Courtesy of author Cory Doctorow on the Mastodon social media network, your ‘umble scribe became aware yesterday of this astounding work by the Austrian death metal band Dead Territory.
It’s their cover of American avant garde composer John Cage‘s seminal 1952 work 4’33”.
Be careful listening to it; you won’t be able to stop humming it all day! š
Yesterday your correspondent arranged a poll on his social media account on Mastodon to coincide with the appearance of disgraced former alleged party-time prime minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson before the Covid-19 inquiry being chaired by retired senior judge Heather Hallett.
Needless to say, Johnson was his usual courageous self, turning up at 7.00am to avoid the crowds of bereaved relatives who’d hoped to make their feelings known to the lazy, bumbling charlatan. He did likewise today with several papers showing him arriving once again in the hours of darkness, but then again this is the same brave politician who hid in a fridge in 2019 to avoid being questions by the talentless Piers Morgan.
There is plenty of reporting and live coverage of Johnson’s evidence to the inquiry, which is also being streamed. Today’s Guardian editorial is particularly scathing of Johnson’s performance yesterday, with its byline stating:
Nothing in the former prime ministerās record or his testimony so far suggests he is a reliable witness or capable of genuine contrition.
Neither reliable nor contrite; that a damning assessment.
Anyway, back your ‘umble scribe’s social media poll. A screenshot of the result is shown below.
All that can be said is that your correspondent is shocked to learn one per cent of respondents would sooner trust a man never known to have had an intimate relationship with something known as the truth.
News arrived today of a bizarre feudal remnant – one used by a human bizarre feudal remnant line his own already well-stuffed pockets.
The human bizarre feudal remnant is none other than Mr Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor, alleged to be the head of state of the English Empire (which some still call the United Kingdom. Ed.), who generally masquerades under the alias of “King” Charles III.
Today’s Guardian reveals that Mr Mountbatten-Windsor is stealing the estates of people who die intestate – i.e. without leaving a will – or with no known relatives in the territory of the Duchy of Lancaster, which consists of consists of 18,433 hectares of land holdings, including rural estates and farmland, urban developments, historic buildings, and commercial properties across England and Wales, particularly in Cheshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Savoy Estate in London. Its principal purpose of the estate is to provide a source of independent income for Mr Mountbatten-Windsor and his heirs and successors.
This theft of other people’s assets is covered by the legal term ‘bona vacantia‘, meaning unowned property. The same practice of ‘bona vacantia‘ is employed by the Duchy of Cornwall to provide an income for the so-called ‘Prince’ of Wales, one William Arthur Philip Louis Mountbatten-Windsor.
The rich and powerful of this backward medieval country have been stealing the assets owned or used by others for centuries. From 1604 onwards the Inclosure Acts created legal property rights for the rich to land previously held in common in England and Wales, particularly open fields and common land. Between 1604 and 1914 over 5,200 individual acts enclosing public land were passed, affecting 28,000 km2.
These thefts of common land were commemorated in a popular poem in the early 18th century.
They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own,
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
This practice of appropriating land owned and used by others reached its zenith during Britain’s colonial expansion under the concept of ‘terra nullius‘, literally nobody’s land. How could allegedly primitive people claim ownership of land when nothing concerning property rights was written down, was the flawed logic behind these seizures, which reached their height in Australia, where people now commemorated by street names and public artworks were responsible for the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people, who have no public monuments by which to remember the victims. This was documented in all its brutality by the three part 2022 TV series The Australian Wars.
Anyway, back from nobody’s land to nobody’s property in the north of England. The Guardian has found out that the Duchy of Lancaster has been secretly using the bona vacantia funds to renovate properties owned by the alleged king and rented out for profit. The Duchy’s accounts suggest it has collected Ā£61.8m in bona vacantia funds over the last decade. Of those, only Ā£9.3m or 15% of the total has gone to charities, which the Duchy maintains is the main reason for collecting the funds.
Needless to say, this news has not gone down well in areas subject to the Duchy of Lancaster’s writ.
Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester is on record as saying:
I think many people in the north-west will be surprised to learn that the savings and assets of friends and neighbours are being taken in this way. I donāt recall this archaic system ever being explained to anyone here nor public consent for it being given.
