Christmas Eve [6 to 10]

(0754) … after which I’ll refer to Wednesday instead. Good morning all, first light up … yep, past the soldtice now. Reasonably on track for today at this end. (0809)

 

10. Moosh corner


9. Deadbeat of the day


8. Good thing too … orrible bint … nasty piece of work


7. Note where I ticked


6. Numbers of invaders

Christmas Eve [2 to 5]

(0611) Morning all, let’s get this show on the road. Amfortas in his quietus time, O&P’s wife and hisself, IYE’s lurgy, Ripper also remembered today.

 

5. Steve at 1241

  • ‘Deeply Upset’ Danish Authorities Summon US Ambassador After Trump Appoints Jeff Landry as Greenland Envoy, and Says About the Artic Island: ‘We Have To Have It’ (JH: Steve, please don’t use single talking marks … it bgrs up the works here, pls use doubles. Topic … remember this is Denmark, not Greenland itself … 🍿🍿🍿🍿)
  • DHS Triples Reward For Illegal Aliens Who Self-Deport Over Christmas
  • Fulton County’s Admission That 315,000 Votes Were Unlawfully Cast Exonerates President Trump Once And For All
  • Vice President JD Vance Participates in Gruelling Navy SEAL Workout
  • Greenland; Trump wants it, EU fears US. Vance, Ukraine will lose Donetsk. Battleships target China
  • The BBC’s superflu campaign: How it started and how it’s going
  • Google and Microsoft to demand “age verification” from Australian
  • Much more.

4. Andy has got this “dodgy website” investigation thing going

That’s nice, appreciated, keep your eyes open, readers for this occasional series. Because of the nature of the subject, best I don’t transfer urls, ok.

3. The real issue


2. DAD at 1241

a) [Lots of twisted and soiled underware in Europe.] The United States announced on Tuesday sanctions targeting five European personalities committed to strict regulation of tech, including the former European commissioner, Frenchman Thierry Breton….

b) Broken and defeated, Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission is a sinking ship. This is a Commission that confuses moralistic fervour and emotional manipulation with legal authority and slogan-infested political theatre with actual power.

c) “Dance, pig”: an ongoing investigation to find the author – surely a Briton – of the humiliation of a Jewish child at Roissy airport.

d) El Salvador’s justice system sentences members of a terrible gang to “exemplary sentences”: from 463 to 1,335 years in prison.

e) Happiness is in Pasta.

Italian cuisine has just been awarded the prestigious status of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO….

Christmas Eve [1]

 


(0500) This is virtually my Christmas message to all readers, which I’ll also post on X but do a separate one at OoL. Merry Christmas to all our patrons and stumble-upons, even those hostile. With some friends not well, my main concern is them, esp. one mate close to the end … so prayers for them seem important, also for those out there we don’t know, doing it hard … they’re first priority.

Then there is the issue of those I’m close to, to varying degrees, on the sites I am at, inc. X … the main problem is both overreach, being over-friendly to those who might not appreciate it … plus being not friendly enough for those who assumed, rightly, that we were friendlier. One friend sent out a generic Merry Christmas and that was that.

Miffed? Initially but then I thought … most of us have dozens to remember … and they must be remembered … my memory is notiriously bad, I have to work from what’s written down. There is truly no offence intended … also, wishing MC out of the blue can jolt some who’d forgotten me. It’s a fraught thing, Christmas … the potential to offend is high, even in quality of gift. Offence is truly not intended … even genuine enemy out there … let’s call it a Christmas truce, defences still in place. Health here is currently not bad.

Lastly, Merry Christmas to all, may a joyful spirit prevail … best to you and yours. (0513)

.o0o.

In practical terms, I do have a visitor today, place here needs cleaning up a bit, so do I, there are cards to go out and messages at blogs and on X between now and midday tomorrow, plus chatting with friends and neighbours. Somehow I’ll keep a skeleton blog service running as I know that many of our readers would like that to be happening … hoping this is a welcoming place these next two days … some films, a few items, some politics.

Tuesday [12 till close of play]

(1606) Evening all … back to 2025 eh? Thoughts and prayers with Amfortas, Old P, IYE, any of us doing it hard just now.

 

20. Secret passages

19. Moosh corner


18. Steve corner

Hearts of Oak at 1241:

Rev. Chris Wickland – The Birth of the Messiah: Light in Bethlehem

War room at 1241:

  • James Rickards: From The Start These Warmongers Never Cared About Ukraine. This Has Been About Getting Rid Of Putin! For There To Be Real Peace, First Zelensky Must Go. As Long As He’s There, There Won’t Be A Breakthrough
  • President Trump Announces New “Trump Class” Of Navy Battleships
  • Captain Fanell On The Fleet We’ve Needed for Two Decades: Time to Execute the Trump-Class Battleship Program
  • Admiral Sonny Masso On The New Trump Class Battleships: This Is Gonna Be A Game Changer For Our Navy, I Just Hope That We Can Get This Moving Along Smartly So It Doesn’t Lose Its Energy

17. Mila Joy


16. They simply leap into suppression

… at the drop of a hat.


15. More of the tacky


14. Another closure


13. DAD

12. Steve

Tuesday [11]

Still exploring at what point in youth culture we changed without realising we were being changed by those influencing tastes. There was a plethora of largely positive songs where male and female looked at each other at least … why did it change?

Aspiration and avarice … bands tried to become more complicated for street cred, hence the wow factor with jarring guitars competing, music was almost dead by 1968/9, then came the turgid Pink Floyds and the screaming Black Sabbath and Cream … and the change of path from fun to … whatever … cleverness … was signposted by Led Zeppelin in 1971, after the Beatles had gone Swami and broken up, after the drug-addled, STD ridden Woodstock, also the change in education into regressive, uneducated … Hendrix died, Joplin, Jim Morrison …

… and Plant had sung about it in Stairway to Heaven … there are two paths … youth had been heading upwards or so it seemed, so bands like Zeppelin and Jefferson Airplane, plus the new metal speed guitar freaks, turned it onto the road to hell and youth dutifully followed, as if behind a Pied Piper … anything melodic was passé, twee … the hidden culture makers behind the scenes were directing it, as they had created flower power, beat generation, hippies … Leary and psychedelics … now it was the road to hell, which yoof saw as kool.

Kids or just past kidhood … we had to be kool, man, had to be with the latest wow … we were led away from “wholesome” … that was so L7 … for the newest cheap, risque trick … as kids are wowed by. Punk was light years from the melodic … it was all frenzied darkness … except the Ramones who at least brought old rockabilly back into it.

When did Ian Curtis suicide? 1980, just as ska was enjoying a couple of years … then the depressing 80s … decade of nothingness … kids had grown up, were having families themselves or else it was all sex and no commitment … late 80s was acid house, followed by Betty Boo and rap style … everything dark in nature. Or else yuppy paradise for the aspiring new, powerdressed middle.

First half of the 90s was at least some attempt to bring back music, but it was lost by 1997, just as the lost generation started … Gen Zee … generation of being sold short, badly educated, diverted into perversion, as primary children. Not unlike the Eloi. May as well not even mention the 2000s and later … and here we are.

Naturally, most will not accept my case above … some might.

Tue Mat

 

“A fey, light-hearted frolic that almost floats away on its own marshmellowy charm, “The Mouse That Roared” served to introduce American audiences to the man who would reshape film comedy in the 1960s much the way his countrymen the Beatles did with pop music.

Yes, that’s Peter Sellers making what amounted to his debut as an over-the-title star, playing not one but three roles. First, he’s Count Rupert Mountjoy, prime minister of the tiny nation of Grand Fenwick, who hatches the scheme of declaring war on the United States in order to quickly surrender and reap Marshall Plan-style aid. Then he’s Tully Bascombe, the nearsighted leader of the Fenwick expeditionary force, who stumbles upon a weapon to force an American surrender. Finally, he’s the Grand Duchess Gloriana, ruler of Grand Fenwick and very keen on war so long as no one gets hurt.

With that premise, and Sellers in the driver’s seat, you expect more than “Mouse That Roared” delivers. Not that it’s bad, or unentertaining. But after a rousing opening 20 minutes spent basking in Fenwick’s goofy ambiance and establishing the daring plot, the film loses steam; first moving the action to an unconvincing Manhattan setting, then inserting a romantic subplot between Tully and an American girl (Jean Seberg) which features neither actor to good effect. The comedy is never sharp, but over time it becomes forced, recovering a bit only at the end.

It’s a shame because the premise, as said, offers much, and director Jack Arnold, while no Kubrick, seems to appreciate both Sellers’ gift for light comedy and the kind of film which suits that best. At times, especially with some inspired breaks from the action, “The Mouse That Roared” feels more like an Ealing comedy than the Ealing comedy Sellers actually made four years before, the far darker “Ladykillers.”

“Mouse” has an edge to it, regarding the folly of mutually assured destruction and American hegemony, yet it manages to couch this very cleverly by emphasizing how essentially good the U.S. really is. You try selling the idea of a film showcasing a successful sneak attack against New York, in which the attackers are presented as the good guys. Yet “Mouse That Roared” was a monster hit, and for that Arnold and his team deserve credit.

“Only an imbecile could have won this war, and he did!” complains Mountjoy of Bascombe, seeing no good in holding America hostage with a football-shaped explosive device 100 times more powerful than an H-Bomb.

Sellers is distinctive if not a laugh magnet in his three roles, but the film suffers from poor supporting work around him. Except for Leo McKern, playing Mountjoy’s scheming ally, no one distinguishes him- or herself around Sellers, and a couple of key performances are gratingly bad. The humor of the Fenwickians being mistaken as spacemen by Manhattanites is beaten to the ground, as is the “comedy” of Tully’s gang peppering the QEII with arrows as it passes them on the ocean.

History favors the big battalions, but comedy loves the underdog. Here you are presented with a vehicle for an underdog who would prove every bit as worthy of our favor as Chaplin or Keaton, though it would take better films to make that point.”

Advent twenty on Tuesday

 

There are two carols I like to reserve for the last two nights of Advent … t’other is Silent Night in a German square. Both are serious plus joyful as well, colourful … the singer today is known as coloratura.

This is especially poignant today as I just had a letter from Amfortas’s son … still holding on but slipping … going to happen to us all. His son said that Chris had mentioned me quite a few times. Amfortas was a Catholic Knight, so this below would be right up his street I’m thinking. Prayers as requested please patrons.

One departs … a child is born. Makes a person think. Chris Rea yesterday.

The increasingly destructive hegemony

… is showing signs of being overturned and this overturning is being spearheaded by young Gen Zee ladies, at least in America, backed by antiWoke men. Against this … the monstrous regiment of Wokerati, male and female, still reigns, e.g. von Leyen … for how much longer?

To say that males have simply “checked out” is the understatement of the late 20s but at the same time, antifeminazi women are surging, esp. online, such as this young lady below.

For a start, there’s the content within the youtube which really should be watched by westerners male and female … the insights are many. But at the same time, the very thing the two ladies are arguing against … dominance and feminisation of almost all key roles in society … they undercut their own argument by their own sharp analyses and most pleasant style of presentation.

Precisely what they’re doing here is their forte, among so many fortes. As I was writing now, a ticker message came up of a new vlog by Ruairidh … one of the classier males, as sharp as a tack. We have insightful males at this blog … but we also have two sharp cookies at least in the female dept.

Just as this Christine does, I also wish to set aside the sheer hostility of one sex towards the other today, mocking, scoring points … and yes, I’ve an ulterior motive, alluded to by these young ladies as well:




All right, personally I find them delightfully OTT but hey … they’re young, what on earth do you expect? There are plenty appearing now too … voluble, not shrill, sane, with all the other assets as well … they’re a major component in our war to overturn the hegemony of Wokery. And it’s increasingly their world now, no longer ours.