These are myCrucial Tracks for the last few days.
I heard this gruesome rhyme on the radio last night. I vaguely remember it from childhood, although I was, and am, a nail-biter rather than a thumb-sucker
“The great tall tailor always comes To little boys that suck their thumbs, And ere they dream what he’s about. He takes his great sharp scissors out And cuts their thumbs clean off, -and then, You know, they never grow again.”
It’s from a longer poem by Heinrich Hoffman - The Story of Little Suck-a-thumb
‘AI slop’ is a great phrase, but it should be remembered that there was an awful lot of slop on the internet well before AI
Podcast episodes I enjoyed in August - Wodehouse, Shostakovich, Heseltine, Enoch Powell, hate mail, George Michael, Edda Mussolini, Salisbury, the 13 Keys to the White House, Getting and Warne, Streisand, gerrymandering, Hitler, Debbie Mcgee and
Some of the episodes I enjoyed this month. Apologies if they aren’t all available wherever you are
The World of Wodehouse Podcast by Nigel Rees - this is my favourite in this series of Wodehouse podcasts, as its largely made up of quotations, such as “It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine, and Lord Emsworth, gazing upon the dour man, was able to see at a glance into which category Angus McAllister fell.”
Origin Story: Shostakovich and Stalin – The Composer and the Dictator - I was a bit of a Soviet history geek, but i found the detail in this jaw-dropping
Iain Dale All Talk: 327. Lord Michael Heseltine - Heseltine says his proudest moment in politics was when the Labour council in Liverpool awarded him the freedom of the city. Boris Johnson once said he was a ‘Brexit-y Hezza’. I can see what Johnson meant, but i cant imagine he would ever have been awarded the Freedom of Liverpool. Was Heseltine the greatest Conservative Prime Minister we never had?
Origin Story: Rivers of Blood – How Enoch Powell poisoned Britain - I’ve always been fascinated by Powell. He said some interesting things, but he’ll only ever be much remembered for how wrong he was on race.
Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Hate Mail: A Scandalous History - includes the true story behind the film Wicked Little Letters.
Talk ’90s to me: George Michael! – From tabloid target to shamelessly gay pop icon - this is very interesting, particularly on the context of George Michael’s career. I remember reading an interview, which isn’t in the podcast, in which he was asked about the speculation around his sexuality. He replied something to the effect that he didn’t know why so many people were interested, because statistically they were all very unlikely to be affected one way or another.
Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Mussolini’s Favourite Daughter - with Caroline Moorehead, author of ‘Edda Mussolini: The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe’. Edda’s husband was executed by the Germans. Mussolini could have prevented it, but didnt. Consequently, Edda’s son wrote a book with the title ‘Quando il nonno fece fucilare papà’, which translates to “When Grandpa Had Daddy Shot”.
Mark Steel’s in Town - Salisbury - I didn’t actually listen to this, this month, but it came up in conversation. Mark Steel researches and visits a town and does a whole stand-up show about that town. This is a recording from the night he came to my home town. I was in the audience, and it was fab
The Hated and the Dead - Joe Biden - this was fascinating, although it’s not much about Joe Biden, really. Allan Lichtman talks about his ‘13 keys’ model for predicting Presidential elections. It’s worth listening to the podcast, and then looking at the Wikipedia page
TMS View from the boundary - Rory Kinnear - I have a friend whose parent was a TV and film actor, and I’ve wondered what its like to see a late parent popping up on TV. Kinnear has tracked down and watched many of his late father Roy Kinnear’s performances. He says he was pleased to recently find an ‘outtakes’ video from one of the shows he was in on YouTube, as he saw his father break character and be himself
TMS The ball of the century, 30 years on - some nice reminiscences about Shane Warne, and Mike Gatting facing an automated verion of that ball
Freah Air - Barbra Streisand - Streisand had an ‘interesting’ relationship with her mother. Her mother used to send Streisand her bad reviews
The Rest Is Politics: US: 104. Trump’s Meeting with Putin and the Plot to Rig the Next Election - interesting discussion of gerrymandering - “the politicians are picking the voters, the voters aren’t picking the politicians”
Dan Snow’s History Hit - Hitler’s Early Years Hitler’s people were ‘brown shirts’ rather than ‘black shirts’ because Hugo Boss had more brown than black material
Witness History - Debbie McGee in Iran - Debbie McGee is best known as a famous magician’s assistant and for “So, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”. However she was in Iran at the time of the revolution, and it’s a dramatic story
Switched on Pop - The Beatles: “Now and Then” and Forever - i didn’t listen to Now and Then properly when it came out, but both the song and this podcast are quite moving. One of the podcast guys suggests that the count of 1,2 at the beginning, rather than 1,2,3,4 refers to the number of Beatles still with us
Rocks Back Pages - Episode 164 : Kate Simon on Bob Marley + Sounds + Joni Mitchell - Kate Simon is a photographer. She was offered a lot of money to get a picture of Bob Marely lying in state. She said ‘yeah, sure’. Simon had no intention of doing so, but thought that saying that she would made it less likely that anyone else would do so
Hit Parade - This Ain’t No Party?! Edition How the first wave of CBGB punks became Billboard popstars, reshaping their knotty thrash into catchy bops. - Debbie Harry originally wanted to record The Tide is High with The Specials
The KLF torched £1m “and are haunted by it daily”. John Higgs knows why 7 Nov 2023 · Word In Your Ear - The KLF made 3 or 4 great singles, then gave up pop, and burnt £1,000,000 in 50 pound notes. Their biographer John Higgs says they would have lost another £5,000,000 by deleting their back catalogue
The Media Show - Return of MasterChef, No. 10’s TikTok Strategy, Bluey on YouTube, Investigating Tesla - according to training materials leaked to Sönke Iwersen, Tesla employees are asked to ‘incorporate the DNA of Elon Musk into their daily work’
Bad King James VI & I - Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society | Acast - Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller, the historians who created the ‘Bad Gays’ podcast and book, say that Henry VIII’s criminalization of homosexuality was bound up with anti-Catholicism and the dissolution of the monastries
The Medieval Bishop’s Sex Workers - Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society | Acast - “Outside Medieval London’s city walls, Southwark was a land without rules”. About the ‘Winchester Geese’ - church-sanctioned sex workers
There are more podcast recommendations at:
Re: the penalty shootout last night, when every player had to take a penalty…there is a flaw in the concept
Say you’re playing in a Cup Final, and you’re a good player - you must be good to be playing in the Cup Final - but you’re a really, really lousy penalty taker.
