Month: October 2023

A Halloween warning

Every year, when Halloween rolls around, parents get paranoid about their kids going trick or treating and being given drugs instead of chocolate or whatever, because giving drugs away for free is something drug dealers do all the time rather than making money, apparently. In any case, though, parents should evidently be worrying about other things turning up in their kids’ Halloween treat bags:

HOLY SHIT (as it were), imagine getting one of those in your swag…

…and, obviously, the reverse situation is also something you might want to watch out for.

Habemus Speaker… oh, fuck no

So the US finally has a new speaker of the house. This latest piece of bullshit began a few weeks ago when Matt Gaetz, one of the most punchable-looking people in US politics, put forth a motion to oust the then-speaker Kevin McCarthy for trying to stop a government shutdown. This meant having to get a new speaker, cos the government can’t actually function without one, and the most likely candidates, the guy who once spoke at an event run by David Duke and the pedophile enabler, failed to get up… but finally they got some character called Mike Johnson to do it, and, impressively, they seem to have got someone even worse than messrs Scalise and Jordan, even if they claim not to know much about him:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) acknowledged to The Hill that he has never met Johnson. Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Senate Republican, said that he doesn’t “know him very well” but “may have met him” in the past.
Some lawmakers added they didn’t know about him until recently, when he became a potential option for Speaker. Only hours before he became the fourth Speaker-designate in a matter of weeks, Johnson lost his bid for that title to House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.).
But senators, who by and large had grown increasingly concerned and desperate over the past three weeks as the House sat in a stalemate, are mostly relieved to have someone running the chamber. And they are willing to give Johnson a chance.
“He seems to be a good pick. I’m all for him. Anybody that can get through,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters with a laugh, adding that he too does not know him well. “No, not much. Seems like a very capable fellow.”

Yeah… capable. Capable of what, I wonder, now that he’s been elevated to the fourth-highest position in the whole US government…

Well, it appears SOMEONE did their research on this guy, and what a charmer he evidently is. And there’s the slight business of him being  a January 6er…

There are some questions about the most notable portion of Johnson’s congressional tenure, though. He was among the architects of the push to overturn the 2020 electoral count in favor of then-President Trump. House Republicans booed a reporter Tuesday night who asked Johnson about his role leading up to Jan. 6, 2021.
However, Cassidy — one of seven Senate Republicans to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial — said that item on Johnson’s resume does not give him pause.
“If all we do is focus upon flaws, we never move forward, because everybody in this institution … has some incredible flaw that you would look upon and say, ‘Does this disqualify them for X, Y and Z,’” Cassidy said.
“At some point, you’ve got to move ahead, and he’s a guy that can bridge those differences,” he added.

Bill. My brother in Christ. This is a guy who doesn’t even believe in the legitimacy of the current US government. This should disqualify him from EVERYTHING, cos all he’s going to do is undermine it. The US is not exactly having its most shining time right now, is it…

The long wait

Talking of Wikipedia, I rather randomly discovered the extraordinary story of Gavriil Popov’s fourth symphony… composed in 1949 but not given its first public performance until this year cos it kind of vanished. I don’t actually know much about Popov and I don’t think I’ve got any of his music, but I find the tale of this symphony quite remarkable. He finished it in 1949, a couple of years after Zhdanovshchina became the USSR’s cultural law; one of the manifestations of that was a 1948 resolution against “formalism” in music, with the composers’ union going after a number of composers including Popov for not being socialist realist enough in their work. So Popov bent the knee somewhat, which produced this curious response noted in the symphony’s Wiki entry:

In her review for Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti of the symphony’s world premiere in 2023, Vera Stepanovskaya wondered why Popov would turn to what she considered were “hollow Soviet texts” for his work…

Vera. My sister in Christ. Gavriil Popov lived in one of the most authoritarian and repressive countries on Earth, and the time during which he composed this symphony saw those tendencies get even worse. Indeed, while he was writing the first version of this symphony, the poet whose texts he was using died under apparently suspicious circumstances, hence why Popov started rewriting it with someone else’s words. He’d been specifically targeted by Stalin’s government (after having been a Stalin Prize recipient in 1946 for his second symphony), which was encouraging composers to use socialist realist texts in their works if they didn’t want to be accused of formalism. Why would he NOT have turned to those hollow Soviet texts? Popov would’ve been trying to save not only his career but quite possibly his life, I don’t suppose he relished the prospect of the gulag or having an “accident”… Prokofiev did the exact same thing when he was also specifically targeted in the anti-formalism crusade, there weren’t a lot of options. Do I know more about the history of her own country than Vera does?

