The Name Game

This clipping comes from the Newbury Weekly News, 22 February 1996. It was the height of the protest against the Newbury Bypass, hundreds of people were obstructing work to clear the route of 10,000 trees, living in treehouses, blockading bulldozers and much more.

There were dozens of camps along the nine miles, and around a thousand arrests were made of people defending the trees. So commonplace were arrests that court cases weren't taken seriously. Two people had similar ideas of how to make their point in court.

The forces of destruction wore different coloured hard hats to denote their role. If memory serves, white hats were the drone security guards, green hats were private detective evidence gatherers from Bray's Detective Agency hired by the Department of Transport, red hats were bailiffs and sheriff's officers and blue hats were police.

Referencing this, one arrested individual gave his name as Red Hats Green Hats White Hats And Police Hats Guard The Trolls Work Of The Chainsaw Gangs Doing Their Little Bit To Build A Wasteland Where Once Was Beauty Making Dirty Money Dirty Profits The Fat Controllers Sit Behind Their Piles Of Money Weaving Their Power Plays So In This Dinosaur They Like To Call Democracy Love And Power To The Tribe Of Eco-Warriors And Mother Earth.

At his initial hearing, Mr Earth was shown a piece of paper with his name and affirmed it was correct. When his case came for trial he was again shown a piece of paper but said that as he didn't have his glasses with him he couldn't read it to check it was correct. The clerk then apologised to the magistrate and read out the full thing.

Another protester actually changed his surname legally to (spelled as one word but broken here to make it legible for you): Oddsocks McWeirdo el tuttifrutti farto hello hippopotamus bum.

He later changed it again to: Oddsocks Mcweirdo el tuttifrutti Mr farto hello hippopotamus bum I think we can all live in co-operation as free individuals without hurting our fellow sentient beings but we will have to work on it the world is for sharing.


 

death by delia

After romantically fantasising about violent death, I find I get a bit peckish. So thankyou Youtube for suggesting I follow listening to the Smiths' There Is A Light That Never Goes Out with a Delia recipe for french onion soup.

a bottle of fight the world

A website about Buckfast's source locality, Dartmoor, informs us that

a popular Scottish phenomenon is the 'Buckie Commando' who is an intoxicated, aggressive, fearless consumer of the Buckfast Tonic Wine... There now are numerous aliases that the wine is known by, some printable examples are; 'Commotion Lotion', 'Wreck the Hoose Juice' and 'Bottle of Fight the World'.

Strathclyde police confirm that there were

448 mentions of "Buckfast" in reports of murders, attempted murders, serious assaults and common assaults in 2008-09, out of a total of 7,483 violent offences. That equates to 6% of the total.

Of these 114 involved the use of a Buckfast bottle as a weapon. This equates to 1.5% of the total

A BBC investigation adds

This echoes a study carried out in 2007 at Polmont Young Offenders Institution. It found that of those offenders who had been drinking immediately before their offence, more than 40% had been drinking Buckfast.

The man who conducted that research, Alasdair Forsyth, says the findings were remarkable. "This is a product, a brand which unusually for any product, is always trumpeting how few units they sell, that they sell less than half of 1% of all the alcohol in Scotland," he says.

This has led to moves within the Scottish parliament to ban Buckfast in the country.

As Monty Python observed, 'contemporary government applies one standard to violence within the community and another to violence perpetrated by one community upon another'. There are times when that enhanced, fearless fighting spirit comes in handy. Are you being bombed by Nazis? Bucky will make it all palatable. This advert ran in the British press during the Second World War.

Buckfast Tonic Wine is made by a secret process and to a formula perfected by the monks many years ago. It is still made with the same unhurried care at Buckfast Abbey in the calm of the Devon Hills. Its recuperative properties are invaluable to meet the strain of war time conditions.

Nerves and depression are largely physical, the result of an unaccustomed drain on your strngth and vigour. A wineglassful of Buckfast two or three times a day will quickly restore your energies and help to maintain your strength and mental poise.

They were not the first to spot its propensity for making people confident in violent circumstances. Those commanding the first world war knew that turning petrified shellshocked boys into Buckie Commandoes would be good for the chances of victory. According to Lyn Macdonald's book Somme, British troops were issued with an English-French phrase book sponsored by Wincarnis Tonic Wine with the slogan 'for the relief of nerves in the trenches'.