Burnham furthermore added that:
This appears to be a bizarre remnant of feudal Britain. While we await the public acts of levelling up that we have been promised, it seems this country still has silent mechanisms of levelling down at work, redistributing wealth in the wrong direction.
Furthermore, friends of some of those whose assets have been stolen have described their use to fix up Duchy properties for future rental as ‘unethical, ‘shocking and ‘a disgrace.
The worst decision this country ever made was to readmit Charles Stuart (son of the late tyrant) in 1660. That would have avoided any future regal robbery of people’s property either in this country or around the world.
Bristolian may exist as a dialect with its own idiosyncrasies, but within the city and county of Bristol itself, there’s one place where English is used in a peculiar way: the Counts Louse (as pronounced in the local vernacular; some call it City Hall – or a variant thereof – after its renaming by the then Mayor George Ferguson in 2012. Ed.).
In his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote the following:
Political language ā and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists ā is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Down at the Counts Louse, the English language has been used to conceal what is really going on behind its mock Georgian faƧade, particularly where funding cuts and redundancies are planned, usually couched in terms such as redeployment, restructuring and the like.
Perhaps the most famous use of such obfuscatory language occurred in 2013 when it was discovered – as reported by The Bristolian – that Ā£165,000 in cash was missing from the council’s loss-making markets department (a department that’s supposed to make money for the local authority. Ed.). This was duly recorded in an internal report as ‘material income misappropriation‘.We ordinary mortals have a much more succinct phrase than material income misappropriation. We call it theft.
That infamous bit of council-speak has now been joined by another phrase by Councillor Craig Cheney, the elected member in charge of the city’s purse strings, which was duly reported by the Bristol Post in relation to the evacuation of Barton House in Barton Hill due to structural defects.
What Cllr. Cheney said to the local press while commenting on Barton House included the sentence below.
Thereās perhaps not as much concrete as there should be.
Perhaps? Most definitely not as much concrete, plus ignorance and non-observance of the building plans, according to your colleague Councillor Kye Dudd.
Give yourself a pat on the back, Cllr. Cheney; that one sentence alone deserves its own special place in the annals of British understatement. š
In less light-hearted reporting on Barton House, it has now emerged that the government warned Bristol City Council in 2017 – six years ago – about the condition of Barton House and four other tower blocks built using the LPS building system and perhaps more scandalously that no structural survey of Barton House had been conducted since 1970, i.e. over half a century ago. Municipal neglect of the city’s infrastructure is endemic down the Counts Louse. šNewsweek in the United States reports that Eric Trump’s recent comment comparing his family’s assets to the Mona Lisa amid their ongoing civil fraud trial in New York has spawned a wave of mockery across social media.
Disgraced former president Donald John Trump and his three adult children – Ivanka, Donald Jr. and the aforementioned Eric are accused of frequently inflating The Donald’s own net worth and the value of his assets by billions of dollars from 2011 to 2021 to secure better deals and loans. Trump and his children have dismissed the accusations and maintained their innocence, accusing prosecutors of being politically motivated and attempting to harm the Dunning-Kruger effect’s candidate’s 2024 presidential campaign.
Earlier this week Eric Trump – hardly one of the world’s towering intellects – claimed that the Trump family properties at play in the civil fraud trial are “worth a fortune” and called them “Mona Lisas of the real estate world.“
Below in true Private Eye style, the Trump Tower in New York and Leonardo’s famous painting are placed side by side, so readers can draw their own conclusions as to which of them are of greater value to the human race as a whole.
In what clearly counts as an instance of buyer’s remorse, today’s inews carries a piece about two Britons – one in his thirties and from Bristol, the other a pensioner from Winchester, who both voted for Brexit and now seem surprised they cannot get visas to live permanently in their respective properties, as per the screenshot below of the report’s headline and byline.
Both are now suffering remorse and a feeling of betrayal (remember all those smooth-talking right-wing politicians who lied to the public saying nothing would really changed in our relationship with the EU and its member states? Ed.).
As defined by the dictionary, the phrase buyer’s remorse has two meanings:
Either of both of those definitions may be applicable in these two instances.
