Oblectation over opinion of one oldie's obnoxious obstreperousness...

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...one of two things ruling the internet this weekend, and it isn't Truck Fudeau. No, as you can tell by the blog-post title (you couldn't?) it's the Neil Young/Spotify/Joe Rogan thing. Surfing away I landed at Riggery Pokery and enjoyed the succinct turn of phrase on the arrogance of certainty; nothing like a good rant; indeed I enjoyed the frisson but no skin orgasm...but I did laugh a lot. 

I don’t particularly want to single out Neil Young here, he’s far from being the only one - but he has rather raised his wrinkly buggeration of a visage above the parapet. He is representative of a very worrying trend that has emerged. Where has this rising trend of fascist fuckwittery come from? 

"Who the holy fuck is Neil Young to determine what I can, and cannot, listen to?
Arrogant shite."

"You supercilious wanker."

There's a lot more. :-)

Also a shout out too to Sophia in the comments: "In other news, my husband thought up with a new cologne yesterday that I think many of us would like to get our hands on. It's called "'Leave Me the Fu' Cologne."

Update 30th Jan: LOL, "Just when you thought Neil Young’s ill-conceived boycott of Spotify over Joe Rogan was fizzling out, Prince Harry and Meghan step in to keep it fizzling a little longer..." [The Daily Skeptic].

And more good reading on the generational aspect of the Young/Rogan spat and Covid HERE: The Needle and the Damage Done from Christopher Roach: "Far from being a cesspool of disinformation, the mainstream media are slowly catching up with the skeptics." [sic]

Oblectation over opinion of one oldie's obnoxious obstreperousness...

---

...one of two things ruling the internet this weekend, and it isn't Truck Fudeau. No, as you can tell by the blog-post title (you couldn't?) it's the Neil Young/Spotify/Joe Rogan thing. Surfing away I landed at Riggery Pokery and enjoyed the succinct turn of phrase on the arrogance of certainty; nothing like a good rant; indeed I enjoyed the frisson but no skin orgasm...but I did laugh a lot. 

I don’t particularly want to single out Neil Young here, he’s far from being the only one - but he has rather raised his wrinkly buggeration of a visage above the parapet. He is representative of a very worrying trend that has emerged. Where has this rising trend of fascist fuckwittery come from? 

"Who the holy fuck is Neil Young to determine what I can, and cannot, listen to? Arrogant shite."

"You supercilious wanker."

There's a lot more. :-)

Also a shout out too to Sophia in the comments: "In other news, my husband thought up with a new cologne yesterday that I think many of us would like to get our hands on. It's called "'Leave Me the Fu' Cologne."

Update 30th Jan: LOL, "Just when you thought Neil Young’s ill-conceived boycott of Spotify over Joe Rogan was fizzling out, Prince Harry and Meghan step in to keep it fizzling a little longer..." [The Daily Skeptic].

And more good reading on the generational aspect of the Young/Rogan spat and Covid HERE: The Needle and the Damage Done from Christopher Roach: "Far from being a cesspool of disinformation, the mainstream media are slowly catching up with the skeptics." [sic]

October obambulation...

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Weekend wandering. England, England, England. October 25th was - as you all know (ahem) - the anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. The [in]famous two-fingered salute (V sign) is 'said' to have come from English longbowmen but according to Wiki "no written historical primary sources support this contention"...except (Wiki goes on...) "Medieval illustrations and tapestries, however, depict English archers giving the sign, as do tapestries hanging in Angers Castle, home of the Angevin (Plantagenet) dynasty." Hmmm, seems like there may be some 'primary sources'. That said, maybe it was just the V of Henry the Fifth (Henry V), what would have been had it not been for his 'unexpected' (convenient?) death...

Anyhoo...on to October 26th and the Rugby World Cup semi-final between England and New Zealand's outstanding All Blacks. The V sign makes its return (image)! Best England performance EVER...and that's in 50 years of watching although early on in the 1960s I could hardly understand what was going on.  Love this: “New Zealand lose occasionally but they are never crushed. So this was a glorious first. Forget the scoreboard. They scored one lucky try and for the rest of the evening, they looked like little boys being bullied outside the sweet shop. They were lucky not to lose players to the bin and there was a time when Marius Jonker, the TMO, was a far bigger danger to England than the opposition." Stephen Jones for The Times quoted in Rugbypass. [my emphasis]



And so onto today, 27th October: the 100th year anniversary of the first performance of Edward Elgar's last major work, the tear-jerking Cello Concerto in E minor. "Most concertos take a little time to come to their main point. if they don’t make you wait until the slow movement – and many do – for their crux, they at least keep the listener waiting through a short orchestral introduction. Elgar was having none of it." [sic] A bit like England XV yesterday. [edit] And another V image - obviously the player makes the difference!



