Good morning to you all.
There is, with the season that is in it, a strong chance that demands from every side will prevent me from the preparation of this weekly (though sometimes more often) deluge of drivel, albeit actual real life drivel.
So, this morning, let’s talk about Christmas.
And sex.
We haven’t touched on sex yet, if you forgive the unfortunate pun. But that will be down the line.
I have never learned how you all play Christmas, but I can’t see any more than two ways to approach the whole thing. You either relax into a period of unstressed down time (my first americanism of the day) or you go aaaarrrggghhhh!!!! at the slightest sign of something not being exactly as you want to imagine. To paraphrase, you are looking to get stressed out of your skull. This is panic just under the surface… Felix!! Donde estan los chocolates de mi primo? Me has dicho que ibas a cojerlos. No lo has hecho, y con todo que yo (ho ho) tengo que hacer… todo esta aruinado!!
You can feel the impending doom now imposed on your plans to actually relax for a few hours and think happy thoughts about the world.
Despite the meaning of the season (the innocence of a baby being born in the equivalent of a shanty town and the soon to be announced murder of all children under 2… ah here, Frank, hang on! That’s not it!) half the people we know appear to be determined to stress out everyone else.
This is now part of the tradition of Christmas. Also, lots of people want and like to be under pressure and stress.
My mother was a perfect example of a Christmas-stresser. No problem was too small to prevent alarm calls that would have emptied the Titanic. What was it? A sense of obligation to make sure the dinner was perfect, the presents were the best ever? Deep down, I think she enjoyed playing her role.
Don’t we all?
A time for the kids? Yeah, right!
If you are lucky, everyone will want to contribute to the food preparations, except that everyone is also secretly (ha!) ultra competitive. That is the straight line between relaxing and duel fighting at dawn the next day.
Thinking back, I remember one occasion when I took the task of preparing part of the dinner. It was fine, and as good as my mother’s usual efforts. All good until she produced «one that she had prepared… just in case».
In case of what? A disaster? I think she hoped rather than expected a disaster on my part.
Ah here, for eff sake, Ma!
My father was in the middle of all this looking rather unsettled and knowing that he had two possibly warring personalities in the room with him.
On Christmas Day too.
So he would (over-)eat both, while I would eat mine and my mother would eat hers, grumbling.
But really, despite the dangers of confrontation, it was fun. Roles to play.
Irritants abound of course, but they should be unimportant. There is (or should be) plenty to enjoy.
Again, I don’t know enough about your day, but I notice that I have assumed a number of habits(?.. wrong word, really) that remind me of the best times and that I hold onto fiercely now that my parents are no longer around.
And that’s the thing – the older we get, the more opportunity we have to drop the stuff we never enjoyed and to keep the things we did.
I would love to know how you go through your Christmas day(s) but I am far away and only I find the time for nonsense like this.
So, let’s get to the real thing, the news…
What’s
happening in Spain? We are not fascists, shout the new party in
Andalucia, as they struggle to control their right arms in a similar way
to Dr Strangelove.
LOL
Meanwhile, in the
north east… Kim Torra (also now known as «you must be Jouchim»… go
on, look for the pun!) is sending out his radical supporters to cause
damage while he hides from doing what he wants others to do.
What a man!!! Leading from the back again.
There aren’t enough problems in the world so let’s get outraged!!!
The professional outragers are back again this week. In New York.
Prada had to apologise after some of its toys displayed at a store in New York which appeared to contain blackface imagery.
What?
Like the actors in early American films? The white ones who used to have their faces blacked so that they could play ‘negros»?
Yes, now you have it.
The «Pradamalia» toys were immediately removed and destroyed after
they caused yet more outrage and accusations that they depicted racist
caricatures of black people.
I mean, come on! How bad can it be?
Prada said in a statement that it had
«not intended the products – some of which seemed to resemble black
monkeys with outsized red lips – to have any reference to the real world
or blackface imagery».
Oh yes, we all say, it can be that bad and there is a picture below to prove it.
What on Earth could they be complaining about?
You decide!
Again, for my sins, I laughed.
Okay, that is astonishingly racist.
Once more, the management meeting must have been fun but unfortunately they didn’t sell tickets for it.
France now, and the Gilets Jaunes.. and the Emperor.
Ex-banker
and man of the rich finally decided to appear on television in very
late response to four weeks of brutal protests in the streets by mainly
ordinary people. This should have been considered by his advisors to be
the most important TV appearance by the fucker. He is permanently being
accused of being the “president of the rich” and this was his chance to
show that he understood ordinary French people’s struggle to make ends
meet. You know, the usual «I feel your pain» type of speech on social
inequality, austerity, etc. Where is the speech from? There he is,
sitting in one of the most opulent and golden rooms in the luxurious,
365-room Élysée Palace, sitting behind a gold-inlaid desk. Yes, he feels
our pain.
