Finally got round to sorting out the rest of the HonkWatch screencaps from the heavetastic (but otherwise mostly shit) Guest House Paradiso.
This time it’s the turn of the newlywed couple in the bridal suite (though we can only see the young groom, played by James D’Arcy, whom you may remember as the lead in the dewy-eyed drama about the Irish war of independence, Rebel Hearts).
[Just to recap, Eddie and Richie run a crappy seaside hotel. Next door at the nuclear plant, some kind of accident has killed lots of fish, which have been whisked away in order to hide the evidence. But the boys, ever eager to save themselves a few bob on food bills, have managed to procure themselves some of the radioactive seafood without realising the danger, and duly serve it to their guests. Cue green chunks being blown all over the place.]
I’m afraid I’d never really heard of Greg until a few years back, when I was working at the chip wrapper factory, and a press release came my way about him playing in Bristol after coming out of retirement. It intrigued me, and I got hold of a CD of his mixes and was fair blown away. So I ended up seeing him play a superb set at Timbuk2, where he commanded two decks, a reel-to-reel and a lappie – with nary a hint of old man’s arthritis or anything . No bubble perm these days though!
Not only does he still have the *ahem* skillz, he’s also a passionate lover of music, old and new. His website was very handy in pointing me in the direction of many of the excellent tunes which helped shape electro-funk and hip hop. And with his name now fresh in my consciousness, I see he’s got mentions all over Dave Haslam’s book Manchester England.
The (perhaps apocryphal) last words of Sophie Scholl (or maybe her brother Hans), on being handed a death sentence by the ‘People’s Tribunal’ of the Nazi state, the Volksgerichtshof.
Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst were all members of the Weiße Rose anti-Nazi resistance movement. They were put on show trial before the quasi-judicial political court for distributing leaflets calling for the fall of the National Socialist regime, and for the end of the war.
Sixty-five years ago, on 22nd February 1943, all three were executed, their heads severed from their bodies by way of guillotine.
Alexander Schmorell and Kurt Huber followed them in July, and Willi Graf in October. Other Weiße Rose comrades were sentenced to long prison terms.
It’s jazz legend Acker Bilk’s dream home. He bought it 15 years ago for the views of rolling Somerset countryside. But they have been ruined, he says, by a neighbouring farmer and a huge pile of plastic silage bags.
“There must be at least 200 of these black and white bags in a field about 250 yards from the patio at the back of my home,” said the 79-year-old musician.
“They’re spoiling my view. There’s a pond in the field with ducks and geese on it.
“I used to like watching them. But now I can’t even see it.”
Mr Bilk named his luxury bungalow at the top of a hill at Pensford, near Bristol, Chulemeau after the low register on a clarinet, the instrument he still plays in gigs around the country.
“I love it here. The views are spectacular and that’s why I bought the place,” said Mr Bilk.
“Nothing like this has ever happened before. The bags have been there for months.
“But when I complained to the farmer’s wife about them, she just said she didn’t know how much longer they would be there.”
At nearby Leigh Farm, in Old Road, farmer Colin Smart’s wife, Jo, said: “I didn’t think they were in anybody’s way.”
She urged the Evening Post to speak to contractor Andrew Tovey.
He said: “By the spring the silage will probably have been used to feed the cattle.
“The reason they are there is that last summer kids from the village kept ripping the bags open and rolling the cut grass in them down the valley.
“They’ve done this before, but it’s never been so bad.
“In the end, we just had to move the bags further up the hill to the field closer to Mr Bilk’s home.
“I wouldn’t agree they were that close, though – more like 700 or 800 yards from his place. I’m 42 and have always been a fan of Acker Bilk’s music.
“But I’m astounded he’s complaining. He’s a village man, born and bred. My dad, Terry, went to school with Acker Bilk.
“Living next to a farm, you expect these things to happen.”
Poochie poo courtesy of Vets In Practice, as reviewed on TV Heaven Telly Hell – an illustrated lesson on why feeding your mutt out-of-date oysters might not be such a treat for your four legged friend. Unless said canine enjoys enemas.
Currently I’m watching the first couple of episodes of the new Strine crime drama Underbelly. It’s been causing major ruckus down under because it’s based on real people and real crimes – including stuff which has yet to come to court (hence the injunction the other day banning its broadcast in the state of Victoria).
For the purposes of HonkWatch we see the aforementioned Vince Colosimo as Alphonse Gangitano splattering his cell after being picked up for the infamous Sports Bar brawl, in which he and fellow hoodlum Jason Moran battered the crap out of a pubful of customers for no reason other than, um, well, being deviant, macho, thieving arseholes.
Well, maybe, maybe not – but El Bonio has been talking up the the reemergence of a British anarchist movement on the streets in recent months, and after discussion on his blog about the lack of regular anarchist magazines and newspapers he’s called for a bit of DIY action:
I’ll set up a separate ‘RE-IGNITE’ page here – RE-IGNITE being the paper’s name! You an submit articles as attachments to: localnews4us@yahoo.co.uk
I’ll edit out obvious rubbish or anything stultifying then you can watch the work in progress. Deadline 5pm February 27th. Then anyone can cut and paste what articles they like and distribute locally as an a4 paper!
Editorial guidelines: Must be of relevance to life, culture, politics in Britain today – no history, no foreign stuff. Be as heretical as you like – we’ve nothing to loose by shaking our thinking up and overturning long held truths.Writers real names preferred – but others will do.
Time to RE-IGNITE our movement comrades.
There you go – ball’s in your court!
PS And obviously you don’t even have to submit stuff to this project, you could start up your own…
Just a quickie today – werewolf-induced belly bile from Dog Soldiers. I’ve not actually seen it, but there was a clip in one of the episodes of British Film Forever, a fairly decent seven-parter on UK cinema I’ve been working through.
