Ronnie Drew is survived by his beard

[alexsarll]

Went to the New Royal Family's comeback show last night at the ever-baffling Lark In The Park - absolutely top hole. Lots of people out to see 'em, rewarded with icecoldinalex going back to blond. a new drummer in a very fetching sailor suit, and heteroerotic Bowie/Ronson guitar antics from charleston and thedavidx. Oh, and chocolate digestives, of course. New single 'I.W.I.S.H.I.W.A.S.GAY' made its live debut, except that live it's not a minute of electropop madness, it's 'Another One Bites The Dust' meets the Sugarhill Gang, especially once moleintheground got in there with the gay guest rap. That's gay meaning homosexual, obv.

Stardust is of all Neil Gaiman's works the one to show the most evidence of Lord Dunsany' influence - and that's saying something. Nonetheless, even the success of the lovely film version did not prepare me for news of a Dunsany film. I confess that Dean Spanley is not a work I know, but if Peter O'Toole, Sam Neill and Jeremy Northam are all in the film, then I have reason to be optimistic. Though I note they have all also worked together on the dismal Tudors, so maybe I should be expecting an announcement of Joss Stone joining the project as the King of Elfland's daughter.

I've noticed the whole Georgia farrago has been mostly absent from my friendslist, and I don't blame people, because there's not much to say; Russia's throwing its weight around again, there's sod all we can realistically do about it, and certain sections of the Left are creaming themselves with glee and blaming the US, just like the old days. But this one I cannot let past without comment: "It is rare that all the blame is on one side. In fact, both sides are probably to blame. That is very important to understand," Germany's Chancellor, there, talking about a war. Perhaps she should acquaint herself with the biographies of some of her own predecessors, she might find a rather startling counter-example. That sort of moral equivalence and equivocation gets my back up whoever's spitting it, but coming from someone in that particular job, is simply chilling.
(And while I'm back off the current affairs wagon:
Paul Duffy, 35, from Castlemilk, was part of a four-strong gang who smashed their way into a car dealer's home...The High Court in Edinburgh heard that Duffy was freed on bail nine days before the raid in February. He had 52 previous convictions for crimes including robbery and carrying a knife. And this man has been sentenced to...50 months. It being deeply unlikely that he will even serve the whole of that. Seriously, what are the odds that this man's continued existence will ever do other than taint the lives of other, better people? What possible purpose is served by allowing the continued existence of a human being so fundamentally rotten?)

I realise there are few lower forms of blogging than 'point and laugh at the interweb mentalist' but what the Hell - go here, skim the article (which is filler, frankly), and then check the comments from a prize pillock I may have mentioned before, 'anytimefrances'. ATF's feeble brain is entirely consumed by a knot of obsessions - chiefly, the notion that rock and rap music (they're interchangeable) are synonymous with drugs and noise pollution, and that they're leading to the demise of Real Literature and Proper Music. In and of itself this would be of strictly historical interest - in an age where even the Mail covers Glastonbury without much hysteria, seeing such retrograde opinions in the wild is a bit like finding a living coelacanth, except uglier. What raises the experience to the level of comedy is that while ATF grandly proclaims its own cultural and intellectual superiority to the foolish rock fans, its incoherent arguments are unfailingly delivered with worse spelling and grammar (never mind sanity) than anyone else on there: "wake up to reality. don't pretend, we can turn it up 'real loud' because everyone loves it. it's sick humiliation detritus." Though I admit that's an atypical quote - for starters, the apostrophes are in the right place.

Comments

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

I think your Coelacanth analogy is flawed. Finding a living Coelacanth was a cause for celebration. People still run around going "how freaking cool are these things!".

Someone like ATF is closer to a fishing boat dredging up those basking shark carcass that look a bit like sea monsters. People run around going "sweet god what is that thing?"

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Fair, but really - coealcanths are only cool 'cos they're old, aren't they? I mean, if you were given a list of their coevals and asked to rank them in order of awesomeness of finding a live population, they wouldn't make the top 20, would they

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

It would be nice to find non-avian dinosaurs (but which sort? its like saying "non-primate mammals", a massively diverse group you can't boil down to representative groups), or a placoderm, etc, but they haven't survived, so we just have to make do with what we've got. "Freaking awesome" animals tend not to survive major extinctions terribly well.

Nor do you tend to find "missing links" persisting for terribly long. Archaeopteryx wasn't a particularly talented flyer, and was outcompeted by its descendants.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

If they failed to survive extinctions, we can only assume that the triceratops et al were, contrary to the impression they gave, insufficiently freaking awesome. As such, we can but hope that certain isolated populations were more freaking awesome than the general population. If the awesomeness took the form of ninja training, for instance, it would also explain why we've yet to find them.

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

Most humans will judge awesomeness on the basis of size and such, which puts you first on the list of "going extinct" when a 10km wide rock falls out the sky on your head. Most of what survives is small, inoffensive and fairly boring (the old "all that survives the nuclear holocaust will be rats and cockroaches" adage).

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Although isn't that a myth as regards cockroaches, at least in temperate climates which would be too cold for them without the warmth of human habitation?