A boy band not coming to X-Factor soon.
I don't know about their politics being out of date but a Pokemon T-Shirt? 2002 was a long time ago.
File alongside this, and not to be confused with that last disastrous reunion tour by Consolidated.
Hat tip to Louis Proyect.
A week may be a long time in politics, but it seems like a bloody lifetime during a General Election campaign.
I know you've all been frothing over Nick Clegg this past week - watch his body language when he speaks; it screams Tony Blair - but I have to step back in time by posting below the excellent spoof election poster that I just this minute stumbled across.
It's rather fine and stands up well, despite the fact that the 8th of April seems like a lifetime ago.
Kudos to Max over at Capitalist Money Madness.
SPGBer Max H. joins in the recent fun of photoshopping that daft 'honest dave' poster:
SPGBers who like that sort of thing tell me that Cameron has a passing resemblance to a Star Trek character called 'Data'. What do I know. Buck Rogers was my sci-fi fix as a kid.
More of Max's excellent Cameron posters on his website Capitalist Money Madness. I especially like these two.
What with me drowning myself in celluloid recently, my eye has been off the blogging ball but Olly's back and he is on form.
ADDED
Kudos to H, also, for keeping the end up for us few and scattered abstract-propagandist-ultra-leftist-added-sarcasm-aloe-vera types.
Very funny anecdote from Citizen Bone's blog about the halcyon days of Solidarity in South Wales. Apparently it's the kick starter to an ongoing blog series about cock-ups on the radical and anarchist left. I'll look forward to that.
I wonder if that particular anecdote is included in John Quail's threatened history of Solidarity? I wonder if that bastard will ever get round to publishing it? Six years and counting. Slow burning fuse? Indeed.
*I wonder if there's still time for me to submit my entry for 2009's 'Worst use of a pun in a blog title' award? I've got a fighting chance with that piss-poor effort.
A festivus present for the anarcho-reformist in your life this choming Christmas:
Place it in their returned garden of eden. Possibly next to a hitchens post. (Now that would have been something.)
Popbitch provides more details for the must have anarcho-consumerist ornament for next year's ten year anniversary of the guerrilla gardening spectacle in Parliament Square.
PS - Whilst I'm on matters Chomsky; What's with 'Noam Chomsky' plus 'broken english' all of a sudden? What does my sitemeter know that I don't?
PPS - The same company would also like to interest you in a Monkish Howard Zinn for good measure:
What do you mean you don't have 134 dollars going spare?
The sixth season of House starts tonight on Fox and I'm glad to note from the photograph below that's it's not just me who is all fatigued out by its formulaic storylines and the cardboard curmudgeonry of Dr Gregory House, as played by Old Etonian, Hugh Laurie. (FFS, Old Etonians, wherever I look they're popping up everywhere. If they didn't already lay claim to it, I'd argue they're taking over the world.)
Quick tip. If you seen 12 consecutive episodes of House on a USA channel marathon, you've seen them all. However, if the syndication rights throws a few quid Liz Fraser way for Teardrop, and it stops Laurie teaming up again with Smug Fry for retreads of their comedy sketches from the last century, then I guess it's a small price to pay.
OK, I''m lying. Not about the mediocrity of House, mind, but about the pic above. It's from a collection brought to you by DribbleGas.com.
The American far right in all their glory, and they're as mad as hell because Bubba forgot to pack the dictionary again.
Obama is the third period?
An 'American patriot' tells it like it is about living under the jackboot of Obama's First Reich.
As recommended by nine out of ten LaRouchians who click on the 'Obama is literally Hitler' website every morning before they pour kool aid on their Special K.
Hat tip to Carlos over at F/B.
Via Slackbastard blog:
Two Greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other: "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies: "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?"
Help me out here: is that an old joke that just gets updated every time someone looks at a police officer in a disgruntled manner somewhere in the world? I could have sworn I heard that joke years ago but I can't remember where.
PS - It doesn't detract from the joke itself. Most of my jokes go through the spin cycle again and again and again.
Adam and the Ants - 'Stand and Deliver Leaflets'
Still the funniest EVER joke about the SPGB. Maybe you had to be there . . . in the SPGB, I mean.
I'll be at the laundromat if you need me.
There's a layer of society brought up with the expectation that it will rule. At their schools, when they do subjects like the First World War, instead of being asked to write about what life must have been like shivering in a trench, they're asked to construct a battle plan for capturing Verdun. They consider, like Tony Blair, that to end up as a Headmaster would be a failure. Instead of being taught to respect authority they're taught to BE authority. They ooze confidence that it's hard not to be intimidated by. For example, I was contacted by an Eton student who wanted me to speak at his debating society. I was doing a national tour at the time, so I called him back to say it would have to be after that finished. He rang me back and left a message that went, 'Right. Now I've looked on your website and seen the dates of your shows, and you've got two days off one week so I'm booking you in to come down on the Tuesday. It's quite simple.' And the words 'quite simple' were imbued with a slight exasperation, as if he was having to take time out from an important meeting with an admiral to explain to the servants how to serve the pâté.
