As usual, Jeremy Paxman comes up with the bon mot – in fact the mot juste. In fact, he says exactly the right thing about the ConDem tax messing…

Even back in WW2 the gals loved the flag

If we don’t stand up to be counted then who will count?

The ‘Gal’ you can see in this picture is not some anonymous lady, this is my grandma. This is Sheila Anne Barkdale. This is the woman who taught me about standing up and being counted. I loved that woman and I love that flag. This woman was POOR in money but not poor in ambition. This woman knew the dream!

She went to the photobooth in 1941 and had the black and white you see here taken. She begged and pleaded with her boss to borrow that uniform cos she had the ricketts herself and could not join our Armed Forces (thanks be to God for our men and girls in Our Armed Forces)

She told me that story again and again until it got through to me. She told me that even though her boss said, “No” it never did stop my Grandma. She told me how she (heartbreaking) worked the day and waited that night until her boss had told her to take the uniform for cleaning.

So she did. And on the way, she took this PATRIOTIC photograph that I treasure to this very day, this very hour in which I – with God one side and my Grandma’s beautiful ghost on the other – I write this piece.

Remember, it takes guts to stand up. And it takes real guts to stand up and yell!

If we don’t stand up to be counted then who will count?

God Bless US all.

Glen

Glen Barkdale

“Ministers were accused last night of deliberately driving poor people out of wealthy inner cities as London councils revealed they were preparing a mass exodus of low-income families from the capital because of coalition benefit cuts.”

So says that left-leaning – yeah, leaning like a vodka drunk on the Kremlin Wall – Guardian ‘newspaper’ in the United Kingdom.

And I don’t understand. So, let US go over that one more time:

“Ministers were accused last night of deliberately driving poor people out of wealthy inner cities as London…

See what I mean?

You don’t? There appears to be problem as far as The Guardian, or Gruaniad as it’s know cos of its history of misspelling and grammatical mistakes, is concerned. There’s a problem with poor people living in wealthy areas. How does that work? How do poor people get to live in wealthy areas from the get-go? They are POOR. They are NOT WEALTHY!

Don’t get me wrong, I came from poor people stock. My daddy and mom were poor as you can imagine. We lived, and loved (heartbreaking) in what people today would call a shack. The people in our neighborhood were poor. Dirt poor. And what did that do?

WHAT DID THAT DO to a dirt poor family?

It made us not want to be no longer poor! It made us want to fight. My daddy was too proud to go get any so-called benefits (or ‘millstones for the lazy’ as mom called them) so mom worked two jobs, and she was PROUD to do it.

I studied hard at the public library before joining the navy where I learned two great lessons:

• Hard worked never killed a man.
• Travelling to overseas shows that home is where the heart, mind and soul is.

The learning and the navy, and the fact that my navy buddy, Jonas Blauburn III needed someone to get his radio station listened to meant that I no longer NEED to live in a poor area. Why? I got a job! Jonas, against his initial thinking – I am a convincing man with the right use of the right ammunition (another thing to thank our Armed Forces for thank God!) soon saw sense and cents when listeners flocked like… when listeners flocked to the Glen Barkdale Blows Hard Against the Winds of Liberalistic Change Drive-Time Show!

Those London poor people can get a job too!

GET A JOB

God Bless Us All

George Orwell passport picture via MI5

Good lord, I was looking for a picture to illustrate a story about the Orwell Rolls in His Grave documentary and I came across this passport pic of George Orwell.

The first striking thing about this image is, obviously, the Hitler/Chaplin moustache. I’m guessing it was the latter and that his photo came from the 1920s/early 1930s. Still, even if it was Chaplin, George (or Eric Blair) wasn’t exactly noted for his comedic slapstick work.

The second most striking, to me, thing about this image is that I found it on the MI5 website. Sat there under the heading, ’4 September 2007 releases: Communists and suspected Communists’ was George… or Eric.

Included in the text is the fact that, according to a Sergeant Ewing (January 1942):
"This man has advanced Communist views, and several of his Indian friends say that they have often seen him at Communist meetings. He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours."

Given that the documentary I am going to blog about includes references to 1984 and Winston Smith’s changing historical records at the Ministry of Truth, there’s a genuine irony in being able to search the Internet for MI5 records.

Keep the Asipistra Flying

A ‘documentary’ or a ‘polemic’ regarding the proposition that the media is totally in cahoots with governments and that George Orwell would object.

Some interesting points made, but as ever, it overlooks the cock-up theory of history over the conspiracy. That said, it’s worth a look for people who honestly believe that ‘the truth’ and ‘getting hits’ are enough to justify yourself as a journalist.