Indeed, in July 1916 as the Battle of the Somme was raging the British Journal of Nursing listed Wincarnis, saying

the primary effect is immediate stimulation and invigoration of the system, and the secondary an upbuilding of mental and physical vigour, and that as the secondary follows immediately after the primary effect, the upbuilding of bodily vigour occurs before the stimulating effect has worn off

A bottle of fight the world indeed. Wincarnis was originally called Liebig’s Extract of Meat and Malt Wine. The subsequent brand name 'win-carnis' means 'wine-meat'. These days they make it without actual meat, and nothing of Buckfast's altercation-inviting caffeine avalanche, but it's still a right radge tipple.

We should perhaps be grateful that Buckfast only augments its alcohol with caffeine. When tonic wines became popular in the late 1800s, many of them

used potent, poorly understood and often addictive ingredients. These included strychnine, morphine, opium, quinine, lithium salts and cocaine.

Buckfast with cocaine? Imagine the possibilities.

Graham Harding's book A Wine Miscellany informs us that

Coca wine, with cocaine, was already flourishing in late nineteenth-century America when Dr. John S. Pemberton created his “French Wine Coca” in 1886. He was a latecomer to the market, which was dominated by Angelo Mariani’s Coca Wine. This product, conceived and marketed by a French priest, added cocaine to wine.

Pemberton added both kola nuts and damiana (a natural aphrodisiac) to his drink and marketed it as an aid to overcoming morphine addiction. It was advertised as an “intellectual beverage” with the capacity to “invigorate the brain.”

Cocaine was removed from the drink in 1904, though the Coca-Cola Company continued to use “decocainised” coca leaves as flavoring for some decades. It is possible that they may still do so.

In 2002, the Bolivian authorities authorized the export of 159 tons of coca leaf to the United States “for the manufacturing of the soft drink, Coca-Cola.” The company was equivocal in its response to inquiries. “The formula for Coca-Cola is a very closely guarded trade secret. Therefore we do not discuss the formula.” Make of that what you will.

munt for wells

The Liberal Democrats, like the other parties, produce a standard format poster for their candidates. It's an orange or yellowy square on end, like a Baby On Board car sign, or an Australian road warning.



Dunno about you, but I'd rather see a camel as prime minister with a cabinet of kangaroos and wombats than have the LibDems in power.

Anyway, they usually plump for having the candidate's surname emblazoned across the middle.







But they've made a solitary killjoy exception, opting to use the forename of their candidate for Wells in Somerset, a certain Tessa Munt.

Just imagine. These posters could have been soooo much better. Miserable buggers.

product displacement

Many years ago I was out drinking with someone who worked in a bar. At closing time, it struck me that I'd never heard her call lasties. 'Haven't you noticed?' she asked. I shrugged and waited. Disbelieving that I was unaware, that her bar's policy really was so subliminal, she nonetheless explained.

Ten minutes before last orders, they put on the Jive Bunny CD, but quietly. No matter how drunk the clientele, the place unfailingly emptied within fifteen minutes.

I wonder if this proven idea could be extended. Indeed, I wonder if perhaps it already has. Further to the news that product placement is to be allowed on British TV, are movies still one step ahead of TV in selling opportunities for anti-product placement?

For example, if a movie shows a family getting into a car with the Volvo badge prominently displayed, it means they're about to have a crash but all survive unscathed. Could Volvo instead pay for a death crash to happen in a Nissan? Could Pepsi pay for an obese toothless nerdy diabetic character to drink Coke?

I haven't seen either of those examples in action, but what else other than this principle can explain the excruciating syrupy songs at the end of James Cameron's movies?

I suspect the cinema cleaners' unions realise he runs seven minutes of credits, so they got him to put My Heart Will Go On - a song as tragic as the needless death of 1,500 people - over Titanic's closing credits, causing everyone to run from the cinema clutching their bleeding ears.

Then comes Avatar and he bolts on Leona Lewis' I See You - a song as great an atrocity as the attempted genocide on Pandora - to the end, making all but the severely hearing impaired trample one another in their rush for the exits.

In both cases, the cleaners get in early and have the popcorn boxes gathered up and are out of there, probably before the intolerable aimless forgettable warbling's ended.

And that forgettability is a further achievement of those songs. Like And I Will Always Love You from The Bodyguard, you've heard My Heart Will Go On a squillion times yet you can't really remember how it goes. How hard it must be to write a song so prevalent yet so soluble.

