I've been a big fan of Spike Milligan since I was about ten and I read Adolf Hitler: my part in his downfall. There was a hilarious passage in it about he and his comrades had leapt into the sea while on R&R and played with their submarines. It took me about five years to work out there might be a subtext. I just rather liked the idea of loads of soldiers pretending to be marine attack vessels. Born in India, and a jazz trumpeter and vocalist before the war, he was wounded at Monte Cassino and had a pretty tough time (I thoroughly recommend his books about the war).
After the war, he was one of the great comic characters around, with a wonderful sense of the absurd and surreal. As well as writing and performing on The Goon Show, he was a poet, artist, you name it. His healthy disregard for normalcy and rules in humour (and indeed life) a striking influence on me as a teen. Here are some of the things he has said.
All I ask is the chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Are you going to come quietly, or do I have to use earplugs?
Contraceptives should be used on every conceivable occasion.
For ten years Caesar ruled with an iron hand. Then with a wooden foot, and finally with a piece of string.
I have the body of an eighteen year old. I keep it in the fridge.
I spent many years laughing at Harry Secombe's singing until somebody told me that it wasn't a joke.
I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.
Is there anything worn under the kilt? No, it's all in perfect working order.
It was a perfect marriage. She didn't want to and he couldn't. It's all in the mind, you know.
Money couldn't buy friends, but you got a better class of enemy.
My Father had a profound influence on me, he was a lunatic.
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[[ps - please check out some of my other quote collections here - The Guy Quote]]
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A great interview. Very very very funny.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/PiJFx-R6HAc&w=700]
Spike, yes.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkOAUht3G5o&w=700]
Anarchy.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl-UYWtx3Mo&w=700]
Stand-up. WAAAAAAAAY ahead of his time.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ps6Mh_o5NE&w=700]
On the Ning Nang NongWhere the Cows go Bong! and the monkeys all say BOO! There's a Nong Nang Ning Where the trees go Ping! And the tea pots jibber jabber joo. On the Nong Ning Nang All the mice go Clang And you just can't catch 'em when they do! So its Ning Nang Nong Cows go Bong! Nong Nang Ning Trees go ping Nong Ning Nang The mice go Clang What a noisy place to belong is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!
Spike Milligan
| [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i-zYdOPG2k] |
Teahupoo, Tahiti
This fantastic instructional series COMPLETE WITH INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEO comes from Wonder How To...Click HERE for the full genius.
Let's say you're a 15-year-old boy nerd looking to SCORE. Real life experience has been... limited. (Ok, you're a virgin.) Lara Croft was inspired (nine years ago when you were six-years-old!). So, where are the sex-ed tutorials that are awesomely geek-friendly?
You can turn to internet porn. But frankly, where's the romance in that? You can read the Kama Sutra. But really. Sanskrit and Asian cartoon drawings?
At long last, everything a boy nerd needs to know about procreation, but was afraid to ask. One of WonderHowTo's boy nerd friends crafted twenty glorious and oh-so-important positions for your viewing pleasure. Nine months from today Geek Nation’s population will swell. Watch out world!
Introducing the geek version of the Kama Sutra: SCORE - a users guide to sexual positions. (That last one is called The Drive-Thru)
Now watch the whole set and bone up on your boning.
Of course, you'll be needing a sound track:
| [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP48M2BEs0] |
...this was one of my favourite songs. It's called Country Preacher, and it's by Cannonball Adderley, whose name seems destined to be mispelled for all time. [audio http://dysonology.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/countrypreacher.mp3]
(you should totally buy it)
Wow... just wow...
And if that wasn't bad enough, somehow this little beauty managed to actually get through the clever police...
I've always been a huge admirer of Jack London. As a child, The Call of The Wild and White Fang filled my head with ideas of man's relationship with dogs, the savage and implacable force that is nature (about as far from a mother as one could get, yet all the more beautiful for it).Then the Star Rover, which, well, which puzzled me, quite frankly, because reincarnation and regression are hippy-dippy holisitic things these days, and not something I'd necessarily associate with the last rational escape of a tortured mind. This was a man who was qualified to write about life and hardship because he had lived it. Who defined experiential journalism and writing, whose crackling, spitting style inspired countless modern writers.
Pioneer, alcoholic, hero, man, icon, but also a strict racist and rabid socialist - Jack London is a fascinating character. A serious tough guy.
Today's Independent has a fascinating piece by Johann Hari (read from below). I've only put up the first half. Do read the whole thing (here).
The United States has a startling ability to take its most angry, edgy radicals and turn them into cuddly eunuchs.
The process begins the moment they die. Mark Twain is remembered as a quipster forever floating down the Mississippi River at sunset, while his polemics against the violent birth of the American empire lie unread and unremembered. Martin Luther King is remembered for his prose-poetry about children holding hands on a hill in Alabama, but few recall that he said the US government was "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today".
