Most Sensational Breaking News…

 

From the i for Tuesday April 24^th, 2018:

Queen thrilled at news of Kate and William’s baby boy

          Is this the paper’s most extraordinary scoop this year? Or ever? Could we ever have known that this might be the Queen’s reaction to the news? The idea of the Queen being ‘thrilled’ at the birth of another great-grandchild, and male at that, is nothing short of astonishing, as is the event itself, which took nine months to come to fruition. So incredible that the Daily Mail devoted its first seventeen pages to the happy event, plus a sixteen-page pull-out supplement. The Queen was no doubt ‘thrilled’ also by all that Royal free publicity, though in retrospect this does not seem to have been unpredictable.

          Admittedly, it’s more cheerful than the dread of expecting a new tweet from Donald Trump.

 

In Praise of Typewriters

          Much as we like novelty as consumers, there has always been a nostalgic streak in us for retaining old things or old ways of doing things. This tendency would seem to have been expanding rapidly over the past few years as capital-driven tech spins round ever faster, throwing up mind-blowing innovations almost every month, or so it seems. Ordinary consumers would seem to be having trouble keeping up with ‘progress’ of this increasingly frenetic sort, as evidenced by ‘retro’ all around us.

          We learn, for example, that printed book sales are outperforming Kindles, though only a few short years ago our pundits were pontificating on the Death of the Book.

          The government had decided to switch off FM by 2020 seeing as how everyone was turning to digital or delayed broadcasting nowadays. Unfortunately it overlooked the phenomenon of domestic homes becoming so stuffed with electronic gadgets that interfered-with DAB reception is almost impossible for many, apart from having a very unpredictable transmission range, whereas good old FM goes chugging on with some listeners actually preferring its tone. So FM remains with us, still popular enough to command the attention of politicians, at least for the time being.

          Likewise, ‘smart’ meters were going to revolutionise energy readings although the government didn’t actually back up the changeover from traditional meters with legislation. Now we discover that ‘smart’ meters spy on us, are expensive to install with little or no savings to make this worthwhile, and require replacing if one chooses to switch energy suppliers. So there goes another bright idea.

          No sooner have we perfected the art of streaming when almost overnight punters return to the trusty old LP vinyl, thought to have been killed off forty years ago by audio cassettes. Indeed cassettes, ‘killed off’ in their turn by CDs, are also making an extraordinary comeback. LP and cassette retailers are springing up all over.

          Who could have predicted the success of Talking Pictures TV, devoted almost exclusively to old and usually British black-and-white movies (most of them incredibly obscure) and drama series? Its aural equivalent for some time now has, of course, been Radio 4 Extra…

          Of course magazine racks weighted down with Classic Car magazines, and buses, and tractors, and trains, and vans, etc., etc. have never really gone away but they are obviously keeping a large section of an apparently dying magazine publishing business going. I can’t imagine all the readers are into actually buying any of these old rattlers. It’s nostalgia. Let’s face it, a Morris Minor convertible or Traveller is a far hotter item on the street today than what has become the computer-designed uniformity of today’s cars, for which you must find the marque in order to learn the make. Great differences among them in performance, no doubt, but they all look the bloody same.

          WH Smith pulled itself out of the doldrums a while back by jettisoning most of its electronic-wares business and handing back its traditional stationary sections more floor space. Result? Profits for Smith’s have soared. Whether it’s Smith’s or elsewhere, the burgeoning of the stationary on display is as great as ever before and perhaps even more diversified. I thought we were into a ‘paperless’ age by this time? But it seems not. Retailers wouldn’t flog it if people didn’t buy it.

          What about digitised antique phones which can be found in any decently chi-chi notions shop? What about razor and soap (with brush) which many men obdurately prefer – get a barber to shave you to find out why – despite decades of TV advertising for the ever-better and ultimately perfect electric  razor?

          Surely now it is time for the typewriter to re-enter the scene? Tom Hanks has led the way by championing the lowly manual typewriter and owning something like 120 of them. Electronic typewriters are still made in Japan but production of manuals ceased in Britain in 2012 (as late as that!) Electronic typewriters always seemed to me like half-assed word-processors: for me the true typewriter is the manual. So what is there about them?

          They are portable – the big old office ones are difficult to find - and in a handy bag (often supplied by the retailer) they can be set up and used anywhere, like a laptop.

          They are durable. If you keep it clean your manual will last you the rest of your life, and then some.

