La La Land – The Musical Debacle
We can now add PWC, the ‘professional services’ group, to the list of folk that couldn’t organise a p**s-up in a brewery – sorry, an Oscars ceremony in LA. Some professionalism. Some service. At least they’ve admitted guilt; a sort of Mia culpa!
So this is for them:
Now the sun’s finally set on the Oscars
‘Tis Moonlight the movie that prospers,
Because PWC
Screwed-up big-time, you see,
Leaving La La Land as impostors.
On the occasion of POTUS’ latest gabshite utterances …
There’s no refugee crimewave in Sweden
So it’s hardly a problem that’s need’n’
That comb-over chump
AKA ‘Walloper’ Trump
To lie to his minions, or mislead ’em.
The Scots terms, above, are taken from the description of POTUS in Lorna Wallace’s epic portrayal of him as “a tangerine gabshite walloper”.
(For those needing help with the language, gabshite refers to someone mouthing-off loudly on a subject (s)he knows nothing about and walloper is a slang term for a limp dick. Seems about right.)
A contemplative rhyme for Kratos, my Ice Cream Buddy’s rabbit, on his recent visit to the vet:
‘Tis the end now of Kratos’s rollicking
Adventure of love, lust and frolicking.
In the worst of all spectacles
He lost both his testicles
When Anna arranged his de-bollocking!
On trugs and affaires de coeur…
Aficionados of a certain class of televisual whodunnit will be familiar with the scene, so picture it now:
A chocolate-box village invested with bucolic grandeur by the landscape that envelops it. Its artfully thatched cottages keeping a hirsute watch over their grounds; gardens that were crafted with love through the hazy days of tranquil summers past – the halcyon summers of her untroubled though solitary mid-life years. And now she kneels. Alone. Trowel in hand.
In faded redolence of her life a tired, but much-loved summer frock mirrors the careworn passion of her being. Her youthful countenance conserved by the wide-brimmed flowery hat that wards off the ageing ravages of the sun’s beguiling embrace and frames the handsome visage of a woman in her prime. How many times has her story been told? Morse? Miss Marple? Midsomer?
Midsomer! We know what happens next…
A never-was-and-never-will-be-beau from decades past returns to haunt the vestige of his youth. He rediscovers long-departed yearnings. He rediscovers her.
She screams! His heinous revenge, exacted for youthful, ill-imagined slights, leavens the madness of his life. His early passion unbeknown to her. Unbeknown and unrequited. For him, unforgotten. His madness now destroys the daylight dreams that once consumed his waking hours. Her scream subsides.
She lies there. Still and silent amid the splendour of her flowers. The tools that shaped her garden recline solemnly beside her in an open casket, a hand-crafted gift of yore; a simple wooden trug.
“She obviously lived alone” said Barnaby.
“How so?” asked his young sergeant.
“The trug” he replied, “it’s a dead giveaway. You see, at a certain age they replace the men in their lives with a trug. Never forget that Troy”. He sounded bitter.
The older man continued: “The day will come when you too will be asked to forgo a romantic moonlit dinner or a picnic nestled by the river on a summer’s day. No more jewels or trinkets desired. No more weekend-away-surprises. No more négligée. No more déshabillé. No more passion. No more … you! Just a trug”.
Barnaby’s face fell as he remembered that day. The day that Joyce had told him she wanted a trug for her birthday “but not a plastic one”.
So with Cully’s help he had bought her a wooden one. An expensive hand-made trug sculpted from willow and chestnut, but it mattered not. Now viewed from marital exile in his cheaply rented rooms, his life had never since been the same.
But Joyce and her garden blossomed. Until, one day, a long-forgotten school-day confrère reappeared in her life.
He had worshipped her from affair, but she hardly knew his name, or cared, as she collected her tools in her trug.
In his lodgings, Barnaby heard a piercing scream rent the air…
“I’ve no need of a passionate hug”
She said with a nonchalant shrug.
“‘Cos I’ve now reached the age
Where I’d rather engage
With my garden; so get me a trug!”
Orangutans with ape-itude …
There was a cheerful story from the Netherlands this week. Staff of a primate park near the Dutch town of Apeldoorn are showing pictures of potential mates to their adult orangutans to see if they have a preferred choice of partner. Tinder for Apes!
Meantime Chester’s orangutans have become the stars of The Zoo, a TV documentary series that follows the lives of the zoo’s animal collection. Their ability to break out of their compound and go walkabout has been most endearing, but perhaps they’d be better behaved, or at least ‘otherwise occupied’, if the zoo introduced Tinder for Apes for them too:
They get into all sorts of scrapes
When a group of them sometimes escapes.