The protests have continued.
In
the UK, and Brexit panic is only hitting the streets now. The Brexit
plan vote in parliament was cancelled 24 hours before it was due to be
convulsively rejected. No way were they going to stay in any agreement
with that bunch of authoritarian madmen who are in total control of
everyone else and want to keep things that way. However, with the
cancellation of the vote, the British House of Commons was thus denied a
vote on their own future.
What did the German parliament do?
They decided to have a free vote on renegotiating the withdrawal agreement that the British were just denied.
That’s
Germany, the country in complete control of the “undemocratic EUSSR”
having a free vote whilst the British parliament isn’t allowed to vote!
Irony meters exploded everywhere.
And on now to the Orange Shit Gibbon…
Last
year he gave us “covfefe” in one of his midnight tweets. This year –
and just in time for Christmas –he gives us another literary gift: the
“Smocking Gun”.
He even wrote it twice.
“Democrats can’t find a
Smocking Gun tying the Trump campaign to Russia after James Comey’s
testimony. No Smocking Gun… No Collusion,”
Some people are claiming that he wanted to write «smoking gun» but I don’t believe them.
There
is no upside with this bastard. This being Christmas I can only imagine
a slightly different game to the usual one. I’ll call it Snakes and
Snakes.
Two South African men accused of cannibalism were given life sentences
for murder last week.
One of them, Nino Mbatha, 33, was arrested after handing himself in at a police station. He was carrying a bag
containing a human leg and a hand. He told officers he was “tired of
eating human flesh”.
Now how can one get tired of eating human flesh? The variations are vast and it tastes just like pork, so they say.
Quite
incredibly, South
Africa has no direct law against cannibalism, but mutilating a corpse
and being in possession of human tissue are criminal offences. Thus,
they went to jail, not for canibalism, but for chopping up a dead body.
It is quite the opposite in Europe, fortunately.
It’s Christmasssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In
Brexitland, Cambridgeshire specifically, a Santa Clause charged angrily
out of his grotto during a fire alarm evacuation to shout and swear
at everyone while tearing off his hat and beard.
The fire alarm went off and he ran about shouting “get the fuck out, get the fuck out!!!”.
Clearly, he was taking the incident seriously, as one would, with lots of children about with slow-moving parents.
Organisers of the event apologised for “any offence or distress” caused by his behaviour.
They were apparently less concerned about the panicked children and the spectre of having another Herodian disaster.
Said one outraged parent… “The guy dressed as Santa at the Corn Exchange is an absolute disgrace. He
came charging in, ripped his hat and beard off in front of 50 odd kids
and started shouting and swearing at people to leave.”
Another outraged woman said children
became extremely distressed when “Santa told them to get the fuck out”.
Please tell me that I am an extremist because I would have punched the slow parents.
And it’s Christmas in New Zealand too…
A
Māori Santa Clause was subject to racist boos and jeers after
appearing in a parade dressed in a traditional Korowai cloak of bright red feathers. The man, Herewini was referred to
as Hana Koko, or Māori Santa.
But this outraged many people,
with some Nelson residents accusing parade organisers of “ruining
Christmas” for their children, and said efforts to reflect New Zealand’s
bicultural and multicultural makeup had gone overboard.
“Santa is
not, has never been and will never be a bloody Māori!” said one man with
a slurred Crocodile Dundee accent, who threw an empty can of beer on
the ground and promptly opened another one. And belched while thumping
his kid on the side of the head for not standing still.
Christmas toys, anyone? A robot?
A
“hi-tech robot” named Boris, shown on Russian state television, was
able to walk, and dance and actually jump, something exceptionally
difficult to make happen and something impossible for Teresa May to do
at all. After the music stopped a very robotic voice rang out. “I
know mathematics well but I also want to learn to draw,”
On Wednesday morning,
the television report briefly disappeared from Russia-24’s YouTube
channel but by early afternoon it was accessible again.
It had turned out that Boris was really a man in a suit and not a robot at all.
The state-run
Channel One was forced to apologise for the fake report
Young
Russian nerds were outraged while watching the «robot» move and dance.
Where were Boris’s external sensors? Why did the robot make so many
“unnecessary movements” while dancing?
And why did the robot look like a person would fit perfectly inside of it?
Later, photographs of the “robot” posted on social media showed the very visible neckline of the person in the suit.
«Ah fuck!» President Putin was heard sayng.
And
just as the Brits manage to make a bad situation even worse… there
comes this book about King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table…
King Arthur’s name continues to resonate with us today, some 1,500 years after he was supposed to have lived. John Steinbeck was given Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) as a nine-year-old and it became his “magic book”, sparking a life-long love of Arthurian literature and of storytelling. Raymond Chandler tipped his hat to the Arthurian age of valiant knights by naming Philip Marlowe’s forerunner Mallory. A week after her husband’s assassination in 1963, Jackie Kennedy used Camelot as a metaphor for the White House under JFK. The knights of the Round Table, as well as Guinevere, Merlin and the sword in the stone have all become cultural memes deeply rooted not just in the British consciousness but around the world, generating new books, films, operas and computer games in which the stories are constantly renewed.