Unfortunately we won't have an all BREXIT rugby World Cup final but if it were so who better than Elgar to provide some Pomp and Circumstance.

October obambulation...

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Weekend wandering. England, England, England. October 25th was - as you all know (ahem) - the anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. The [in]famous two-fingered salute (V sign) is 'said' to have come from English longbowmen but according to Wiki "no written historical primary sources support this contention"...except (Wiki goes on...) "Medieval illustrations and tapestries, however, depict English archers giving the sign, as do tapestries hanging in Angers Castle, home of the Angevin (Plantagenet) dynasty." Hmmm, seems like there may be some 'primary sources'. That said, maybe it was just the V of Henry the Fifth (Henry V), what would have been had it not been for his 'unexpected' (convenient?) death...

Anyhoo...on to October 26th and the Rugby World Cup semi-final between England and New Zealand's outstanding All Blacks. The V sign makes its return (image)! Best England performance EVER...and that's in 50 years of watching although early on in the 1960s I could hardly understand what was going on.  Love this: “New Zealand lose occasionally but they are never crushed. So this was a glorious first. Forget the scoreboard. They scored one lucky try and for the rest of the evening, they looked like little boys being bullied outside the sweet shop. They were lucky not to lose players to the bin and there was a time when Marius Jonker, the TMO, was a far bigger danger to England than the opposition." Stephen Jones for The Times quoted in Rugbypass. [my emphasis]

And so onto today, 27th October: the 100th year anniversary of the first performance of Edward Elgar's last major work, the tear-jerking Cello Concerto in E minor. "Most concertos take a little time to come to their main point. if they don’t make you wait until the slow movement – and many do – for their crux, they at least keep the listener waiting through a short orchestral introduction. Elgar was having none of it." [sic] A bit like England XV yesterday. [edit] And another V image - obviously the player makes the difference!

Unfortunately we won't have an all BREXIT rugby World Cup final but if it were so who better than Elgar to provide some Pomp and Circumstance.

Odd ones out...

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I'm guessing that all these items have at some stage been confiscated! Saves laughing at the costumes (or voting!) I guess.

Odd ones out...

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I'm guessing that all these items have at some stage been confiscated! Saves laughing at the costumes (or voting!) I guess.

Oasis of oddness...

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Blurred vision? How else to explain the very interesting 'aberration' of the Lib Dem result in the graph below: Sebastian Payne's article about Britpop (the "an outer-suburban, middle-class fantasy of central London streetlife, with exclusively metropolitan models" [Jon Savage]) in The Spectator yesterday: "Britpop 20 years on: the Tory voters who love Oasis".



The article highlights a YouGov poll that asks questions about the quirky musical 'anti-grunge' sub-genre; the results are split depending on region, age, gender, 'social grade' and UK political party voting intentions: however Oasis wins hands-down in ALL sections apart from those intending to vote Lib Dem (graph) in which Labour and Conservative are relatively equal, UKIP similar split but the Lib Dems the complete opposite (maybe the poll was taken in Lewisham Lib Dem club?).

Oasis of oddness...

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Blurred vision? How else to explain the very interesting 'aberration' of the Lib Dem result in the graph below: Sebastian Payne's article about Britpop (the "an outer-suburban, middle-class fantasy of central London streetlife, with exclusively metropolitan models" [Jon Savage]) in The Spectator yesterday: "Britpop 20 years on: the Tory voters who love Oasis".

The article highlights a YouGov poll that asks questions about the quirky musical 'anti-grunge' sub-genre; the results are split depending on region, age, gender, 'social grade' and UK political party voting intentions: however Oasis wins hands-down in ALL sections apart from those intending to vote Lib Dem (graph) in which Labour and Conservative are relatively equal, UKIP similar split but the Lib Dems the complete opposite (maybe the poll was taken in Lewisham Lib Dem club?).

Ovine observance...

