Objects in history may be smaller than they appear…
Yes, you guessed it. In the complex and sophisticated iconography of sweasel.com, this diagram illustrates Gordon Brown getting his ass kicked in the European elections.
And an historic kicking of ass it was! We sat up and watched the regional count. Everybody knew Labour would do badly, but this here debacle was a fucking Greek tragedy of an ass-kicking: the worst Labour has done since 1918 (founded: 1900). The worst a party in power has done in a national election EVER.
Labour lost Cornwall for the first time in decades. They came in sixth. Below the Cornish National Party (Uncle B describes as ten nutters in a pub). This after coming in lower than the Monster Raving Loony Party in St Ives last week.
It was epic.
And meaningless. For now, anyhow. Labour doesn’t have to call an election until May next year, and (from a cravenly political point of view) they’d be nuts to do it any sooner. They’ve got the power, and a year is an eternity in politics. Gordon Brown has dug his heels in and nobody in his camp (so far) has the stomach to give him a push. David Cameron of the Tories is way out front, but he’s still the Lindsay Graham of British politics (now with added Greenie!). The fringe parties are still…fatally fringe-y.
And this was the European election. Voting in this thing is like getting to choose between being smacked upside the head or elbowed in the crotch (hence the pathetic turnout).
Still, Labour got its ass kicked! And it was a hell of a thing to watch.
June 8, 2009 — 8:19 pm
Comments: 16
Can NOTHING be simple…?
This is the little radio Uncle B kindly bought me today. We have a radio (or ‘wireless’ as they insist on calling them) in pretty much every room in the house, but I was missing out on the steady drip-drip-drip of BBC leftist venom as I moved between one room and another. So, now there’s this.
You’ll notice that good old AM and FM have been replaced with waves and maths and kHz’ses. You need a ham operator’s license to drive one of these.
Okay, not really. But I do get tired of every fucking thing being a learning experience.
Notice the little round frequency markers? Y’all know what a test match is? It’s what they call a cricket game.
That’s right. This radio has the cricket stations printed on.
June 3, 2009 — 7:19 pm
Comments: 23
I wonder what they sell in there…
Spotted on a drive up the coast. We didn’t stop.
June 2, 2009 — 7:16 pm
Comments: 25
We blessed the crops, but we didn’t get to whip any damn children…
The ancient church is the heart of our little settlement, though services there are few. So far, Uncle B and I have neatly sidestepped most of them because the hours we keep. When an afternoon service cropped up this Sunday, we were kind of stuck for good excuses (“we’re aggressively obnoxious atheists” didn’t seem a very sociable excuse).
This was the annual Rogation Service. The Rogation Service is a church adoption of the pagan custom of blessing the crops and livestock in Spring. It originally lasted three days, which coincided with the Gange Days — a procession known as “beating the bounds.”
Yea, verily, in ye days before ye Google Earth, remembering and maintaining the boundaries of each individual parish wasn’t easy. So once a year, substantial men of the village — along with many boys — would walk the entire perimeter of the parish. “Entire perimeter” to include wading canals, walking through the middle of houses and trampling any new fences or outbuildings. Literally every inch of it was retraced on foot, along with much partying and whooping it up.
Along the way, the boys were thrown into the brambles, tossed into ponds and slammed into hard objects, all the better to cement in their tender heads the landmarks and outlines of the boundary. Works for me.
We had a feeling this Rogation wouldn’t be quite that sort of wild medieval par-tay. And so it wasn’t. When we reached the open field, our entire merry band consisted of six bluehaired old ladies, the vicar, Uncle B and self. We were handed programs and given speaking parts, and off we went.
We shuffled twenty feet into the field and said prayers for the livestock (astonishing several lambs). Fifty feet the other way and said prayers for the crops. Up the road a piece and prayers for the church. Then we had mugs of hot tea and little sticky cakes and walked home. Hymns and all, about an hour.
Huh.
The strawberries? First of the year. Uncle B growed them in his greenhouse, a little bowl for each of us. They were awesome and flavorful, and so sweet they didn’t need sugar.
I reckon it was the Jesus blessing that done it.
May 25, 2009 — 6:24 pm
Comments: 16
Run, leetle peeg!
Okey dokey. Let’s see if I can take a crack at translating this expenses thing into Yankee.
Members of the British Parliament are expected to keep a home in their constituency district and also have accomodation in London for when Parliament is in session. Two homes. London is the second most expensive city in the world. The average MP makes £64K per annum (around $100,000).
You could swing it, but it would be pretty tight. So, rather than pissing the voters off by giving themselves a fat raise, the government set up an easygoing allowance scheme that would reimburse them up to £24K ($38K) in expenses a year. Few questions asked.
