Month: November 2025

Cinquante et un

Yeah, your humble scribe is now 51. I am now undeniably in my 50s (I say “undeniably” because the world is full tedious cunts who are tiresomely pedantic about a zero year being the end of the old decade, not the start of the next one, and I hate them; if you are one of them, please go and fuck yourself). Middle age continues. I won’t go over the usual birthday existentialism (“how have I made it this far and why am I still here?”, etc), though I will say I think I’m feeling it more than usual. But this year has been like that, hasn’t it? I’m hardly the only one for whom the state of the world at large isn’t enhancing their wellbeing…

Ooga-booga

…Anyway, that’s me in the early hours of today. Hair unwashed and uneven, and increasing receding from my forehead though still keeping most of its colour, while the beard gets greyer (and it looks even more so in the bathroom mirror), and the black t-shirt has seen better days much like the individual wearing it. Still, could be worse for 51, all things being equal…

Leave those semicolons alone!

Haven’t had an awful lot to say of late, just having one of those occasional lulls; there’s enough stuff happening that I could talk about (like the US government shutdown and the chaos resulting therefrom) but haven’t wanted to. But I must note this story, at least…

So the author Joyce Carol Oates posted this on Twatter the other day, and a bit of a storm erupted thereafter… and I recognise the tendency she brings up, I wrote about it a while ago; it’s the “art won’t fuck you” thing. These things don’t get these people anything, there’s no material benefit for them. You may notice, though, that Oates doesn’t specfically identify any individual “wealthy man” that she might be thinking of, but someone made it all about himself…

EDOLF! I haven’t had anything to say about that cunt in ages, haven’t missed him for aome reason, but anyway he felt the need to make himself the main character of the Internet again after Oates posted that tweet about him that didn’t even name him, and he was fuming like this for ages, apparently…

…to the point of being all “SEE? I do SO read books, Joyce!” like this, making an ad to promote an old Blinkist list of some of his favourite books (which I had seen before; he’s been a reader at some point but I feel like he hasn’t been one for a very long time)…

…and though this post did predate the current nonsense, it’s been revived as a result of same. You may notice the book in the link is conspicuously not the one he mentioned.

As for Joyce:

Which I do believe is a rather more concise and brutal burn than the one that kicked this off. To be honest, I don’t think the “art won’t fuck you” thing really works with Edolf. I don’t know if he’s actually that interested in sex per se; he’s obviously invested in spreading his genes as far and wide as he can, but I don’t know that sex in and of itself otherwise interests him… we’ll leave aside entirely the question of whether or not he’s even functional Down There (most if not all of his many kids seem to have come from IVF or susrrogacy, though), but anyway, I suspect he’s more interested in power than anything really. But there’s equally no denying a hollowness at the heart of him; he may not be bothered that art won’t fuck him, but he evinces no real interest in it anyway that I can see. He really is all he has, and when you’re him, that’s a pretty fucking awful thing…

Sounds more like your problem, “Doctor”…

I thought this had to be a somewhat abstract joke when I saw it earlier today, so I did a quick search for this Ricardo Duchesne fellow. And… oh, he’s evidently not kidding. Such interesting people this character hangs out with. And he’s the migrant child of TWO mixed-race parents. Such Aryan, very master race, wow, as the kids used to say. Also… let’s face it, and I say this as a white person and regular consumer of meat-based products, we do pretty poorly compared to Asian cultures where our bovine friends are considered sacred, which is far more than can be said of the glorious West. I feel oddly sure that the “other races” he’s mostly thinking of are the JOOOOOOOOOOS! and the MUUUUUSLIIIIIMS!, for whom beef is obviously acceptable as long as you kill it after making the appropriate religious gesture, but frankly the good Christian West doesn’t even do that, the best we do is stun the animal first before slicing it up… does anyone in the abattoir make the sign of the cross before doing the deed? I suspect not many…

Obviously

Donald Trump pardons Rudy Giuliani and others involved in trying to overturn 2020 election

