptable,” said Bill Emery, the ORR’s chief executive.

“The weakness in Network Rail’s management of these projects had a serious impact on all of them and on the reputation of the railway.

“It is quite clear from our thorough investigation that Network Rail is failing to manage major engineering work as consistently as it should.“

This, he said, was due to poor planning between the company and bad communication with train operators who use its track. The fine reflects the growing frustration at Network Rail’s stewardship of the system with signalling failures and track problems embarrassingly commonplace.

Last year there were more than 52,000 separate incidents in which the infrastructure broke down. Although the fine does not guarantee that Network Rail’s chiefs will have their bonuses cut, the ORR said it it expects the company’s remuneration committee to take it into account when they are calculated.

[2] Network Rail chairman knighted

The Chairman of Network Rail, Ian McAllister, was knighted by Prince Charles today in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

He was knighted in the New Year Honours for his services to transport.

What a fucking farce !! His ’services to transport’ consisted of completely fucking up most of the network and ruining the festive period for hundreds of thousands of travellers.

And for that he was paid a salary of £236,000.

These people just make the rules up to suit themselves as they go along.

Random Cuts - Number 59

I was reading the March edition of Record Collector, which amongst the usual monthly crop of exciting and informative articles has part 2 of its series on Bob Dylan rarities.

One of these rarities happens to be one of my all-time favourite Dylan songs.

I thought I would illustrate this posting with a snapshot of part of the bookshelves behind me.The eagle-eyed will detect a theme.

Dylan recorded the song featured here on numerous occasions, in several different versions and styles, and apart from these studio out-takes I’ve also got a few live renditions. He obviously likes the song and rates it, but he has apparently never been able to capture it to his own satisfaction, because he never officially released it.

The version here is undoubtedly the best and closest to what Bob was searching for. I simply love the interplay between his voice and his fantastic (and much under-rated) piano playing. He just quite effortlessly creates a masterpiece which nearly every other songwriter would kill for, and would consider as a pinnacle of their art. His singing is quite extraordinary on this song, squeezing every ounce of passion and emotion from the lyric in a way which 98% of popular singers can only dream about. Every other artiste would think this was a major achievement.

Dylan doesn’t even release it.

The lyric is a gunfighter ballad set on the US/Mexican border. The narrator has had a fling with a mexican beauty but has had to flee back over the border to escape the law -

Melt when you hear Bob sing

Still I’ve always kinda missed her
Since that last sad night I kissed her
Broke her heart
Left my own
Adios
Mi Corazon

This is Bob Dylan - Spanish Is The Loving Tongue

28 February 2006

Two years ago to the day, I posted only one entry, melodramatically reading

All Quiet on the Western Front

………………

I was about to leave home, the following morning, to go to hospital for the heart by-pass. I wasn’t entirely sure whether I’d ever be back.

And yet here we are two years later - still here. Amazing.

This year, of course, being a leap year, has an intervening day tomorrow - but I will be self-indulgent and return to this topic  on Saturday 1 March, because that will mark the literal second anniversary of me going to the hospital in Clydebank.

Falkirk 0-2 Hibernian

Recent results and performances had lulled us into a false habit of thinking that football was enjoyable.

But tonight we reverted to the natural state of your average football fan - viz; utter misery.

Falkirk were well beaten tonight by a vastly superior Hibs team, and really the only time the Bairns threatened was around about the time when the PA announced that ‘there will be 3 minutes additional time’.

That’s too little.

That’s too late.

The photograph below shows the only time in the entire game when Falkirk were in with a shout - it’s 7.45pm and Falkirk are just about to kick off. It was all downhill from here.

Unfortunately there was nothing in the Bairns performance tonight to suggest that this was just an off-night. Rather the whole way the team is set up is not conducive to winning games. They carry no goal-scoring threat. The Hibernian goalkeeper, who appears to have no discernible qualifications for the job, was not tested at all, although he looked like an accident waiting to happen. In fact, he was an accident waiting to happen - he had to be subbed in the 2nd half, having somehow got injured - which is really difficult to do when the ball never comes near you.

Hibs will hardly gain an easier 3 points all season. They played very well and thoroughly deserved to win.

Transport News (Incorporating Football Snippets)

I forgot to report - 5 minutes late yesterday.

4 minutes late today.

It’s getting better.

Dare we hope for a train to run on time sometime over the next twelvemonth?

Anyway, while I was waiting this morning I noticed a couple of things of interest in the Metro newspaper.

First, with Forfar Athletic winning last night, Dumbarton have finally reached the position they’ve been angling for all season - ie bottom of division 3 - worst team in Scotland !! - good grief

Secondly I see that Motherwell have signed former Rangers defender Bob Malcolm (or Bob Malcolm ftp as he occasionally styles himself). It reports that Bob ’struggled to make an impact down south’ with Derby County. That should be alarm bells ringing right there. But the bit of the report that cracked me up reads as follows -

“The player was banned from driving for 20 months last month after being found asleep and twice the legal drink-drive limit in his car in the middle lane of the M1“

Jefferson Starship Enterprise

Remember what the dormouse said.

