Plastic Yankness in Labour Leaders

Neil Kinnock signed the death certificate for his chances of being Prime Minister - and the causes of death listed on the certificate were, number one, not being a half-out-of-the-closet Thatcherite who sucked up to Murdoch, two, being bald, three, ginger, and four, Welsh - when he fist pumped and shouted "Well Alright!" on a public stage. 

David Milliband did the same thing when Paxo asked him if he was 'tough enough to be Prime Minister', and he said "Hell yes, I'm tough enough!" on public television. 

A better answer might have been something like: I don't see that 'being tough' is necessarily part of the job, Jeremy - making tough decisions, yes, but not acting like a character in a gangster film.

Blair was a half-out-of-the-closet Thatcherite who sucked up to Murdoch, but he wasn't bald, ginger or Welsh, and he replaced aitches with glottal stops to try and sound like a man of the people (as all English political leaders do now), rather than making an embarrassing attempt to sound like a Yank.

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Of course, these hysterically over-hopped and violently flavoured beers are designed to be attractive to people who have been weaned on energy drinks and Sunny Delight, and who knock back Jägermeister as if it were an actual drink rather than something for hangovers that smells like pine lavatory cleaner (and probably doesn't taste much different either). 

It's the same with their hearing - the music has to be loud, they're indifferent to sound quality and they all shout, because they've damaged the cells in their inner ears by listening to in-ear bud speakers at max volume from an early age.

AND their sense of smell - the universal popularity of 'fabric conditioners' that smell like they were originally developed at Porton Down, fruit scented (??!!) cleaning products, toilet ducks, blocks and gels mean that they've been surrounded by such an all-pervading haze of 

pungent industrial byproducts, for so long, that the only smells that register are at max volume too. 

Hence the popularity of Lynx-type deodorants that smell like tear gas or urinal blocks, and which actually make your eyes water and your nose smart if your sense of smell works normally.

The Aum Shinrikyo cult's 1995 Tokyo subway atrocity was a grim precedent for the experience of travelling on public transport anywhere today when there's a young man on board. 

Or in a lift. 

Shocking News

As I've said before, I'm going off beer, part of the reason being the popularity of 'craft beer' brewed by 'craft breweries'. I like English bitter brewed by English breweries like Thwaites or Fullers. When it was real ale brewed by micro breweries, like Dent Bitter, it was still ok. Now 'craft beers' are fashionable, everywhere that does decent beer is too full of young people shouting their heads off and taking all the seats, and the beer they're so keen on is undrinkable - fruit beers, and in Scandinavia, Indian Pale Ales and 'American' Pale Ales that are so bitter they're like sucking a lemon, and, in Britain, 'golden' ales that are SBTLSAL, and taste of chrysanthemum or Lynx deodorant.


The brewers compete to produce the most extreme or bizarre flavour they can, egged on by people who award prizes at beer festivals. It's like single malts versus Irish whiskey and bourbon. 
And beer's too strong now. The default setting for beer in the UK and Czechoslovakia used to be 3.5% or just above, whereas now it starts at 5.

Now look at this:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/may/30/golden-ales-flavour-of-summer

When I was in  a Young's pub recently I saw that the 'sleeve notes' on the pump badge described Young's bitter as 'the original Pale Ale', and in a Greene King pub, my wife tried their 'Indian Pale Ale', which was nothing of the kind - it was what they until recently sold as bitter. The other ales were IPA Gold, which they used to call IPA, and IPA Reserve, a stronger version of what they used to call bitter.
I also note that of the 50 beers advertised in Wetherspoon's house mag for their recent Real Ale Festival, the descriptions of 26 of them feature the words 'pale', 'golden' or 'amber-coloured'.


Where (or more importantly, when) will this madness end?

Record Facts and Statistics

Building on the success of my earlier blog on music-related matters, http://robocono.blogspot.com/2014/09/defibrillated-frankensteins-monsters-of.html, featuring Jedward and Justin Beiber, here are some more

Record Facts* and Statistics**

1.* There are two** 'space' records with excellent starts sorely let down by the pedestrian nature of what follows: 'Telstar' and 'Intergalactic' by The Beastie Boys.

2.* Rap is nearly all rubbish. The best rap records ever made are 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised', and 'Tubthumping' by Chumbawumba , one** of which is the first rap record, and both** of which would stand out as being excellent on their own merits whatever the genre.

Nostradamus of the Airwaves

I confidently anticipate a remake of the popular 1961 Anthony Newley production updated to reflect the current surge of interest in cookery and dining generally, and gourmet organ-based cuisine promoted by top chefs such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Fergus Henderson in particular, most probably with a blockbuster West End show and  spin-off TV series. 

My tip for the updated title: "Stop the World I Want to Get Offal".

