Month: September 2024

Reel around the fuckwit

Morrissey’s latest hissy fit in his never-ending battle against Johnny Marr took a kind of hilarious twist in the last few days… following Marr’s recent “statement” about the possibility of a Smiths reunion (said statement, you may recall, having been a photo of Nigel Farage in response to someone speculating on Twitter), Morrissey couldn’t resist escalating things by claiming Marr had more or less nicked the Smiths’ band name trademark:

On Sunday night, a statement written on Morrissey’s behalf titled “THE PLOT THICKENS” was posted to his website claiming Marr has “successfully applied for 100% trademark rights / Intellectual Property ownership of The Smiths name.”
“His application has been accepted on whatever oaths or proclamations he has put forward,” it continues. “This action was done without any consultation to Morrissey, and without allowing Morrissey the standard opportunity of ‘objection.’ Amongst many other things, this means that Marr can now tour as The Smiths using the vocalist of his choice, and it also prohibits Morrissey from using the name whilst also denying Morrissey considerable financial livelihood. Morrissey alone created the musical unit name ‘The Smiths’ in May 1982.”

All of which is interesting, obviously, but Marr responded with receipts to the contrary. According to him and the paperwork he provided, Marr discovered that no one in the band actually owned the trademark—apparently some unnamed third party had tried to make a claim for it, which was how he found out—so he contacted Steven Patrick about it; when the latter failed to respond, Marr acquired the trademark to make sure the aforementioned third party didn’t… on top of which Marr agreed to sign some document back at the start of this year that would actually give Morrissey joint ownership, but for reasons best known to himself (probably because he doesn’t want to share) the latter hasn’t signed on the dotted line yet. As for Marr touring as The Smiths with a new vocalist… I think that if he were going to do that, he would already have done it, given that he’s evidently had the trademark since 2018. And frankly I suspect Morrissey would be more likely to tour under that name with a bunch of ringers…

Anyway, the latest development is that now Morrissey has fired his management for reasons not yet stated, but presumably because it’s their fault he’s such a thunderchud and they had no idea how to stop him from behaving like his own stupid self. They had a client and then they were looking for a client, and heaven knows they’re probably glad to be shot of him now…

Indeed you shouldn’t

‘I shouldn’t have listened to those around me’: Janet Jackson on Michael, motherhood and how she’s taking back control

I wonder where she stands on the forthcoming election. After all, I say, America could be on the verge of voting in its first black female president, Kamala Harris.
“Well, you know what they supposedly said?” she asks me. “She’s not black. That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian.”
She looks at me expectantly, perhaps assuming that I have Indian heritage.
“Well, she’s both,” I offer.
“Her father’s white. That’s what I was told. I mean, I haven’t watched the news in a few days,” she coughs. “I was told that they discovered her father was white.”
I’m floored at this point. It’s well known that Harris’s father is a Jamaican economist, a Stanford professor who split from her Indian mother when she was five. “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” Harris wrote in her book The Truths We Hold.
The people who are most vocal in questioning the facts of Harris’s identity tend to be hardcore QAnon-adjacent, Trump-loving conspiracy theorists. I don’t think Jackson falls into that camp, but I do wonder what the algorithms are serving her.

Poor Janet Jackson. Lost one of her big brothers recently, apparently lost her brain at some point too. This comes from a Guardian article obviously intended to celebrate an impending comeback, but… well, it’s become notable now mostly for this exchange. You may notice the URL has certain differences to the article headline quoted here, as if they were trying to not highlight that detail or something, but too late… I mean, with all due respect to her, one of her brothers was this guy. You’re not really the ideal person to be accusing a black woman of not actually being black, Janet…

Sieg Pillow!

Yeah. Someone posted this on the PIAT Facebook group and said it was direct from the MyPillow Twitter, and, not entirely believing that, went to see… and well, there’s the screenshot I made of it myself. Fourteen dollars eighty-eight cents, hmmm? I mean, it’s possible that MikePillow doesn’t know the significance of those numbers and he just pulled them out of the air, but it’d be a remarkable coincidence if that were the case. Even if the “promo code” gets you 50% off the sale price, 50% of $29.99 is $14.99, not $14.88… yeah, the “coincidence” theory really doesn’t fly, does it? Someone at that company knows what those numbers mean, and I’d be surprised if it’s not that shithead Lindell himself; you don’t hang around the political far-right as much as he does without picking up at least a bit of the lingo…

There’s always a tweet, isn’t there…

Whoops

I don’t think I’d heard of Olivia Nuzzi until now, she’s a journalist who’s become the unfortunate star of her own story, having admitted to having an affair with “a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign“, as New York magazine put it when they announced they were putting her on leave for that reason… and though I don’t know if she specifically named said former subject, everyone else is saying…

Yeah. Junior. GREAT CATCH, Olivia. Per Axios, she’s claiming the relationship wasn’t physical, and Bob the younger is denying it even happened… and though I obviously have no evidence either way, I’m oddly disinclined to believe him, given that he has form when it comes to cheating on his wife. Did it dozens of times to his previous one, why wouldn’t he do the same to the current one?

