Kurt Vonnegut Explains His Literary Inspiration……..

…………….with a marker pen on the back of a bit of toilet paper………………….

I saw this on ‘Table of Malcontents’

Bionic Woman

Nice, huh?

But not real.

I saw this young woman on boingboing - she’s a computer generated image and if you click on the link below then you’ll possibly be astounded, though maybe not.

http://cubo.cc/

Wendy Red Red Flag……….

Here’s a good one. You’ll like this.

Question - What’s the alternative to Nationalism in Scotland?

Answer - (no sniggering at the back) Socialism !!

Socialism ??

Wot, that bankrupt political philosophy that the Labour party abandoned a generation ago in order that they could ’seize the centre ground and make themselves electable?’

Yup, the very same.

And who, pray, says so?

Why none other than Wendy ‘Che Guevara’ ‘keep the donations at just under the grand so the working class don’t find out’ Alexander.

Forgive me for choking on my muesli.

Hardly anyone in Scotland could be more identified with anti-Socialism than Ms Alexander (and her wee brar, Ms Hoolie). She clambered up the greasy political poll on an unashamedly ‘torier-than-thou’ ticket. Wendy has a degree in Business Administration and she has conducted her political career in accordance with the manuals of the clip-board men.

Doesn’t she remember that the Socialists were hounded out of the Labour Party at the end of the 20th century? Where does she think that Tommy Sheridan et al came from? She should know - at one time when she was an ambitious researcher she worked for George Galloway. Presumably George’s idea of Socialism no longer chimes with Wendy’s.

Doesn’t she realise that if we’re voting for socialism then we’re definitely not voting for Labour?

The Labour Party is irretrievably tainted by sleaze, corruption and hypocrisy. The fact that Wendy is (still) the leader says as much as you need to know. Socialist leaders ought not to be involved in financial scandals, because it makes the workers think that they are greedy bastards, just feathering their own nests.

Wendy is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Wendy, there are no socialists left in the Labour Party !!! You and your pals exterminated them.

No wonder Alex Salmond laughs so much.

My Favourite Books

No 72 - Bleak House by Charles Dickens

I read this book 35 years ago. I can recite the entire first sentence from memory. It reads,

“London“.

That fixes the location in general. The next sentence particularises the locus to the Lord Chancellor’s Chancery Court in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. And the third sentence locates the action in time - it is November of implacable weather, mud in the streets, fog everywhere, up river, down river, in the streets, in the Chancellor’s court, in the minds of men.

The court is concerned with the long-running case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce. People and parties have been born into and died out of this case. Suitors initially hopeful, then ruined or driven mad or both, have come and gone. Lawyers whose careers have been built on the case, are now easing themselves towards the pension it has provided. Not one living soul either has, or ever can have, a grasp of all the tortuous ins and outs of wills, dispositions, codicils, back letters, conveyances, bequests, entails, bills of suit, attainders, reclaimers, suspensions, sists, adjournments, motion rolls, fee notes, audits, and all the other writs and notices of multifarious sorts that have attended this most dripping of roasts.

“The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world“.

Jarndyce v Jarndyce binds this novel together. Years after I read it, my friend Helen floated the surprising notion that Dickens intended the case to be pronounced ‘Jaundice v Jaundice’, and I have come to believe that that is absolutely right, Dickens famously taking great pains over every minor detail of his characters, particularly their names.

The Chancery Court and the Jarndyce case allow Dickens free reign to parody and satirise the legal profession, and much of the court action is hilariously funny -

Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

“Mr. Tangle,” says the Lord High Chancellor, latterly something restless under the eloquence of that learned gentleman.

“Mlud,” says Mr. Tangle. Mr. Tangle knows more of Jarndyce and Jarndyce than anybody. He is famous for it—supposed never to have read anything else since he left school.

“Have you nearly concluded your argument?”

“Mlud, no—variety of points—feel it my duty tsubmit—ludship,” is the reply that slides out of Mr. Tangle.

“Several members of the bar are still to be heard, I believe?” says the Chancellor with a slight smile.

Eighteen of Mr. Tangle’s learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity.

“We will proceed with the hearing on Wednesday fortnight,” says the Chancellor. For the question at issue is only a question of costs, a mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit, and really will come to a settlement one of these days.