Arcane Argot

M&S

Two examples of criminal cant whose origin you may have pondered on: 

"Moody", meaning dodgy, on the fiddle, not kosher (as in 'moody brief'). Rhyming slang, from Moody and Sankey, American revivalist preachers and hymnalists who visited the UK in the 1870s. Rhymes with 'Hanky-Panky'.

"Dock asthma": the histrionic intake of breath used to signal shock at the supposed severity of a sentence on its pronouncement.

I love 'em, me.

The Sacred Ash Groves (and Sycamore, and Horse Chestnut, etc etc)

Before I begin, let's get one thing straight: I like trees, and I've planted a great many in my time. 

What I'm complaining about here is the thoughtless and misplaced planting of trees or the absence of steady site maintenance which allows self-seeded trees to grow where they shouldn't, and which then permits their subsequent flourishing.

A combination of the above has led to the obliteration of vistas, wholesale marginalisation of vantage points, and obscuring of architectural landmarks everywhere. 

Parliament Hill, Hampstead Heath, London

This has been exacerbated by an epidemic of tree-worshipping of a virulence not seen since the time of the Druids, which dictates that once a tree stands, wherever it may be, and no matter how inconvenient for any purposes other than those of the tree, it must never fall.

The first part of the problem, like so many others, can be laid at the door of the Chicago School's hypothetical model of economics, first put into effect in Pinochet's Chile, then as Reagonomics, then Thatcherism, and eventually as a global dogma which dictates that the world must be run by, and for the benefit of, a top echelon of businessmen, with, ultimately, disastrous effects for everyone except the top echelon of businessmen.

One of the many consequences of this was the ditching of longterm, gradual methods of keeping things running, administered by experts kept on tap, and the replacement of those methods by repeated short term, quick-fix interventions from cheaply-hired non-experts.

So in this case, sites such as public parks were looked after by teams of gardeners who were trained by a system in which experienced gardeners passed their skills on and supervised new members of the team. The teams of gardeners were also local teams who had an intimate knowledge of and pride in looking after their own patch.

They were part of local government and directly accountable to democratically-elected councillors.

Such work is now done by gangs of teenaged skinheads employed on minimum wages by outside contractors hired by local government forced under Thatcherite lowest cost tendering rules to employ the cheapest option, regardless of how unrealistic it may be for a decent job to be done at that price. 

Steady maintenance is replaced by widely-spaced periodic blitzes where shrubs are brutally cut off horizontally as if by using a spirit level, and any tree saplings that have appeared since the last visit are left to sprout and grow uncontrolled. 

Planting of perennials, border plants, trees and shrubs is indiscriminate, done by people who are seemingly either unaware of or indifferent to the fact that what they're planting will grow at different rates and end up being different sizes.

Maintenance of roadside verges and railway tracksides was also by teams looking after particular stretches of road or track, in longterm employment and also accountable to the public, but not any longer. 

Large sections of railway journeys now resemble green-walled corridors, with any sight of the landscape invisible behind phalanxes of strangled, densely-packed sycamores. In this case, of course, the main reason for keeping trees away was to avoid the problem of leaves on tracks affecting braking and leading to interruptions of service - not a problem for the company responsible for trackside maintenance, because they don't run the trains.

The problem of public parks and beauty spots being blighted by uncontrolled tree growth can be seen everywhere and anywhere, but the consequences are most serious when, rather than views being blighted, they are obliterated.

The worst example I have seen of this, by a long way, is in Barcelona. The best view of the city and its situation on the shores of the Mediterranean is from the cliffs of Montjuic. The problem is, when the city hosted the Olympics in 1992, the area was landscaped and terraced to provide car parks and areas for stalls selling souvenirs and food for people visiting the stadium below, now used for pop concerts as well as sport. 

When I visited recently, it was all strangely deserted as I walked from level to level climbing the slope. When I got to the top, I found out why. A wide viewing platform had been created at the summit, but, incredibly, shrubbery and trees had been planted on the other side of the low wall on the brink of the cliff, which had grown up to form a dense hedge completely obscuring the view - negating the very purpose people originally visited the site before it was landscaped.

I could go on, but very briefly: Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath used to have a magnificent view of the whole of London, which is now restricted to a narrow slot by an overgrowth of self-seeded scrub together with deliberately planted trees which have appeared over the past 25 years. 

And at a former mine spoil tip in Lancashire landscaped to form an outdoor sculpture site designed for the enjoyment of views - of the landscape from the top, and of the sculpture on top from the surrounding landscape - the Forestry Commission, presumably a sponsor, has carpeted the entire mound with a thicket of immature trees which, with the exception of a single sightline where the path reaches the summit, already obscures any view of the landscape from the top. 

As the trees mature, it will become impossible to see the giant piece of stonework commissioned for the site from anywhere in the surrounding landscape, except for a head-on view, from which point the sculpture's subject is impossible to discern at a distance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_(sculpture)