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Showing posts with the label old stock

Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.

Here is one from a while ago now. For some reason the photo that I had uploaded had deteriorated in quality from its pre-uploaded form. It’s a shame, because I had a very nice photo of Ezra preparing to repulse the Tsarist hordes of Aleksandr II Nikolaevich (it’s all very well to emancipate the serfs, but he is not going to get his grubby, imperialist hands on our Casino!) Anyway, that photo is just not going to happen tonight, so you’ll just have to use your mind’s eye to envisage it yourselves. Think ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ with children operating heavy guns and you’re there. In the absence of that image, I delve deep into the well of unused photographs to find one from last year of a more youthful, gentler Ezra re-enacting one of our favourite discussion points: the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes. Here, Ezra takes the role of Lieutenant-General Pavel Ilich Bulgakov as he bunkers down in the long jump sandpit – standing in for the Augustów Primeval Forest in modern-d...

Comedy always works best when it is mean-spirited.

A race from the end of last summer. Long Beach, Sandy Bay. February 2012. I catch the bus to and from work each day, and am therefore exposed to many of the horrors of modern top ten charting pop hits, as the local bus company appear to have all radio dials soldered in to commercial FM stations. The endless s hit parade of Auto-Tune atrocities does make one want to weep, especially if you're keen a nice vocal track here and there. Thus, for today's Sunday Top Five Six, I revisit some of my favourites from Berry Gordy's Motown label. Now, I'm not claiming this as a definitive list by any stretch, but these songs offer sustenance to my ears after another abominable 'tune' that's been processed to within an inch of it's life on GarageBand or some such... Thus, I present to you My Top Five Six Motown Remedies In The Event That I Hear That Incredibly Bad Tik-Tok Song (Or One Of Seemingly Fourteen-Thousand Like It)! This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak F...

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. However, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

The end of the race. Victoria Esplanade, Bellerive. February 2012. Wordless Wednesday.

An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.

Go to sleep Ezra!

Television is very educating. Every time somebody turns it on, I go into the other room and read a book.

The succulent's edge. Quayle Street, Sandy Bay. January 2012. This Blinding Absence of Light by the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun is a very dark book, in more ways than one. Its narrative is essentially a reconstruction based on the testimonies of the former inmatse at Tazmamart, a Moroccan secret prison for political prisoners that operated with the harshest of conditions. A hole in the middle of the desert, Tazmamart was a place where prisoners were give us subsistence level of food and water to keep them a live, but deprived them of every aspect of life, including that of light. Thus, we the reader are primarily left with the voice of a solitary prisoner, a voice all the more powerful for being draped in darkness. As one might expect, there is a starkness to the crystalline, pared-down prose. The author certainly rises to the challenge of maintaining interest in such a limited environment and utter hopelessness facing those characters held here. Thus we are treated t...

Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.

Okay. Running away or chasing something? You decide!

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

You heard! St Johns Park, New Town. June 2011. Week two into the new job, and I'm slowly picking up reading time. One really top book this week, Tom Keneally's Gossip from the Forest , a novel which reconstructs the minutia of the negotiations surrounding the declaration of an Armistice at the end of World War I. Now don’t let that concept fool you, as this is an engaging and impressive work. Kenneally paints vivid portraits of the key characters, and infuses a humanity that is often absent in this kind of work. The novel is a fantastic study of the profound challenge of ending a conflict that featured such brutality. As might be expected, the real interest can be found in the vanquished, rather than the victors. This is magnified as the key Allied negotiators - vain French Marshall Foch and cold British Admiral Weymes - relish their roles as conquerors (even though the the reality was somewhat more complex than that) and that the Germans were something approaching evil incarna...