More News From Zimbabwe’s Powerhouse Economy

I notice in a posting on boingboing that the black market rate of exchange in Zimbabwe now gives you 20 million (ie 20,000,000) Zimbabwean dollars for 1 (one) US Dollar.

The days when you could buy a hamburger for 15 million Zimbabwean dollars

http://almax.wordpress.com/2008/01/20/news-from-zimbabwe/

are just a distant memory

A Merry Muse

With reference to the foregoing post about the Merry Muses of Caledonia, I now post one of the least obscene of the verses set to music, arranged by Dr Fred Freeman in the Linn Collection of Burns songs.

However, I have to say that those who are offended by such things will find plenty to be offended by here - I deliberately do not re-print the lyrics, so if you want to be righteously offended you’ll have to listen very carefully.

More than once.

Probably a few times.

This is ‘My Girl She’s Airy‘

My Favourite Books

No 66 - The Merry Muses of Caledonia by Robert Burns

Of course Burns has appeared on this blog on many occasions, and an edition of his collected poems has already featured at number 6 in this series

http://almax.wordpress.com/2006/05/05/my-favourite-books-6/

Now we turn to verses which don’t appear in many of the collections of Burns’ work, though the tradition of keeping them apart from the conventional collected works was broken, probably finally and irrevocably, with the publication of ‘The Canongate Burns’ in 2001, where many of the so-called ‘Merry Muses of Caledonia‘ appeared in a discrete section of the ‘complete poems and songs’.

The ‘Merry Muses‘ (not a title chosen by Burns himself) are a collection of bawdy, rude, pornographic, obscene verses, usually though of as unworthy of the bard, and certainly not fit for ordinary public consumption over the 2 centuries plus since his death, and these verses have sometimes been referred to as the ’suppressed poems’ for that reason.

These poems are generally not written by Burns, but were merely collected by him as examples of the bawdy verse of his day, and it seems beyond doubt that he derived considerable amusement from reciting or singing these poems and songs in the company of his male friends in pubs and clubs.

The first time a published collection of these verses appeared was just a handful of years after Burns’ death. It was called the Merry Muses and described itself as a collection of favourite Scots songs. That edition was expressly said to be “selected for the use of the Crochallan Fencibles” (one of the Bard’s Edinburgh drinking clubs). Various editions were published from time to time from then on, though most of the time they were very much under-the-counter publications.

The edition I have here was published in 1982 as a re-issue of a book first published in 1959. I mention these dates because there are forewords by J. DeLancey Ferguson and James Barke written in 1958 which are quite astonishingly frank and open, in a way that one doesn’t associate readily with that age. Ferguson’s piece opens

“That Burns collected bawdy folksongs, and added to them, is a fact not questioned even by the bardolators who strive to ignore it……“

while Barke very quickly finds himself considering the derivation of the F word when he says,

“Fuck” I take to be an onomatopoeic word equivalent of the sound made by the penis in the vagina…….today it may be regarded as either the most tender or the most disturbing word in our language…

Bear in mind please that in 1974 Philip Larkin famously noted that sexual intercourse only began in 1963 just before the Beatles first LP, and in that same year he was still able to shock the literary world with the poetic averment that ‘they fuck you up, your mum and dad’.

But back in 1958, Jimmy Barke was moving from the meaning of ‘fuck‘ to the meaning of an even worse word beginning with C which even to name would be unlawfu’, though Jimmy boldly names it and notes that it derives from the Latin cunus. Barke’s fairly lengthy piece on ‘Pornography and Bawdry in Literature and Society‘ is an integral part of this book and it is still a matter of deep regret that he died in 1958 before the finished book was published.

All of this is by way of introduction to Burns’ Merry Muses.

The first verse to appear is “I’ll Tell You A Tale Of A Wife“

I’ll tell you a tale of a Wife,
And she was a Whig and a Saunt;
She liv’d a most sanctify’d life,
But whyles she was fash’d wi’ her ——-

Fal lal etc

There then follows another 10 verses containing words like runt, brunt and affront, in order to allow the rhyme with the word we cannot mention.

Next up is ‘Bonie Mary‘ which is really so obscene that I cannot print any of it here, but suffice it to say that Mary had apparently not had her bikini-line waxed.

Then we turn to the law in the poem ‘Act Sederunt of the Session’ which begins

In Edinburgh town they’ve made a law,
In Edinburgh at the Court o’ Session
That standing pricks are fauteors a’,
And guilty of a high transgression

Are you getting the picture?

These verses have no literary merit whatsoever, but Burns collected them for a reason, and the reason was so that they would be preserved and perhaps continue to be sung long after he was gone. There is a place for this sort of ribald bawdry. It’s not to everyone’s taste, and certainly it probably wouldn’t be to mine had Burns not been associated with it.

But, it exists. I like it. It’s here as one of my favourite books.

Madgie cam to my bed-stock,
To see gif I was waukin;
I pat my han’ atweesh her feet
An’ fand her wee bit maukin.

Fal,lal, lal etc

Jesus, is that you up in those trees again?

Don’t bother asking which country this story comes from - you know the answer already.

This is from recordonline.com

The story begins -

The figure in the bark appeared about four months ago.