Sure, you think you can remember And I Will Always Love You, but (apart from people who know the Dolly Parton original) try singing anything other than the title line. Go on, really try it.

See what I mean?

The Bodyguard. For fuck's sake. They made that piece of shit whilst the same studios were turning down Tarantino. Top tip kids: never watch a movie where you can tell everything that will happen from the fucking title alone.

My friend Caroline found that out the hard way last weekend with Snakes On A Plane. Sheesh.

polyamory is wrong

Twelve years ago I compiled a pamphlet of writings about non-monogamous ideas and practice. This was suppemented two years ago by my expanding someone else's fabulous little pamphlet on the same issue that came from a more practical standpoint, With Open Hands.

When an idea is new to cultural prominence, it's understandable that we have no word to describe it so define it by what's different, like non-linear mathematics or the cordless phone. But the term 'non-monogamy', commonly used in the 90s, was unsatisfactory as it defined it solely by what it isn't. It's rather like calling yourself a non-Christian.

There's a whole brace of ideas and relations that need their own words. My lovers is easy enough, but my lovers lovers, their lovers lovers, these are things we frequently have to refer to yet there's no simple short word. It's like expecting someone to say 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland' all the time - it may be impeccably correct but it's hopelessly unwieldy for frequent conversational use.

There's 'metamor' for lover's lover but, like 'polyamory' for non-monogamy and all other neologisms, it excludes anyone who hasn't had it explained to them. As this is almost everyone you talk to, it kind of defeats the purpose of language.

Lovers' lovers and their lovers are like in-laws - you're connected in an ongoing way by somone you're close to, and your personal relationship with an in-law can be pretty much anything. But the term 'lover in law' sounds really weird, and of course the whole deal with non-monogamous life is that it is moving away from contractualised relations like marriage ('I love you so much that I want to make a contract about it with the state that'll make it very expensive for you to leave me').

So we're still stuck. I know someone who needs a snappy word for 'my girlfriend's wife'. It may be a while before we see one included in the Concise Oxford.

But as concept gains cultural currency so its jargon becomes commonplace. The term 'polyamory' ('many lovers') came into popular usage about ten years ago. It trips easily off the tongue and it can already be found in good detailed articles in the mainstream media.

However, that doesn't hide the fact that it, too, has its drawbacks.



(via A Laptop for Every Donkey)

cool yule

In the words of the bard; it's the season of love and understanding, merry Christmas everyone.

But was Joseph perhaps a little too understanding?



myspace.com/burninghank

number ones

Danny Chivers' recent post on A Daisy Through Concrete says

It's getting so you can't type "ranting performance poetry video climate change bespectacled freak" into a search engine without my leering face popping up in front of your startled eyes.

The delicious irony is that, like a serpent eating its own tail or the first chicken coming from its own egg, he's self-fulfilled. If you type "ranting performance poetry video climate change bespectacled freak" into Google it comes up with one result - Danny's post.

A while ago commenters on a post over at Five Chinese Crackers mentioned being number one in Google for "pubs in leeds belgian beer", "Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks grapple fake hookers" and 5CC's own "Paul Dacre's robot arm".

It's something I've brought up in conversation with a couple of bloggers since, and I think it's time to start a meme.

Give me five great things that your blog or websites rank number one in Google searches, then tag five other blogs. Bonus points if you manage to have any sexual content in the phrase, as it's fairly easy to be top of the heap for 'post-marxist dialectics in contemporary radical discourse' than it is for summat like 'fisting shaven catholic teens'.

Bristling Badger's number one for:

"An old man wanking into a sock"
"Caviar enemas"
"Fuck you liberal democrats"
"Baboon in a bucket"

and - a matter of considerable personal pride - I also get number one for Strawberry Switchblade.

What about you;

A Daisy Through Concrete
Chicken Yoghurt
The Quiet Road
Dreamflesh
Alice In Blogland

mootopia is nigh

Bovine terrorism continues. As I mentioned at the time, in June David Blunkett was nearly killed by a cow. The cow chose to do it on his birthday for extra symbolic and media value.

This week, Question Time chairperson David Dimbleby missed the programme for the first time ever after being attacked by a bullock, possibly in retribution for having Nick Griffin on his show.