It’s like your boss saying, “I can’t give you a pay increase this year, but I’ll turn a blind eye if you swipe office supplies and pad your meal allowances.” No big? Ah…but X factors have whipped this into the perfect political shitstorm.
THE TIMING IS LOUSY. Right in the teeth of a global financial meltdown. One that is widely blamed (rightly or not) on bankers. The public has a great big hair across its ass, and the name of that hair is “greedy rich guys.”
THE RECEIPTS ARE STUPID. It’s a slush fund, really. And MP’s never dreamed the paperwork would go public. So the things they tried to claim for and their correspondence with the fees office are sloppy and wrong to the point of smartass. Five pence for a shopping bag. Tampax for a male MP. Pissing and moaning whenever they didn’t get their way.
THEY DID THEIR BESTESES TO COVER IT UP. The Freedom of Information Act is new here, and ex-Speaker Martin spent over £100,000 in court trying to exempt Parliament from it. In the end, the receipts did a mysterious end-around and flat-out leaked. Oh, but the Blair-era receipts were shredded, despite being subject of an official FOI request. Hrm.
THE CONTRAST IS HIGHLY OFF-PISSING. See: timing. The economy is tough. Record layoffs and bankruptcies. There’s a rage for growing your own vegetable gardens. A waiting list for wood-burning stoves. The public mood is austere. It’s a really, really bad time to try charging a £8,865 Bang & Olufsen widescreen TV to the taxpayer.
MP’S ARE SO VERY FUCKING TONE DEAF. I cannot believe how badly these bozos are playing it — all whiny and butthurt. They compare themselves aloud to “other professionals” like doctors — yeah? What exactly are the qualifications for MP again? — and I guess their fantasy doctors live like rock stars and premier league footballers. Alternating snot-monsters and victims; the worst possible reaction. The only major figure who seems to understand how scary-mad the public is is David Cameron (mixed feelings on this; I can’t stand him).
But I think the biggest aggravating factor is, MP’s are asking the public to cut ’em a little slack at a time when NOBODY CUTS THE BRITISH PUBLIC SLACK, EVER. Civil liberties are in the crapper. There are cameras everywhere. Three traffic no-nos and you lose your license. Councils are paying neighbors to snitch on each other. They collect your garbage half as often but ream your ass if there are recyclables in with your kitchen waste. “Health and Safety” legislation daily shears off great chunks of familiar freedoms.
The worst is at the local level, but government flows from the source. The great dam of public rage has up and busted, and MP’s are standing right in its path. Clutching receipts.
May 22, 2009 — 7:24 pm
Comments: 48
Say, is that a pie funnel under your crust, or are you happy to see me?
A little something Uncle B whipped up. It involves kidneys. And pie crust. Hells no I didn’t taste it.
Please savor his culinary triumph in place of my usual thoughtful and engaging blog post. I got jammed up tonight trying to do the layouts for the church guidebook.
Yes, really.
Shut up.
May 21, 2009 — 7:44 pm
Comments: 24
Take one down, pass it around, 645 snouts in the trough…
So! Michael Martin has stepped down — the first Speaker of the British House of Commons to be forced out in 300 years. Yes, chillun, that is a very big deal.
Corruption, money; the usual. But there’s a whole nother undercurrent here that you and I, Yanks that we be, are apt to miss.
Did you realize Tony Blair is a Scot? Yup. So is Gordon Brown. So are many of the ‘New’ Labour stooges, butt-munches and ass-wipes they brought to power with them in the last twelve years. There’s a huge sense in which the NuLab triumph has been the political ascendancy of Scots over English.
There’s awfully bad blood there, still. There are huge differences in history, in attitude, in economics. The closest thing in the States would be the urban/rural divide, with the Scots playing the role of resource-sucking inner-city welfare queens. Labour stuck a giant funnel in the South and has spent a decade siphoning resources to the North.
Now the Speaker of the House of Commons is a special role in British politics. Much more so than our Speaker, he is supposed to be apolitical. Even-handed. Fair. A peacemaker and judge. He keeps order, decides who speaks. Knows his historical shit. Wears silly britches and gets a special fru-fru apartment. He is known as the First Commoner of the Land.
The Speaker is elected by the whole House, but there’s a tradition that the office should shift back and forth between parties, regardless of which is in power. The last Speaker — who, by all accounts, did an excellent job — was Labour. So this one should really have been Conservative.
But the Blairites, carried away by the throbbing size of their majority in 2000, laughingly dropped a turd on Parliament. Michael Martin is a Glaswegian son of a sailor and a cleaning lady. He left school at fifteen to work sheet metal, but he aspired to higher things — union thug. From union thuggery, it was a short hop to government.