Despite his fame, Arthur is “something of a nightmare from the historian’s perspective”. As Nicholas Higham shows, practically everything about him is disputed, even down to “when and where he belongs”. In this fascinating, authoritative analysis of the many Arthurian texts and theories, Higham asks: “Was he a fiction, right from the start?”
Practically everything about King Arthur is disputed, even down to when and where he belongs
Since the 19th century, Arthur has been viewed as a historical figure who lived around AD500. But the lack of reliable contemporary accounts of his life poses a problem. His name does not appear until some 300 years later, in the Historia Brittonum. But despite its title, this is not history in the modern sense. “Britain’s foremost Dark Age hero” was, Higham concludes, “made up by one imaginative clerk”, who was anxious to please his master, a Welsh kinglet, by creating a historical tradition of resistance to foreign invaders.
Higham weighs the evidence and ultimately finds it all
wanting, from mythological explanations (“clutching at straws”), and
apparent references to Arthur in Old Welsh texts that predate the Historia
(“no evidence”), to the intriguing theory that he was a Roman soldier, L
Artorius Castus, who served in Britain and is buried in modern-day
Croatia (“entirely unconvincing”). He even casts doubt on the existence
of Camelot, which is first mentioned in “a highly imaginative”
12th-century French romance. Higham remains sceptical All we are left
with are poems and stories in which the life and exploits of King Arthur
have been written and rewritten. They are testament to his enduring
mythic power. Perhaps the true value of this elusive leader lies in what
he can tell us about ourselves rather than the long forgotten past.
While cannibals might get tired of eating human meat, it isn’t the same for all creatures..
A
Buddhist monk was killed by a leopard while meditating in a
protected forest for the big cats, the fifth such attack in the area
this month according to Indian police.
Some people never learn.
Two other meditating monks who were with him at the time escaped unscathed to alert police, who started a search for his body.
The
monks had ignored warnings
from police about venturing too far into the forest.
The moral to the story is easy to see.
When
in serious difficulty, you don’t have to run faster than a leopard. You
just have to run faster than at least one of the people with you.
Okay, and now for the sex…
There are literary prizes every year for best books, prizes for actors, films, etc.
However,
teh English do get some things right, and in an equivalent to the
Razzies in Hollywood (awards for the worst films and actors), there is a
literary «bad sex» award in the UK for the wost description of sex in a
book.
Ah come on!! You didn’t expect serious sex from me here, did you?
The judges at the Literary Review chose the winner which included sex encounters in a car park
and in the back of a taxi, but were especially convinced by an extended
scene in a Paris bathroom. They have to give the specific examples of their decisions and the exerpts are given here…
And please, do not read unless you are over 18 and have had several awful sex experiences yourself.
This is from the winner, as I said…
“Blinding breathless shaking overwhelming
exploding white God I cum inside her my cock throbbing we’re both
moaning eyes hearts souls bodies one,”
The writer, a Mr Frey, must have had either no sex ever, or else is the worst participant in the UK. All the participants in the awards this year were male, incidentally. In the past there were some female writers. The next example is almost vomit inducing…
“One. White. God. Cum. Cum. Cum. I close my eyes let out my breath. Cum. I lean against her both breathing hard I’m still inside her smiling. She takes my hands lifts them and places them around her body, she puts her arms around me, we stay still and breathe, hard inside her, tight and warm and wet around me, we breathe. She gently pushes me away, we look into each other’s eyes, she smiles.”
Truly awful!
Here are some more examples for the other writers…
Murakami’s Killing Commendatore (“I slipped my erect penis inside. Or, from another angle, that part of her actively swallowed my penis, immersing it in what felt like warm butter”);
Woodward’s The Paper Lovers (“Beneath them her wetness met his own wetness, and they stirred against each other, she pestled him slowly, until miraculously he found himself rigid again, as though he had risen out of his own pain, fresh and ready”);
Scoundrels by Major Victor Cornwall and Major Arthur St John Trevelyan (“Her vaginal ratchet moved in concertina-like waves, slowly chugging my organ as a boa constrictor swallows its prey. Soon I was locked in, balls deep, ready to be ground down by the enamelled pepper mill within her”).
Actually, that would have been my personal choice. Absolute nonsense.
So, did you find that erotic?
To be honest, I am not sure how to describe the sex act as a literary contribution.
If any of you are bored, please feel free to offer your own contributions. There are no judges here.
That’s it, I’m going to start lunch. I have hungry sons.
I did not go to play football this Sunday.
Stay well and happy (if that’s possible) and enjoy your week.
love and blessings and the hope of experiencing something better
f