Month: April 2024

Blackout in Gretley

Book #10 for 2024. This was one of Valancourt’s cut-price titles for this month (less than AU$5 for Kindle), so I decided why not… The book is a wartime thriller published in 1942, right in the middle of the war, and Priestley was interestingly on the money when he had a character observe that a German loss would result in America dominating one part of the world and Russia the other; given that America had only just officially entered the war (I don’t know the month of publication, but the story takes place at the end of January ’42), that seems reasonably prophetic. (And interesting that Priestley apparently didn’t see the UK as part of the postwar world power deal.) Blackout is a pretty straightforward example of the sort of thing it is; our hero is a Canadian engineer who’s been suckered into working for British counter-intelligence, and the story sees him posted to the somewhat shitty industrial town of the title, because it’s a bit of a clearing house for Nazis sending vital information back to the Fatherland. The problem is going to be working out exactly who the Nazis in town are, cos Gretley offers a number of possibilities… Not exactly a deathless masterpiece of world literature, then, but an obviously solid example of this sort of story, with sufficient intrigue to keep you interested while being short enough to read in one night without feeling like it’s crapping on unnecessarily at any point. And Priestley’s socialist sympathies are in full evidence; if they inspired his positive words about Stalin which have… aged poorly (along with some remarkable and unfortunate racism early in the book), they also inspired the undercurrent of anger in the ultimate revelation of the main villain… which I obviously won’t spoil but I can imagine Priestley genuinely hating the “rightly privileged person” running things. I enjoyed this a fair bit.

Speaking of Shitter…

…Something I only realised the other day:

For all the noise months ago about Twitter rebranding as X, whatever part of the company that sends out the emails saying “we got your report about this person being racist, and decided we’re OK with them being racist” was still using the Twitter name until just ten days ago. I never even noticed this until I suddenly realised they’d abruptly switched to X. No one we all still insist on calling it Twitter, cos part of the company itself was still doing that…

Oh the optics

So the black grandson of South Africa’s arguably most famous black person just had his Twitter account suspended. You know, Twitter, the company by that white South African character who evidently has little if any idea how this is going to make him look, and how little this is going to change perceptions of him as a racist shithead. Well done.

Sad!

Another professional liar looks like going down:

The Gateway Pundit, the notorious far-right blog and prolific publisher of conspiracy theories, said Wednesday that it had filed for bankruptcy protection as it grapples with litigation related to its coverage of the 2020 election.
The move comes as the staunchly pro-Donald Trump website, which promoted the false notion that the 2020 election was stolen by President Joe Biden and his allies, faces multiple lawsuits over its bogus claims.
One of the lawsuits, filed by two former Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, accuses The Gateway Pundit of publishing stories that falsely accused them of election fraud, which the pair said prompted a wave of harassment and threats of violence. The judge has rejected several attempts to throw out the case, which is currently in the discovery phase ahead of a potential trial.
Another lawsuit, filed by former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer, accuses the outlet of defamation. A Colorado appeals court ruled earlier this month that Coomer’s sweeping case can proceed toward trial against Gateway Pundit and several other prominent defendants.

Heart: not bleeding. Gateway Pundit has a string of bullshit news stories to its (dis)credit and a bunch of lawsuits already behind it as well. Fuck Jim Hoft and his cast of hate-spewing maggots, I won’t miss them if this forces them out of business.

Important images 45

ALL-NUDE EDITION! Yes, normally I let the random function of Irfan View (my image viewer of choice) pick the selections for each post in this series, but for a change I decided to make this edition a themed one; still let Irfan pick the pictures, but I went specifically for the nudie ones rather than the usual mixed bag. So be advised that it’s all varying degrees of undressed in both photographic and illustrated form from this point…

Continue reading “Important images 45”

Self-own of the century?

To the best of my knowledge, Andrew Tate is under (but pushing) 40 and has fewer than 5 children (like… none). Which makes this an awfully odd thing for him to have posted on Twatter:

I mean, Taint posts lots of odd stuff but even by his standards this is… look, all those “fellas, is it gay to [do not particularly thing]” jokes have just been rendered pointless; Taint just said with a perfectly straight face that men having sex with women just for the fun of it is gay. What, then, is he saying about himself here, cos as far as I’m aware he has no “genetic legacy” of his own? Is he implying he’s gay? At best it looks like he’s saying he’s asexual or has no real interest in sex per se, which is obviously perfectly fine, although it does make me question the sincerity of some of his song lyrics (yeah, he had a “music career” at one point too); otherwise you could certainly read this as him saying he’s gay, which is also obviously perfectly fine but would seem… ironic, shall we say, given what a fan of the LGBTQ&c he isn’t. This also wouldn’t be new speculation either, since a few people have pondered that question already. Whatever the case, those of us with sense have always known that Taint always sounds like a right dickhead, even though he clearly has no idea himself; this time, his lack of self-awareness has outdone itself…

Is it strange to…?

Happy 80th birthday to Tony Visconti, whose big day I choose to mark accordingly:

That’s a demix someone’s done of “Cosmic Dancer” by T. Rex, cutting it back to just guitars and strings. It’s fucking GORGEOUS. Some silly git whines in the comments about missing Bill Legend and Bolan’s vocals, but they can fuck off; I think this demonstrates brilliant just how exactly right Visconti was with those string parts. It’s an amazing piece of instrumental arrangement.