Anyway, this news comes hot on the heels of this other news:

A federal law enforcement agency confirmed it’s opened an investigation into Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after he allegedly cut off the head of a dead whale and took it home two decades ago.
The former independent presidential candidate disclosed the investigation on Saturday while campaigning outside Phoenix for Donald Trump.
Kennedy’s daughter recalled the whale incident in a 2012 interview with Town and Country magazine, which recently resurfaced and was shared extensively on social media. Kathleen Kennedy said when she was 6 years old, her dad got word that a dead whale had washed ashore. He got a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head and strapped it to the roof of their minivan for a five-hour drive home.
“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kathleen Kennedy recalls. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

I actually did see this story when it started circulating again, but for some reason I can’t think of I evidently chose not to record it here. But… yeah. That’s something else he allegedly did with a dead animal (as reported by his own daughter 12 years ago; how was that not more of a story back in 2012?). And, coming after his own admission of the business with the bear, I find it as entirely believable that he would desecrate a whale’s corpse as I do that he would cheat on his wife. Cos, you know, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

What I have written

His Muskness is inclined to write some curious things on that social media thing he owns, but this has been particularly striking:

He’s not a poet and he doesn’t know it

Um. This shouldn’t be too surprising, cos Oolong did call himself a “cultural Christian” (for reasons at least partly related to his obsession with birth rates), but somehow him actually coming out with… whatever this is does feel kind of weird. Not least because it’s in verse. Obviously no one should seriously believe for a second that Musk actually believes in Christianity or anything; he’s a Christian in the same way Drumpf is, in that the only god he really believes in is himself. That’s one of the things that makes this kind of peculiar; the other is the particular timing of this thing, given that he’s made some other interesting statements lately…

The White House has condemned Elon Musk for tweeting “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala” in response to an X user asking “Why they want to kill Donald Trump?” […]
Musk, himself a Trump supporter, was quickly criticized by X users from the left and right, who said they were concerned his words to his nearly 200m X followers could incite violence against Biden and Harris.
The tech billionaire deleted the post but not before the Secret Service, tasked with protecting current and former presidents, vice-presidents and other notable officials, took notice.
“The Secret Service is aware of the social media post made by Elon Musk and as a matter of practice, we do not comment on matters involving protective intelligence,” a spokesperson said in an email. “We can say, however, that the Secret Service investigates all threats related to our protectees.”

To be sure, I’m not sure there was anything in that post that actually said someone should have a go at them, but people these days are stupid enough to take it that way. Oolong later basically said it was just jokes, bro:

“Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X,” he later wrote. “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.”

Meet Elon Musk, theorist of comedy, folks. I don’t know what if anything the SS (because he would call them that, I suspect) actually said to him, but he evidently wasn’t too bothered about it for too long, given that this is his currently pinned tweet:

“OK, I’ll be circumspect about the shooting jokes, but I reserve the right to lie through my teeth about the Democrats on my social media platform where I won’t allow propaganda”… sure. Anyway, I’m still puzzled by the poetry and its purpose, but I did wonder…

…Was Oolong in fact trying to show this creep how to do it? Cos Jordibles has attracted notice for his own “verse” posts—kind of like Nice Cave’s moustache, it’s something he does mostly because other people find it irritating—which are of a notably more free sort. I wonder if Oolong was trying to give him a hint about doing it properly? In which case, Oolong’s got some way to go himself and shouldn’t be advising anyone about anything…

Baby pay back

Eddy ain’t dancing with Dampnut no more:

Donald Trump has lost a legal battle with the singer Eddy Grant over using his 1983 song Electric Avenue in a 2020 ad without permission.
The 40-second clip – an animation of Joe Biden travelling in a railroad cart while a Trump-Pence campaign train passes at high speed – was viewed more than 13.7m times on Twitter before it was removed, according to Grant’s lawsuit.
The video was originally posted to Trump’s personal Twitter account on 12 August 2020 as the Republican president campaigned in his second, unsuccessful presidential election. Grant’s lawyers immediately sent a cease and desist letter, but the video was not removed until Grant sued on 1 September.
In a Manhattan court, a federal judge ruled that Trump breached Grant’s copyright and is liable for damages and Grant’s legal fees.
Judge John G Koeltl rejected the argument made by Trump’s lawyers that the video was protected under the copyright fair use doctrine. “It’s everything we asked for,” one of Grant’s lawyers, Brett Van Benthysen, told Business Insider. “100%.”
Another of Grant’s lawyers, Brian Caplan, told Business Insider: “As a staunch believer of artist’s rights and the ability to control their creative output, Mr Grant believes that the decision will help others in their fight against the unauthorised use of sound recordings and musical compositions. Politicians are not above the law and the court reaffirmed that.”

I’m perfectly fine with this, not just because it’s Trump losing (but hey, watching him lose a legal case certainly is pleasant to watch) or just because it’s Eddy Grant winning, but because fuck any politician who does this (on either side, obviously, I’d be pissed at any Democrat doing this, but I think they would have more sense). Especially when they’re stealing from an artist you know would hate them.

