Sex, drugs and HIV.

I recently read the Wisdom of Whores.
If you want to, you could consider HIV a politically transmitted disease.
It's not original, Georgie Monbiot got there in his article. I think it has a great deal of merit.

2 asides to everything.

Crossword clues that have tickled my fancy in the last couple of weeks.
1. The sound of the pen with nothing that is inside it (4) - OINK
2. Little birds here should be feature of wedding - Euan Blair's? (10) HATCHERIES

My own appearance in Araucaria's 24,761 at 5 across I take to be a chance matter.
Scotsman' s far away river for all in 21 letters (6).
21 down, since you ask, is
Scottish queen - imprisoned queen indeed! (5)

It's Official!

Dave doesn't like TWATS.
Amen sister! Amen!

A slip up or a new bit of spin. I would say it was a Chinaman if that was still allowed!

Never Mind the Quantity

Even at today's paperback prices, say 10 quid a throw, Mrs Brown has, according to the BBC report, had access to a library worth a quarter of a million sovs in the course of her reading life.
This bounty has, of course, been shared with her community. I would suspect the cost spread between the worthy council tax payers of Dumfries and Galloway is pennies.

Library staff said they were amazed by the achievement, particularly since Mrs Brown has never had an overdue fine.
The Dumfries and Galloway pensioner first became a member at Castle Douglas library and has particularly fond memories of the staff there.
....
Staff at the library described Mrs Brown as a "remarkable lady" and said they looked forward to her weekly visits.

It's not the quantity it is the quality of life that has been available to Mrs Brown as the result of a little cooperation.

I don't suppose the Library Police of this part of Southern Scotland have broken into her home to repossess the copy of 1984 which she was reading. Nice one Amazon; caught on the hop by John Naughton at Memex1.1 amongst others!

Interesting times for readers of books, libraries, writers, publishers, makers of gizmoes etc!

My grills are in their prime!

So; a certain amount of embarrassment when I popped into the local Library to retrieve this order.
The Wisdom of Whores by Elizabeth Pisani.

I like her style!

Way beyond the blue.

I have been reading Notes from Walnut Tree Farm compiled after Roger Deakin's death from 45 lined exercise books of his jottings. I had enjoyed Waterlog and Wildwood so much I thought I ought to give it a go. I am greatly enjoying it. Your man Deakin had a rare eye for detail, to wit; page 8 ......

good hills are hard to find in most of Suffolk.

Amen brother, amen! Doesn't it also have some awesome skies?


I ventured out today, having no demands upon my person, to Mellis; Deakin's stomping ground. I tramped from the common, via Cowpasture Lane, to Thornham Parva Church where I sat down and ate my lunch of pork pie and an apple. I nearly wept with the joy of it for the pig must have been deeply christian, the sun shone and if ever a church could be said to be easy on the eye, St Mary's is such. It has the scale of humanity, a small, squat, tower with a pyramidal thatch. The whole edifice has the air of shelter and support. It does not set out to impress or oppress you!


We had the good fortune to explore the Tardis like interior when herself was invited to a poetry reading by Oliver Bernard and music from a group of young(ish) women in an a cappella ensemble - Way Beyond the Blue. They were good and the sound they produced let alone their feminine charms was enough to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window! I was recalling this when I heard a green woodpecker fly off into the woods with its characteristic mocking laugh. So I upped stumps and headed back to Mellis.
A pint of Adnams at the Railway Tavern calmed me down and I returned to the pueblo much restored.

The price of cat litter

Thanks to Open Democracy for this story about Sahkalin, the people, the bears, and the increase in the price of cat litter because of the crisis (33% overnight since you ask).

I must admit I haven't checked the weather but I guess it is business as usual...

a powerful cyclone with abundant snowfall has hit Sakhalin

Many thanks to Ksenya Semenova.

Bankers don't you just love 'em

I rest my, brief, case.

His bank was merged/absorbed into Barclays; and
you do remember what they have been up to since they did that little trick with apartheid.
Here it is.......... link.

Ships Ahoy!

And so a wet Friday evening in the seething metropolis of Bury St Edmunds to see Quadriga.
Live music again, maybe not so popular with the locals as less than 40 of us turned up and we looked like a bad comb over (barcodo) in an auditorium that can hold nearly ten times that number. But I enjoyed it and the new arrangements of old favourites.

It is very hard though to get Fairport's Saucy Sailor out of my brain to make a reasonable comparison. You can do that here and here if you want, or I can go on about Seaman Stains and young Master Bates, the finest hands on the Spanish Main!

OK. I'll stop now.

Usefully Large Sums

I'm just coming to the end of(Capitalism as we know it Jim) Fools Gold by Gillian Tett
and I have started reading Portfolios of the Poor (PoP) (See link to first chapter for pdf ) my interest being sparked by a certain enlightened economist.