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Whilst shepherds watched...Craig writes "Did you know that only one Christmas carol was legally permitted to be sung in the Church of England following the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660? ...That carol was When Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night." No, I didn't know that nor most of the rest that he tells us summarising Jeremy Summerly's 'A Cause for Carolling' on BBC Radio 4. An excellent post and ironic when you see the raison d'être of his blog. "Only in 1782 was the legal monopoly of When Shepherds Watched revoked as Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and O Come all ye Faithful joined it in the licit embrace of the Anglican communion."  The carol, really a hymn - 'Song of the Angels at the Nativity of our Blessed Saviour' - based on the Gospel of Luke (Luke II. from v. 8. to v. 15) in which angels tell shepherds about the birth of Jesus; the words, written by poet Nahum Tate, appeared in Tate and Nicholas Brady's 1700 supplement to their New Version of the Psalms of David of 1696 ('before 1700 only the Psalms of David were permitted to be sung').

...Good-will, henceforth, from heav'n to men, 

        " begin and never cease.

Ovine observance...

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Whilst shepherds watched...Craig writes "Did you know that only one Christmas carol was legally permitted to be sung in the Church of England following the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660? ...That carol was When Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night." No, I didn't know that nor most of the rest that he tells us summarising Jeremy Summerly's 'A Cause for Carolling' on BBC Radio 4. An excellent post and ironic when you see the raison d'être of his blog. "Only in 1782 was the legal monopoly of When Shepherds Watched revoked as Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and O Come all ye Faithful joined it in the licit embrace of the Anglican communion."  The carol, really a hymn - 'Song of the Angels at the Nativity of our Blessed Saviour' - based on the Gospel of Luke (Luke II. from v. 8. to v. 15) in which angels tell shepherds about the birth of Jesus; the words, written by poet Nahum Tate, appeared in Tate and Nicholas Brady's 1700 supplement to their New Version of the Psalms of David of 1696 ('before 1700 only the Psalms of David were permitted to be sung').

...Good-will, henceforth, from heav'n to men, 
        " begin and never cease.

Oberto: opening opera...

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Last month was Joe Green's 200th anniversary: and today the 174th anniversary of his first opera: Oberto. Joseph Fortune Francis Green - or one of his works or themes - is one of the first names most people would mention if asked about Opera, (or certainly Top 5 along with Puccini, Rossini, Mozart and Wagner...or maybe Bizet?). I am of course playing by using an anglicised version of his name; I mean Giuseppe Verdi, a composer who - if we were to have such vulgar and useful things as opera stats and tables...oh, we do - would be well ahead in terms of performance runs (how many times a work was programmed not the number of performances) and five of the Top 20 operas. He almost ended his career before it had begun as his two young children and wife died before the debut of his 2nd opera [Bio], Un Giorno de Regno; this wasn't successful; ironically it means 'A One-Day Reign' and Verdi was almost a one hit wonder.

"Verdi’s music transcends the barriers between high and low culture. Many of his arias count among the greatest songs ever written, streaming out of opera houses and into football stadiums and even the charts."

[from video debate: Verdi vs. Wagner]. What is Ows on about opera for? Well, opera is posh, innit, and that last quote mentioning football chants reminded me that last week Paul, writing about class envy, put up some very interesting information: "Class envy unfortunately is deeply routed in the British psyche, like subconscious racism it is always with us. Football is 'the working mans game' at £50 a ticket (the cheaper end) whilst the English National Opera (£22) and the Royal Ballet (£24) are for 'toffs'."



P.S. If you think I'm being inventive or pretentious I have written this listening to the Overture from Nabucco.

Oberto: opening opera...

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Last month was Joe Green's 200th anniversary: and today the 174th anniversary of his first opera: Oberto. Joseph Fortune Francis Green - or one of his works or themes - is one of the first names most people would mention if asked about Opera, (or certainly Top 5 along with Puccini, Rossini, Mozart and Wagner...or maybe Bizet?). I am of course playing by using an anglicised version of his name; I mean Giuseppe Verdi, a composer who - if we were to have such vulgar and useful things as opera stats and tables...oh, we do - would be well ahead in terms of performance runs (how many times a work was programmed not the number of performances) and five of the Top 20 operas. He almost ended his career before it had begun as his two young children and wife died before the debut of his 2nd opera [Bio], Un Giorno de Regno; this wasn't successful; ironically it means 'A One-Day Reign' and Verdi was almost a one hit wonder.

"Verdi’s music transcends the barriers between high and low culture. Many of his arias count among the greatest songs ever written, streaming out of opera houses and into football stadiums and even the charts."

