Welcome to St. Paul’s

Primark your cards

I’m on my hols at the moment, but in the spirit of getting back in the saddle, I’ve just remembered something that the LLF told me she overheard on a security guard’s radio whilst following him down the escalators at the new Primark last Friday:

…There’s reports of a topless woman trying on bras in the underwear lingerie department – can anyone deal?

This is the dawning of the age of web querulous

Perhaps I’m being unreasonably tetchy, but this just seems mighty wrong.

At 9.40am I tweeted a link to a photo on Street Boners, captioned “Using party balloons for nitrous is like getting a unicorn to talk to teens about breast cancer”.

At 9:41am I received an email notification that CancerInfoHQ was now following me on Twitter.

You’ve Been Framed: The Google Street View Years

Bike crash at junction of City Road, Upper York Street and Stokes Croft, as captured on Google Street View. Perhaps more astonishing than this pile-up (and exactly how did that happen? Is the chap on the left riding an invisible steed?) is that there are no tramps in the background. I guess they heard about the plans to water down White Lightning.

Tip O’ The Titfer: [underscore] via Stefan Goodchild

ETA: Chris Hutt has spotted that The Sun has picked up the picture – it’s the third one in this slideshow, and also mentioned here.

ETA: It’s also featured in this BBC article (5th image in the gallery).

ETA: I can’t find any pictures showing the pre-crash situation, but this picture shows the aftermath in a bit more detail. That skateboarder is definitely acting suspiciously!

EXCLUSIVE: Mark Bradshaw hates Bristol bloggers!

I just thought I would see if my earlier post had earned (ex-’transport supremo’) Mark Bradshaw any more Twitter friends, only to discover that the blighter has blocked me!

Good to see a politician with such a healthy interest in engaging with local people, as ever

Us & THEM

spEak You’re bRanes on the Baby P fallout:

Incidentally, I’m fairly sure that somebody, somewhere, makes a USB keyboard that has two fist sized buttons on it: a blue one (for the daddies) labelled “REST IN PEACE LITTLE MAN!!!” and a pink one (for the mummies) labelled “NOBODY CAN HURT YOU NOW LITTLE ANGLE!!!! XXX”.

Vagina pepper!

Spotted on Shasta Gibson’s Stiletto Diaries, made I larf, forgot to show the LLF.

Non-Ladybird endorsed youth sex-ed!

Following the chortleworthy détournement shenanigans of the not-Banksy Ladybird Book People At Work: The Policeman comes Boys And Girls (“A short book about choosing if and when to have sex”), jointly published by NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde, NHS Lanarkshire and NHS Ayrshire and Arran (and “not in any way associated, endorsed or connected to or with Ladybird Books Limited“, guv’nor)!

I think it’s rather sweet, especially with the Claire Grogan-ish narration

(Tip o’ the titfer: Sexocentric)

Revisiting San Serriffe

The most excellent Strange Maps blog has just published an article about The Guardian’s fondly remembered 1977 April Fool supplement on the island of San Serriffe.

(Well, I say fondly remembered, though I do not personally remember the, fondly or otherwise, seeing as I was only rising one at the time. Over the years I became aware of it, though, by way of the 1999 reboot of the spoof, and also in much the same osmotic way as I know about the Tomorrow’s World piece on spaghetti trees.)

Talking of fake-stories-as-Grauniad-news, I am reminded of the (and correct me if I am wrong) 1976 piece the paper published in which a reporter related the story of his chance encounter with a member of the SAS on a train.

The journalist – a sceptic of the British military strategy in Northern Ireland – had recently been writing about the deployment of SAS troops to the province, and in none too complimentary terms. IIRC he suggested they were swaggering cowboys who offered little to the peaceful resolution of the Troubles.

And lo, by complete serendipity he happened to meet one such soldier (in civvies) on an InterCity, who, during the course of a spontaneously-struck up conversation, turned out to be articulate, erudite, and anything but macho. His opinions on British policy in Ulster shifted slightly, and he wrote up the story for the paper.

Then many years later it transpired that the whole ‘chance encounter’ had been a psyops fabrication; the journalist had been picked out as a possible target and a well-briefed and affable serviceman been placed on a train he was known to be travelling on in order to casually strike up a conversation with a view to modifying his opinions.

I’ve no idea whether that is a true story, as I can’t remember where I read it. Perhaps I imagined it? But it sounds like it might be a Colin Wallace one. I know the original story exists, as I read it in one of those Guardian Yearbook thingummies which they used to publish.

