I think we should be told

I've been bothered by a couple of resemblences for a while now. I wonder if they are by any chance related etc etc. First up, Mancunian drunk Mark E. Smith and wood engraver David Jones...

And secondly, rubbish painter Francis Bacon and Claudius the God...

So there you go. The first picture there is taken from the most pretentiously drammy picture I have ever seen. Kenneth Branagh on his own is quite annoying, but look at this. It's firing squad time...

Or maybe Claudius is idly wondering which wild animals will be tearing Branagh apart come Saturday down the Colosseum. It's a nice thought.

Season of pissed-up mellow fruiters

It's damson gin time again. Four glass jars, about 5 litres of shit Lidl gin, lots of sugar and 2 carrier bags full of damsons. The liquid has turned purple already. Which is what passes for excitement round here.

In other news, the Guardian have been printing these little booklets of interviews with various famous types the last couple of weeks. This morning's was with Margaret Thatcher and of course it was in the bin before the end of the street. But yesterday's was with Hitler, whose rantings I was content to carry around in my bad all day. Now, it's not that I'm saying that I think Thatcher's as bad as a genocidal maniac, but one has to have some standards, eh.

Serves him right

Today I have been mostly musing on how cross it would've made General Sherman, above, to learn that his name is mostly known as a euphemism for masturbation. Look at him. He'd be furious!

Would that all the gun-toting idiots in the world could be ridiculed in the same way, eh.

Reason to be cheerful no. 4,076

Thelonious Monk playing table tennis...

Abso-cunting-lutely

"The sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or of a lack of verbal interest is just fucking lunatic" - Stephen Fry.

Whisky galore

There are many reasons to visit Islay, there's the historic Celtic culture, there's the fluffy cows and there's the undeniably stunning scenery. But obviously for me it's all about the whisky. There are 8 distilleries on Islay and we visited them all. We only did tours of 4 of them, but we had a good look at the others and here are my thoughts, based on a completely futile and deliberately pointless scoring system.

The categories were: amount of stripped pine in the visitor's centre, quality of heritage photography, size of tour guide's beard, accent of guide, number of americans or japanese on the tour and pictureskewness, with bonus points for other things.

Laphroaig - 83% (50/60). Extra points for getting a taste from a cask and for being in the actual process of stripping pine to extend their visitor centre. Marked down for having a stairwell full of pictures of Prince Charles visiting in a kilt.
Lagavulin - 66% (40/60). My favourite whisky. Anytime anyone wants to give me a bottle of the 16 year old they'd be welcome. The mouldy shed full of casks quietly maturing will haunt my dreams.
Kilchoman - 66% (40/60). A brand new distillery that still hasn't produced any whisky, since to be whisky it has to be 5 years old. But plenty of stripped pine, charmingly small and owned by some of the islanders rather than a big company.
Ardbeg - 66% (20/30). Didn't do the tour but scored heavily on the quality of their steak and ale pie and for having waitresses in tartan flat caps.
Bunnahabhain - 66% (20/30). Wonderfully remote and staffed in part by a man with a wheelbarrow full of peat wearing a midge-net who looked like some kind of alien and gave me a right shock before he started talking in a broad accent. A barrel up the road says "Bunnahabhain" on one side and "other places" on the back.
Caol Ila - 50% (30/60). One of only two that were actually running, as they tend to close down in the summer for maintenance. This is because historically the workers would use the downtime to cut peat for their homes, fact fans. Crucially for this driver, the only one close enough to walk to from where we were.
Bruichladdich - 37% (11/30). The other Islay owned distillery and notable for having a much larger variety of whiskies in an attempt to get people interested, it only having been reopened a short time after being closed in the 80s. Barrels show the name backwards in the yard, inexplicably. But why not.
Bowmore - 33% (10/30). Definitely the poshest, as it's in the island's capital town. No beards to speak of.

Visitors to mod towers are advised to check pronounciations or they won't get any.

The youf of today

The BBC website has a report on the rebranding of the Dandy, which is 70 this year. Nothing too unusual about that, even if the new publication, Dandy Xtreme, has a shit badly spelt name. Such is life. But here's what the Editor had to say...

"Following extensive research, we discovered The Dandy readers were struggling to schedule a weekly comic into their hectic lives. They just didn't have enough time. They're too busy gaming, surfing the net or watching TV, movies and DVDs... They required a guide, packed with the stuff kids need to know to stay in the loop - a lifestyle magazine attuned to their hectic lives, featuring all the latest trends, must-haves, must-sees and must-dos."

Phew. Those demanding kids, eh? Their lives are too hectic to read a few fucking words. I mean, it's a comic, the whole point of it is that it has fewer words and takes less time to read. The new issues appear to have the Simpsons on the front, which kinds of points to a lack of initiative and originality. I give it a couple of years before it folds because the kids are too busy buying the Beano.

Copy, right?

Ok, so I shamelessly nicked the title from an MP3 blog of the same name (which is worth a look if you like cover versions), but anyway. The point is that I just found a link to the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft. Now I've never read any H.P. Lovecraft, but I'm aware that good and sensible people like Neil Gaiman have, and so here's the link. Link.

Rejoice!

FIP's back on the air. 98.5FM, Brighton people. Thanks for drawing it to my attention, Mr. a_non, whoever you are! (And who are you?!).

