Wednesday 27th of November 2024
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fun fun fun no more...

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Of the Greek rubber chicken...

From the SMH, Anthony Ackroyd
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"Come to the edge, he said. They said: We are afraid. Come to the edge, he said. They came. He pushed them and they flew." These are the words of Guillaume Apollinaire, a French writer well-credentialled as an artist who lived at the edge.
...
To put it bluntly, a rubber sword won't cut through the bullshit, and that is one of the most vital functions of comedy.
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 meanwhile at the Devine factory:

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Here's another thing to blame on greenies: the revolting trend of nose-to-tail eating. It found its apogee at this month's Sydney International Food Festival when the high priest of the dark art, the British chef Fergus Henderson, hosted a Nose-to-Tail BBQ with lots of sacrificial baby pigs and a team of Sydney chefs recreating the simply offal recipes from his cookbook The Whole Beast. Carpaccio of stuffed pigs trotter with black pudding and crispy quails egg was a staple.

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Gus: In the weird weird world of black pudding comedy, Miranda wins handsomely, yet she's trying to be serious, or at least she appears to knit a serious point. Of course blaming the greenies for the revolting trend of whatever is Miranda's staple diet... A dog farts, she blames the greenies. A plane crashes, she blames the greenies. A war goes pear-shape, she blames the greenies. She's paid to blame the greenies.
Now, every serious comedian would know that the nose-to-tail eating goes way back, to the Roman Empire decadence, when fresh eyes of newts in aspic, bat-farts alla tomato sauce and hedgehog liver soup were the rage in the orgies — the lot accompanied with fermented grape juice mixed with oyster purée.
Then this glorious nose-to-tail eating also stained the middle ages as food was precious and every bit was valued. Yourp was awash with fermenting tripe and haggish stuff-it stuff, while the good bits, like snouts and pigs-knuckles in jelly, were the rage amongst kings.


But unfortunately nothing much is so black and white, except for a few loose ends...
As Anthony Ackroyd explains:

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The giant among lifelong comedic agitators is the US comic Lenny Bruce, who challenged audiences to examine their attitudes on crucial topics such as religion, sex, politics, and race.
Hey, Hey It's Saturday's misguided blackface sketch evoked painful memories of the ways in which humour was used to denigrate racial minorities before comedians such as Bruce started utilising it to lead audiences to the edge of new insights.
Forty years after the death of Apollinaire in 1918, Lenny Bruce started performing a routine in his club act that would have truly met the definition of surreal for the comedy audiences of the late '50s. Bruce would emerge chained to a black musician named Eric Miller and launch into a brilliant parody of one of the biggest movies of the day, The Defiant Ones.
The premise of this Oscar-winning film rests on the escape of two prisoners from a road gang, a white bigot (Tony Curtis) and a black man (Sydney Poitier). The intimation in Bruce's pastiche - that these men of different colour shared a homoerotic relationship - was an edge too far for many in a time when equal rights was as radical an idea as sexual freedom.
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Ah... this assemblage of opposite colours, would be good grounding for some funny repartee...
On the same planet, we've got to look at this next hot item:
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A Louisiana justice of the peace says he refused to issue a marriage licence to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have.

Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, said it was his experience that most interracial marriages did not last long.

"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."

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Meanwhile on the good land of Oz, great Aboriginal women get Masters in Public Policy:

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From the NYT:

But this was no hallucination: Yuwali's world had changed, beyond recognition, forever. Before long, the Martu were taken to a church mission, where they were given clothes, taught English and schooled in becoming good Christians. In the documentary, surviving members of the group take the directors Martin Butler and Bentley Dean to their homeland in the Percival Lakes area of the Great Sandy Desert. The area is extremely remote: even now, it is a four-day car journey to get there – half of it entirely off tracks – from the nearest town, Newman, in the Pilbara region.

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Meanwhile the Zionistan comedians in charge of laughing war crimes into a farce, do their stand-up routine:

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War crimes report a farce, says Israel
Israel has slammed a resolution by the United Nations Human Rights Council endorsing a report that accuses it of war crimes in the Gaza Strip.

The report was the outcome of an investigation led by South African jurist Richard Goldstone.

The report makes damning allegations against Israel and Hamas, accusing both of war crimes by deliberately targeting civilians.

The Human Rights Council has voted to refer the Goldstone report to the UN General Assembly.