On the other hand, whenever starts a request, as most of us do, with 'Oh, eer hello, um sorry to bother you but I was just wondering' you know they didn't go to Eton.
Despite it being unavailable stateside, I've finally been able to snaffle a copy of Mark Steel's 'What's Going On?'
Only seventy pages in, I'm enjoying it as I have all of his books that I've previously read but I am once again struck by the thought that I wish that I had a dollar for every time he starts a sentence with, "It's a bit like . . . .".
I wouldn't be rich but I would be able to afford a jar of marmite from the Chip Shop.
Of course, as with the wonderful 'Reasons To Be Cheerful', waves of recognition pour over you as you read Steel. He may have been thirty years man and petition peddler in the SWP but, whether you have SPGB, SWP, CWO, CPB, SPEW, ICC, L & S or RWP-UNB sewn into your lapel, there is a reason why we all pretend to be in on the Life of Brian joke.
Irrespective of the groupscule you're currently hiding from the real world in, the experience is pretty much a muchness of a muchness. On average, the groan of recognition hits you every two pages by my reckoning.
The excerpted passage below about the break in relations between the SWP and ISO a few years back had me shouting at the walls, 'that's us, that is':
The result of all this was the British and American wings of the organisation formally parted, so the British attempted to start up a new American party. After a few months someone told me excitedly, 'There's good news from America - we're up to eight.' Eight - in the whole of America - good news. When I relayed this conversation to someone else they said, 'And what he didn't tell you is that six of them are on Death Row.'
In my darker moments, I realise I only stay in obscurantist politics because of the one-liners.
Not the YouTube downfall I was looking for, but a witty wee video take on the current fallout in the upper echelons of the SWP.
Hat tip to the tubes over at HP Sauce for the heads up on the blogger video.
Kara's just back from voting.
A registered Democrat she originally wanted to vote for Dennis Kucinich in the primaries but his campaign didn't reach New York so instead she opted for Clinton over Obama.
What was a political 0/2* now looks like 1/3 as, but for real life imitating art, it looks Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States.
No four hour queues, no problem with whether or not she'd be allowed to vote. In and out from the local school/polling station in the time it took me to play side 1 of Trout Mask Replica to Owen. (I've put him on a crash course of Pretentious Muso-Bollocks Disappreciation. I'm inoculating him against The White Stripes next week.)
She was that quick with the exercising of her democratic rights that she didn't even pause to see who else was on the ballot paper. Shame that 'cos I would have been intrigued to see if the Socialist Party Presidential candidate, Brian Moore, had made the ballot in New York.
If nothing else, you've got to admire the chutzpah of Moore for issuing a press release on the Sunday before election day whereby he announced his shadow cabinet in the event he gets elected the 44th President of the United States. He's pencilled in Howard Zinn as Secretary of Labor; the original maverick, Mike Gravel, as Secretary of Defense; and, my favourite curveball from his proposed political dream team, Barack Obama's former religious mentor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, would be appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in a Moore administration.
Before any reader scoffs too hard at Moore's press release, the bloke's no fool. He's a student of history. The history of political humour. He knows his Lenny Bruce, and because of that knowledge he's ensuring that he doesn't fall victim to the same lack of preparation that Norman Thomas did when he won the Presidential Election in a Lenny Bruce sketch all those years ago:
Norman Thomas/Filipinos/Midgets mp3
There's a lot of political truth in that Lenny Bruce skit. Dating back to the days of Werner Sombart, social scientists, radical activists and bar room philosophers have debated again and again the complex matter of American exceptionalism. In a nutshell - and to paraphrase the title of Sombart's own classic 1906 work - 'Why has there been no Socialism in the United States?'
Now we know. Second International Social Democracy never looked out for the little people.
*Compare and contrast Kara's 1/3 with my own political 0/1904.
Nice wee anecdote from FN Brill over at the WSPUS discussion list:
"I've spent a fair bit of time in Europe hanging with various radicals of various stripes. I was at a party in the squatted anarchist bookshop in Brixton, London. IT was a three story affair with huge kitchen on the top floor. I went up to get something to eat. Now, I can pass as English, so I walked up to the guy selling the food and he says in a parody American accent (not knowing I'm not British) "Do you want a hot dog or Burger?" Emphasis on the vowels, very long and nasally. My reply "Well since I'm American I should celebrate my countries' culture with a Burger". To which I got the most outrageous "American culture is nothing more than Imperialism and the Pershing Missle!" I quietly replied, "Yes, just like British culture is nothing more than the Irish Famine and the Raj." He was stunned and sheepish, I took my burger and had a splendid time."
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