The fact is that the truth is easily manipulated, and often times subjective observation such as that done by Orwell in Wigan or Robert Capa’s Spanish Civil War coverage or Keith Murdoch’s Gallipoli coverage are as worthy, if not more so. The only truth about journalism is that it is subjective.

Sarah Silverman

To be exact, Mr Anderson tweeted that Ms Silverman was “God awful”. The video of her performance was never aired. Now, I have not only got a connection to this by dint of the fact that Chris Anderson was a former boss. I was also the father of a seriously disabled child who died in 2005.

There’s been some misunderstanding about this post.

I used to work at the Australian Caption Centre. Once upon a time a copy of South Park came in featuring a character called Timmy – you know the guy, cerebral palsy. So, rather than get me to caption the episode, I was taken aside by some really good-willed people. They were sure that I’d be offended by the sight of an actual disabled person being portrayed in a satirical cartoon.

I watched the episode and was happy as happy could be that Timmy was portrayed as a character. Not an evil genius. Not a pitiable caricature (thanks Nick Cage). Not a ‘Token’. Timmy was there. More people were offended for me and my daughter than I was. More people were made uncomfortable by a home truth than I was. The home truth? Heavily disabled people exist.

I think that Sarah Silverman’s thought-catalyst (as I’m sure the people at TED would say over the sound of heads nodding at the same speed as headbangers at a Slayer gig) offended people on that basis. Also on the basis that, yes, there are a lot of kids out there already. Yes, the retarded ones need love too. Yes, in a great number of cases, such as mine, those kids will die before their parents do. Those are real thoughts.

In short: I actually agree with Sarah Silverman on this one. Thanks for bringing it up.

PS: why were you so rubbish when you came to England though?

Watch the clip

Mr Rupert Murdoch sir.

Ah, there I was on Sunday night watching Exit Through the Gift Shop thinking to myself, “Good on you Banksy, what with your under-mining of expectations and all that good stuff.”

Then he went and undermined my expectations again. There I was yesterday with the Internet (specifically the usual Twitter fawns) scweeeming, “Oooh, Banksy has done opening credits for The Simpsons, it’s the best! I love Bansky, he’s so subversive! And The Simpsons, they’re so satirical!”"

Now, I admit that most of the people I follow on Twitter are either in marketing and PR or are self-aggrandising hacks (like myself) who spend their lives scweeming with joy over such over-rated filth as Beatles Rock Band, Muse, their own friendships with each, and anything else that keeps the fear away. So, I shouldn’t have been surprised at the fact that, in order to maintain a level of wittering happy faces no one pointed out that Mr Murdoch sir makes quite a bit of cash from The Simpsons, which in turn enables funding of positive influences as Bill O’Reilly, Glen Beck and The Sun. Awesome stuff.

Still and all, at least in making the titles for a tired cartoon that revels in its own self-reference, Banksy has indeed over-turned my middle class, holier than thou expectations. You win… bet you’re a Bristol City fan though.

Oh, you can find the Banksy Simpson’s thing all over the Internet, I’m not linking to it. Humbug!

Mickey and Pluto shocked in their discovery.

Mickey Mouse Discovers the Government Cartoon Conspiracy Against Glenn Beck

Youtube user ikat381 has posted a follow-up to the Donald Duck Meets Glen Beck video posted recently.

Unlogo is a web service – from Hacktivist/tech artist Jeff Crouse – that eliminates logos and other corporate signage from videos. On a practical level, it takes back your personal media from the corporations and advertisers. On a technical level, it is a really cool combination of some brand new OpenCV and FFMPEG functionality. On a poetic level, it is a tool for focusing on what is important in the record of your life rather than the ubiquitous messages that advertisers want you to focus on. In short, Unlogo gives people the opportunity to opt out of having corporate messages permanently imprinted into the photographic record of their lives.

It’s simple: you upload a video, and after your video is processed, you get an email with a link to the unlogofied version (example). You can choose to have the logos simply blocked out with a solid color or replaced with other images, such as the disembodied head of the CEO of the company. This scheme is a bit ridiculous (which is kind of my style), but I like it because it literalizes the intrusion into the record of your life that these logos represent.

Unlogo Intro from Jeff Crouse on Vimeo.

New Towns - a dream that died

An ideal that, from my experience gave us Canberra via Milton Keynes.

One of those dreamy but backboned films from when people came home from wars and wanted to make the most of what was left after the bombing.