Thou shalt be fabulous, kween

Although the glitter is awfully hard to wash off afterwards. I mean, I presume it is. Er… anyway, The Federalist is a magazine started by Ben Domenech, noted liar, plagiarist and paid shill for the Malaysian government, and it previously attracted quite some controversy for an op-ed piece defending Roy Moore over, frankly, having tried to date teenagers (some under the age of consent) when he was in his 30s, and also for spreading bullshit about things like Covid-19, climate change and the 2020 elections. Being bigoted shits in the name of “freedom” comes as no real surprise, therefore, and I am pleased to see that almost all the responses I can find to this dickhead have been thoroughly negative. Indeed, someone posted possibly the best reaction image I’ve ever seen…

…and I am now positively itching for more opportunities to use it.

And RIP 11-13 Randle Street

Big fire in Surry Hills this afternoon:

(all pictures via)

So that was the heritage-listed 11-13 Randle St, Surry Hills, which caught fire somehow around four this afternoon. As of now the fire is apparently contained but that whole area is still pretty dicey; fire did spread to one or two other buildings but they seem to have evaded real trouble.

Funnily enough, 11-13 Randle St was the subject of this development plan a few years ago:

Demolition of the existing buildings at 7-9 and 15 Randle Street, retention and re-use of 11-13 Randle Street and construction of a 9 storey building with 2 levels of basement across the sites including through site link between Randle Lane and Randle Street. Use of the building as hotel accommodation (123 rooms) with 2 restaurants, small bar and café

Now, I said that 11-13 was heritage listed, which I presume is why the developers talked about demolishing the buildings on either side but “retention and re-use” for 11-13 cos they evidently couldn’t get past the heritage thing. Which is evidently not so much of a problem for them now, isn’t it. Needless to say I have NO DOUBT WHATSOEVER that this development plan and this fire are all ENTIRELY UNRELATED TO EACH OTHER and there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING UNTOWARD OR SUSPICIOUS about this fire breaking out in a building destined for redevelopment but with a government-placed stumbling block in the way of that happening, and if there WAS anything untoward like CRIMINAL ACTIVITY involved it had TOTALLY ZERO CONNECTION with that redevelopment and was COMPLETELY RANDOM and WHOLLY COINCIDENTAL… I have equally little doubt that Robinson Urban Planning are distraught in any way about the event, of course. After all, their job is somewhat easier now…

RIP Aunty Entity

Jesus fuck. It’s been a few days for people dying, hasn’t it? Now we can add Tina Turner to the list… we actually nearly lost her in 2016 due to kidney problems when her husband donated one of his own and basically bought her seven more years on Earth. Good man, Erwin. Ike would never have done that for her. And obviously her finally breaking away from Ike in the mid-70s was the best thing she could’ve done; I actually never realised until today that he owned her name. He not only renamed young Anna Mae (or was it Martha Nell?) Bullock, he trademarked the name Tina Turner so that if she tried to leave him he could just replace her and she wouldn’t be able to work under that name again. Just like KISS copyrighting the old makeup for Ace Frehley and Peter Criss so Paul & Gene can use it on whatever ringers they get to replace those two. She made a point of demanding the name in the divorce, and won it despite Ike’s efforts.

I had no idea in the 80s, cos I was still too young, to realise just what it meant for her to become big in the 80s; I don’t know if I was even aware that she’d had a career before that, or maybe I was dimly aware that Ike had been a thing but it was only a dim awareness if that… certainly I didn’t appreciate that this was her rebounding from years of abuse and lack of solo commercial success on her own by the end of the 70s, having a mega hit of an album released by a record label that hadn’t even wanted her… and that she was in her mid-40s by the time she was doing this. She’d undeniably earned it by then. Here she is in 2009, still having it at nearly 70:

The Third Grave

I opted for the cover art for the original Arkham House printing; the Valancourt reprint is good but slightly on the cheesy side.

Anyway, book #6 for 2023, Horror May-hem continues with The Third Grave by David Case… I gather the latter’s normal forte was werewolves, and this book does have a perhaps slightly pointless red herring in that line, but otherwise it’s actually a sort of mad science-ish tale with an Egyptological twist. In classic “Return of the Sorcerer” style, our narrator, Thomas Ashley, is hired by a most peculiar man, Lucian Mallory, to translate some hieroglyphics for him; Mallory’s real interest, though, is immortality, and he thinks he’s found part of the secret and wants Ashley to work out the rest of it. Neither, however, realises just what the immortality of the ancient Egyptians actually involves…

This is an awfully slow-burning book; it’s only about 200 pages long but the build-up feels paced for a much longer book, and the real business only really happens in the last third or so… mind you, when it does, damn. Mallory’s work, based on incomplete and misunderstood knowledge, has already had awful results; the murder-mystery stuff in the first two thirds of the book is resolved in a not exactly surprising manner, but conceptually speaking the nature of the killer turns out to be… yikes. The book has a weird sense of… well, time, I don’t know how to describe it really; I got this from Mallory’s ruminations about his own sense of the passage of time and the book kind of embodied something like that… the Egyptological setting of the book’s opening already felt decades old for a book published in 1981 and, evidently, set around that time as well, and the setting of the rest of the book—the crusty old rural village and the even crustier old house where Ashley and Mallory do their stuff—gave a similar sense of not quite the modern world. I don’t know, maybe I just felt that because it’s 2023 now and the book itself is as removed from my own time as the story feels. Wonder what its original readers thought.

One thing about the book that, unfortunately, was of another time but still is of ours is the racism of the village characters, who have thoughts and feelings about immigrants even though they’ve almost certainly never met any (the local “vagabonds” are bad enough for them. Cf. also the vicar who laments how much of the Bible was written by Jews). It’s probably more of a general small old village distrust of outsiders and newcomers than anything, but still… and I don’t suppose David Case actually shared in that sort of thinking, having been an import to the UK himself, but Ashley as narrator never exactly does much if anything to contradict these people’s Middle Englandness… That aside, though, I wound up liking this a lot; should read more Case.

Didgeridead

(Post title stolen from someone on Twitter who is clearly smarter than me)

Anyway, Rolf Harris died…

…in fact he apparently did so on the 10th of the month; the family opted to wait until he was safely in the ground before making it public. Can’t imagine why they might want to do that, I’m sure it’s completely unrelated to him being a convicted and unrepentant pedophile whose funeral might’ve been the target of protests if people had known where and when it was happening…

A theological point I’d never considered

Holy Righteous Penis (Batman). This makes me wonder various things including 1) where do women’s vaginas come from in that case and 2) …what else do you use your penis for? I know Puppetry of the Penis is a thing, and so is Lifto from the Jim Rose Circus, but… are there other things? Can you tape a paintbrush on it and do art with it? Learn to shoot lasers from it? I ask this as an avowed penis-haver, though mine is frankly pretty humdrum so maybe that’s why I can’t imagine doing things other than sex and peeing with it (and let’s face it, it only does the latter of those things as it is)…

Emilia ’13

So I have a bit of a thing for Emilia Clarke, which I think makes sense. I also have a bit of a thing for girls wearing headphones, which I don’t really understand at all. Anyway, with that in mind, here’s the best of both worlds, la belle Emilia doing her character voice for Futurama in between being the mother of dragons and surviving another brain aneurysm (click for full-size):