But a Dutch zoo has found
That they all hang around
When they swipe right on Tinder for Apes!
Postscript: For a while now my place of work has promoted a networking scheme for staff via its so-called ‘Random Coffee’ club. Its aim is to encourage staff to meet colleagues they would not normally bump into. Interested parties put their names forward and random pairings are then drawn to share a coffee break at a mutually agreeable date. Random Coffee is, in fact, a location-based social discovery service that facilitates communication between mutually interested users.
That is all very worthy and innocent, but can you spot the obvious? Let me help. The last sentence of the paragraph above is a truncated version of Wikipedia’s opening paragraph in its entry for Tinder:
Tinder is a location-based dating and social discovery service application (using Facebook) that facilitates communication between mutually interested users, allowing matched users to chat.
Yup! It was not long before Random Coffee became known as the Lab’s version of Tinder. I don’t know who coined it thus or if it has yet led to romance, but it’s given us two limericks for the price of one this week …
I sent out a new memorandum
That staff should now meet up at random.
So forget about Tinder
And let us not hinder
Your efforts to hook-up in tandem.
A quote usually attributed to the late USA Senator Patrick Daniel Moynihan is that: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but they are not entitled to their own facts”.
In truth, there are some that argue otherwise. An Australian philosopher, Patrick Stokes, gets to the nub of the problem: “If ‘everyone’s entitled to their opinion’ just means no-one has the right to stop people thinking and saying whatever they want, then the statement is true but fairly trivial, but if ‘entitled to an opinion’ means ‘entitled to have your views treated as serious candidates for the truth’ then it’s pretty clearly false”.
Which brings us to the new White House incumbent’s view of (i) winning the popular vote in the American presidential election (along the lines of “I won if you disregard the votes of the millions of illegal voters” – this despite any evidence of mass illegality and rather akin to saying that “if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle”) and (ii) claiming the biggest-ever crowd at a presidential inauguration despite clear evidence to the contrary.
The White House trumpeted its non-sensical perspectives as ‘alternative opinions’ or, more insidiously, as ‘alternative facts’.
Dangerous stuff, so:
When it’s “truth” that your verbiage lacks,
They’re “lies” not “alternative facts”.
So without much compunction
I hope that you’re dumped-on
For your pathetically risible acts.
Postscript #1: Fred Shapiro, editor of ‘The Yale book of Quotations’, points to an earlier quote about the right to one’s own opinion by Bernard Baruch, an American financier and philanthropist. It seems to have historical precedence over Moynihan’s quote and states that: “Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”
Postscript #2: My all-time favourite title for an article is Richard Lewontin’s and Stephen Jay Gould’s paper entitled: ‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm’.
Having just become aquainted with Fred Shapiro’s work (Postscript #1), I’m now pleased to say that I have a second favourite title, from his article: ‘The politically correct US Supreme Court and the Motherf**king Texas Court of Criminal Appeals‘.
Adrift on the high Cs …
I’ve just thought of a category to add to my recent post for That Was My Year That Was, (2016) namely: The most beguiling performance of the year.
Two contenders stood out – Eleanor Tomlinson (Demelza in the TV series Poldark, see #TeamDemelza in posts passim) and an Irish soprano, Anna Devin, who was in Scottish Opera’s production of The Marriage of Figaro in which she played Susanna.
It was a close run thing, but Devin won. I’m by no means an opera buff, but I was completely beguiled by her performance and thought that she stole the show. Not just her singing, but her acting too. However, despite that and the critical praise of her “vivid sense of bel canto style” and “musico-dramatic intelligence” (which I think means ‘acting’) even she couldn’t relieve the tedium of the last 20 minutes of the opera – too long, Mozart, just too long!
It took a lot to put Tomlinson’s portrayal of Demelza into second place, but Devin managed it if only because her performance was live and the twinkle in her eye was enchanting! She can certainly belt them out as well. Anyway, this is for her …
I was enthralled by a singer called Anna;
Ms Devin, that is, and I canna
Forget her recital,
‘Bel canto’ and vital,
As she beguiled in the rôle of Susanna!
I’ve always liked the term bel canto ever since Harry Secombe disparaged his own singing ability as “more can belto than bel canto“. Meantime, I’d have had a better version of the limerick if only there was an appropriate rhyme with bel canto. You can’t win ’em all 🙁
Not long ago in a galaxy very close to home …
I was sorry to hear of Carrie Fisher’s death. I hope they write her out of the Star Wars franchise and don’t resort to a CGI impersonation otherwise it tells the world that she was ephemeral to the rôle she took; just a collection of molecules that could be replaced by some bits and bytes fed into a GPU. She was a lot more than that.