RIP Bobi

Alas, the world’s oldest dog couldn’t last forever.

When a brown-and-white puppy called Bobi mewled into the world on 11 May 1992, Yugoslavia was tearing itself apart, LA was still smouldering from riots, the ink was drying on the Maastricht treaty, Sharon Stone was baiting Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct and REM were five months away from releasing Automatic for the People.
The late canine, who has died at the spectacular age of 31 years and 165 days, has not so much broken the record for the world’s longest-lived dog as shaken it violently from side-to-side, torn it to pieces, buried it and then cocked a triumphant, if elderly, leg over it.
Bobi, a Portuguese mastiff, or Rafeiro do Alentejo, shuffled off his mortal collar on 21 October in the Portuguese village of Conqueiros, where he had lived his entire life with Leonel Costa and his family.
One of the earliest tributes came from Guinness World Records, which said it was “saddened to learn of the death of Bobi, the world’s oldest dog ever”. Bobi was awarded the title of world’s oldest living dog in February this year, effortlessly snatching the crown from the paws of Spike the chihuahua, a young pretender from Ohio who was then a mere pup in comparison at the age of 23 years and seven days.

Good rest, old man. You were the most fortunate of boys.

On Hearing the First Eastern Koel in Spring

I know I promised to use this blog at least in part as an outlet for my own original creative writing but, well, there hasn’t actually been much of that to share… I can go for weeks without an idea even for a line, let alone a whole finished thing (the worst thing is when I do have an idea but I’m already in bed when I have it and I’ve forgotten it when I get up again). However, the other day I was moved to post a little rant of Facebook about the annual return of the Eastern Koel to my area, which I’ve now substantially recast from free verse outburst into these slightly approximate trimeters:

It’s fucking five a.m.,
Can’t sleep as fucking usual;
That fucking Eastern Koel
Outside in the fucking tree
Is singing its fucking song;
The fucking sun’s not up yet
While you make that fucking racket,
And every fucking year
Around now it’s the fucking same;
A hideous fucking noise,
No wonder I fucking hate you.
You bastard fucking cunts,
Go and get fucking eaten
By my neighbours’ fucking cats.

Why, no, I’m not a fan of the Eastern Koel, and I have no idea what could’ve possibly led you to that entirely correct assumption…

Whatever, Jo

J.K. Rowling Says She Would “Happily” Do Prison Time Over Her Transgender Views

Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling has revealed that she would happily do prison time over her views on transgender women.
Rowling appeared to be responding to a story in the Mail on Sunday, which reported that a Labour government in Britain could make gender identity attacks a criminal offense.
Critics told the newspaper that it could result in prison sentences for those who refuse to use a transgender person’s preferred pronouns.

“Could” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, isn’t it? Labour could do this. People could go to jail for it. Good thing for the artist sometimes known as Robert Galbraith that there’s almost certainly no danger of this actually happening, cos it would require Labour to actually win the next election, which they’re not obliged to have until January 2025, and the unelected Rishi Sunak appears to be in no rush to have it any earlier, and which, frankly, I can’t see them doing; I mean, if Corbyn couldn’t defeat that clown Johnson in 2019, I can’t see Starmer beating Sunak. Anyway, if Labour did get it, you know the Tories will do everything they can to block any law of this sort… I don’t know why but I’m getting a distinct feeling of Jordan B. Peterson’s bullshit about the Canadian Bill C-16 to this story, in that Bill C-16 existed but what Jurr Durr said about it was grossly dishonest and overblown to make people terrified about it; similarly, Labour’s promise to strengthen UK hate crime laws is evidently a thing but the Daily Fail just wants to horrify its readers with the prospect of treating trans people as human beings. Still, if Joanne’s OK with going to jail, I won’t get in her way…