A little something saucy from the seaside
For years and years, the tradition here was to send home a saucy postcard from your seaside holiday. Which is where everybody went for their holidays, always. And the undisputed king of the saucy postcard was a man named Donald McGill (link goes to a Google Images search; click for an amusing hour of postcard browsing).
He was born in 1875 and was a draughtsman in the Navy when he drew a little get well card for a sick nephew in 1904 and kinfolk said, “Jed, move away from there.”
Fat ladies, drunks, vicars, honeymooning couples, wartime propaganda…he poured out tons of the damn things. The ruder they were the better they sold, though he only got pennies for each design.
He is author of the famous joke “Do you like Kipling?” / “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled!” which sold a record-holding six million copies.
He went on merrily until the Fifties, when the authorities decided to clean up all this disgusting smut and conducted a series of raids on seaside postcard shops. Some of the naughty designs had been on sale for decades without apparently causing riots. They confiscated thousands, mostly McGill’s, and took him to court.
He admitted breaking the Obscene Publications Act, but his defense was, “holy shit! REALLY? NAUGHTY DOUBLE MEANINGS? ZOMG, I had no idea until you pointed it out. Boy, is my face red!” Also, he was pushing eighty. So he pretty much got off, except for the lost revenue.
You still see McGill’s designs on cards and packaging (I saw a box of candy with a McGill wrapper the other day, which resulted in this post). Some say the vacation postcard is making a comeback, but I think the Royal Mail should be so lucky.
So. There. Something fun for the weekend. Have a good one!
August 3, 2012 — 10:41 pm
Comments: 19
…over the weekend…
A Punch and Judy show. Still common here at the seaside.
In the local version, Punch beats Judy to death and then the policeman hauls him away and he beats the policeman to death and then the devil appears and Punch beats the devil to death, and then he spreads out through the crowd beating the children to death.
No, wait. I think that last part was just in my fantasy version.
Anyhoo, the sound is like if you jammed a ventriloquist’s whistle up a cat’s ass and beat it to death with an axe handle. Like that.
So! Good wholesome entertainment for kids of all ages.
August 1, 2012 — 10:35 pm
Comments: 30
I won! I won the Olympics!
That’s right! I got me a free Co’Cola, suckas!
The bus behind the Coke bus was a Lloyd’s Bank bus, but sadly they were not giving out free money samples. I did ask.
There was a great rolling parade of corporate sponsors driving slowly ahead of the torch making a helluva racket. Dozens of coppers on motorbikes rolling around sealing off roads as the procession lumbered down the A259. I had a tame bobby with an earbutton radio next to me, so I knew what was coming.
The torch bearer himself was toward the end, a chubby gentleman of mature years. Bit of an anticlimax. Then they relit a lantern from the flame, blew out the torch, trundled the lantern onto a bus and off to the next town.
Not exactly a day at the circus, but above average for a Wednesday morning. Plus, free Coke!
July 18, 2012 — 9:54 pm
Comments: 17
Run, it’s a cyclops!
Yeah, these two butt-ugly abominations are the Olympics mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville.
Wenlock was named after the Shropshire town of Much Wenlock. It is thought that the Wenlock Games, founded around the mid 19th Century acted as a catalyst to the modern Olympic Games that we all know (and love?)
Mandeville is named after the Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Buckinghamshire where in the 1940s, Dr Ludwig Guttmann established the Stoke Mandeville games at his Spinal unit at the hospital. From here it is said the foundations were laid for the modern Paralympic games.
Now don’t you like them better? No? Me neither.
The Olympic torch is in Sussex at the moment, passing through into Kent tomorrow. I couldn’t give the proverbial at a rolling doughnut about the Olympics, but when Stuff happens near me, I have to be there in the front row waving a flag, yelling, “yay whatever!” It’s an American thing.
It’s trudging through Hastings before nine in the morning, so I have to be up bright and early to catch it. A friend is driving me in. Uncle B would rather floss with rusty barbed wire than turn up and wave a flag.
Nighty night!
July 17, 2012 — 8:50 pm
Comments: 45
A small man with a big…umm…heart
Behold, Matthias Buchinger (1674–1740) (or Matthew, as he lived much of his life in Britain), the proverbial man with no arms and no legs. Well, he had bits of arms and legs, but no hands and feet. He had little kind of flippery things.
…with which he played a half dozen musical instruments, was a crack shot and loved to build ships in bottles. He was also an accomplished magician, conjurer and card sharp. He made his living as an artist of insanely detailed engravings.
He engraved this self portrait, and if you look very closely (not in my little jpeg, obviously) you will see that the ringlets of his wig are composed of tiny Bible verses.
Oh, also he was married four times, had at least seventeen children by at least eight women, but was rumored to have fathered brats by seventy different ladies. He was so well known a cocksman that the 18th Century vajayjay was popularly known as Buchinger’s boot (which explains the smirk on his face).
What have you done today, Mr or Ms Smarty?