I was struck by the comparison.
In Fools Gold -JP Morgans boys and girls developed a breed of innovative derivatives as exciting new instruments CDS, CDO etc to smooth the choppy seas of the global economy and, of course, turn a handsome mega buck in the process. These financial WMD were abused of course and not, according to the book, by JP.

The authors of PoP who carried out an analysis of the household economies in Banladesh, India and South Africa of some very poor people - $2 a day! They record and demonstate the portfolios of a mix of instuments these families use to survive and prosper (yes, it is shaming) They are boring old instuments, borrowing informally from family and friends at zero interest, moneylenders (convenient and flexibleup to a point Lord Copper), microfinance institutions and savings clubs that charge ( hard to credit!).

As well as 'fortress balance sheet' I think The Rock, Bare Stearns, Lehman Brass could have learnt a thing or two from Hamid and Khadeja. I know I could.

United and clueless

A reasonable defence can be made for listening to the video in this blog in addition to the fact that the performers are Canadian. Thanks for the link to Status Q up to a point! I have my own feelings about Country and Western Music as many of our regular readers will know.

United Airlines must be deeply pissed about the publicity, or perhaps not as there is no such thing as......

I did like the touch at the end, no guitars were harmed in the making of this video. Glad to hear it!

A stroll down memory lane, again

Twice in the last week I have been out walking with people from the pueblo. In each case one of the group has had a connection with the village where we have been ambling, strolling, dandering or bimbling. (Each to his or her own mode of progression.) It adds a dimension which not only provides information but also insight. The past may be another country but many amongst us are cartographers and geographers of rare quality! I recognise that my own map reading is not as it used to be.

I discovered a site, John Naughton yet again, which may prop up the old grey matter for a few years more - Wolfram Alpha - It is not a search engine, it's more a sort of encyclopedia with a calculator attached which is able to do the kind of thing that has become popular in the TV shows which have an Xs of Aliens and X files and government departments dedicated to killing off extra terestrials and good guys and gals. ( As opposed to the real life ones which connive and conspire to, allegedly, have people's finger nails pulled out!)

So to conclude, I used the website to check my day of birth, Thursday since you ask, and I must confess I had forgotten, but then, as a man with a great future behind him, I have far to go. Herself was born on a Friday, and is convinced that she is loving and giving, though she seems to remember being born on a Tuesday and full of grace! This after a few glasses led to the thought that we ought to organise a gay pride march in our village and prior to this send out a questionnaire to determine those who were born on the Sabbath day and as long as they were blithe and bonny we could invite them to join us in a gloriously pink progression!

Perhaps too much, too soon?

The Birds

Ok figure this one out.
Starvelings gather and they could be musical or menacing.

Carnage

I am not now, nor have I ever been a vegetarian. I'm weak I know. In my defence - I eat very little meat and ensure that it comes from Happy Cows etc. When this argument was advanced to a small child questioning the propriety of being a carnivore it brought forth the answer that surely you should eat the unhappy cows and leave the happy ones! But I digress, as always.

I must confess to feeling a bit unsure when, red in tooth and claw, some carnivore devours a poor defenceless beast, alive, whole even, in close up on a tv nature programme. So if you suffer from nervous dyspepsia and/or extreme paranoia do not click on this link 'A Killer Advances'
Gardeners among you may enjoy the tale that is told before the picture, another cracker from
Susan McCarthy's Blog.

Where Sheep May Safely Graze

A few days off; aren't they all?

Glastonbury at the solstice. I didn't go up the Tor for sunrise being, uncharacteristically, sound asleep. Those that did said it was like a drunken football match! I chose to go up the Tor solo, steady on chaps, and had a pleasant bimble in the sun, even being wished a happy solstice by a woman who ought to have known better. Later I had the privilege of sitting on the slopes of the Tor in a refurbished, mobile, shepherds hut. I shared a teabag, and looked out from the hut and saw this.


Sometimes, for the strangest of reasons, you can feel incredibly lucky and blessed.
As I may have said on a previous occasion:- Gracias a la vida

We then went off to see the shepherd castrate two of the little lambs that had been quite happily nuzzling their mum. Ouch!

Opportunity

In the darkest night, in the depths of despair, there is always a chance. Ingenuity, even in the less scrupulous orders, brooks no impediment.

An article in the FT, the Mafia blamed for $134bn fake Treasury bills.

My first thought was, in the current world of quantitative easing, how could they tell the difference?

Reading on, a quote counters my scurrilous conclusion...

“They are all fraudulent, it’s obvious. We don’t even have paper securities outstanding for that value,’’ said Mckayla Braden, senior adviser for public affairs at the Bureau of Public Debt at the US Treasury department.

Apparently your Treasury is up there in the interweb age and has been for some time.
Since the 1980s they have been issuing these kind of bonds by making electrons do fancy things that you probably don't want to think about!

