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oh ffs
Yes, that'll really shame people into paying their rent.

'The first sign went up a week ago outside what appears to be a well-maintained property in Birkenhead.

There was no answer at the house yesterday, although the sign had been torn down.'

Torn down? I am so shocked. Hold me, I may faint.

steerpikelet? One for your scrapbook?

Kiplin' versus Palin.

You can't be a Sussex boy like me and not be overshadowed by Kipling. The house I was in at secondary school (yes, we had houses, just like in Harry Potter) was called Kipling after him.[1] My mum lives down the road from his house, 'Batemans'.

[1]Another house was called 'Fuller', after local popularly-believed-to-be-nutjob-but-quite-a-clever-bloke-really 'Mad Jack' Fuller whose accomplishments included being entombed in the world's most incongruous pyramid. Legend has it [2] that he is entombed upright within, seated in a chair, in full evening dress, top hat and all, a glass of port held in his hand.

[2]In this, as in so much else, legend is completely wrong.

okay, linguistics people, I need your help here
Is there a term for the following, and if so, what is it:

Connecting several isolated historical personages, events or phenomena and attributing a particular retrospective contextual identity to them, in the course of which declaration one also (implicitly or explicitly) reinforces a claim of authority for oneself, or for a philosophy or view.

For example: Islam placing Moses, Jesus and Mohammed alike in the category of 'prophets', and also naming Mohammed (PBUH) as the Seal of Prophets, i.e. the last one.

Example 2: Crowley deeming the same persons to be 'Magi' that have 'words' and in that process identifying himself as a Magus with a word of his own.

Example 3: the Golden Dawn identifying various historical luminaries as previous 'secret chiefs'.

Example 4: Identifying various historical events as the work of 'the Illuminati' so that you can identify current events as the work of those same Illuminati.

There has to be a term for this. It's just too prevalent for there not to be. The 'retrospective' part is crucial - the claim of contextual identity is not made by the elements themselves necessarily, but by commentators after the fact, linking diverse historical points together to empower something in the present.

Mad Dave
For anyone who used to be part of the Hulme 'scene' back in the late 80s and early 90s:

Dave Hughes, commonly known as 'Mad Dave', has been murdered. He was beaten to death at his flat in Bristol and the place was set alight. By the looks of it, he'd been victimized by junkies who wanted to use his flat to shoot up in.

Dave was a deceptively erratic guy who had a lot more depth and intelligence than people gave him credit for. He may not have been the most balanced of Hulme's characters, but I never knew him to be dangerous or even threatening. He fucked with his own head, not other people's.

Full story here.

Shitty way to go.

Current Mood: saddened

for the record
winking to camera?

get the fuck out.

thankyou.

EDIT: Some sublime comment on the whole 'Joe Six-Pack' thing.

*shudder*
There's something just a bit Silent Hill about this.

the big ship sailed on the alley alley o
Just heard this on TickaBilla, which the Bean is watching avidly. I've always wondered what the heck it was all about, especially as it has a sense of fatality and doom to it: big ship sails 'on the last day of September', the Captain says this will never do, everyone 'dips their heads in the deep blue sea', surely a euphemism for drowning.

Well, today I found out that in one reading, the 'alley alley o' is the Manchester Ship Canal, specifically the bit down to the River Mersey.

Current Mood: happy

wait
Did I dream it, or did the US just say 'no'?

I just love this.

so, Warhammer Online
I'm not going to waste space with superlatives. Suffice to say it's really good fun, and the mechanics are VERY clever.

theory
Craig Ferguson is actually David Tennant from 30 years in the future, come back to warn us.

Vaarsuvius, you make me proud.

Current Mood: go team elf mage

Sit around and I shall tell ye a tale. A tale of iridescent fabrics, youthful exuberance, and a fashion sense so far in the negative it were swimming with the crawly things on the ocean bed. Yarr.

Back in the early to mid 1980s, my adolescent world was turned around by Mr. Gary Numan and his Tubeway Army. Before that, I had been mostly into heavy metal such as Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, and all such sounds that eventually cause young men to grow their hair long and begin painting armies of orcs. 'Are Friends Electric' excited me so profoundly because it was all synthetic, autistic and unemotional. It was like the nerdy digital heart of everything Cyborgy and Micronautish I had loved until that point, finally grown up and given a credible voice. When it got to number one in the charts I was ecstatic.

Then several years later I saw Tik and Tok and decided I had to learn robot dancing.

There was nobody around to teach robot dancing in Heathfield, Sussex. Combine harvester maintentance is about as close as they get. So I practiced for hours in front of a mirror and after many weeks of practice I had achieved a basic level of incompetence.

My mother decided to help me in my newfound android career by buying me an item of clothing. At the time, I thought it might as well have come straight from Arcturus. It was that cool. I remember it as cold, black, futuristic, shimmery and metallic. Perfect for doing the robot in.

It was gay.

I don't mean that in the youth-of-today sense of 'ghey'. Fuck that noise. It was brazenly, glaringly, proudly homosexual. It could not have been a more gay garment if it had a big, inverted, pink lurex triangle on the front.

Oh wait, it DID have a big, inverted, pink lurex triangle on the front.

And I couldn't have looked more of a nonce in it, at the tender age of 15 or so, if I'd turned up to the teenage party of the year wearing it and carrying four cans of alcohol free lager.

Oh wait I DID... yeah, you can guess the rest.

Anyway. The point of this story is that on a recent visit to my mum's, she informed me she'd kept it. The black has faded to brown with time, and it's a bit rumpled, but you can still feel a glimmering of its essential power.

( I am Count Gayass of Fagulon IV, and I bring you DISCO. )

If this was satire, it would be beautiful satire. But it is not.
Were you traumatized when you were a sperm?

I... I just... no.

'As incredible as it may sound, our experiences prior to conception can lead to deeply held psychological patterns that often influence the rest of our lives.'

Translation: navel-gazing workshy hippy fucks will blame ANYTHING for their perceived defects EXCEPT the fact that they are navel-gazing workshy hippy fucks.

'The trauma of a sperm, ejaculated into the hostile environment of a woman’s vagina, on a quest to find the Holy Grail and impregnate the egg can be the most challenging and bitterly painful psychological experience.'

Painful?

IT IS A CELL. IT HAS NO NERVES, YOU PRATING TWAT.

'If you survived as a sperm, and you are here to tell the tale, it’s likely that you may have endured some devastating experiences that have left their scars.'

I do have this recurring nightmare of bouncing my head off some sort of immense trampoline...

'It’s interesting how once we become conscious in a really somatic and experiential way, we can begin to change the patterns that run our lives.'

...

Fuck off. Just fuck off.

I still have time for neopaganism, because despite all the bullshit there's still some worth there in a few places, but I am really beginning to despise much of what passes for 'alternative therapy'. Rancid junk like this is at the top of the list.

(Props to

stevegb for finding it)

Don't turn your back, don't look away, and don't blink.