Donna Pascariello poured coffee that October morning and looked through her back window, hoping to see a deer or a fox or maybe a squirrel through the fog. She saw the figure in the bark. Was it Jesus Christ?

Yeah, we’re in Nutsville, USA.

Don’t see Jesus in the tree?

Try a close-up -

Praise the Lord, and pass the Lysergide

Finbarr Doo-Wop

This is one of my periodic plugs for the great Finbarr Records, purveyors of the very best in doo-wop, fifties rock’n'roll, r’nb, etc etc, occasioned by me taking delivery tonight from them of a handful of doo-wop discs, chief amongst which was the fourth volume in Finbarr’s own stupendous series ‘the Golden Treasury of Doo-Wop‘.

If you’re in the slightest bit interested in the predominantly black vocal group sound of the mid-fifties/early sixties then these 4 volumes are simply must-haves. Well, certainly the first 3 volumes are, and on a very quick sampling, it seems that vol 4 is well up to the previous standard.

The sample track here is ‘Baby Oh Baby‘ by the Shells. On the extensive sleeve-notes it is said that “the Shells were a bitterly unhappy group, thanks largely to their impossible lead, Nathan Bouknight, a drunken braggart who would meet an early death“

Bouknight wrote this song and it was released in 1957 - so here’s to you, Nathan, impossible as you were.

Finbarr can be contacted here -

FINBARR (CD DEPT)
FOLKESTONE
KENT CT20 2QQ
England

Gourmet News

I also saw this one on the BBC.

A group of friends went out for a meal to Joe Delucci’s Italian restaurant in Bird Street, Lichfield, Staffordshire a week past on Friday night.

The service was a bit slow and some of the party complained.

When the bill came, it seems that their complaint had been sympathetically considered -

The illustration above from the BBC has some words ‘redacted’ with sno-pake to spare the blushes of a family audience, though I understand that the actual bill contained the invitation in full.

So far, so amusing.

What really killed me about the story was this paragraph -

Joe Delucci’s owner Mr Langsdon said the message had been meant to be seen only by kitchen staff and he did not know how it ended up as an item on the receipt.

Note how ‘Mr Langsdon’ casually doesn’t apologise for a member of his staff expressing the idea that fuck face should suck his dick, but apologises only for the technical hitch that the idea ended up on the bill.

Be assured that while all the waiters are peeing in your minestrone without reprimand, Mr Langsdon will be apologetic if the kitchen door swings open and lets you see this special free flavouring being added.

You Tubes

I quote from a BBC news story that tells you pretty well all you need to know about the government of Pakistan and its relationship with free speech, to say nothing of the competence of their telecom engineers -

Pakistan’s attempts to block access to YouTube have been blamed for a near global blackout of the site on Sunday.

Google, the owner of YouTube, blamed the outage on “erroneous internet protocols”, sourced in Pakistan

BBC News has learned that the nearly two-hour long blackout was almost certainly connected to Pakistan Telecom and internet service provider PCCW.

The country ordered ISPs to block the video-sharing website because of content deemed offensive to Islam.

The BBC News website’s technology editor, Darren Waters, says that to block Pakistan’s citizens from accessing YouTube it is believed Pakistan Telecom “hijacked” the web server address of the popular video site.

Those details were then passed on to the country’s internet service providers so that anyone in Pakistan attempting to go to YouTube was instead re-directed to a different address.

But the details of the “hijack” were leaked out into the wider internet from PCCW and as a result YouTube was mistakenly blocked by internet service providers around the world.

…………………………….

Reports said Pakistan made the move because YouTube content included Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad that have outraged many.

But one report said a trailer for a forthcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, which portrays Islam in a negative light, was behind the ban.

I don’t believe that the citizens of Pakistan approve of this totalitarian behaviour by their government.

Transport News

6 minutes late today

24 consecutive days

Eureka. I’ve got it.

The sentiment behind the old saying that “Hitler/Mussolini made the trains run on time” is almost synonymous with totalitarianism.

In that context, the fact that the Edinburgh to Dunblane train is late every day is in fact a shining beacon of freedom in this world of increasingly centralised authoritarianism. I, and my fellow travellers on this eternally tardy mechanised vehicle, are in fact warriors on the front line of the battle between freedom and slavery. ‘Leaves on the line at Straiton junction’ is a stab into Big Brother’s regimented black heart.

They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our late-running trains.

Bouncing Balls

I missed this action from the currently ongoing 1st Test between Bangla Desh and South Africa, but Douglas draws my attention to it and sets the scene thus,

Bangladesh v South Africa, and Bangla Desh are in a strong position. Ashraful (slow offspin)comes on to bowl to de Villiers.

He bowls an utter shocker, pitching closer to his feet than the batsman’s, then bouncing again before reaching de Villiers. He thinks it’s a free hit, and tries to send it back over the Indian Ocean, but edges it into the sky. Ashraful catches it. De Villiers isn’t bothered, but Bangla Desh appeal. Steve Bucknor knows the rules.

He’s out.

The ball is only dead if it either bounces MORE than twice, or rolls, before reaching the popping crease.

Cue utter astonishment all round.