Can anyone fill in the details? The source of this tale swimming round my rapidly-shrinking brain? The journalist it seems to be about? The year, even?

“If American foreign policy was a gift shop, what would it sell?”

From Phillip Toledano’s America The Gift Shop website.

Tip o’ the titfer: the redoubtable Violet Blue.

Frayling at the edges

The other day I watched a programme in a series called Nightmare: The Birth Of Horror*, in which Christopher Frayling looked at the creation and success of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Today on Shadowlands I noticed a reference to “Sir Christopher Professor Frayling”.

This led me to have a quick look on Wikipedia to find out more about Frayling.

Apparently, when Frayling was knighted, he

chose “PERGE SCELUS MIHI DIEM PERFICIAS” as his motto, which translates as “Proceed, varlet, and let the day be rendered perfect for my benefit”. In more modern English, the phrase would say: “Go ahead, punk, make my day”.

* This programme also taught me the word ‘bibliogenesis’ (in Frayling’s words, “birth by books”).

TWoT lists, slowly

My beautiful lady friend hijacked me for a fortnight, but I’m back now, looking forward to [edit for correction] EndorseIt.

Anyway, here’s the first David Rees-23/6 Get Your War On video:

Tip o’ the titfer: Graham Linehan’s Why, That’s Delightful.

Keeping it real on Wilder Street

“Gentlemen… We’re history”

Oh, and a belated perestace to George Carlin, who shitpissfuckcuntcocksuckermotherfuckertitsed his way off this mortal coil Sunday just gone. Bon voyage, George.

WLTM NVWE racist fantasists with GSOH

Tell me that seeing an advert for ‘Interracial Gay Dating’ on the front page of the Racial Volunteer Force forum doesn’t make you laugh…

(Tip o’ the titfer: IndyMedia UK)

Usługi w Godzina 9..?

Apparently Polish Catholicism is big on throwing shapes in the church of dance.

Tip o’ the titfer: Polandians

NTBCW #001: Bill Murray – the royal of Lebensraums

It came as a shock to me when I read it on the Lancaster UAF blog, but how must his Ghostbusters co-stars Ernie Hudson (African-American), Harold Ramis (Jewish) and Dan Aykroyd (Roman Catholic) feel to learn that Bill Murray is, in fact, the BNP’s Welsh Regional Secretary?

Following last week’s elections the BNP bragged as loudly as it could at the fact that it had ‘won’ a further six new councillors in North Wales, putting the total up to nine (all of whom are, incidentally, town councillors, the equivalent of parish, and all of whom walked into office completely unopposed).

According to Bill Murray, the BNP’s Welsh Regional Secretary;

‘After the hard work of all our activists we will be taking a week break then it will be back to business as usual.’

The hidden agenda of estate agents…

Best Photoshop Disaster of the year, methinks:

This is the back of a bus in Bergen, Norway. Bob Megleren is some sort of realtor there. Be very careful if he asks if you have enough living space.

Unnerving translation: “We are ready… with 60 years experience… Bob Megleren – that’s why.”

Bruiser versus the Bearded Mentalist

Apparently a somewhat pished John Reid gave Bristol-based tinfoil nutter Tony Gosling a midnight call in order to discuss Bilderberg. This is what the conversation sounded like…

(Tip o’ the titfer: IndyMedia UK)

Humphrey Lyttelton: Sleeping under a Mornington Crescent moon tonight

Bollocks

With all the arseholes in the world, the bedwetting, pantysniffing, kiddyfiddling, planet-fucking, wifebeating shitheads out there still drawing breath, and it’s got to be one of the good guys who takes a Friday night tumble down the slippery stairs of death.

The world of modern policing

From a recent eBay auction (tip o’ the titfer: Bristol Graffiti)

Digital carkeys in a bowl: Bristol blogosphere goes swingertastic

Most peculiar blog post of the day goes to Bristol Greengage for the following:

Last night, I dreamed I was on a camping holiday with my sister, brother-in-law, and the Bristol Blogger.

Whatever next? A paean from James ‘Ken’ Barlow opining the love-that can-never-be which he harbours for Charlie Bolton?

Chief Inspector Andy ‘Gordon’ Bennett offering to go twos-up on both Bristol Graffiti and Bristol Street Art?

Pink Pixie purring sweet web 2.0 nothings into the moistened shell-like of Gusset?

Fischer of men, master of games, victor of TWAT..?