Twenty-five of the 47 member nations supported the resolution, although six voted against it - including the US - and 16 either abstained or did not vote at all...


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So even under the Obama Administration, the US vote to protect the Zionist butchers...

Meanwhile at the ghost factory...

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We can now clearly see the identity of the real Leader of the Opposition. It's not Malcolm Turnbull or Peter Costello or Joe Hockey. It's not anyone currently serving in Parliament. On all three of the big policy problems now gripping our national politics, the man animating the Coalition is John Howard.

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Yes, comics need a much sharper tool than a rubber chicken to cut through the bullshit. A rapier like wit... But then, trying to cut the hypocritical mustard with a rubber chicken may prove to be an effective counterpoint, showing how ludicrous our efforts in faking to be angels are, when we are beasts with a two-ended digestive tract — like the pigs of which we can eat both extremities in nose-to-tail culinary delights...

Please... Enjoy the holes...

ghostly advice from backstage...

Howard is not trying to play the part of some shadowy manipulator. Although he does give his advice to former colleagues when they ask for it, he has accepted defeat. He is busy in his so-called retirement, travelling widely, giving well-paid speeches and behaving himself.

This is in contrast to Paul Keating, who is often on the phone giving unsolicited advice to serving Labor politicians on all sorts of matters.

Wayne Swan has entertained the cabinet with the story of how Keating phoned to give him a vital piece of guidance in how to prepare the federal budget. Swan thought the former treasurer was going to deliver a profound fiscal insight. Instead, Keating told him to get a green eye-shade.

Howard's influence endures through the way he conditioned the Liberal Party, conditioned the Labor Party, conditioned the whole political system, in his long tenure as the Wizard of Oz. You can see it, first, in the way the parties are responding to the boat people.

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Ah... the old Boat-People trick...

black is black...

And while our own John Saffran studies race relations in a more flippant than serious fashion, one has to remember John Howard Griffin, as mentioned below... I still remember his brave stint, as he actually took some pills and exposed himself to UV rays to achieve his aim to get a "black" skin... and experience prejudice first hand...

Then, in the late 50s, his experiment was for real...

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Exposing the colour of prejudice

 

The answer to that question may seem obvious now after decades of slow and uneven progress towards racial equality and enlightenment.

It would have seemed very different 50 years ago to the white Texan writer John Howard Griffin, when he embarked on one of the most remarkable one-man social and psychological experiments in history.

Griffin was the white man who fooled hundreds of Americans into believing he was a black man as he travelled through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia - and who felt at first hand the bigotry that meant.

In later life, the six-week venture - described in his book Black Like Me - was to expose him to the hatred and violence that underpinned that bigotry, too.

When he toured the South lecturing to white audiences about his experiences as a black man, he was threatened, intimidated and, on at least one occasion, seriously beaten.

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See cartoon at top and blog below it...

lie to me...

History is weird and often records things in a variety of ways, some erroneously or incompletely.

People too remember things that never happened or meetings with other characters than the ones they remember... It's our lot that our memory plays tricks on us. Or that we play tricks on our memory... In one of the chapters of one of my books I explore our strong ability to lie to ourselves... In that regard, our brain is often bipolar. If we study our behaviour well, we will bullshit to get out of a sticky situation, hoping it will work. We invent a new persona, often benign, to make ourselves interesting, Gus included.

As salespersons, we sing the praise of this or that item when we've got no clue as to the reality of them working well, but we "hope", we need to make our weekly quota and the buyer is swayed by the chromium... Sometimes we just plainly forget what it was all about... Sometimes we're confused... Sometimes we can't reveal the truth because we have sworn to our beloved we will not tell... Thus when ask, we can hum and err, or we can fabricate a plausible suite of events with a closure point as not to be asked again... Some people are more adept at bullshitting than others and this is the subject of my work called "the Age of Deceit" that may be published one day in full. But sometimes the truth is hidden away for years and sometimes it is distorted by the flimsy surface of our memory...

for some of us it is plain bullshit and delusion of grandeur... We all possess a bit of that.

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From the ABC

Lawyers for the disgraced Federal Court judge Marcus Einfeld want to introduce new medical evidence as part of an appeal against his jail sentence.

Marcus Einfeld is serving a minimum two year jail term after pleading guilty to perverting the course of justice and making a false statement under oath to avoid a speeding fine.

The 70-year-old claimed that an American academic was driving his car when it was caught speeding, despite knowing she died the previous month.