Well, it would be rude not to include this one. It’s from the good-but-not-great World Of Pub, which made the radio-to-TV transition in 2001. It’s all about an East End boozer run by two brothers – Barry (Phil Cornwell) and Garry (Peter Serafinowicz) – which in the beginning of each episode undergoes a name change and which burns down at the end, generally as a result of help from Dodgy Phil (Kevin Eldon).
This is from the second episode, ‘Drink’, in which the chaps rebrand their hostelry as sports bar the Gym & Tonic, and get in a giant telly screen to show the Pub Olympics, of which vomiting, obviously, is an event.
PS There’s plenty more heave-ho when the boys are challenged to a drinking contest by a rival landlord…
Been working through the mildly diverting Murder Rooms. It’s a Victorian detective series based on the life of Arthur Conan Doyle and his mentor Dr Bell rather than a makeover show with interior decorators getting slaughtered, sadly. But it’s so-so.
Watched the Jimmy McGovern film Dockers today. It’s a dramatisation of the long strike at Merseyside docks, in which dockworkers fought against intolerable conditions and the drive towards casualisation. The film was cowritten by some of the striking dockers and members of the Women of the Waterfront support organisation, and is worth a look.
Anyway, found a nice video of the big ‘March For Social Justice’/'Never Mind The Ballots’ event in London in April 1996, co-organised by the Liverpool dockers and Reclaim The Streets. Some familiar faces…
And, as is the way here in Britain’s biggest village, this apparently is A Good Thing, at least judging from the giddy excitement with which BCC has greeted its chart position in the Stonewall ‘Workplace Equality Index 2008’.
The survey shows that our good burghers were beaten in the cuddly boss stakes by no fewer than eight police forces, the screws service and even the Foreign Office (sections of which, lest we forget, have a habit of vetting for gay men and women), but judging from deputy leader Pudge Hammond’s response, this is good gravy:
Stonewall’s workplace equality index is an important external assessment and validation of this council as an employer of lesbian, gay and bisexual people. It tells us what we are doing well, and how we can improve our performance even further to attract and retain staff.
Bristol – because sometimes mere mediocrity is just too good.
Zimbabwe has extradited Briton Simon Mann, a leader of alleged mercenaries, to Equatorial Guinea to face coup plot charges, his lawyer says.The ex-SAS officer was jailed in Zimbabwe on arms charges in 2004, and rearrested after his release last May.On Wednesday the High Court turned down an appeal against his extradition – his lawyers argued he could face torture.
He was flown out of the country without his legal team’s knowledge before they could lodge a final appeal, they said.
There has been no official confirmation of the extradition from the Zimbabwean government.
Mann, you might remember, was the British mercenary captured in Zimbabwe along with a planeful of former 32 Battalion soldiers, $130,000 in cash and a shitload of weapons en route to Equatorial Guinea. The general gist of things was that Mann was hired to overthrow the dictator of Equatorial Guinea, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, by a group of businessmen wanting control of EG’s oil exploitation rights. Mann himself was in for a slice of the black gold pie.
Except it all went pear-shaped: South African, Zimbabwean and EG intelligence all knew about the plan, and it’s suspected so did MI6. Mann’s main pack of dogs of war were captured in Harare, whilst a forward group, including South African Nick du Toit, formerly of 32 Battalion, was arrested in EG capital Malabo.
Ex-SAS soldier Simon Mann has extensive previous in the field of ‘private military operations’, having been involved in the setting up of companies such as South African mercenary company Executive Outcomes and the British-registered Sandline International (most famous for its gun-toting asset stripping in places like Sierra Leone and Bougainville).
Am cooking me tea (roast pork & veg), so more later. I’m drawing diagrams an’ everything!
Well here we are then – another year. Let’s hope it isn’t as crappy as the last (actually, last year had plenty of good shit as well, just very much very high highs and very low lows).
The month of January reflected in the BunKRS…
Lordy, if I didn’t go overboard on Alan Clarke (the film director with an ‘e’, not the knicker elastic-twanging Tory without). Knocked up a rather nice graphic of all the corpses in Elephant too, if I say so myself;
As ever, I’ve been trying out some new format ideas…
Cinematych – different screen versions of the same story, compared: can’t say it simpler than that
Ikons Ov Musik – well, I realised I didn’t have a category for stuff about people in thee world of music
Clouds & Winds – what British blog would be worth it’s meat and two veg without a section devoted to the weather?
Recently added to NetNewsWire:
Class War Youth Death Brigade – clearly the best name for a group since that Spanish anarchist militia monickered up in tribute to some Manc band or other, and impressively angry
Down The Tubes – chipper comics-related news stories from the people that bring you the main DTT website
Density Of Sound – my former TCTE companero Tangerinebreem blogging about all the cultural delights Lancaster has to offer, and thankfully much more (you have to pad it out somehow )
Bear Alley – Steve Holland and his bewilderingly vast collection of comics arcana, as well as paperback artwork, story papers and other similar such subjects
nialler9 – awesome Irish-based music blog, chock full of tunes, videos and news
Podcasts blowing the BunKRS speakers this month…
SRI Radio Sweden – more daily English language Swedish news bulletins than you could shake a smörgåsbord at
Talking Robotics – it’s a talky one, and it’s all about artificial intelligence and androids!
TheGoatLab Radio – Bristol-based breakcore shenanigans, could do with an update though…
Oh, and I managed to see the love of my life, my soulmate, my best friend, too. First time since… Well, first time in a long time. Hopefully we can build our friendship up again
Finally got round to sorting out the rest of the HonkWatch screencaps from the heavetastic (but otherwise mostly shit) Guest House Paradiso.
. No bubble perm these days though!