US President Donald Trump has pardoned his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani as well as several others involved in efforts to overturn 2020 election,  a Justice Department official says.
Mr Giuliani was formerly the mayor of New York and Mr Trump’s personal lawyer until he was disbarred last year.
Justice Department Pardon Attorney Ed Martin posted on social media a signed proclamation of the “full, complete, and unconditional” pardon, which also names conservative attorneys Sidney Powell and John Eastman. […]
Presidential pardons apply only to federal crimes, and none of the Trump allies were charged in a federal case.
But the move underscores Mr Trump’s efforts to continue to rewrite the history of the 2020 election he lost to Democratic nominee Joe Biden. […]
Mr Giuliani and others who were named in the proclamation had been charged by state prosecutors over the 2020 election, but the cases have hit a dead end or are just limping along.
A judge in September dismissed the Michigan case against 15 Republicans accused of attempting to falsely certify Mr Trump as the winner of the election in that battleground state.

So it’s kind of an empty gesture in that it has no real immediate effect, but it’s also a useful shot in the propaganda war. Mushroom Cock’s got to keep that myth alive even though it’s pointless now. I only wish he’d let Four Seasons Total Landscaping make the announcement, that might at least have made it funny…

Goodbye world

John Laws is gone at last. Did you know he was still alive until now? I certainly didn’t. I suppose this is what happens when you don’t listen to AM talkback radio stations that struggle to get more than a few thousand listeners, you don’t realise what coffin dodgers are on them… Anyway, nothing of value, etc? I don’t know. Nothing if not a fantastic voice, obviously, iconic figure and all that, and most charitably called “problematic”:

Laws did not achieve his fame and success without controversy. In 1999, he was at the centre of the cash-for-comment scandal alongside his fellow 2UE broadcaster Alan Jones. The pair were accused of accepting payments from companies in exchange for favourable on-air commentary. Both denied any wrongdoing.
“Nobody has suggested I have broken any law. But you would think from the controversy that it was first-class industrial espionage or industrial rape,” Laws said at the time. […]
He was found in contempt of court for interviewing a juror in 2000 and received a suspended jail sentence. In 2001, his show was found to have breached the rules around decency and the treatment of suicide. In 2013, Laws asked a tearful female caller describing her childhood sexual assault if she might not have been at fault.
Two years later, he told a distressed older male listener who had called in to describe his childhood sexual abuse to “go to the pub and have a lemonade” and, although he had been empathic, Laws was criticised for his lack of awareness. In 2015, the former Socceroo Tim Cahill hung up on Laws after he repeatedly questioned him about his wealth.
In 2021 he was found to have breached the commercial radio code after calling a listener “mentally deficient” and urging them to “say something constructive, like you’re going to kill yourself”.
“I’d hate to think I was very cruel. I’m certainly rude and I’m certainly impatient, intolerant and a lot of things I shouldn’t be” he told Studio 10 in 2017.
He called his producers “handmaidens” and insisted they wear skirts or dresses to work although at least one former female employee maintained he was always a courteous boss and said “his old-fashioned manner felt respectful” to her.

His Wiki entry further notes:

In 2004, Laws and rival talk-back host Alan Jones were accused of taking payment to make favourable comments on products and services under the guise of merely expressing personal opinion, after entering into deals with Telstra. The ABA subsequently found that Laws’ deal constituted cash for comment but Jones’ did not. Laws, apparently angered by what he saw as inequitable treatment, launched stinging attacks on Jones and the ABA’s head, David Flint. In an appearance on the ABC’s Enough Rope, Laws accused Jones of placing pressure on Prime Minister John Howard to keep Flint as head of the ABA, and made comments that many viewers took to imply a sexual relationship between Jones and Flint, and broadly hinted that Jones, like Flint, was homosexual.
In November 2004, Laws and 2UE colleague Steve Price were found guilty of vilifying homosexuals after an on-air discussion about a gay couple appearing in the reality TV show The Block. They described the couple as “young poofs”. Laws had previously apologised for another incident in which he called gay TV personality Carson Kressley, of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy fame, a “pillow-biter” and a “pompous little pansy prig”.

