Month: June 2025

Piss-up, brewery, etc, literally

Reform UK summer party planned for Lancaster Brewery is cancelled by venue

A summer party for Reform UK politicians booked for Lancaster Brewery has been cancelled by the venue.
The party – led by Nigel Farage – had made a booking which brewery boss Phil Simpson said had not been “identified as political” – something which goes aganist company policy.
The Stand Up To Racism Lancaster and Morecambe group posted on Facebook that it contacted the brewery, based at Lancaster Leisure Park in Wyresdale Road, on Thursday evening after hearing that Reform UK had planned to hold a summer party at the venue.
And today, Friday, they announced that it had been cancelled.
The group posted: “Result! We found out yesterday afternoon that Reform UK announced its summer bash with VIP guest (wonder who that could be?) at Lancaster Brewery.
“Two SUTR members who live next to the brewery emailed at 10.30pm last night. Someone messaged workers at the brewery who in turn messaged the bookings manager and by 9am this morning the booking was cancelled.
“Seems Reform UK, who say they are for honesty and accountability, did not say who they were when they booked. The bookings manager thanked everyone for the heads up.”

Weird how far-right mobs like this have to pretend they’re not who they are in order to get bookings in places like this, isn’t it (I mean, I’ve contacted a venue myself in the past to advise them they’d booked someone very dubious; I forget who exactly but I think it was some Muslim-hater gang a la the Q Society). If they had as much support from “real” people as they claim they do, you’d think they could just be open about who they are and what they’re doing. Wonder what Rod Stewart makes of this?

Should we be doing anything, for that matter?

Are we doing enough to save Earth from a devastating asteroid strike?

It is a scenario beloved of Hollywood: a huge asteroid, several miles wide, is on a collision course with Earth. Scientists check and recheck their calculations but there is no mistake – civilisation is facing a cataclysmic end unless the space rock can be deflected.
It may sound like science fiction, but it is a threat that is being taken seriously by scientists.
Earlier this year, researchers estimated that asteroid YR4 2024 had a 3.1% chance of hitting Earth in 2032, before revising that likelihood down to 0.0017%. This week, new data suggested it was more likely to hit the moon, with a probability of 4.3%.
If that happens, the 53- to 67-metre (174ft-220ft) asteroid previously called a “city killer” will launch hundreds of tonnes of debris towards our planet, posing a risk to satellites, spacecraft and astronauts. […]
The chances of an enormous asteroid – the type that did for the dinosaurs – hitting Earth is admittedly low. “We think there’s one of these every 10m to 100m years, probably,” Lintott told the Guardian. “So I think you’d be right to ignore that when you decide whether to get up on a Thursday morning or not.”
Snodgrass said there were “precisely four” asteroids big enough and close enough to Earth to be considered “dino-killers”, and added: “We know where they are, and they’re not coming anywhere near us.”

And if there is a 4.3% chance of it hitting the Moon, that’s still a 95.7% chance it won’t. Obviously I’d rather see space agencies working to prevent all collisions if possible, but I think all the “ZOMG THIS ASTEROID COULD HIT THE MOON!” discourse doen’t help them much…

Da ya think I’m fashy?

Via Billy Bragg’s Bluesky:

Whoops. Someone let their inner Morrissey out, didn’t they, Roderick?Indeed, according to someone else responding to the above, this isn’t a new thing…

International Times issue 94, December 17 1970. If Eric Clapton ever sees that, he’ll probably wish he’d said his own piece about Enoch Powell in the underground press where apparently nobody paid much attention to it rather than on stage… though people do seem to have picked up on it since then, from what I can see online, but this is the first I’ve discovered it, it doesn’t seem to be as well known as Clapton’s incident. The whole interview, such as it is, can be found at the IT archive; a slightly curious time capsule in which violence comes up a lot and Rod reckons his own career won’t last much longer, and the Enoch Powell bit is the only part highlighted thus. I assume someone at IT really wanted that to be noticeable… I suppose Rod still gets points for his support of Gaza and Ukraine, but if he thinks Cuntface Farrago would be anything even approximating an improvement to the admittedly kind of awful Starmer Labour, he’s fooling himself, obviously.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Given that I’ve watched pretty much all the main Universal Monsters films before now, it seemed like the time was finally upon me to finish them off (I know the Gill-man was still to come, but because he only came about a few years later I don’t really consider him and his adventures part of the main series)… much like Universal itself had finally decided to, after a few years of “monster rally” films, they decided to pair Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr. and Glenn Strange with the ultimate monsters, i.e. their flagging comedy duo Abbott and Costello… By this point, the studio was now Universal-International and the new management was trying to build the studio’s prestige again by killing off their B-films and serials and horror, but they were also near bankruptcy, so despite all that William Goetz agreed to the combination of horror and comedy in case it worked… which, indeed, it did, being quite a hit and reviving A&C’s failing fortunes. I’m not sure how well it worked for me, though… I’m less sniffy about it than Wm. Everson seems to have been, but equally I wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as a lot of critics are; per the film’s Wiki entry, one contemporary critic claimed you really needed to be an A&C fan to enjoy the thing, and perhaps they were right. My own prior acquaintance with them is limited entirely to the A&C cartoon show, and I haven’t seen that since I were a little ‘un in the early 80s; I don’t believe I’ve ever seen any of their actual films until now, and I found something kind of grating about Abbott in particular here… and yet the film is as well made as it probably could’ve been, given how relatively cheap it was (some really good sets in the film) and how neither A&C were happy about having to do the film at all; the monsters are actually played pretty straight (Chaney is the best in show), and though the mix of comedy and horror is kind of ungainly, the actual horror business in the film is pretty well done (Chaney’s transformations are particularly good). Accordingly, even if not everything works, I think I’ll still give the film a thumbs up more than otherwise.

