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Yeah... I truncated the information, you'd need a server-monkey with no trace of ADD for this lot...

Evolution and Devolution (with a steam-rex)

Just For the record.

It has not escaped my knowledge that the football world Cup is on at the moment, despite me not having a television. It's all-pervasive, look, it's even on this blog.
I'm a man. I'm English, so therefore I'm wearing a red and white shirt and swallowing beer in between cheers and moans in front of a big screen?
Incorrect. I hope to see not a moment's coverage, nor hear or read about it, but, let's face it, such a hope is as implausible as hoping there won't be another Olympic games. ever.
Sporty just didn't happen for me. My dad was a keen cricketer, and hockey player, (that's real hockey by the way, the one without ice).
I just could never see the point of getting excited about chucking and whacking an inflated pig's bladder, wrapped in leather, from one end of a field to the other.  Oh, I'm sure there was a point to it, the first time a gang of marauders kicked their enemy's captain's head up the village street, but, hey, lads, all that's a bit passé now, isn't it?
The point of this post is to express my extreme disappointment in the U.S. team's failure  to knock England out of the competition.  Okay, it wouldn't totally have stopped the ad-nauseam coverage, but it would have de-smugged a whole heap of f**kwits.

I'm fascinated by the way corporate "sport" brainwashes the masses. People have blind loyalty for a team, so blind they seem unable to see that the team is just another big business corporate entity, where the people who make up the team are not team members, but employees, who are bought, sold, valued, devalued, traded like any other commodity. The guy you cheer for as a hero this time out, you'll jeer at in a year's time because he's wearing a different colour?
And when, I ask, did it become necessary that everybody out there is a heap of mobile advertising? That any company with enough money can buy space on the players?

No, no, no, he moans, stop right now... we all know the world's doomed and dumbed down, come on Soubriquet, calm down, take your medicine, there's a good chap. Look, nurse will be here soon with more tranquil pills. In the meantime, let me tighten the head-clamp, and pin your eyelids open.. oh yes, look, we're wheeling a television in now, won't that be grand?

What's that, fellow? mmmfmmmf? Oh, well, the gag's for your own good, and the shouting was disturbing other patients. I'll just turn the television on now. Football? Yes, that'll keep you entertained.

Another Bed

Edmund Dulac's illustration for
"The Princess and the Pea"
by
Hans Christian Andersen

There was once a prince, and he wanted a princess, but then she must be a real Princess. He travelled right around the world to find one, but there was always something wrong. There were plenty of princesses, but whether they were real princesses he had great difficulty in discovering; there was always something which was not quite right about them. So at last he had come home again, and he was very sad because he wanted a real princess so badly.

"One evening there was a terrible storm; it thundered and lightninged and the rain poured down in torrents; indeed it was a fearful night.

In the middle of the storm somebody knocked at the town gate, and the old King himself sent to open it.

It was a princess who stood outside, but she was in a terrible state from the rain and the storm. The water streamed out of her hair and her clothes; it ran in at the top of her shoes and out at the heel, but she said that she was a real princess.

‘Well we shall soon see if that is true,’ thought the old Queen, but she said nothing. She went into the bedroom, took all the bed clothes off and laid a pea on the bedstead: then she took twenty mattresses and piled them on top of the pea, and then twenty feather beds on top of the mattresses. This was where the princess was to sleep that night. In the morning they asked her how she slept.

‘Oh terribly bad!’ said the princess. ‘I have hardly closed my eyes the whole night! Heaven knows what was in the bed. I seemed to be lying upon some hard thing, and my whole body is black and blue this morning. It is terrible!’

They saw at once that she must be a real princess when she had felt the pea through twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds. Nobody but a real princess could have such a delicate skin.

So the prince took her to be his wife, for now he was sure that he had found a real princess, and the pea was put into the Museum, where it may still be seen if no one has stolen it.

Now this is a true story."

I myself would find such a pea-obsessed princess insufferable. If she would moan and gripe about one pea beneath twenty mattresses, then just think of how much complaining she'd do about everything else, every day, every night. 

I'd wait until the rain had stopped, and set her on her way again.  

And, in my way, I have been there, somewhat, and miraculously,  I have found my princess, (given the chance, she'll infiltrate my bed with toast-crumbs).
Though I buried a pea beneath the mattress, and saw the terrible bruise it gave her, she smiled at me, in the morning,  and made no word of complaint.
She's the one.

If Ikea Sold Cars

 

 Via http://www.demotivateur.fr/

We Are The Village Green Preservation society

Sung by that wonderful yorkshire lass, Kate Rusby



The song was written and originally recorded by Ray Davies of the Kinks, for their eponymous album.

Today's Poem, selected by Red Dirt Girl.

I was sent this poem by Red Dirt Girl, I suspect all men know the truth of the words herein, and all women fail to understand them.


Poem

If the night flights keep you awake
I will call London Airport and tell them
to land their dangerous junk elsewhere.

And if you fall asleep with the sleeve
of my jacket under your head,
sooner than wake you, I'll cut it off.

But if you say:
'Fix me a plug on this mixer',
I grumble and take my time.

~ by Christopher Logue

A Bed For the Maharajah

Nawab Muhammad Bahawal Khan Abbasi V of Bahawalpur, then 20 years old, and with an eye for the ladies, commissioned this rather fine bed from French  silversmiths Christofle, in 1882, it was delivered in 1886.. Nothing special, a load of rosewood, 640 pounds (290Kg) of pure silver, four life-sized statues of european maidens, mechanically driven to fan the Maharajah's brow, and whisk flies away from his slumbering form. Oh, and a mechanical music player to play him to his sleep with an air from Gounod's Faust. Bahawalpur is in what we now call Pakistan. Nobody seems to know where the bed is now.

"The design was sent to Christofle in Paris calling for a bed of "dark wood decorated with applied sterling with gilded parts, monograms and arms, ornamented with four life-size bronze figures (of naked females) painted in flesh colour with natural hair, movable eyes and arms, holding fans and horse tails".

Some 290kg of silver was needed to decorate the bed. The four naked figures were European, representing women of France, Spain, Italy and Greece, each with a different skin-tone and hair colour. Through ingenious mechanics linked to the mattress, the Nawab was able to set the figures in motion so that they fanned him while winking at him, against a 30-minute cycle of music from Gounod's Faust generated by a music box built into the bed." (Independent)

 

Adding, as it were, a few thoughts of mine own, this bed is a wondrous contrivance, a thing that might have in earlier times, been entrusted to Michelangelo... A blend of outrageous wealth and questionable taste. 

Now here's my question. The young Nawab had unimagineably large heaps of wealth, the commission, by the way, at the time was top-secret, nobody in the firm was to know who it was they were making this for. 

At twenty years old, a young Indian aristocrat, lord of all he surveyed, bought himself this. Which looks to me like a single bed, a bed for one only. Where the  occupant would listen to music and gaze up at his obediently fanning four nubile western women, paler skinned and differently featured to the women of his home country.  Whilst music played.

Well no. I shy away from the question...

The lad, surely, might have found real women?

Let me quote e.e.cummings.

a pretty girl who naked is
is worth a million statues