[from video debate: Verdi vs. Wagner]. What is Ows on about opera for? Well, opera is posh, innit, and that last quote mentioning football chants reminded me that last week Paul, writing about class envy, put up some very interesting information: "Class envy unfortunately is deeply routed in the British psyche, like subconscious racism it is always with us. Football is 'the working mans game' at £50 a ticket (the cheaper end) whilst the English National Opera (£22) and the Royal Ballet (£24) are for 'toffs'."

P.S. If you think I'm being inventive or pretentious I have written this listening to the Overture from Nabucco.

Obnoxious Ohio ornery's opus...

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An interesting post by Mark Steyn (as always...) at the weekend: "America's so-called government shutdown* got me thinking. What do government officials do when they're not governmentalizing? Well, some of them write hit songs."...that got my attention:

"...who is the only successful candidate on a national ticket to write a big hit song? A song so big it features in the plot of the novel cited above - Summer Blue by Floyd Skloot - not to mention a bunch of movies, including Diner and She's Having A Baby. It's the only American Number One and British Number One to be written by a Nobel Peace Prize winner... ...A song so popular, it's been in and out of the charts pretty much every few years for six decades. A song so versatile it's been recorded by Bing Crosby, Van Morrison, Dinah Shore, UB40, Liberace, Barry White, Merle Haggard, Elton John, Lawrence Welk, Donny and Marie Osmond, Louis Armstrong, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Sammy Davis Jr, Phoebe Snow, Isaac Hayes, and the Gaylads."

WOW. Well, if you haven't already read Mark's piece, it was this man and here's Cliff's version.



* Re the shutdown, all I can say is don't get your US news from the BBC.

Obnoxious Ohio ornery's opus...

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An interesting post by Mark Steyn (as always...) at the weekend: "America's so-called government shutdown* got me thinking. What do government officials do when they're not governmentalizing? Well, some of them write hit songs."...that got my attention:

"...who is the only successful candidate on a national ticket to write a big hit song? A song so big it features in the plot of the novel cited above - Summer Blue by Floyd Skloot - not to mention a bunch of movies, including Diner and She's Having A Baby. It's the only American Number One and British Number One to be written by a Nobel Peace Prize winner... ...A song so popular, it's been in and out of the charts pretty much every few years for six decades. A song so versatile it's been recorded by Bing Crosby, Van Morrison, Dinah Shore, UB40, Liberace, Barry White, Merle Haggard, Elton John, Lawrence Welk, Donny and Marie Osmond, Louis Armstrong, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Sammy Davis Jr, Phoebe Snow, Isaac Hayes, and the Gaylads."

WOW. Well, if you haven't already read Mark's piece, it was this man and here's Cliff's version.

* Re the shutdown, all I can say is don't get your US news from the BBC.

Onanara...

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Damn, missed it (here's a screen shot in case they delete past events); would have loved to be there with the group, beating that thing; of course the name may suggest you'd do it alone - thumping that tight-stretched skin that gives life and joy at parties, oh yes, but it's usually touched by women...with a stick.

Onanara...

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Damn, missed it (here's a screen shot in case they delete past events); would have loved to be there with the group, beating that thing; of course the name may suggest you'd do it alone - thumping that tight-stretched skin that gives life and joy at parties, oh yes, but it's usually touched by women...with a stick.

Ooh obbligato...

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Ooh, Heaven knows. RIP Donna Summer, Queen of Discos. "I Feel Love" wasn't the first song of hers I loved but it was the one that had most impact: it is taken from her 1977 concept album I Remember Yesterday and it was the "future" segment of the album.



According to David Bowie "its impact on the genre's direction was recognized early on: 'One day in Berlin ...Eno came running in and said, 'I have heard the sound of the future.' ... he puts on 'I Feel Love', by Donna Summer ... He said, 'This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.' Which was more or less right." [Wiki]

Ooh obbligato...

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Ooh, Heaven knows. RIP Donna Summer, Queen of Discos. "I Feel Love" wasn't the first song of hers I loved but it was the one that had most impact: it is taken from her 1977 concept album I Remember Yesterday and it was the "future" segment of the album.

According to David Bowie "its impact on the genre's direction was recognized early on: 'One day in Berlin ...Eno came running in and said, 'I have heard the sound of the future.' ... he puts on 'I Feel Love', by Donna Summer ... He said, 'This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.' Which was more or less right." [Wiki]