These stories have a moral, i.e. think before you vote (bearing in mind that all politicians lie. Ed.) and always remember the law of unexpected consequences.
The Shropshire Star is a local newspaper serving the county where your ‘umble scribe was born. However, its role in the field of science – and the discipline of asinine anatomy in particular – has not previously been recognised.
Until now, that is.
On Friday the Star carried a report of a donkey with its back legs and rear stuck in a storm drain somewhere undisclosed in the vicinity of Market Drayton, your correspondent’s home town.
The incident was attended by crews from Market Drayton, Telford Central and Wellington fire stations, who were able to extract the donkey called Amigo from the drain.
The Star was so pleased with its contribution to asinine anatomy and veterinary science that it incorporated it into its headline: Firefighters rush to rescue donkey stuck waist-deep in storm drain,
There are two dictionary definitions of waist, one pertaining to anatomy, the other to apparel. Neither mentions donkeys:
The Guardian also covered the story. Curiously, its account fails to mention Amigo’s waist. š
According to Wikipedia, “999 is an official emergency telephone number in a number of countries which allows the caller to contact emergency services for emergency assistance“, with approximately 35 million calls being made per year.
The English Empire (which some still call the United Kingdom. Ed.) uses the emergency number to provide a certain number of emergency services – ambulance, fire brigade, police and coastguard being the main ones, as well as – depending on location – lifeboat, mountain rescue, cave rescue, mine rescue and bomb disposal.
However, and this is quite a significant however, one of the services not offered is advising the hard of thinking where they can get a haircut in the wee small hours, as the Bristol Post duly reported after reading Avon & Somerset Constabulary’s social media feed on X, formerly known as Twitter before man-baby Elon Musk spent his pocket money on the company.
The post reads:
999 call: Caller has stated he is in an emergency, as his local barbers are closed at 01:00am. Upon reflection, the caller agreed that it is unlikely that any barbers would be open at this time, and that this was not a Police matter.
The tweet was sent by Mr Plod as part of International Control Room Week which aims to highlight the work done by people working in 999 control rooms across the emergency services.
One of the cultural jewels of Market Drayton – the town where your ‘umble scribe grew up – is the Festival Drayton Centre. However, in those days it was Frogmore Road Primitive Methodist chapel, a venue where my late mother took to the pulpit as a lay preacher when I was a child.
Last Thursday Iranian-British comedian and actor Omid Djalili pulled out of a show at the Centre due to “personal threats due to the situation in Israel“, as reported by the BBC.
The BBC did manage to get the essentials of the story correct. However, one significant national news outlet did not.
Step forward The Independent, once a decent broadsheet newspaper that refused to publish trivia about the so-called royal family, but now sadly reduced to a badly researched news website with irritating properties and mediocre content.
In its rendition of the story, The Independent wrote as follows:
On Thursday (19 October), Djalili was scheduled to perform at the Festival Drayton Centre in West Drayton, Shropshire. However, the show was pulled hours before its scheduled opening due to safety concerns for the star.
No gazetteer of Shropshire features such a place as West Drayton. Whilst Market Drayton itself consists of two parishes – Drayton in Hales and Little Drayton (also known as Drayton Parva. Ed.), but of an occidental Drayton, there’s not a sign.
Within the polluting embrace of London’s M25 orbital car park there is the London suburb of West Drayton, whilst another village of the same name exists in Nottinghamshire.
Your correspondent notes that the Independent piece was written by a ‘culture reporter and reviewer‘ writing mostly for titles based within that there London, so perhaps the geographical ignorance can be excused. š
One of the regular features of Private Eye magazine is its Dumb Britain column, which typically records the answers clueless quiz show contestants have given on TV.
The advent of social media has now enabled the entire population to show how stupid they can be without the need to apply to appear on a TV quiz show, as in the case of one unidentified woman from Armthorpe near Doncaster, which was duly reported 2 days ago by the Daily Mirror.
The story was also picked up by other tabloids, with Daily Mail commentards questioning the lady’s sanity – quite a feat given their single-digit IQs.
If Hamas were contemplating invading Yorkshire, their paragliding aviators would have to train really hard, given the distance between Gaza City and God’s Own County is several multiples of the current world paragliding record of some 612 km for a straight line flight.