But perhaps the greatest act of historical castration is of Jack London. This man was the most-read revolutionary socialist in American history, agitating for violent overthrow of the government and the assassination of political leaders – and he is remembered now for writing a cute story about a dog. It's as if the Black Panthers were remembered, a century from now, for adding a pink tint to their Afros.
If Jack London is chased forever from our historical memory by the dog he invented, then we will lose one of the most intriguing, bizarre figures in American history, at once inspiring and repulsive. In his 40 years of life, he was a "bastard" child of a slum-dwelling suicidal spiritualist, a child labourer, a pirate, a tramp, a revolutionary socialist, a racist pining for genocide, a gold-digger, a war correspondent, a millionaire, a suicidal depressive, and for a time the most popular writer in America. In Wolf: the Lives of Jack London, his latest biographer, James L Haley, calls London "the most misunderstood figure in the American literary canon"– but that might be because he is ultimately impossible to understand.
London nearly died by suicide before he was even born. His mother, Flora Chaney, was a ragged, hateful hysteric who reacted to anyone disagreeing with her by screaming that she was having a heart attack and collapsing to the floor. She had grown up in a 17-bedroom mansion, but she ran away as a teenager and ended up joining a religious cult that believed it could communicate with the dead. She had an affair with its leader, William Henry Chaney, who beat her when she got pregnant and demanded she have an abortion. She took an overdose of laudanum and shot herself in the head with a—fortunately—malfunctioning pistol. When the story was reported in the press, a mob threatened to hang Chaney, and he vanished from California forever.
When Flora delivered Jack in the San Francisco slums in 1876, Flora called him "my Badge of Shame" and wanted nothing to do with him. She handed him over to a black wet nurse (and freed slave) named Virginia Prentiss, who let him spend most of his childhood running in and out of her home. She called him her "white pickaninny" and her "cotton ball", and he called her "Mammy", no matter how many times she told him not to.
"I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak," he wrote years later. As soon as he left primary school, he was sent to work in a cannery, stuffing pickles into jars all day, every day, for almost nothing. For the rest of his life, he was terrorised by the vision of a fully mechanised world, where human beings served The Machine. The shriek of machinery pierces through his fiction, demanding that human beings serve its whims.
He didn't get a toothbrush until he was 19, by which time his teeth had rotted. London grew up into America's first Great Depression, slumping from one unbearable job to another. He shovelled coal until his whole body seized up with cramps. He tried to kill himself for the first time by drowning, but a fisherman saved him. He began to notice the legions of toothless, homeless men on the streets, broken by brutal work and left to die in their Forties and Fifties. He responded, at first, with a cold Nietzschean individualism, insisting he would escape through his own personal strength and courage.
But in the despond of the depression, new ideas were emerging in America. London said they were "hammered in" to him, against his will: "No lucid demonstration of the logic and inevitableness of socialism affects me as profoundly and convincingly as I was affected on the day when I first saw the walls of the Social Pit rise around me and felt myself slipping down, down, into the shambles at the bottom."
When the tramps organised a march across America to demand jobs in 1894, London hit the road with them – only to be arrested at Niagara Falls for "vagrancy". When he asked for a lawyer, the police laughed in his face. When he tried to plead not guilty, the judge told him to "shut up". He was shackled and jailed for a month. London had always known the economic system was rigged against him, but now he came to believe even the law was rigged.
When he was released in 1894 at the age of 18, he began to deliver impassioned speeches on street corners, and soon he was on the front page of San Francisco papers as "the Boy Socialist" urging the workers to rise up and take the country from the robber barons.
He was offered a place at a posh prep school, and escape seemed possible for a flickering moment. But he soon dropped out after the parents at the school protested against his supposedly coarsening influence on their little darlings. He enrolled in another academy – only to be thrown out for completing the entire two-year curriculum in four months, embarrassingly outclassing all the rich kids. London felt humiliated and enraged. Soon after, he charged off to the Canadian Arctic, where there were rumours of gold. He watched his team of gold diggers die around him of drowning, cold, and scurvy. A passing doctor inspected him and told him he, too, would die if he didn't get urgent care. He was 22 years old, and he vowed that if he lived, he would become a writer, whatever it took.
Namibia 2009. (c) Dysonology.
Mister Adam Hammond Sitting on a dune It could be in Africa It could be the moon It’s lucky it’s the former though Because although the wind might blow At least there’s an atmosphere he can survive in
He is a very angry man.
| [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ilXcr5rWiU] |
Awesomeness RemindersHow great would you feel if a real person called you every day to tell you, "You're Awesome!"?
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It would be like having your own baby hedgehog AND a newborn fennec fox in your top pocket.