The Chancellor rises; the bar rises; the prisoner is brought forward in a hurry; the man from Shropshire cries, “My lord!” Maces, bags, and purses indignantly proclaim silence and frown at the man from Shropshire.

“In reference,” proceeds the Chancellor, still on Jarndyce and Jarndyce, “to the young girl—”

“Begludship’s pardon—boy,” says Mr. Tangle prematurely. “In reference,” proceeds the Chancellor with extra distinctness, “to the young girl and boy, the two young people”—Mr. Tangle crushed—”whom I directed to be in attendance to-day and who are now in my private room, I will see them and satisfy myself as to the expediency of making the order for their residing with their uncle.”

Mr. Tangle on his legs again. “Begludship’s pardon—dead.”

“With their”—Chancellor looking through his double eye-glass at the papers on his desk—”grandfather.”

“Begludship’s pardon—victim of rash action—brains.”

Suddenly a very little counsel with a terrific bass voice arises, fully inflated, in the back settlements of the fog, and says, “Will your lordship allow me? I appear for him. He is a cousin, several times removed. I am not at the moment prepared to inform the court in what exact remove he is a cousin, but he IS a cousin.”

Leaving this address (delivered like a sepulchral message) ringing in the rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the fog knows him no more. Everybody looks for him. Nobody can see him.

These words were written nearly 160 years ago - but if you care to make your way into the Court of Session in Edinburgh tomorrow morning you will almost certainly see a scene remarkably like the one just described.

There is the usual cavalcade of quite amazing and fantastic characters, including such well-known literary creations as Krook (an alcoholic who spontaneously combusts), Skimpole, Guppy, Smallweed, Nemo, the Dedlocks, Inspector Bucket, Turveydrop and Tulkinghorn.

The structure of the story, as so often with Dickens, is dependent on a vast web of interlocking coincidences and unknown family connections suddenly being discovered or revealed. Not one pin is dropped in the story, without someone picking it up with later devastating effect.

At the time when the book was published in 1853 some reviewers were highly critical of that structure, saying things like, “Bleak House is, even more than its predecessors, chargeable with not simple faults, but absolute want of construction” ; “the whole Dedlock set, might be eliminated from the book without damage to the great Chancery suit” ; Dickens is “indulging in stale satire at the length and expense of Chancery proceedings“.

For me, they are too critical. I think the Chancery case is a quite superbly inventive basis for the story of a wrong side of the blanket illegitimate child, and great and lordly people brought low by haughtiness and hypocrisy. It is one of my favourite Dickens books, though I would accept that the narrator of much of the story, Esther Summerson, is just too sickly sweet to be entirely wholesome. She has been described by one critic as ‘a model of unconscious goodness; love and reaping it wherever she goes, diffusing round her an atmosphere of happiness and a sweet perfume of a pure and kindly nature. Her unconsciousness and sweet humility of disposition are so profound that scarcely a page of her autobiography is free from a record of these admirable qualities’ - Puke, puke.

Despite that fault, Bleak House was recently serialised by the BBC to great audience acclaim, and I’m personally aware that the serialisation was avidly watched by many who had never read a word written by Dickens. It was superbly entertaining and so is this book.

I finish by quoting old man Smallweed’s loving words directed to his wife -

“You’re a brimstone idiot. You’re a scorpion—a brimstone scorpion! You’re a sweltering toad. You’re a chattering clattering broomstick witch that ought to be burnt!“

This is going to turn out well………………

Here are the first two paragraphs of an article in yesterday’s Guardian :-

A German theatre is to stage the world premiere of the controversial Salman Rushdie novel The Satanic Verses, breaking a long taboo and prompting fears of a backlash by local Muslims.

The Hans Otto theatre in Potsdam, south-west of Berlin, is due to begin an eight-week run of the stage adaptation of the 1988 novel on Sunday, aiming, said its director, to expose it to a new audience.

Fark summarised this story as follows :- German theatre is to stage the world premiere of the controversial Salman Rushdie novel “The Satanic Verses”. Doors open at 8. Fire brigade and police due at 5 past

OK - Here’s the Rules :-

from Engrish.com