Headline of the year

Amazing, and accurate. Jeff Bezos, the individual who runs Amazon, basically hired the whole city of Venice for his wedding this weekend, which situation is pissing a bunch of people off:

Campaigners in Venice have claimed victory after Jeff Bezos was reportedly forced to change the venue for his wedding celebrations in the city as his guests started arriving on Tuesday for the three-day jamboree.
The main reception for the wedding of Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, a former TV journalist, was due to be held in the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, a majestic 16th-century building in the city centre.
But according to the No Space for Bezos group, the couple relented after activists threatened to fill the canals with inflatable crocodiles to block their celebrity guests from entering.

I just can’t imagine how many of those things they’d need to cause that sort of havoc, and I feel like real crocodiles would be more impressive, but still, as long as this shithead is inconvenienced somehow, I’m there for it.

Cease… fuck

So Mushroom Cock was quite happy earlier about having wrangled a ceasefire out of the Israel/Iran bullshit. A few hours later…

So did this “ceasefire” even exist outside his tiny mind, or are the two countries just cunts? I kind of feel the latter is more likely. Anyway, Donakd is all foot-stompy about his glorious piece of international diplomacy has apparently been comprehensively ignored… but anyway he himself said when he quit the G7 thing last week that he was working for something “bigger” than a ceasefire, so a ceasefire would’ve technically been a backward step anyway? I don’t know. I don’t know anything about this shit any more.

Oil be damned

With all due respect, DONAKD*, you were the one that just dropped a bunch of bombs on Iran, which has since threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, which the US has begged China to convince them not to do because that could be an economic disaster for a bunch of other countries that might just stop being America’s friends (assuming they still are) as a consequence. “EVERYONE” is not responsible for this bullshit. And “EVERYONE” doesn’t have the power to affect oil prices like you do. Cunt.

* Because “covfefe” wasn’t enough, he had to misspell his own NAME:

The Comfort Zone

Michael K. Vaughan is one of my favourite Youtubers, and his latest video is a particularly interesting one; he tells about a viewer who expressed disappointment that, for a while now, the sort of books he’s been reading and reviewing on his channel isn’t as broad as it used to be, and he should read more widely and out of his comfort zone, and dared him to read something by Jane Austen (there being a Booktube reading event devoted to her in June)…

“That’s more like it, Roger!”

Now, I’m sure the horror he expresses at that idea in his video was mostly performative and for comedic value, cos he has a couple of videos on the subject of favourite books (one of which I actually rewatched the other night), and he’s upfront about his broad tastes being pretty populist, but his top 100 also encompasses classical authors like Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus (whose Histories is his top book), Arrian, Xenophon, Polybius and Livy, and “serious” authors like Dickens, Steinbeck, Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins, Hemingway, Stevenson, Charlotte Bronte, John O’Hara, Conrad, Dostoyevsky, Wilde, Dumas, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, Haggard, Wells and Hugo, and even his “genre” preferences would mostly be considered classics of their kind and even literature in general too (Asimov, Bradbury, Lovecraft, E.R. Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDonald, Matheson, LeGuin, Machen, S. King, Verne, Simak, Tolkien). So his tastes are much broader than his viewer possibly thinks. But he’s also made videos about all of these in the past, so it’s probably not like he feels the need to redo them.

And the whole thing made me wonder: what if someone did that with me? I mean, if someone came across this blog and looked at the page for the films I’ve reviewed and decided the stuff I’ve reviewed on here so far (which is mostly of a horror nature) so far constituted my “comfort zone”, and then told me I needed to watch something “good” instead… well, would I respond with similar grace to Michael? Cos I suspect probably not; I would note that yeah, horror is a lot of what I’ve been watching in the last few months, but I have seen plenty of the standard classics. I’m not stupid enough to make a top ten list or anything of the sort, but if they demanded I name some non-horror titles I have considered “great” over the years, I’d include a lot of the following:

    • Citizen Kane and quite a few other Welles films
    • Singin’ in the Rain
    • The Rules of the Game
    • Sunrise
    • The Great Dictator
    • Bad Day at Black Rock
    • The Searchers
    • A Matter of Life and Death and, again, most other Archers titles from the ’40s
    • Lucifer Rising
    • 2001: A Space Odyssey
    • Duck Soup
    • Sherlock Jr.
    • A Hard Day’s Night
    • North by Northwest
    • Blazing Saddles
    • Wild Strawberries
    • Forty Guns
    • Yojimbo and, again, several other Kurosawas
    • Sansho the Bailiff
    • Tokyo Story and, again, quite a few other Ozu films
    • Fitzcarraldo and, yet again, other Herzog films
    • Battleship Potemkin
    • King Lear (1971)
    • The Cranes Are Flying, Letter Never Sent and I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov triple bill)
    • Metropolis and, once more, several other Langs
    • Heat
    • Ben Hur (1959, though the 1925 one is also good)
    • And any number of Warner Brothers cartoons, especially from the 40s and 50s (and by Bob Clampett particularly)

Alternately, I could just point them at my Letterboxd, save myself time, and tell them to choke on my general experience of “good” cinema. It’s not like I feel the need to justify myself anyway, of course, but if someone were to approach me like Mr. Vaughan’s viewer and tell me to widen my horizons, I think they’d soon live to regret doing so…