ITEM: Earlier this week a friend and I were talking about various health and beauty fads that have come and gone. She mentioned colonic irrigation and I mentioned those beauty parlour places where you can dip your bare feet in a pool and tiny fish will eat all the dead skin, and then…
If you have a horror cast of mind, you’ll know what I came up with next.
So how tiny are piranhas?
ITEM: Talking of unpleasant deaths in horror fiction and films, in an idle moment I was amusing myself by reflecting on which, of the many deaths I’ve witnessed onscreen, was the most unpleasant and/or inventive.
The answer I came up with was a scene from the film Twisted Sisters in which drop dead gorgeous Fiona Horsey is introducing a guy to the delights of being fucked in the butt by a woman wearing a strap on, but when he’s really getting into it and too far gone to notice the substitution, she inserts a humongous rocket, lights the blue touchpaper and retires. Very nasty.
So what hits the spot for the rest of you?
ITEM: Talking of unpleasant deaths, it’s time to acknowledge the sad and untimely demise of the Labour party.
It took place on Tuesday just gone when, instead of opposing a ConDem motion to retroactively change the law to make their botched Work Programme legal and dodge having to pay compensation to those caught in its tangled web, the party’s great and good ruled that Labour should abstain.
None of the reasons I’ve seen given for taking this approach – that concessions were won, that with a majority of 100 the ConDems would win anyway – deserve the slightest bit of consideration. And yes, Liam Byrne, it’s possible we do need sanctions, but not imposed retroactively to catch out the innocent. The principle of the rule of the law should have been paramount, but it was thrown under the bus to serve party politics and save the blushes of a thoroughly incompetent and bungling secretary of state.
Shame on everyone who supported this legislation, whether actively or through abstention.
Kudos though to the forty three Labour MPs who defied their whips to vote against the bill. They at least showed some principle, and I hope that when the stench of decomposition gets so bad it can no longer be endured they will walk away from Labour’s corpse and form the backbone of a new party of the left, one that has nothing to do with Ed Moribund and the corporate shills in cheap suits that he surrounds himself with.
With the exception of the Iraq War interlude, I’ve voted Labour all my life, as did my parents before me, but this generation of mock-Tories in designer sackcloth have disgraced the traditions of the party and turned their backs on just about everything I believe in. They’re not worth spit, and supporting them is to soil your own integrity.
For a long time I’ve felt that the only reason to vote Labour was because they weren’t the Tories, but now…
Now it’s that Orwell moment, when all of us animals look in through the farmhouse window at those gathered round the table, and we can’t tell the difference, one from the other, pigs from humans, Tories from Labour, all of them in it together, all with their snouts in the trough and scarfing up as much swill as they can, while everyone else is left to hang in the name of party politics, ideological inanity and the great god austerity.
ITEM: I was going to post this tomorrow as my Song for a Sunday, but then I learned that tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, so that day is already spoken for.
So, excerpts from One, not the U2 song but an opera by Michael van der Aa.
And, on this evidence, if you want something seriously weird then modern opera leaves the rest standing:-
At the three minute mark, anybody else reminded of When Harry Met Sally?
Just me then. I was afraid of that.
Trumpetville 