Posts by Simon Grigg
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Any excuse for a party, in reply to chris,
the degree of pride I feel that we didn’t simply oust or behead our monarchs
It's easy to forget that beheading and slaughtering other contenders, and then proclaiming it was divine will, is however how this current lot originally got here.
Mostly monarchy's claim to the god-given right to rule comes from being descended from the guy who killed the other guy on the field of battle and then was able to kill anyone else - and their friends and all related, who put their head up with a claim - or might have.
More or less, the monarchs since the constitutional monarchy was forced on them in the 1600s, have been a pretty mixed bunch of lunatics, the self obsessed, the dim, philanderers and the hopeless. The current Queen, despite her rather hapless lineage over the past few hundred years and her own offspring seems to be one of the best of the bunch, as was her father, although perhaps that was because he wasn't trained for the job unlike his idiot pro-Nazi brother.
Not a lot to take pride in though.
-
I rarely agree with Nick Cohen but this time I'll go along with him:
When the 18th century English dissenter Richard Price, friend of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, warned that fawning before royalty produced "idolatry as gross and stupid as that of the ancient heathens," he aptly titled his denunciation "A Discourse on the Love of Our Country."....
........The trouble with monarchy, however, is that, by definition, no one can stop the Prince from becoming King Charles III, because the British are not allowed to vote for their head of state. Charles Windsor constantly interferes in politics and promotes every variety of reactionary superstition and new-age quackery. He sounded like the leader of a messianic cult when he announced in a recent book, "I would be failing in my duty to future generations and to the Earth itself if I did not attempt to ... indicate possible ways we can heal the world." Yet whatever his personal failings, he will be King because he was born to the right mother.
-
Hard News: Any excuse for a party, in reply to BenWilson,
Ooooo hard one. I doubt a King would be into selling off the family silver, that's what makes him King.
There was a great Larry King some years back - he had the Duke of Kent on and was clearly suffering from the sort of royal awe only Americans can ascend to.
After welcoming him as Your Dookness, the Queen's cousin immediately launched into an extended pitch for Royal souvenir cutlery, plates and cups, complete with a 1-800 number which the aristocrat repeated over and over again.
Larry, with, I imagine, producer going nuts in his earpiece, kept on trying to divert conversation to things more seemly, but selling replicas of the family silver was what the Duke was there for and he wasn't going to be sidetracked.
-
Hard News: Any excuse for a party, in reply to Russell Brown,
This isn't an argument for keeping the monarchy in Britain, just noting that the public investment in running it is relatively modest when you take into account the commercial return
That £37m is just the civil list.
The Guardian did a wider analysis a few years back - which I can't find - and came up with a figure of around £150m in costs once ancillary expenditure is added - the likes of royal transport, security costs hidden in other budgets, lost revenues from land and the like.
I note that the BBC story also includes revenues from the likes of the Victoria and Albert & National Maritime Museums which is a bit of a stretch. I've been to the V&A at least a dozen times - not once did Prince Charlie drive me through the door.
-
Dunno if it's been mentioned here before but The Weeknd's House of Balloons mixtape - gratis from their site - is pretty special in a kind of XX meets post R&B way - if that means anything (throwing words together to try and put a loose tag on it).
-
Jamie Xx
The Fact Mag mix this week is pretty fine too.
In fact, the Fact Mag mixes are a constant source of fineness.
-
Muse: Hey Greg O'Connor, Krup You!, in reply to Paul Campbell,
They were doing that up and down the country - going into the pubs to show off their shiny (literally) new batons - a sort of pre-tour intimidation to make sure we all stayed in our places
And denying they had ever done so. Meurant said several times that long batons were not used pre-tour. It was a lie.
Riot Squad was written about a police assault on XS Cafe, with long batons, months before, and I was one of quite a few victims of a long baton advance on a pretty peaceful party in then mostly commercial St George's Bay Rd in May of 81.
-
Muse: Hey Greg O'Connor, Krup You!, in reply to Paul Campbell,
In 1981, at the Gladstone Tavern in Christchurch, the Newmatics were playing at part of the legendary Screaming Blamatics Tour.
The cops retreated rather quickly as I recall. The song (Riot Squad) wasn't even released at the time but we'd given tapes to student radio and it had received solid airplay, so it had some currency with the crowd.
The cops looked shaken, but waited outside to harass.
Gideon Tait
..used to live near my parents after he retired. One night some guys were driving around and around the loop that is Cliff Rd / Clarendon Rd and he came out in his dressing gown, watched by neighbours (from whom this story comes).
He walked out and stopped the car.
'Don't you know who I am?' he asked.
'Who?'
He answered and was decked with one immediate punch.
It was hard to feel sympathy. I saw his squads in action many, many times and they were unprovoked, bloody and racist.
Awful, awful times.
-
Hard News: It Began ... in Chicago, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Now, get back to Music, Simon gets a bit ansty when someone goes off topic.
I'll put my hand up and confess to a perhaps grumpy overreaction to Toto but I did jump in and and wave the Elton John flag a post or two later to make up for that.
-
Hard News: Libya, in reply to Rich Lock,
Although it has been argued that it wasn't so much the loss of life as the fact that America woke up to TV pictures of the corpses of US soliders being dragged through the streets that caused the furore.
It was also the collapse of the fantasy. The US Marines came ashore in Somalia to waiting CNN and network news crews who had filled the beach with lighting and reporters. It was bizarre, but after the 'dream' wars of Desert Storm, Panama and Grenada (although the last one was a military disaster - in a grand tradition they just rewrote the whole story and claimed victory and battle honours) the public had come to expect grandstanding with a happy ending,
It was when that came crashing down.