I knew it

Tony Blair's a wanker,
Tony Blair's a wanker,
la la la la
la la la laaa.

Tony Blair's a wanker,
Tony Blair's a wanker,
la la la la
la la la laaa.........

Or Tony "I'd love to suck Jesus' cock" Bliar to give him his full title. Can't believe I ever voted for him.

Galaxies, sir, thousands of them

No way are we alone in this universe.

Paul Simon singing Brian Wilson

Ignore the annoying announcer bloke. This is just lovely...

Yep

(From the Gibson forum).

"Whaddaya gonna do?"

RIP Sopranos. Best. TV. Ever. (Even though the last series was a bit pants). Better swearing than the West Wing, better haircuts than the Wire, and less Lovejoy actors than Deadwood. Some of my random favourite things about it:-

1. Sil. The hair. The suits. The terrible Al Pacino impressions.
2. Paulie. Again with the hair. He loved his mum, the big cuddly psychopath. And the fact that he survived is kind of sweet.
3. Steve Buscemi. Turned an already genius series into the best goddam weekly fix that you've ever experienced.
4. The swearing. For me, the best swearing was one time when Tony was pulled over by a black cop for speeding. He tries to bribe him, but gets nowhere and a ticket anyway. As he pulls away and passes the cop he mutters "Affirmative action cocksucker". Not big, not clever, but it doesn't half trip off the tongue.
5. The music. The closing credits invariably had the perfect tune to come down off an episode with. If fucking Channel 4 hadn't trailed Big Brother and other shite over it that would have been perfect. Thanks, you idiots.
6. Lauren Bacall getting punched in the face. What other show could write that?!

And probably lots more. It got out just in time, the last series had a lot of padding but it picked up enough in the end to make me miss it now it's gone. Cheers Tony you fat fuck.

In praise of gambling

Hurrah for the boks. For all the media hype about England's brave band of crocked old men, the best team in the tournament won it. I watched it with a friend who loves to gamble on sports. He's way more interested in it than I could ever be and has developed an approach that's left him significantly up after several years. Not enough to buy a yacht, but it's certainly kept him in beers. Rule number one is don't bet on horses, with baseball a close second, apparently.

The South African win last night was a triple whammy for him, and it's interesting to note what his winning bets were. He had a tenner on the boks from the beginning of the tournament at 9-1, which is fair enough, and then two other bets on last night's game, neither of which I'd have ever considered but both of which make perfect sense. Firstly England to not score a try (nice one, Mark Cueto's little toe), and then the total points scored to be under 38. Both no-brainers, really, when you look at the form. So, beers on him, then.

Any doubts I had about whether I'd soften my usual anti-England stance and support them even a little bit evaporated the first time they showed the princes. Fucking leeches. And what was with Gordon Brown, the French rightwing bloke and Thabo "AIDS isn't a big deal" Mbeki all up on the podium? Just weird. Surely Catherine Deneuve would've sufficed?

Is it just me?

Front of the Observer Music Magazine today, Paul McCartney and Pete Doherty. Jesus. I don't know who to be more angry at. The Observer for printing this rubbish, Macca for being a publicity whore, or the smackhead for being a talentless, well, smackhead. What's the point? Who cares? When did this become worthy of an exclusive splash?

Ok, so the paper know people will buy it whatever they do. I do. But then I buy it for the crossword, and the sport. Macca knows it'll make him seem just a little less like a pensioner who spends too much on hair dye. And smackhead must just be a lunatic if he believes the hype.

Now, I admit, I never heard the Libertines. But they looked good, and made the right people make the right noises and fair enough. But since then what has he done? Where did he cross the line from tosser who's done a bit of music to troubadour in the lineage of Blake and Rimbaud? It's that bloody Kate Moss, that's who. The media now believe he farts Booker Prize winners. I wish he'd just overdose and put an end to it, frankly. Although that would lead to people calling it "the ultimate show of artistic self-expression" and putting him up with all the other corpses who punch below their weight, Morrison and Curtis and Cobain and so on. And that would that. The orthodoxy of iconography. And that would piss me off too. So I don't know. But he can fuck off whatever.

Enter the Thirty Twix Chambers

No wonder Raekwon always looks a little chubby.

Don't Believe the Tripe

This is what happens when you spend too much of your time down the pub discussing food-related hip hop puns. It could happen to any of us, I'm sure you'll agree.

Mr. Aesthetic Archetype

So this bloke. Any ideas? He's probably northern European, he undoubtedly owns an Audi and has a thing for rimless spectacles and propelling pencils. He occasionally smiles to put small children at ease. He's old enough to think that black polo-necks are elegant and doesn't get out much on account of all the thinking he does. All his classical LP's are in date order.

The clue's in the picture, actually. He's Erno Rubik, inventor of the Rubik's cube, and doesn't he just look exactly like you'd imagine him? "Hmm, yes, if I put colours on the side of a cube I will create a most stimulating puzzle" he thought, tidying the paperclip drawer in his mountainside Bauhaus retreat, and the rest was history. He would definitely not approve of this cake.

The 25th World Championships was won by a Japanese kid in 13 seconds, incidentally. Bastard.

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?