You, for example, are Gareth Southgate and you’re playing alongside Alan Shearer and Frank Lampard.
The clock is ticking up to the end of extra time. It is now to your teams advantage to get yourself sent off.
Then, if the penalty shootout does go all the way through the whole team, then that 11th penalty for your team is taken by an Alan Shearer stepping up again, rather then by a Gareth Southgate.
There are more pressing concerns in football , but if I ever meet Mr Infantino I shall mention it ⚽
It’s autumnal in the Shire, so I got out my big puffy coat for the night-time dog walk.
It felt like the return of an old friend, and some consolation for the end of the summer
About time we got another trophy ! ⚽⚽⚽
Even before the Champions League draw was under way, Chelsea had picked up yet another trophy.
President and chief operating officer Jason Gannon was presented with a special award to honour the club for winning every UEFA competition
I’ve been to Maldon in Essex, to visit an aged P.
Maldon is most famous for salt, and for being the place where George Washington’s great-great grandfather is buried 🧂🇺🇸
My surname ‘Penny’….it means ‘hill’ in Brythonic.
“Sixpenny was first recorded in 932 as Seaxpenn, and means “hill of the Saxons” (from Old English Seaxe and Brythonic penn). The reference is to the hill now known as Pen Hill east of the modern farm, and probably marks an ancient boundary.”
Other derivations of ‘Penny’ are that it’s do with money, or it derives from the Welsh ‘son of’, as in Pendragon or Penhaligon….but I hadn’t heard of this Brythonic derivation before. To be fair, I hadn’t heard of Brythonic before either.
I was looking up Sixpenny Handley, which is close to the Ancestral Home of Broadchalke
I did once look up the distribution of Pennys across the UK and found that we are concentrated in Wiltshire, and more famously, around Liverpool.
Proposed entry for a future edition of The Meaning of Liff - crudwell noun, when reading a book, the uneasy feeling that you’ve read it before
Currently reading: Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz 📚
Nicky Manic-Street-Preacher on TV chefs
I’m editing my old tweets in mattypenny-tweets.micro.blog , and I quite like this one
Nicky Manic-Street-Preacher in @SylvPatterson’s ace book, I’m Not with the Band, is quoted as saying this
Saturday morning kids TV has been ruined by pious -pontificating - revolting chefs. We used to have the Banana Splits, Tiswas, Swap Shop - Tarzan - Robinson Crusoe - The Singing Ringing Tree, we had imagination. Now we have these grotesque vain people lecturing us on how to live - it’s sick.
A bit harsh on the TV cooks…but he has a point
I didn’t know the word pareidolia. It means “the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist”.
I think it’s appropriate that, to me , the word looks like a random jumble of letters
Retirement project #4 - resurrect and finish off the Salisbury’s roadnames website
(I should say I’ve got no intention of retiring….I’m clearly far too young)
I’m not comfortable with comparing anything to 1930s Germany, for both historical and political reasons…..but ‘The Nerd Reich’ is a great pun
I didn’t realise you could pile up cimsessions like this
Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_NetworkConnection -cimsession $(new-cimsession -computername myserver,yourserver,hisserver,herserver)
The automated loading of my twitter archive into micro.blog didn’t quite work, so I’m loading it in with powershell and manually adding pics and editing
That guy that wrote all those tweets is a lot like me….but I don’t know if we’d get on
Back in the ’90s, before kids, and moving back to the Shire etc, we used to go to a thing called Club Montepulciano. They used to play groovy but ancient music by the likes of Andy Williams, Perez Prado, and Herb Alpert
Went to an ’80s thing yesterday and realized that that music is now older than the sounds at Club M were at the time
Feeling really old now….. nostalgia is indeed not what it used to be.