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From the BBC

Mr Lake died in June aged 94, but his account of the meeting has been released by the National Archives.

It is contained within his Special Operations Executive personnel file and describes a meeting with Gen de Gaulle in the town of Saintes, south-west France, on 18 September 1944.

Nom de guerre

Mr Lake, then a captain, spoke fluent French and was known by the field name Jean-Pierre Lenormand.

He decided to join a number of French officers who went along to greet the general, but was surprised by the conversation that followed...:
...
Gen de Gaulle: "What are you doing here?"

Mr Lake: "I belong to the Inter-Allied Mission for Dordogne, and I am at the moment with Dordogne troops at Marennes, mon general."

Gen de Gaulle: "But what are you doing here?"

Mr Lake: "I am training certain troops for special operations."

Gen de Gaulle: "Our troops don't need training. You have no business here."

Mr Lake: "I obey the orders of my superiors."

Gen de Gaulle: "You have no business here, I say. You have no right to exercise a command."

Mr Lake: "Mon general, I exercise no command."

Gen de Gaulle: "We don't need you here. It only remains for you to leave. You too must go home. Return, return quickly. Au revoir."

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from the "records"
14 septembre  Le général de Gaulle est à Lyon. 

15 septembre  Le général de Gaulle est à Marseille et Toulon. 

16 septembre  Le général de Gaulle est à Toulouse

17 septembre  Le général de Gaulle prononce un discours à Bordeaux. 

18 septembre  Le général de Gaulle est à Orléans puis regagne Paris. 

23-26 septembre  Le général de Gaulle effectue un voyage dans le Doubs, le Jura et la Meurthe-et-Moselle.
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Thus here, there is no "semi-official" public record of Gen. de Gaulle being in Saintes on September 18...
But it is highly probable that from Bordeaux to Orleans, the General travelling with his circus, went through Saintes on the 18th, then onto Poitiers and Orleans?... But such conversation would have been heard by others as Lake remembers:

"It was so unexpected that I must confess I was far too taken aback to reply intelligently, and I think the majority of those present had similar reactions."

One would hope there would have been another account of the encounter made. Hushed by the frogs themselves? Or did Lake had the conversation with someone else? Or were recording of things like the encounter judge not important enough? Or had the general already acquired a hidden agenda in his mind about the way Europe was going to be shaped-up after the war — deciding he had enough of the Brits?... From this date, 1944, it took him 20 years to throw the Yankees out of France — Americans who were secretly meddling in his master plans — of a "united" Europe on the verge of being realised now (2009).

And the snooty French would have applauded a Brit being put in his place — no matter how useful the Brit was...? I am being facetious, sorry...

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Meanwhile at the Einfeld factory, the fact of being bipolar would have excluded Marcus from the bench long ago... It would have been noticed beyond his peculiar personal ways... I am not a psychiatrist... Despite having achieved many things in my life, I know my limits in the bipolar bullshitting department... It took me years to gauge. Some of us never do. And we can all be full of our own self importance as a driving force to get things done, not expecting anyone to challenge our skewed wisdom... or our wriggling out of misdemeanour... Often if we hesitate, opportunities get lost... And more often than not it is in moments of bravado that we seize the day : carpe diem... And it is when we are depressed that we loose the plot... And as I point out in my observations, the way out of depression is often through passive delusion or traumatic delusion... Trust me I've been there. making a habit of that and we end up bipolar — self-inflicted...

And if we need to bullshit, please we need to make it as plausible as possible. The first thing police will do is check our version of events with LIVE people... "Using a person identity knowing she died the previous month"... I ask you... That takes the gall of lying beyond the call of delusion.
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For Mr Lake, there is a good chance his encounter happened, but only recorded by him as such. So what would his goal be — if he had any — in holding onto the story till his grave and the story not made it public while De Gaulle was annoying the English-speaking world?... Modesty? lack of evidence? Wait and see...?
And why the National Archives choose to release his papers now? Is there a subplot to create doubt in the Pommy minds about the French in the Unification of Yourp...? Who knows... I believe there is a motive of sorts behind many actions, even if not obvious... May be I am too naively suspicious... and it may not matter...

see toon at top and story below it.. and please let me say that there is always a strong TRUE throughline that supports the twisted words and the funny cartoons. I would not like it any other ways, though I can make mistakes too — genuine mistakes...