A couple of things about the 14th century

I've just finished a superb biography of Sir John Hawkwood, who started out a squire in Essex and ended up married to the daughter of the Duke of Milan and one of the most influential men in Italy. After his death the above fresco was painted in Florence Cathedral. He more or less achieved this by failing to go home after the Hundred Years' War (actual length, 116 years) and instead heading to Italy to start menacing cities with his company of mercenaries. Italian politics were so insane that this kind of worked, with Milan and Florence and Siena and the Pope (and the other Pope) all hiring and firing or otherwise capturing and ransoming him while he changed sides more often than you can count and acquired huge amounts of property and cash. It's all hugely entertaining from a distance of 600 years.

The two completely trivial things that really got me, though, were:
1 - Knights in battle were often electrocuted in their armour during thunderstorms.
2 - Popular belief at the time held that if you had sex with a menstruating woman the baby would be a leper.

Who needs fiction?

Because I have a mental age of 12...

Another reason to hate Travis

I have specific reasons for hating Travis that predate their dire years of being rained on. One night in 1996 while having a pint before seeing Beth Orton we were asked to move from our table "so the band could have their tea". Thinking, well, ok, we got up, and 4 spotty students sat down and started eating. "Where's Beth?" we thought. They turned out to be this stunningly average pub rock band who went down like a lead balloon as the support that night. "I bet they become successful just to annoy me" I remember thinking, pissed off that not only was I having to endure this shite, but that they'd also nicked my seat.

So just to add another layer of annoyance, they've gone and ripped off the above photograph of Sao Paulo, which I randomly found on the net last year and have loved ever since. It's by Rennee Burri, who also took a fantastic picture of Che Guevara, here. And what do Travis do? They walk across a rooftop in New York and try and grab some of the cool for themselves. Well, it isn't working, lads, you will forever be a mediocre bunch of whingers who give Coldplay a good name. Now fuck off and don't come back until you have an original idea.

Aaaahh. And relax.

Big and clever

Some sweary highlights from tonight's "The Thick of It" on BBC4...

"We are going to ram you so hard up Tom's arse that he'll have to shit out of his mouth."
"Ok, twatweasle, you got that?"
"It sucks cock so deep that the bellend is wearing your appendix as a hat."
"You couldn't organise a bum rape in a barracks."
"Normally you're about as secure as a hymen in a south London comprehensive."
"I will personally eviscerate you. Obviously I don't have your education so I don't know what that means, but I'll start by ripping your cock off and busk it from there."
"Oh God, it's like a prostate consultant's waiting room in here."
"You don't leak. Well, not from the mouth, anyway."

My Pet Goat and other important state archives

Fark had one of their photoshop contests to suggest designs for Dubya's Presidential Library (hallelujah, he's almost gone). I liked this one the best. Although honourable mention must go to this one, too.

An Army of Her

Glasto kind of passed me by except for some late night telly. The Arctics were noisy and fun, the Who weren't half bad (Pete Townsend sure plays a mean riff), but what really got me was Bjork.

I'm not a huge fan, but I'm always interested to see what planet she's currently on. Last week she had this sound going on that rather obscurely reminded me of an instrumental on an old Elvis Costello album Spike called "Stalin Malone", all dissonant brass and warm tones underpinning her usual beats and odd stylings. It was amazing. And of course it looked wonderful, two rows of pixie women playing french horns and the like with stars on their brows and flags apparently flying from their dresses. Just the best thing I've seen in ages. Nice one BBC4.

Youtube has a few examples posted, here, here and here. Give it a whirl.

Mod chuffed to be back online!

Flogging a dead corpse

I can't get excited by the recent Nick Drake release, Family Tree, which collects family recordings and includes several examples of his mother singing. When I first heard Nick Drake in the early 90s, there were the three albums and a fourth rounding up odd studio quality tracks and outtakes. That was really all you needed, and you could definitely make a case for only needing the three albums, each perfect in its own way. Pre-internet, it seemed enough.

But of course capitalism and the cult of youthful death will have their way. Since then his fame has grown exponentially, which is great for convincing people that Coldplay haven't made a single note of interesting music ever, but then so have the magazine articles, biographies, anthologies and craving for new material. The tragic poet who died without achieving fame and the legend of a finite oeuvre have become an overwhelming clamour. So we get some teenage doodles, a bad Bob Dylan cover and him playing the clarinet.

Nick Drake recorded three of the finest and most moving English folk albums and then died of an overdose of antidepressants. Just leave it at that.

Mod out.

PS In case anyone has no idea what I'm on about, buy Bryter Layer. Now.

Corporate English

A friend of mine was sent this letter after complaining about a meal they'd had. One the one hand, it's admirable that a complaint should be answered when most companies of Wagamama's size could care less, but one has to ask, where were they when the punctuation was handed out? And is there some house style which bans the use of capital letters? They're obviously massive e.e. cummings fans.

Been making me chuckle all week. Mod out for random carriage return soup.

Welcoming Summer with the Candylion

I've just bought some music for the first time all year. Which felt weird, I can tell you. Tom Waits and the Arctics do what they say on their tins and shout about strange fish meals and annoying people in clubs respectively. Both recommended.

But the album I think I'll be mostly playing in the sunshine this summer will be Gruff Rhys' Candylion, a typically idiosyncratic collection of ditties and gentle strums. Less ambitious than the Super Furry Animals' stuff with none of that scary techno noisiness, it's deliberately playful (the sleeve features 70s kids TV style instructions on how to make your own candylion... fluff!) and a totally ego-free experience. Refreshing and almost as catchy as Mwng. Download tracks using the Hype Machine here.

My only gripe is that I wish more than a handful of the tracks were in Welsh. For some reason that makes it doubly catchy.

Mod i maes, look you.

From the sublime to the ridiculous

Bugger

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An appropriate expanse of black space to suit my mood...