Phwhat I hear you ask, were these, allegedly Japanese, men in their 50s intending to do with the funny money? Buy drugs, guns, small children and other animals and fish, stolen works of art, influence in high places, a country even; no of course not.

It seems this kind of thing has been going on for a while and in a similar case recently, a mere $1bn...

The fake bonds were to have been used as collateral to open credit lines with banks, Reuters news agency reported.

Very sound! Very sound!

Plus ca change!

An interesting article via Arts and Letters Daily.
When I first discovered this online mag many years ago I could not believe my luck. Someone was prepared to trawl through online stuff and put it up like a newspaper. Some of it did not interest me and some of it did. I only paid for the electrons and didn't have to worry about recycling them!
Having spent several years studying physics I'm still not sure if electrons ultimately, recycle, decay or change in all around I see. (I was certainly never very good at words to songs or hymns, definitely not Protestant ones!)
Moving on.
So Oliver Wendell Holmes Jnr. tendered a dissenting opinion in a decision of the Supreme Court
on April 17, 1905, in the case of Lochner v. New York.1

At a mere 617 words, the dissenting opinion is an interesting one.

The burden of the article is that the Supreme Court, under the corrosive influence of Holmes' dissent, has drifted into a form of paralysis and the view that the Constitution is an empty vessel with no moral content. It would allow tyranny as equitably as it would restrain tyrants.

Go on give it a whirl, stretch the old grey matter!

A very brief and clear history of the interweb!

T'internet is celebrating its 40th birthday, allegedly, and there is some good stuff out there.
Your man John Naughton has a very clear and interesting podcast.
You may claim that you don't understand all this stuff and it does not effect you.
In the same way there was some worthy German burgher laughing his socks off hysterically when he saw the first printing press. You can imagine his words when he had it explained that it was used to press sheets of paper which were then bound into books. It'll never catch on. What will all those monks do? I don't want my son reading books. I certainly don't want my daughter reading books, I don't want my daughter reading, full stop!

Mr Brown meets a voice from the past.

In the number ten bunker a large and slightly disheveled character sits with a half consumed bottle of malt whisky. Muttering quietly to himself he notices an image enter the room.

Shite!

It has long greasy hair, a cadaverous face and frame and a sallow complexion. It is dressed in a poor quality black suit.

Gordon! It's guid to meet you at last.

Jimmy! As I live and breathe, is it you?

Aye.

Gordon pours himself a large one and offers Jimmy a dram.

Och weel! I have nae had one this year, so yes.

God Jimmy! I did nae think it would be so fucking hard!

Gordon, you need to watch your language, and the drink nae doubt!

Bugger that. You've no idea what the bastards are capable of.

Remember, Gordon, the essentials - Socialism in oor time; vote Broon save the children. Och weel we can't have everything! Have ye got a fag?

No allowed Jimmy!

Well, well are we still allowed tea?

Yes, but have another, a large one.

Now Gordon; you know I only drink in moderation once a year or thereabouts to show willing. I could murder a tea though, lashings of tea!

I'll see if I can raise one of the little people to do a brew!

Don't fash yerself, I'll be off. I just thought you need to be reminded that eventually someone is going to stand up and say:-

Sit down man! You're a bloddy tradgedy!

Gordon slumped and poured the rest of the bottle into his glass!

To the wheelie bins!

I come from a tradition that had the slogan 'Vote Early, Vote Often' to contend with.
The Spanish go to the urns.
Some poor beggars don't have the 'luxury' of the vote.
If you don't vote you can't complain.

However, I did have a chuckle walking through the village yesterday where I saw this:-




Our blue bins are for the recycling of paper, cans and cardboard! It seems that the EU and politicians have lost a bit of ground recently.
And have I voted? Of course!

Let him who is without sin cast the first Stone!

OK so here is the deal.

I.F. (Izzy) Stone was a journo who made a modest living and a substantial reputation from self publishing his weekly. In those days, before blogs, the collapse of print journalism as we know it Jim, hell fire and damnation, and small snot green coloured animals that cling to your crocks in the summer, he made, in my view, a very reasonable job of speaking and writing truth to power.

Reportedly starting from a base of 5,200 charter subscribers he and his wife cranked out 20,000 postal issues by, 1963, and 70,000 in its final year, 1971.This was all done, Mom and Pop enterprise, from the 'kitchen table' on the back of a Government postal subsidy.

I am here waving my, well dodgy, fiver a month and proffering it to the first person who can provide me with journalism on a par with Izzy Stone or Jimmy Cameron and deliver it over the e-waves to my virtual front door.

Yes, of course, I could subscribe to the electronic Grauniad etc., etc.

But what I want is a small group of people knocking out stuff that would challenge me and cause the bastards serious trouble.

A group who would have these current thieving gobshites up against a wall and begging for the works of Corporal Murphy.

A dream of course!

I still have the fiver have written on it that:-

Our King is a true British Sailor!

Let me know if you find it and I might tell you the story!