Electing this man Speaker was like making a Teamster roustabout your Miss Manners. He was a gift to the South, and the label said fuck you, snooty English beeyotches. He performed exactly as you’d expect.
This expenses scandal is big and important and touches all the parties. Martin’s resignation is neither the solution nor the end. But the sight of this porker in the trough, up to his hamhocks and squealing for more, was just too much for anyone to bear.
Even some Labour MP’s got on the bandwagon, but the leadership is madder than hell. The question is, will Labour — still very much in the majority for a little while longer — have the brass balls to shatter tradition and force a third Labour Speaker on the House?
May 20, 2009 — 9:00 pm
Comments: 10
ZOMG! Now I know where I am…!
We were driving around the countryside from garden center to garden center today, trying to find growing bags or strawberry plants or…some junk (I’m still unclear on the ‘gardening’ concept). One misty, flower-spangled leafy country lane after another. It was all very sparkly. Like the Ice-capades.
We drove through one tiny village and Uncle B said, “I think I counted six thatched rooves just then.” And then it dawned on me: I’m trapped in a Thomas Kinkade painting.
Y’all know this boo-boo, right? You should. He’s one of the most grinding self-promotional hustlers on the planet. Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light ®. He sells framed bubble-jet prints by mail, in dedicated Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery franchises and on the Home Shopping Channel for anything from hundreds to ten thousand dollars. For a print. To be fair, the really expensive ones are touched up with a bit of real oil paint by a registered detailologist. Or something.
I don’t hate Kinkade. His mixture of demonstrable technical competence, shit-awful taste, improbable Christian piety and rancid venality is…kind of…fascinating. Doing a Google images search this evening, I discovered he has moments of almost brilliance. And moments of such mindblowing gaudy crassness, it hurt like having my ass-bone broken and reset wrong.
I don’t know why the likes of Hallmark, Disney or the Salvation Army have anything to do with him. Well, I do — he claims to have pushed more than two billion-with-a-b dollars worth of merchandise. But he gives off a disastery vibe, if you ask me.
The FBI investigated him a few years ago for crippling his gallery franchisees with a combination of Jesus and strong-arm tactics. There have been allegations of heckling and groping and what Wikipedia called “his proclivity for ritual territory marking through urination, once relieving himself on a Winnie the Pooh figure at a Disney site while saying ‘This one’s for you, Walt’.”
See? How can you hate this guy?
May 13, 2009 — 7:29 pm
Comments: 20
Count Chocula, Hannibal Lecter, James Earl Ray: not welcome in Britain
If you aren’t watching the current British government walk in little circles pee its pants, you’re missing a sweet schadenfreude-y treat. Yesterday’s boob move: revealing that 22 people have been banned from entering the UK in the last nine months. Sixteen of them were named.
Why is that retarded? Wellll, for one thing, there was no particular reason to release that list now. In fact, there’s no practical reason to release it at all. What do we look like, border agents? Why tell us?
For another — eh, go read it. I can just hear the Home Secretary shrieking, “for chrissakes — it’s all Pakistanis and Palestinians! Quick everybody! Think up some evil Jews or Christians or something!”
So they rounded out the list with people who — as far as anyone knows — had no plans to visit Britain.
Think about that — a no-fly list that includes people who didn’t intend to fly. And it took them nine months to think of 22 of them? I mean, if you’re talking purely hypothetically and you have the whole fucking world to choose from, couldn’t you come up with A LOT more than 22 dangerous evil assholes?
And would Michael Savage make your list? Dude. Michael Savage. He’s a rude, mouthy jerk, but come on. He was just sitting in his bathrobe yesterday morning, innocently being his own rude, mouthy jerk self, and bam — some government officially lumps him in with the father rapers and mother stabbers, forbidden by name to travel somewhere he didn’t want to go.
Sue. Sue like the wind!
The Home Office was obviously so desperate to include Righties to break up the monotony of Islamic splodey dopes, they included a pair of Russian skinhead murderers who won’t be out of Russian prison for ten years. A no-fly list that includes people who couldn’t fly if they wanted to and would automatically be rejected as ex-felons in the distant, unlikely possibility that they ever can.
Really, at this point, aren’t you simply making a hypothetical list of the general kinds of things that piss you off?
May 6, 2009 — 7:46 pm
Comments: 18
Shandy
Shandy.
It’s lemonade. With a little beer in.
So little beer, they sell it alongside the Pepsi and Orangina and other kiddie pop in the cafe cooler.
Yes, I know how it SOUNDS. But I really like this stuff.
Bite me.
May 5, 2009 — 6:17 pm
Comments: 32