According to the Health and Safety Executive figures cited in a report about the Blunkett attack, cattle kill about four people a year and injure a further 75. This is far more than any other terrorist group in the UK. Furthermore, they've proven they are better at targeted attacks on prominent political figures than any other terrorists.

I reckon this is just the warm-up, there'll be a mass stampede on parliament just before the Christmas recess, ushering in a great cow revolution and new year mootopia.

storks on a lamp post

curiously specific

Come with me to Southampton Road in the market town of Ringwood, and ponder as I have.

How exactly did they decide how much to charge an unauthorised motorist for parking their car?

You can almost hear the disagreement in the meeting and the dissatisfied harrumphing at the compromise figure agreed upon.

what would sid say?

Was anyone as goosed as me by the incongruity seeing Boris Johnson, mayor of London, cuddling Barbara Windsor?

Not just for their disturbing physical similarity but politically?



It's a real Mandela and the Spice Girls moment ('Having spent several decades imprisoned as a reviled revolutionary, I really really really wanna zig-a-zig-ah').

Ken, if you want the job back try canoodling with Sam Fox.

boy scout wankers

In the Tom Bell Hut at the Scouting movement's buildings at Hebden Hey in West Yorkshire, there is a carving of the scout fleur-de-lys logo. The artist has signed it 'Donald Potter 1932'.



The explanatory plaque at its base has been moved to a somewhat ill-fitting place in the centre, in order to make way for a more recent explanatory one. The explanation on the latter reads

This carving was hung in the rover den of the 2nd (Heath Grammar School) Halifax Scout Hut for 50 years, until the group closed in 1984, when it was presented to this hostel along with the assets of the Group.

That original plaque reveals something altogether more saucy;

THIS ROVER HUT
was presented to
THE 2nd (HGS) HALIFAX GROUP
in grateful memory of the Mother & Aunt of the donor
BOTH OF WHOM WERE INTENSELY SYMPATHETIC
TOWARDS YOUNG MEN & BOYS

Oh come on, stop smirking. That's just our modern smutty minds corrupting innocent and noble sentiment, right?

I mean, 'intensely sympathetic to young men and boys' doesn't necessarily mean any carnal activity to alleviate any other urges, does it?

Don't be so sure.

This section was deleted by the publishers from the original edition of Lord Baden-Powell's Scouting For Boys in 1908, but was reinstated in the 2004 reprint

You all know what it is to have at times a pleasant feeling in your private parts, and there comes an inclination to work it up with your hand or otherwise.

Well, lots of fellows, from not knowing any better, please themselves in this way until it often becomes a sort of habit with them which they cannot get out of.

The practice is called self abuse and the result is that the boy after time becomes weak and nervous and shy.

He gets headaches and probably palpitation of the heart, and if he still carries it on too far he very often goes out of his mind and becomes an idiot.

A very large number of the lunatics on our asylums have made themselves ill by indulging in this vice although at one time they were sensible cheery boys like you.

The use of your private parts is not to play with when you are a boy but to enable you to get children when you are grown-up and married.

But if you misuse them while young, you will not be able to use them when you are a man.

Remember too that several awful diseases come from indulgence - one especially that rots away the inside of men's mouths, their noses and eyes.

do have a cow

Margaret Thatcher milk snatcher breaks her arm. David Blunkett has his ribs broken by a cow.

In a week when Nick Griffin had eggs thrown at him, it's certainly an escalation for someone to chuck a cow at Blunkett. But the Griffin thing's not part of the true pattern. I'm seeing a cows/politicians/broken bones commonality here.

These things come in threes, so what's next? I think it'll be Peter Mandelson trampled to death by rabid buffalo. Hopefully.

euro elections: epilogue

Newly released footage reveals how the British public figured out who to vote for.



(I fear I may never blog in another format ever again).

xtranormal

Last week, when it still seemed like Nick Griffin was going to go to a do at Buckingham Palace, the excellent Five Chinese Crackers posted a funny little animation of Griffin and the queen.

It finished with the words 'if you can type, you can make movies. www.xtranormal.com'.

It's a real tin-claim/actual-effect match. I haven't looked at any instructions or anything, and it's quick and easy to make these weird lego-people animations.

Whilst I'm sure it'll have great purpose in satire and whatnot, my first impulse was to make it sweary. Let's make computer voice software say the words of Ice-T's Straight Up Nigga and be responded to by a woman saying all manner of filth.



Then, let's recontextualise the Theme From Shaft.