          They are cheap. The price range is around £50 to £110. Of course you can’t get them new anymore, but re-conditioned ones good-as-new are available through the internet. My retailer here is Brian Rothwell of Inkjet Stores in Bury, Lancs, who also sells a range of typewriter accessories, such as a felt mat that makes them quieter. The modern ones in a plastic casing are already quieter than the older all-metal models that made such a clatter. Incidentally, this plug for Brian comes as a free favour to him which he doesn’t even know about. But of course there are others. Personal experience makes me suggest you avoid eBay, though, unless you can get a very reliable opinion on the performance of what you intend to buy. Ribbons are easy to order, perhaps in bulk, and last far longer and are a hell of a lot cheaper than ink cartridges!

          The manual requires no power except muscular. Like the wind-up radio it is popular in the southern world, in offices in Latin America and Africa plagued by frequent power blackouts making computer use hazardous. We may be proud of our smartphones but remember that every new stage in miniaturisation eats up energy like nobody’s business. A world of the tiniest smartphones will kill off the environment for sure. We MUST get back to more manual and mechanical uses if we are to conserve energy for use only where it is strictly necessary in future.

          You can’t hack into a manual typewriter; it is entirely oblivious to electricity, let alone cyber systems. That’s why governments are turning to manual typing of top-secret documents and cables, in order to avoid the prying eyes of the NSA, the Russians, or 15-year-olds in suburban bedrooms. The only trace left behind by a typewriter is paper, and if you can’t secure that for secrecy it’s entirely your own fault. Incidentally, paper can be recycled.

          It is even possible to obtain carbon-paper, though not usually from a high-street stationer’s. This obviates the need to photocopy your typewritten document and of course copying is not a separate operation. One sheet of thin carbon paper will last for ages before it gives up the ghost.

          If you’re new to typing, and most people now are, be prepared with lots of whitening fluid, for mistakes are inevitable though you can improve with practice. At any rate the keyboard is the same as on a word-processor so it’s not difficult to get the hang of it. Though as you’ll discover in various ways, it’s a bit more ‘hands-on’….

          Why type at all? The simple answer is to get weaned off excessive screen-watching which is doing your eyes in. For instance I mainly type letters to my friends and send them through the post rather than emailing. Like longhand, typewritten looks as if a human being has done it: it has a personal touch. Typewriters themselves were never wholly uniform, and in old detective stories killers and blackmailers were often unmasked through the print-peculiarities of the particular typewriters they used. There is something comfortably not all that high-tech about typewriters, though they remain beautiful objects of mechanical engineering at its best.

          As well as nostalgia for old things, people are rediscovering the joys of bread-making, or cooking from recipes instead of takeaway and the CO2 menace of microwave ovens.  Or throwing their own pots. Any of these will bring their own reward. I would add manual typewriting to this: it gives a ‘human’ touch to correspondents who otherwise spend every day viewing anything from a dozen to two-dozen emails a day or more. And a letter sent that looks as if some effort has gone into it (whether through the typing or by improved orthography) shows that the sender cares.

          Typing fits into a multi-media environment what with photocopiers, scanners for turning the typing into a computer documents and emails to attach it to for quicker sending. As I say, the object is to spare your eyes by doing more stuff off-screen, not to ‘save time’, whatever that means.

         

           

         

 

 

Why Is Jeremy Corbyn Not More Popular?

 

Too old at 68. (Donald Trump, after all, is only 71 and plans to run again in 2020.)

Too eccentric. Has an allotment. Wears sandals all the time. Has a beard. Doesn’t drink much and is a vegetarian. So, bohemian.

Too London-Islington-southeastern; intellectual, neither ‘one of us’ nor a proper toff like Bo-jo and Theresa May; toffs are born to rule, after all. Even if they can’t govern. Anyhow Bo-jo is blokey in a millionaire sort of way; Corbyn is not. Corbyn isn’t rich enough to look good being blokey.

Pro-immigrant. Wants to open the floodgates to the Swarm, destroy all our jobs.

Pro-environment tree-hugger. Wants to destroy all our jobs.

Anti-nuclear weapons. Wants to destroy all our jobs.

Don’t trust that McDonnell, either. His economics will bring down the country sooner than the Tories will.

Doesn’t big up Britain in the world. Sees us Brits as third-rate. Hates this country.

Will raise taxes and bloat bureaucracies for his public-sector union cronies  that will bring this country down.

Never held a proper job outside politics.

Ruthlessly autocratic and weak. Runs the Labour Party like a dictator, and can’t face down dictators like Putin.

Too weak to get rid of the anti-Semites who run the Labour Party, the biggest Nazi-type party in Europe, with a long history of book-burning, torchlight parades, brown shirts and shorts, open anti-Semitism. Would let Israel down in its heroic nation-building.