She was sassy: “Instant gratification takes too long“.
She was brassy: “We treat beauty like an accomplishment, and that is insane. Everyone in L.A. says, ‘Oh, you look good,’ and you listen for them to say you’ve lost weight. It’s never ‘How are you?’ or ‘You seem happy!'”.
And she was classy: “I don’t want my life to imitate art, I want my life to be art“.
She was also wise (in between the excesses of her life): “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die“.
There’ll be some that may shed a tear
When the news reaches them and they hear
That Carrie had died
And the world is denied
The ‘spark’ that empowered Princess Leia.
Take off optional, landing mandatory …
I received a genuine surprise from Management on my birthday – a pleasure flight in an autogyro (aka a gyrocopter or gyroplane) for when my next hometown trip to the English Lake District coincides with fine weather.
Three weeks earlier I would have been utterly delighted by it, but in the interim the Cumbrian press was full of an autogyro that had crashed, injuring both its pilot and passenger. Apparently there was a bird strike causing it to hit power lines after which, in the words of Monty Python, it “did not so much fly … as plummet”.
The question is: did Management know about this before she bought my present? Is she trying to tell me something? Has she surreptitiously taken out extra life insurance on me? Only time will tell. Meantime …
An autogyro that recently crashed
Hit the ground so hard that it smashed
Its cockpit in two
While both of the crew
Saw the seat of their pants flying past.
Postscript#1: Fans of the older James Bond movies will remember Little Nellie from the film You Only Live Twice in which Bond, flying a heavily armed autogyro, out-guns numerous baddies in traditional helicopters on his way to another victory over Blofeld and his SPECTRE organisation.
Such is its fame you can still buy die-cast models of Little Nellie 50 years after the film premiered!
Postscript#2: I try to edit my posts to be as lean as possible – usually unsuccessfully – and sometimes that means a smart-a**e bit has to be removed because it just doesn’t ‘work’ in the context in which it is set. That, pains me greatly.
This week’s sacrificial edit expunged the following re-wording of Bond and Goldfinger’s memorable exchange from an earlier Bond movie, Goldfinger, into the aerobatic context of You Only Live Twice:
Bond: You don’t expect me to walk?
Blofeld: No, Mr Bond, I expect you to fly!
There! I’ve sneaked it in!
I’m quite pleased to see the back of 2016, but for what it’s worth here are some pics for my ‘best of’ compendium for the year …
Best new experience of the year:
A bread-making course at ‘Bread Ahead’ (Borough Market, London). Just me and a bunch of Chelsea girls loafing around …
Best ice-cream of the year:
Beating Zanoni’s of Vienna by a short head was the first ice-cream pit stop of the year.
Best blog idea of the year:
A limerick a week. How else can one show one’s proficiency at celebrating #TeamDemelza in verse with an anapestic meter and strict rhyme scheme?
Best cycle ride of the year:
Finally, at the age of 24, Firstborn scraped her knee whilst participating in a physical outdoor activity. Her mother was so proud 🙂
Best health tip of the year:
… and from the Graun: Bike rides and hot baths – a fitness match made in heaven and it’s official!
Best impression of a marine mammal of the year:
Management performing dolphinarium tricks (we’d boycotted Marineland Mallorca whilst on holiday) with Firstborn as the ‘trainer’.
Best meal of the year:
The most hotly contested category of all. It could easily have been the baked brie at the Crofters Bistro, Rosemarkie, or the scallops at the Applecross Inn or the mega-breakfast at the Hatton Locks café or the liver and bacon at the Tigh an Eilean Hotel, Shieldaig. But by a country mile, ‘hats off’ please to the Gasthaus Ubl in Vienna for keeping traditional Austrian cuisine alive and at its best. Roast pork, sauerkraut and dumplings like my Grandma used to make. Großartig!
Best sausage of the year:
Another Viennese delight – mit brot und senf, of course
Best new toy of the year:
A micro-campervan. According to the Daily Mash, “as a form of accommodation it is slightly more expensive than The Savoy“, but I think it’s cool.
Best fresh air of the year:
As sensitive bio-indicators of atmospheric pollution, these lichens growing on a wooden bench seat next to the main road through Lochcarron attest to the freshness of its air. Unusually for Scotland the air was still on the day this picture was taken, making it the best fresh air of the year!
Best concert of the year:
No real competition here. Bellowhead on a Saturday night at the London Palladium during the band’s farewell tour. Simply awesome.
Best offspring pose of the year:
Firstborn and The Tall Child ‘having a moment’.
And finally …
Best roof picture of the year:
Eavesdropping from the top of Stephansdom, Vienna