It's really easy, it's free, no catches as far as I can see. Apart from the fact that's it's probably going to be the biggest distraction time-hoover ever invented.

Have a go.

xtranormal.com

=========================

UPDATE:

Having encouraged friends to have a go, I've been sent a link to this masterwork

artistic balancing commando

We recently bade an eternal farewell to Lux Interior. Coming so soon after the deaths of John Martyn and Ron Asheton, I'm deeply alarmed. If the good artists die quicker than the bad ones, the proportion of bad ones increases.

So I propose the formation of an Artistic Balancing Commando splinter group of Shoot The Suit. Every time a Levi Stubbs or a George Melly dies, the ABC will take out a Mick Hucknall or a Stevie Nicks.

This will not only help to preserve balance, but in the long term the crap artists' insurance companies will find it worthwhile to stave off payouts by giving free high-quality healthcare to the good artists.

Win-win.

shoot the suit

I had a conversation recently with a climate activist about how some people we feel are onside end up saying something stupid that undermines our good work. Witness Mark Lynas' support for nuclear power and Jim Hansen's criticism of anti-aviation activists. It goes back into the mists of time. I remember well the big chief of Friends of the Earth, Charles Secrett, issuing a press release calling some Newbury bypass protesters 'hotheads and idiots'.

The activist I was talking to posited that these people are sellouts in proportion to the amount of time they spend in suits. Without wishing to sound a bit like 'never trust anyone over thirty', there's something to it.

It is not important to demonstrate causality here. Whether the suit remoulds the mind or the remoulded mind becomes attracted to suits is irrelevant. There is a clear established link between suit-wearing and talking a bunch of unhelpful arse.

The solution suggested was to form a genuine eco-terrorist group called Shoot The Suit. You know how nurses who work with X-rays and stuff have to wear little badges that react to radiation? If their badge changes colour they're taken away from that work before it does any damage. Shoot The Suit would be the activist equivalent, monitoring the amount of time spent in suits and taking out anyone overexposed before they can do any harm.

Personally, I think that's a bit hardcore, and perhaps offenders should initially be given the chance of rehabilitation via another kind of hardcore; compulsory membership of an anarcho-punk band.

Rather like an old-school boot camp that shaves your head and makes you do months of mindless square-bashing, people like Hansen would be given a mohican, doused in ketamine and forced to spend a year or two in squats shouting unintelligible rants about vivisection over brainmeltingly loud guitar that sounds like an avalanche of dirty gravel.

Hopefully this would redress whatever part of them has been knocked out of kilter. If, at the end of this, they are still found to be beyond hope then it's time for Shoot The Suit to take over.

ain't that the truth

If you're all alone this valentine's day and wish you had the love of a good woman to warm you, take a tip.

more dirty pop

Having passed on the recipes for assorted dirty pop, the ideal drink for the second-day munter, there’s a new one.

Victorian literacy rates were much lower than in the present day, so there was a neeed to have visual clues for important instructions. Also, really really important warnings needed to be glaring so that they cut through any daydreaming and mindfog. Hence, in the apothecary’s dispensary and the chemist’s shop, substances that were poisonous were stored in blue bottles.

The blue bottle has recently returned to public notice. The advent of cruelly strong and chemically dubious white cider (has it really ever been near an apple?) has given the adolescent experimenter, the street drinker, and all others interested in the best price per millilitre, a new favourite.

I used to wonder why it is sold in blue bottles. This is not one brand after all, it is a synchronicitous industry standard. Then it hit me; this is a folk-memory. It harks back to the Victorian glass bottles. It says ‘Warning! Poison! Unfit for human consumption!’.



And yet, as with the cheeky vimto that makes blue WKD into something not just drinkable but actually pleasant, it is possible to perform alcoholic alchemy.

Cheap and boozy ginger punch

6 litres of ginger beer
4 litres of strong white cider
1 litre-ish of really crap whisky
slices of orange and lemon

Combine ingredients, ladle into glasses and drink. Repeat until there’s none left.

As is essential for the second-day dirty pop, it has novelty, it is unchallenging, not bitter and packs a bit of a woof. Clocking in at around 6% alcohol, it’s ideal for staving off sobriety without getting you too splattered.

And,as with the Alcoholic Dr Pepper, it is cheap to buy so you can afford to get it in for everyone, refreshing not only your inebriation but also the team's bonds.