‘Reasonable conservative’ blogger (and all-round wag) Jon Swift posits a halfway convincing scenario in which the ‘War on Terror’ is won through the strategic hothousing of young backgammon players, based on the life and times of chess genius Bobby Fischer…

Applying Guantanamo rules to horticulture…

Spotted this choice Warren Ellis guide to gardening via Natali Fisher’s blog:

If you’re planting in a garden, you need to be digging that garden over now. Well, not now, it’s probably dark. But over the next week or two you need to be turning the soil over so it’s crumbly and then mulching it. “Mulching” is not in fact a new sexual practise invented by Something Awful. It means covering the soil you just dug over with compost.

You see, the Earth’s natural tendency is to fuck with you. This is the secret of gardening. The planet does not want to give you anything. Mulching the soil is like waterboarding Gaia. It’s the Human saying to the Planet, “give me what I want or I will continue to drown you in handfuls of shit.” Be merciless.

Possibly my all-time favourite gag

Wood

John

Hants

Well, it’s always tickled me… I have a nagging suspicion I got it from Wham! annual 1970.

Tis the season to be ANGRY

Huzzah! Ace comicjockey Jamie Smart (he of Bear and My Own Genie fame) has designated the lead-up to Xmas as HATE WEEK and is posting up a new Angry Little Robot strip every day!

welcome, innocents and vulnerables, to the ANGRY LITTLE ROBOT’s very own sense of festive cheer in the slow uphill chunder to christmas day, a whole week of daily HATE. A new strip every day for the week, to leave you seasonal and warm in this, the world’s special time of guilt-free abhorrent gluttony. whoo! f’in gluttony!

i hope people don’t ask me to explain my work. the violence and puke increases in ratio to the festive cheer all week, check every day! garghhhh!

Check the *ahem* ‘Anger Vent Calendar’ at Bohda Te all week

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Forget-Me-Knot #001: The ‘Tap Marmite White’ conundrum

Forget-Me-Knots – those reminders you stick on your phone and then forget about, until much later…

Months back – August it was – I was visiting my friend Lucrezia and her chum in London, and after perhaps a bit too much booze, the subject of Marmite somehow came up.

Lucrezia’s mucker – let’s call him Ignatius – swore blind that there’s something in the chemical composition of that yeast spread friend of vegans everywhere which means if you agitate it enough, it turns from its familiar dark brown/black colour to white. I’m a little hazy on the details, but it all sounded jolly plausible the way he explained it at the time (and believe me, he explained it at length).

“If you get a spoonful of it, and shake it really vigorously for a few minutes, it really does work,” he assured me.

Libations aside, I was fairly sceptical, but there was no Marmite in the house, it was too late to go on a mission to find a shop that might sell it, so naturally I stuck a reminder in my phone so I could check for myself when I got home.

Well, needless to say, I completely forgot. Until November.

I went down The Farm to meet my flatmate and see a few friends, and somehow I got to flicking through the reminders on my phone. I spotted the Marmite one mentioned it out loud, as you do. Scorn was heaped on me for even considering that it might be true. But still, lingering thoughts… ‘What if it is true?’

The next thing I knew the bloke who’d been sitting behind us appeared from the bar, and thrust a big jar of the black stuff and a spoon into my hands.

“Knock yourself out,” he said.

Well, when an invitation like that comes around, you don’t hang about, do you? It would have been churlish not to get shaking. So shake I did. For rather a long time. A long, long time.

Ignatius, you bastard

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Kentish Ken, The Dark Duke & The Wonder Boy

I never realised that infamous rave-busting Kent copper Ken Tappenden had entered showbiz…

It seems the former CID head honcho in the Garden of England – who first made a name for himself harassing pickets during the Miners’ Strike – has entered into a second career as, and I quote:

a fully trained toastmaster and Master of Ceremonies having undergone a rigorous process of training

Lawks!

He’s put his lethal toastmastering skills to the test at a wide range of events, from royal galas to private wedding functions, and has celebrated the likes of Thatcher (her 80th birthday), GMTV (its 10th anniversary), and even Nelson Mandela at a dinner hosted by the ‘Jewish Board of Deputies’*!

It all makes something of a change from his most celebrated work as a police officer, setting up the Pay Party Unit, which was tasked with monitoring and then destroying the nascent rave scene in the late 80s and early 90s:

Tappenden was eager to take on the ravers on their own terms. As he’d shown during the Miners’ Strike, he wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty, maybe stretching the spirit of the law a little.