So another dinosaur bites the dust (along with Graham Richardson, who popped his own clogs just the other day). Nothing else to say about the tedious old git.

Lyndwulf

John Coulthart features an interesting edition of Beowulf at his blog today, this being a 1939 edition illustrated by Lynd Ward…

I admittedly haven’t seen much of Ward’s stuff, and what I have seen has only been his b/w woodcuts; I think this is the first time I’ve seen him in colour. I should note I haven’t just nicked this from John’s blog post, cos he rarely if ever posts large versions of stuff; instead I nicked it directly from the Internet Archive scan of the book that he links to, whence I got larger versions of the colour illustrations. John also notes:

It’s also possible to read the poem itself, although I wouldn’t advise it with this translation by William Ellery Leonard, not when it begins so risibly with the words “What ho!” Beowulf famously opens with a declaration in Old English—”Hwæt!”—that bards would have shouted to gain the attention of their audience. The word doesn’t translate easily to contemporary English but it’s usually given as “Hear!” or “Listen!” Leonard’s “What ho!” is a phrase that belongs with Bertie Wooster.

Woof. The only W.E. Leonard work I’m otherwise familiar with is his translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, which I did not particularly like and I don’t think that was entirely Lucretius’ fault (even though I do find the whole concept of didactic verse of that sort frankly bizarre), I recall Leonard’s translation doing some contortions to the English language that were just… off-putting. Don’t think I’m into what I read of his Beowulf while getting these illustrations, either; keeping the appearance of the Anglo-Saxon verse with the caesura in the middle, but not the alliteration structure or the four-beat pattern (turning it into hexameters which I’ve never liked in English verse), and then making the line ends rhyme which English alliterative verse generally just didn’t do, all strikes me as a bit of a bastardisation. Still, the illustrations are pretty cracking, and I give you some of my favourites (click to enlarge, obviously):

Dunn and dusted!

The astounding tale of Sean Dunn appears to have reached its end:

A former Department of Justice employee who threw a sandwich at a federal agent during Donald Trump’s law enforcement surge in Washington DC was found not guilty of assault by a DC jury on Thursday in the latest legal rebuke of the federal intervention.
Sean Charles Dunn, a former justice department paralegal, became a symbol of the resistance to Trump’s occupation in the nation’s capital when video of him, clad in a pink polo shirt and shorts, throwing a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent, wearing a bulletproof vest, went viral.
“Why are you here? I don’t want you in my city!” Dunn shouted at the officers on 10 August, calling them “fascists”. After throwing the sandwich, he took off running.
Dunn’s lawyers argued his sandwich throw was a “harmless gesture” meant as an act of protest. In a city under federal siege, the incident served as a rallying point, with posters showing Dunn mid-throw popping up around the district. Prosecutors said Dunn knew he didn’t have a right to throw the sandwich at the agent, and that his speech was not the issue, but that he threw a sandwich at a federal officer “at point-blank range”. […]
The jury acquittal was another example of DC residents pushing back on federal troops in their city. Grand juries have in several instances, including Dunn’s, refused to indict people with assaulting officers as the US attorney Jeanine Pirro has pushed for felonies.
The man who was hit with the sandwich was CBP agent Gregory Lairmore, who told the jury earlier this week that the sandwich “kind of exploded all over my uniform” and “smelled of onions and mustard”, according to the Washington Post. The defense pushed back, as it appeared in imagery from the scene that the sandwich did not leave its wrapper.

What a transcendently ludicrous situation this was from the start, and that’s a third failure on Jeanine Pirro’s part to get an indictment out of it. Mind you, though I said the story appears to be over, I wouldn’t be surprised if they go for a fourth, just to make sure. In conclusion, Colbert: