(0926) Not cold but gloomy sky. (1045) One of these busy ones again. (1058)
20. True
19. Obama and the other crooks
18. Laura the Vetting Czar, ha ha
17. The evidence accrues
16. Over at OoL
https://orphansofliberty.blogspot.com/2025/07/opening-cafe.html
(0615)(0652)
15. Just a sshot, not a clip
14. Dearieme
(i) Usually allegations about Rishi’s extreme wealth have proved to be false – they have treated his wife’s money as his own. Could this be an exception?
(ii) The “Blind Trust”: aha! Joe Bloggs might assume that the phrase implies a trust fund where the trustees decide on the investments and the settler of the money is kept in ignorance. Wonderful if true. But we learned from Toni Blair’s blind trust adventure that Cherie Blair was instructing the trustees what to invest in. So I now assume that all purported Blind Trusts are fake.
Maybe, just to be sure that Joe Bloggs understands the corruption involved we should refer to them as “Blair Trusts”.
13. Redacted come home, all is forgiven ☺️
Seriously though … look at that song in Sat 10 again … whatever your view of the song, the genre … every one of those guys and one gal were musos, adept at what they did, the result was not a cacophony but a blend of elements.
We need the angles, the links, even the remonstrances of each of us to jog along, to get there in the end. Toodles and I were talking about Long Tall Texans with six guns or whatever … we even have a France based contingent here … if we’re westwide, we’re getting a mix of approaches … there’s a connection with Mandy Gall with info from Eire … whowoodathunk it even a decade ago … she detests Sinn Fein … now tell me that all these angles are bad … dot dot dot.
At the same time, my job, “editingly”, is to watch flooding when the levy breaks … maybe we need an overflow channel for that … dead easy for me to create an “overflow page” for “longs” or long rants. Idea would be that if you feel a long rant coming on, drop it there, I see it, signpost here in big letters, just as I’d do for NOWP, OoL, for any of our drops. That Overflow link would be in HQ sidebar near the top, rather than in the navbar, which serves all sites.
You might ask why not just use the underused UHCWP? Cough, how can I put this … HQ is unique in that it has this extra freedom and self-control, you see, to the other sites, with bags of disk space … best to keep long rants within HQ itself. Were I to have some sort of index, table of contents at the top of that page, you could find the particular piece easily enough.
Let’s try that anyway … give me an hour or so to set it up.
12. IMHO, the purtiest gal in Congress, on digital currency
11. IYE
CO is over the target, imo. 47 is comped.
(0526) Grey bleah rises out there, low Gates cloud. (0606)
10. Was she pushed into it?
Plus Donny and Pammy? Or was it all part of the cunning plan?
Living on Tulsi time … with apologies to Eric, Sheryl, Don and Tulsi G
9. Uh huh … Fraser Nelson?
Anything to say, former Spectator editor?
8. DAD at 1110
a) Nice. The statue of Joan of Arc in Nice will not be removed. The Marseille Administrative Court of Appeal ruled Thursday in favor of the Nice municipality…
b) A far-left LGBTQ+ activist in France is alleged to have been at the heart of an underground pedophile network that drugged and raped children as young as three years old…
c) As the government seeks to save on healthcare spending, the French National Authority for Health (HAS) has unveiled recommendations aimed at “guaranteeing safe and high-quality care” for adult gender transition requests.…
d) ‘The situation has become intolerable!’ Nice is restricting access to city center streets due to spiraling drug crisis…
7. I just turned 60 today, yay! Razmatazz!
Translated, it just means that for 60 days straight, I’ve posted “Reader drops” … which in turn means our boys/lads/chaps have been doin’ their thang at NOWP … which in turn means that it’s running nicely, touch wood and/or thank the Lord.
6. Andy at 1110
Ski News Oz is always a good source of amusing stories. If only we had something similar over here. | https://youtu.be/1FLzcSqHgnM?si=m0en2InLHMISVoP2
……
JH: Ski? Uh huh, it’s ski season just now downunder, I was forgetting.
(0429) Morning all, too dark to see outside. You have a wonderful day and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. (0520)
5. Careful which you pick
4. Colbert
3. Steve at 1110
2. Yesterday
The sanitised version:
1. Epping … Adam Brooks reminds us
“What then happened, was the Police escorted 50 “ ANTIFA “ down towards the hotel, with masks on and covered faces. The riot Police then had to kettle those extremists into a side street, due to loads of local teenagers & youths coming out to challenge them. What we’ve seen is not good, but questions have to be asked, why are ANTIFA allowed to turn up for trouble with masks on? That sparked the violence seen in Epping tonight, nothing else. This is not a far right protest, it’s a town of worried parents,uncles and grandparents.”
It was followed by police vans being used to actually drive antifa out of the mayhem safely. Why? Who authorised this? There was a shot of masked males, all features covered up, escorted by plod … at least this lot are unmasked:
(1651) Finally back, evening all.
19. Steve and war room at 1110
18. True colours
17. One of the nastiest incidents was one of the riot police in Epping
… verballed by a protester. Usual response is two police take him down, handcuffs etc. etc. … the policeman stepped fwd and broke the man’s teeth with the riot shield.
16. The Unholy Alliance
15. First Nations I think mean the First Fleet, 1788
14. Ssssh, don’t say the word “Christian”
13. Steve and Hearts of Oak at 1110
Hearts of Oak: Ben Habib – Advance UK: Fighting for Britain’s Cultural and Political Revival
Review:
Johnny Mansell is forced to flee London after running up large gambling debts and returns to his native town, the industrial town of Rawborough, where he moves into a flat with his brother Dave and Dave’s girlfriend Calico. (It’s a nickname!). The two brothers are, at least on the surface, very different. Johnny is a suave, fashionably dressed playboy, whose sources of income are rather mysterious, whereas the dowdy, bespectacled Dave is a wages clerk in a local steel mill.
The outwardly respectable Dave, however, is hiding a guilty secret. He has embezzled £300 from his employers in order to buy expensive gifts for the glamorous but mercenary Calico and desperately needs to repay the money before the auditors make their annual visit to the firm. Johnny believes that he can win enough money in a betting coup, but Calico comes up with a plan for Dave to rob his workplace and to steal enough money to cover his fraud. Dave is desperate enough to go ahead with this plan, and the rest of the film deals with the disastrous consequences of his action.
British films noirs, unlike their American counterparts, often included elements of the “kitchen sink realism” which was very much in vogue in the Britain of the late fifties and early sixties, not only in the cinema but also in literature and the visual arts. “Tread Softly Stranger” with its factories and its shabby flats and nightclubs, permeated by an atmosphere of seediness and moral corruption, fits well into this tradition. George Baker’s Johnny, a handsome, charming drifter living on the edge of the law but with a certain sense of honour and loyalty, is a classic noir figure.
This was the second film which Diana Dors made after returning to Britain following her brief and unsuccessful attempt to conquer Hollywood; the first, “The Long Haul”, was also a crime drama. Dors is often thought of as Britain’s answer to America’s blonde bombshells like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, but on the evidence of this film she could also be seen as the British equivalent of femmes fatales like Lizabeth Scott and Gloria Grahame.
American films noirs often featured a beautiful and seductive but dangerous young woman as one of the main characters, and British directors working in the same style sometimes copied this feature. Although there were occasional brunette examples, such as the character played by Ava Gardner in “The Killers”, the majority of these women were blonde, possibly because blondes had a greater visual impact in films shot in black-and-white. (This was said to have been the reason why Hitchcock used blondes in so many of his films, although he continued doing so even after he switched to colour).
Diana’s pneumatic figure and platinum blonde looks meant that she was often cast in comedies, generally with a sexual edge to them, but her real strength was in serious drama. (Although many people thought of her as little more than a sexy bimbo, she was actually a classically trained actress). “Yield to the Night” from two years earlier is often quoted as her greatest achievement in the cinema, but in my view she is equally good here.
The two roles are in a sense complementary. Mary, her character in “Yield to the Night”, is a murderess, yet is portrayed as a woman more sinned against than sinning. Calico, by contrast, is selfish and amoral, yet it is Dave and Johnny, both of whom have fallen for her charms, who have to pay the price for her selfishness and amorality.
The one jarring note in Diana’s performance is her accent. In her private life she spoke with a strong West Country accent- she was a native of Swindon- but in her films she generally used the upper-class Received Pronunciation she had learned at drama school, and that sounds wrong here, as Calico is supposed to be a working-class girl who has clawed her way up from the gutter.
British film-makers of this period, however, could be curiously careless when it came to regional accents, even when they were aiming for realism in other respects. Rawborough is supposed to be in Yorkshire- Rotherham was used for location filming– but there are hardly any Yorkshire accents to be heard. (“Brief Encounter” is another example of a film ostensibly set in the North where everyone sounds as though they are from the Home Counties).
The film did well at the box-office on its original release in 1958 but was generally ignored by the critics; there was a common assumption, on both sides of the Atlantic, that crime dramas, including some which are today regarded as cinema classics, were no more than potboilers. Interest in them, however, has grown over the decades. “Tread Softly Stranger” is not, perhaps, in the same class as the greatest British noirs such as Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” or Robert Hamer’s “The Long Memory”, but with its gripping action, some good acting and its starkly expressionist photography of the industrial scenes it certainly remains worth watching. 7/10
(0946)(0949)
Rupert writes
Hillary’s at it again. Medium size break for awhile now … brekky, chores.
(0606) There are going to be time gaps today, reader, multiple ones, for an hour, maybe three hours … there’s a whole weekend to catch up. No film ready just now for midday to mid afternoon, I’ll look around. (0653)
11. A pinned tweet for my X profile
… can’t think of any better way to scribble this, later to transfer to X. It’s not “blog stuff” per se but to do it otherwise is too complicated today.
This account is two in one … firstly quite social, with landscapes, architecture, fashion, art, nostalgia for fine things … and then, separately, quite caustic politics (see moniker above). To get around this issue and not flood revered people such as Yorkshire Wolds, Nicky, Bobbie, lida, Jeanne with my politics, we don’t mutually follow … I still assiduously visit all day everyday but they’re not flooded by my politics.
Many people such as Xenosmilus, Moosh, Deryl, Lisa, Wolf etc. etc. … well we do mutually follow, on the basis that the caustic politics do flood their timelines … that’s how I view “following”. I don’t care about traffic, being mainly a prolific blogger, I don’t see “followers” as disciples, just as friends.
Please do not be offended if a “commercial” follower … if it’s a biz scheme or crypto, I’ll not further respond in DMs, sorry. No lists either please. I’m also shy with ladies … if one follows, I would of course respond, only right to, but am certainly not chasing skirt as skirt … not interested, no time for that.
10. There’s quite a problem on the antiWoke side just now
9. Grotesque misunderstanding
8. DAD at 1109
a) This is not Iran, Iraq, Pakistan or Bangladesh, this is Isl@m1c Republic of United Kingdom.
b) A solar panel park near Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport has been ordered by a judge to remove 78,000 panels after they were found to be blinding aircraft pilots.
c) “Absolute Disaster”: EU Parliament unites against €84 billion budget cut to Farmers.
d) “Gates of Vienna” website is suffering this morning.