Luciano Pavarotti sings La Danza by Rossini. Mama Mia. Good singalong chorus, this one. It is also, I'm told, a patter song.
| [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaBneRSEc04] |
Man, Pavarotti just had the best eyebrows ever.
19 August, 1990. Doesn't seem that long ago really. Leonard Bernstein conducted his final concert, ending with Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He died just five days later.
He wrote the music for West Side Story and more, but really the man was best known as a conductor. His conducting style is perhaps best described as exuberant. He strayed far from classic conducting techniques, using his whole body to coax the best out of his orchestra, and had evident fun doing so. One of his tricks was to rehearse an entire Mahler symphony by acting out every phrase for the orchestra to convey the precise meaning, each one accompanied by a vocal manifestation of the effect required.
I don't have the recording of his farewell concert - he had a coughing fit during the Beethoven part, and it almost had to be called off - but here are the first two movements, conducted by Carlos Kleiber:
| [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1qAWcd4rr0] |
| [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqtPVEuAbzM] |
Just beautiful.
ps - The official Guinness world record for the world's largest baton is currently held by Kenton J. Hetrick, who on 14 October 2006 conducted the Harvard University Band in the introduction to "Also Sprach Zarathustra" with a baton 10 feet (3.0 m) long.
'nuff said. [audio http://dysonology.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/jimi_hendrix_-_little_wing.mp3]
Boris is clearly missing a trick with his public information. We need better tube posters. Here are a few etiquette posters that appeared in the Tokyo subways between 1976 and 1982 (more at the original post, via Pink Tentacle). * * * * *
The Seat Monopolizer (July 1976)
Inspired by Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator," this poster tells passengers not to sit like idiots.
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Don't forget your umbrella (June 1977)
This poster of the high-class courtesan Agemaki (from the kabuki play "Sukeroku"), whose captivating beauty was said to make men forgetful, is meant to remind passengers to take their umbrellas when they leave the train.
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Space Invader (March 1979)
This 1979 poster has a fairly simply play on words. If you can't work it out, I can't help you.
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Don't forget your umbrella (October 1981)
The text at the top of this poster reads "Kasane-gasane no kami-danomi" (lit. "Wishing to God again and again"). The poster makes a play on the words "kasa" (umbrella) and "kasane-gasane" (again and again). Doubting Thomas looks pretty freaky.
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Coughing on the platform (January 1979)
Modeled after the paintings of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, this poster -- titled "Hōmu de Concon" (coughing on the platform) -- urges people not to smoke on the train platforms during the designated non-smoking hours (7:00-9:30 AM and 5:00-7:00 PM). The poster makes a play on the words "concon" (coughing sound) and "cancan" (French chorus line dance).
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Clearly show your train pass (September 1978)
Napoleon's partially concealed train pass is meant to remind passengers to clearly show their train passes to the station attendant when passing through the gates. The dictionary page in the background is a reference to Napoleon's famous quote: "The word 'impossible' is not in my dictionary."
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Marcel Marceau (October 1978)
Marcel Marceau gestures toward a priority seat reserved for elderly and handicapped passengers, expecting mothers, and passengers accompanying small children. He makes me afraid of clowns.
You ever get caught swearing behind someone's back? There's nothing worse than that sudden flood of realisation - you sort of lose control of your face for a second. Now imagine doing it on national TV. Check out this guy's spazz hand.
| [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3SuooQ-1T0] |
(copyright me)
Thank you Maria!
To see a world in a grain of sand,And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour. (from 'Auguries of Desire')
There's a good biography in Wikipedia, but here's the short story: Born in 1757, William worked in his father's hosiery shop until his talent for drawing became so obvious that he was apprenticed to an engraver at 14.
He worked on his first book, Songs of Innocence, with his wife Catherine. Blake engraved the words and pictures on copper plates (a method he claimed he received in a dream), while she coloured the plates and bound the books. It sold slowly during his lifetime. Songs of Experience (1794) was followed by Milton (1804-1808), and Jerusalem (1804-1820). He poured his whole being into his work. The lack of public recognition sent him into a severe depression which lasted from 1810-1817, and even his best friends thought he'd gone nuts.
Blake worked on a small scale. Most of his engravings are little more than inches in height, yet the detailed rendering is superb and exact. His work received far more public acclaim after his death. He died on August 12, 1827, and is buried in an unmarked grave at Bunhill Fields, London. Utterly unique, incredibly creative, a true original. Possibly the greatest artist our shores have ever produced.
A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
Do what you will, this world's a fiction and is made up of contradiction.
Energy is an eternal delight, and he who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.
Every harlot was a virgin once.
Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, and happiness is better than mirth. What is a wife and what is a harlot? What is a church and what is a theatre? are they two and not one? Can they exist separate? Are not religion and politics the same thing? Brotherhood is religion. O demonstrations of reason dividing families in cruelty and pride!
I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.
No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.