Too much of a youth cult following, bad because anyone under 21 is a fuckwit glued to their smartphone.

If Corbyn is so great, why is 99% of the British press and media against him? No smoke without fire.

This country never got anywhere – Industrial Revolution, Empire, victories in two World Wars – by thinking first and acting afterwards. Boris Johnson, our greatest-ever foreign secretary, knows that well enough. Until Corbyn takes a leaf out of Bo-jo’s and May’s book and acts decisively without thinking, he will never gain the trust of the great British public.

Over to you, Momentum!

 

 

 

 

 

Play It Again, Sam?

          If you own virtually the whole of the known world, you have to be on constant watch on every front all the time to keep possession of it. Thus the greater in extent the Roman Empire became, the more permanent its military crisis – whether on the German, Dacian or Parthian fronts. Roman emperors (‘emperor’ = ‘imperator’ or military leader) were little more than military commanders, moving from one end of the empire to the other in the cause of ceaseless defence. It was this, linked to economic decay through the ever-more extensive importation of slaves,  that brought Rome down in the end. Late capitalism is in somewhat an analogous situation. Now entirely global, its leaders in both politics and the economy must be ever-vigilant for any sign of any trouble anywhere, prepared for a quick heading-off/pre-empting of ‘trouble’ by disembowelling  before it gets out of hand. Thus the guardians of the long and impregnable-seeming dike that in fact is very leaky and becoming more so.

          In the case of the ‘serious’ threat of Jeremy Corbyn and the possibility that Conservatives will lose political control over the UK to him and his Labour Party, we are experiencing, in the run-up to the local elections in May, wave upon wave of media-co-ordinated ‘fake news’ about JC: anything will do and it requires no proof: first, his apparent secret relations with a Czech ‘spy’ in the 1980s, and after that fizzled out a focus on his failure to condemn Russia immediately for an apparent poisoning in Salisbury until the facts were such as to substantiate a prima facie case: needless to say, no such facts have come to light as yet (so far as we know) and indeed the whole thing is very mysterious, but none of that bothered Mrs May and her otherwise beleaguered government from getting an international bandwagon rolling to  condemn Russia on all sorts of grounds but based on Salisbury, with the mass withdrawal of diplomats (‘intelligence agents’) from various embassies. And then we have had a return of the anti-Semitism-rife-within-Labour canard (though the vast majority of anti-Semites dwell in the Tory Party and UKIP) all down to Corbyn and a ridiculous insinuated anti-Semitism of his own. No distinction is made between anti-Semitism and Corbyn’s lifelong disavowal of support for an ultra-Right Israeli government illegally seizing Palestinian lands to which it holds no right. You are either for Netanyahu and Likudism or you are anti-Jewish per se.  All this is now being increasingly denounced in articles and letters to editors by an increasingly sceptical public. All it remains for me (and for the rest of us) is to await the bringing of criminal charges for anti-Semitic incitement against various members of the Labour Party, though this seems unlikely even if such charges have recently been successfully prosecuted against two British fascists. Let’s see the accusers put their money where their mouth is. Then to see if Corbyn can continue to be reviled for ‘failures of leadership’ in refusing to condemn Russia for the Salisbury poisoning; my latest news is that the head scientist of the relevant division at Porton Down says that (at least from a scientific perspective) it is not possible to name Russia as the culprit. This does not stop No. 10 Downing Street from insisting that Russia is to blame: the Tories have gone so far in all this as not to be able to go back on it for mere lack of evidence. It seems obvious, doesn’t it?,  that Putin would launch such foreign assassinations on the eve of the Moscow World Cup just so various nations would boycott it. Interesting to note that the British government is careful to allow the British Team to go: imagine the furore if England players were refused entry to the World Cup by their own government!  (But everybody else should stay home, thus rendering terrific support for their team from the Moscow stands.) And finally I look forward to seeing the evidence that Corbyn passed ‘secrets’ to a former Czech agent back in the 1980s (no matter that he had protested as long before as 1968 when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia to regain their control over the country). And now I find that Corbyn has been celebrating Seder with Marxist-socialist Jews in his constituency, and been widely denounced even by some Labour MPs – out to get him anyhow – for mixing with the ‘wrong kind’ of Jew. Apparently there are ‘good Jews’ and ‘bad Jews’ and you are ‘anti-Semitic’ if you like the bad ones. Aren’t these accusers displaying no end of stupid anti-Semitism themselves? After all, even the Nazis had their ‘good’ Jews: one or two, like General Milch, former head of Lufthansa,  in high positions of military power. As someone recently said: there is no Pope in Judaism, no ultimate unitary authority over the whole faith. Indeed the Jews are about as herd-like and conformist, said this writer, as a herd of cats.