Dead Pool! Tomorrow! Six WBT! Be here!
July 12, 2012 — 10:27 pm
Comments: 16
No bunnies were harmed in the making of this post
Don’t worry; bunny is fine.
Charlotte’s been losing the battle of dental attrition for ten years now, thanks to a wicked bad case of Feline Dental Resorption. Last year, the vet removed her bottom fangs, leaving her with just the top two. As in, at long last, two whole teeth left in her whole furry head.
Last week, we noticed one of those has vanished. She is now Charlotte Einfang. Must take her in to make sure she hasn’t got a root left behind or something.
Anyhow, she let out a little self-congratulatory meow and her prey took the opportunity to scamper off into the hedge, apparently unharmed. For, like, the fifth time this week (Wanna bet it’s the same stupid bunny every time?).
She hasn’t yet worked out why this terrible thing keeps happening to her.
July 9, 2012 — 10:28 pm
Comments: 25
So, this thing is in London
Tallest building in Europe, at least for now. It went live earlier tonight with a laser show.
Phew, and I thought the Pickled Gherkin was big and ugly.
I have a kind of thing about skylines. When I went away to art school, my mother drove me up to Rhode Island. I refused to stop for the night until we saw The Skyline of Providence. Next thing we knew, there was the Welcome to Massachusetts sign. (Yeah. Providence was smaller than I realized. It does have distinct and lovely skyline, but a little one).
This thing…and the Gherkin and the Millenium Dome all the other modern abominations visited onto London has really screwed up a lovely skyline (you can barely make out good old St Paul’s any more).
Oh, well. I guess Hitler started it.
Oooooh! Forgot to add: See you at 6pm WBT for the new Dead Pool!
July 5, 2012 — 10:45 pm
Comments: 26
Speaking of Druids
So there’s this guy, who is the reason why cremation is legal in the UK.
William Price (1800–1893). Welsh doctor, Chartist, neo-druid, nutcase.
The Chartists were the first mass labor movement, and when that gig hotted up for Price, he fled to France until things cooled off. There, he spotted a rock in the Louvre with a Greek inscription, which he believed to be an ancient Celtic bard’s address to the moon. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that’s what’s sewn onto his jaunty longjohns there. No word whether he borrowed Joseph Smith’s magic rock for the trip.
So he became a druid. Arch druid. And named his first born Iesu Grist (Jesus Christ in Welsh) just to piss people off.
It worked.
So when the poor baby Jesus Christ Price died as an infant and Price decided to cremate him on a hilltop, there was trouble. Angry pitchfork wielding mob type trouble. An autopsy showed Jesus died of natural causes, so he was just charged with the cremation.
Much to everyone’s embarrassment, it turns out cremation was not actually against any law. Also, Price did a darned good job pleading an anti-burial case.
He walked free. His trial, plus the nascent Cremation Society of Great Britain, led to the Cremation Act of 1902.
Price’s last words were, “bring me a glass of champagne.” He drank it and died. At his request, they cremated him on the same hillside where he had cremated Jesus Christ. Twenty thousand people turned up for the event and they drank the pubs dry.
The end.
June 21, 2012 — 10:29 pm
Comments: 30
Whur’s my shootin’ iron?
These things go over so low, it’s tempting to pour out the front door in a loincloth, shake a spear skywards and go, “ulululu!” at them.
Awesome day in the sunny South today. When this climate is nice, it is the best — warm in the sun, cool in the shade. It’s turning to rain tomorrow for a few days, so we spent the evening sitting out in the garden drinking fizz and burning junk in the chimenea.
Happy Solstice! Okay, it’s tomorrow, but the Druids have started their sundown procession up to Stonehenge, so y’all can sleep safely in your beds tonight.
June 20, 2012 — 11:04 pm
Comments: 22
Count yer blessings, Yanks
In case you aren’t down with math or hip to the current exchange rate, that box of Premium Fucking Saltines costs $26.73 in real money.
Dang. What a weasel has to do for a cracker around here.
Speaking of economic tragedy, our neighbors just got back from a week in Spain. I asked if they saw signs of impending doom and they laughed. Not so much the impending doom, but the madness that drove them to it.
They said Spain is lousy with pointless and abandoned infrastructure projects. Like sections of new, modern, multi-lane highway that run parallel to the old, usable road for miles and then just stop. Connecting nothing to nothing, with no access at either end.
Way, WAY out in the middle of the empty countryside, standing in a field slowly grassing over, they saw an enormous concrete bridge. The kind that a big highway would pass over and another big highway pass under, but no road. Or town or anything to go from or to. All funded with loans that are now coming due.
Liberalism really is a cargo cult. The Spanish know — in a dim, inchoate way — that roads are important to a thriving modern economy, so they built little road-shaped shrines out in the ass-end of nowhere, hoping prosperity would follow.
Oh, this thing is going to get ugly.
June 11, 2012 — 10:00 pm
Comments: 46