Third time’s the charm?

Yeah, someone apparently took another pop at Dampnut. I find myself oddly “meh” about this one, possibly because bugger all really happened; the gunman got chased off by the secret service before he could get a shot off, so Drumpf and his apologists can’t even claim he “took a bullet” like he did the previous time… not, of course, that he did take a bullet then, some other poor bastards did and it’s become increasingly obvious that Trump never suffered any real damage that time.

I hesitate to call “false flag” in the way my housemate Joe did when he spoke about to me, because that’s the sort of thing they would say (Alex Jones does all the time), but… the timing certainly is interesting. This all comes as the orange one has been on tour with Laura Loomer in the last few days; Laura is one of the biggest pieces of shit involved in right-wing activism, and there’s been many eyebrows raised at her accompanying Trump from the Republicans (Marjorie The Gathering had a particularly hilarious fit of the vapours over Loomer being racist towards Kamala Harris), partly because she’s an obviously revolting human being and a potentially very bad influence on someone who doesn’t need bad influences, but I’m sure it’s mostly because THEY’RE not getting to be bad influences on him as long as she’s in their way…

But the worst thing about Loomer’s presence around Trump…

…is that it’s given Milo Hanrahan a way to desperately become “relevant” again. I was so enjoying not hearing from this tedious cunt, but he’s been insisting on spreading stories about Loomer and Drumpf being, you know, a thing. Quite apart from it being inconceivable that Trump could actually get it up long enough for her to give him a blowie, this is Milo telling the story. You can’t trust him to tell you the sun will come up again tomorrow.

Anyway, the theory has been that this shit with Loomer has been a stunt to distract people from the debate last week, which is believable cos hardly anyone’s talked about that lately, she’s been the real subject of discourse for the last few days… so is this “shooting” also a distraction? To draw people’s attention away from Loomer now? Or from this?

In a stunning admission, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said he was willing “to create stories” on the campaign trail while defending his spreading false, racist rumors of pets being abducted and eaten in a town in his home state of Ohio.
Vance’s remarks came during an appearance on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, where he said he felt the need “to create stories so that the … media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people”.
Asked by the CNN host Dana Bash whether the false rumors centering on Springfield, Ohio, were “a story that you created”, Vance replied, “Yes!” He then said the claims were rooted in “accounts from … constituents” and that he as well as the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, had spoken publicly about them to draw attention to Springfield’s relatively large Haitian population. […]
The rumors proliferating out of Springfield have led to bomb threats aimed at local hospitals and government offices. Vance on Sunday told Bash it was “disgusting” for the media to suggest any of his remarks had led to those threats. He also used the same term to refer to the people issuing those threats, though – in a separate appearance on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press – he made it a point to blame the media for accurately reporting on them, saying it was “amplifying the worst people in the world”.

So the whole story about illegals coming for your pets was transparent bullshit, obviously, but the racist foghorning worked, and that was the whole point. And J. Divans basically just said it outright. Helpful. Anyway, I don’t personally think this business with the Mar-a-Lago gunman actually is a false flag or similar distraction to take our attention away from the debate or Laura Loomer or JDV or Project 2025 or whatever we’re supposed to not be looking at… just why other people might do so. I do find it curious, mind you, that in both instances so far, the shooters have been Republican voters, which is not really what I’d expect if it were staged, you’d think they’d be more likely to hire a Democrat or independent or, well, anyone other than a Republican. Just waiting for someone to claim Taylor Swift was really behind it…

Send my soul to Cleopatra Brown

I KNOW that’s not actually what the lyric is (it’s apparently “send my soul to bleed apart your ground”), but that’s what it sounded like when I first heard it… anyway, this week I bring you the following:

    1. Gina X Performance, Nice Mover
    2. Bauhaus, Antonin Artaud
    3. Ramones, Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment
    4. The Chameleons, Here Today
    5. Public Image Limited, Rules and Regulations
    6. Fields of the Nephilim, Phobia
    7. Ministry, Primental
    8. He Said, I Fall Into Your Arms
    9. Abecedarians, Wild Flowers Grow From the Trash
    10. The Embarrassment, (I’m a) Don Juan
    11. Gary Numan, M.E.
    12. Wipers, Romeo
    13. The Modern Lovers, She Cracked
    14. The The, Flesh and Bones
    15. Pure Hell, I Feel Bad
    16. ABC, Hey Citizen!
    17. David Bowie, Look Back in Anger
    18. Play Dead, Shine
    19. Cabaret Voltaire, Walls of Jericho
    20. Lou Reed, Waves of Fear
    21. MX-80 Sound, Metro-Teens
    22. My Bloody Valentine, Several Girls Galore
    23. Sonic Youth, Rain King
    24. Thomas Leer & Robert Rental, Day Breaks Night Heals
    25. The Jesus & Mary Chain, My Little Underground
    26. Soft Cell, Sex Dwarf
    27. Buzzcocks, Airwaves Dream
    28. Altered Images, Dead Pop Stars
    29. Icon AD, Fight for Peace
    30. Wire, Strange
    31. The Adverts, The Great British Mistake