But never mind: all the JC ‘fake news’ will go rolling on and on, courtesy of the Daily Mail etc., at least until after the local elections in May.  

          I can’t be doing with this anymore just now: so I turn to what for me is some welcome light relief:

 

A ‘great line’ is the characteristic or otherwise wholly appropriate emblem and theme of the whole movie.

          So-called ‘great lines’ from movies are not noted for their literary or philosophical depth. They are not even witty bon-mots. So why are they remembered and cherished? It is because of what they stand for: the whole movie they are in. ‘Great lines’ are rare and seem to be a matter of chance. Even if they are often no more in themselves than hand-me-down shop-worn phrases, their genius lies in their compression of a whole story into a single line.

(NB: As I cite from memory I hope am at least 90% accurate!)

‘You weren’t supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’  Essence of a plot in which a caper so exquisitely planned falls apart due to unforeseen circumstances. Not the bloody doors, but the line foreshadows the kind of mishap that may be just around the corner…

‘Make my day, Punk!’ sums up Dirty Harry’s frustration with a corrupt, crime-ridden society and his violent gut-instinct – likely futile if not complicit – to do something about it.

‘Play it, Sam, play it!’ The grip of nostalgia for a thwarted love must be loosened. Casablanca is suffused in great lines: ‘We’ll always have Paris.’ ‘The Germans wore grey; you wore blue.’ Captain Renault’s shifty ‘I’m shocked, shocked…’ and Bogart’s ‘This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship!’

‘Top of the world Ma!’ The last ringing words of a mother-obsessed psycho mobster as he bestrides a gasometer about to blow him up. The film in a phrase.

‘Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.’ Groucho here epitomises Marxist surrealism at its purest. Note the comedic inversion: ‘Either my watch has stopped or this man is dead’ would have been about as funny as a funeral.

‘I’ll be back.’ The inexorable robot is as good as his word. And true to Arnie’s form, for in real life Arnie has been coming back ever since.

‘You’re gonna have to get a bigger boat.’ Man’s puny pretensions in combatting a demonic natural force. (Mind you, they didn’t need the bigger boat in the end.)

‘Well, nobody’s perfect!’ A cheerful response to male cross-dressing and an advocacy of more live-and-let-live in a world of freedom. Ushers in the 1960s.

‘Who is that guy?’ Film chiefly about inscrutable Nemesis and how she stalks our two happy-go-lucky robbers relentlessly, and perhaps the rest of us, for everything we’ve ever done wrong.

‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.’ (Line taken from the original novel.) The response to a woman who cannot tell real from histrionic emotion, linked to the futility of the Old South as an ideal that now can never be.

‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!’ Al Jolson’s ad lib at the beginning of the Talkies may have been meant ironically: what he was really saying was: ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!’

‘Where’s the rest of me?’ What you say when you wake up legless after a double amputation. Since this is hardly a comedy (King’s Row);  the banality is breath taking, but deeply honest at the same time: what else could Ronald Reagan say?  (He went on to become the US chief executive lampooned with ‘the president’s brain is missing!’ – Spitting Images.)

‘Rosebud.’ The single word (uttered by the dying Citizen Kane at the beginning of the film) that sums up the plot and the drive behind it. And tells us that we will view the whole thing unfolding in retrospect. A word repeated in the penultimate shot as a burning image on a child’s sled whose natural element was snow.

‘The stuff dreams are made of.’ Last line of the film about the plaster of a fake bird-object everyone was chasing after thinking it was priceless.

‘Last night I dreamt I was at Manderley again.’ Also the opening line of the du Maurier novel on which the film is based: not a great novel (or film) but surely the greatest opening line in English-language fiction? Devotees of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities may be inclined to differ.

          Some notable lines are in fact both pseudo-deep and misleading. ‘This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind’ (Olivier’s Hamlet, 1948) degrades both the film and the play, an embarrassment in an otherwise outstanding picture. Like those portentous narrators at the beginnings of (sometimes) quite spectacular sword-and-sandal epics: ‘Rome! Empire of triumph and tragedy, of magnificence and mayhem…’ and so on. It would have been more seriously impressive if he had just shut up and let the clanking legionaries march past us dragging their slaves and exotic booty behind them. A composer like Miklos Rozsa could  easily do the rest…

          Some great lines never even got said: ‘You dirty rat!’ (Cagney) and, of course, ‘Play it again, Sam.’