…If this was a high-tech war, he wasn’t going to be the one fighting with obsolete hardware. If they used phone lines, he’d counter with phone taps; if they used pirate radio, he’d monitor it; if they sent out spotters to find remote warehouses, he’d have helicopters and light aircraft out after them…

“After three months we had started 20 major investigations. The HOLMES database held 5,725 names and 712 vehicles. We had monitored 4,380 telephone calls and made 258 arrests.” The work went on all week, relentlessly. “We weren’t using the lads on the ground, we were using very experienced, hardened detectives,” says Tappenden. “At any one time we were running over 200 intelligence officers through the country. Now that is a colossal amount of intelligence, and it was banging down these computers 24 hours a day. We never stopped, we went through the night, through the day. The database was unbelievable.”

(pp101-2, Altered State by Matthew Collin and John Godfrey)

PS Whilst I was flicking through Altered State, I came across a rather interesting reference – one which I don’t remember picking up the first time I read the book ten years back – to spooky right-wing nutjob and Lord Lucan lookalike, David Hart. You may remember him as the chap who styled himself as an informal adviser to Thatcher.

Anyway, one of the principal rave organisers was one Paul Staines, who had been a member of the Federation of Conservative Students (and is now a political blogger). He ended up as Hart’s political aide, and got involved in all manner of shonky business (Brian Crozier gets a mention) under Hart’s tutelage, before taking his first E and immersing himself in rave culture. I like the touch about becoming Sunrise’s publicity officer and “at first running the operation out of Hart’s premises”!

Staines’s past political involvement came back to haunt him when a ‘Home Office offical’ tried to put the screws on him:

He said, ‘look, I know who you are, we know all about you’, because I had a Special Branch record from being in poitics, working in extreme groups. They couldn’t work it out: ‘You’re a right wing Tory, why are you doing this?’ Because I’m doing loads of E and having a great time!

He’s also got a rather nice description of Hart:

He’s completely charming and can charm senior people like Thatcher and appear sane for a while. But any close proximity to him for a prolonged period of time, you know he’s completely off his fucking head.

A nice touch of circularity there: Staines, the protegé of Hart (architect and financier of the scab National Working Miners’ Committee), duelling with Tappenden, strikebreaker-general. Oh happy days.

PPS Staines also mentions working on World Briefing and British Briefing, the propaganda rags-cum-political newsletters published by Hart for the benefit of any powerbroker into whose ear he could whisper; according to Staines, George Bush (the elder) was on the mailing list

PPPS I finally got round to putting together a proper triptych picture of the trio mentioned, but I had great difficulty finding (okay, I *couldn’t* find) a picture of David Hart. I trawled the interweb, all the usual places; couldn’t find a chipolata. I waded through all my miners’ strike and spook books; nothing. But I know I’ve seen at least one published picture of the dude…

So if any of you out there can point me in the right direction, I’d be most grateful.

In the meantime the Richard John Bingham snap shall act as a placeholder…

* I think Our Ken means the Board of Deputies of British Jews, but hey, when’s accuracy ever been all that to a senior copper, eh?

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Cream of the cop

I’ve been rewatching Bergerac, that fine 80s Jersey tec drama, and whilst pootling around the interweb for fansites, I discovered that the man from the Bureau des Étrangers himself has been blogging his own brand of booze-free, boss-antagonising common sense.

Here’s Jim on drugs:

Don’t do Crystal Meth. That’s the advice from the government following a recent study into the UK’s latest drugs explosion.

On a superficial level I must say that, yes, I’m inclined to agree. Nobody likes these destructive class A drugs and the people who besmirch our green and pleasant land by dealing in them deserve to be shot (see series 4 for my armed response to 4 teenage marijuana dealers).

But hang on a minute. Could we be going too far by demanding an instant crack down on this particular narcotic? Could it be that crystal meth, far from being a repellent, evil and damaging drug might actually be a useful tool in the fight against crime?

Stop and consider the evidence. In episode 4, series 3 of Bergerac, I spend 4 sleepless days setting a trap for 2 well to do businessmen who are hell-bent on defrauding the Jersey Rotary club. How did I stay awake and alert I hear you cry. Yup, you’ve guessed it. I snorted meth til my eyes bulged out. And then some.

Drug Tsars listen up: Crystal meth warms, invigorates, energises and by god, it makes you feel like a man. I can stop any time. Any time.

Jersey Cream – The Random Bloggings Of Jim Bergerac

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Hartcliffe’s Eurovision entry