FRIDAY MUSIC: Mariska Veres, by JD

Among the 'one hit wonders' of the Sixties was the Dutch band called Shocking Blue. Their lead singer was Mariska Veres known for her sultry voice, eccentric performances, and her striking appearance which featured kohl-rimmed eyes, high cheekbones, and long jet black hair, which was actually a wig. 

Her real name was Maria Ender. Her father was the Hungarian Romani violinist Lajos Veres.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariska_Veres

.... and this is her father, Lajos Veres: 'Sirba pompierilor-doina' (1960):

De-twitting Twitter

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The exodus from Twitter since Elon Musk bought it may be exaggerated. This report says 875,00 have deactivated their accounts and another half-million have been suspended.

In context, that’s a ‘flee’-bite. According to this source, Twitter has nearly 400 million users globally and half of those are daily users. Even with those numbers, the Blue Bird is merely the 15th most popular social network.

The writer also says:

10% of Twitter users are responsible for 92% of the tweets from all U.S. users, meaning there’s a particularly active group of users publishing a large chunk of content.

If those are the category leaving (and that’s not clear), maybe it will affect advertising revenue but otherwise are we going to miss them? After all, who’s going? Censorious hysterics who cannot cope with alternative views? Perhaps Mastodon is getting the fleas and Twitter will keep the dog.

There may be an opportunity here. Since we’re in a mass-spying and data automation age, there may be a way to scrape the user details of the screamers to make a list of those to be watched for totalitarian tendencies.

Similarly, years ago there was a regular ad on TV for a small, agile Peugeot car, showing it nipping through building sites and concrete pipes and generally zooming about recklessly. Soon after I noticed that dumb drivers with their d*cks on the accelerator were in such vehicles. I told a friend that the police and vehicle licensing agency could simply make a note of people making purchases in response to such ads, as a forewarning of dangerous drivers; perhaps shove nine points on their licenses to deter them from copying the driving style seen on the boob tube.

The immaturity and lack of impulse control are everywhere. I look on with concern at the way that e.g. universities have given in to intolerant wokies and could wish that my alma mater Oxford would rusticate such people as incapable of benefiting from a liberal education.

But no, that would be to play the game that governments and their agencies have been using against us for years. When Oxford students staged a demo march against Margaret Thatcher in the early 70s there were grey men perched up lampposts taking photographs of the crowd; seeing what kind of regime was allowed into power twenty-odd years later I think they can’t have done the follow-up work properly.

Best to take a laid-back approach, then. Maybe a lot of the noisy ones will grow up.

Or maybe they’ll take over and we’ll find out what happens when spoiled children get big.

Meanwhile, I’ve just registered with TruthSocial to watch Orange Man’s progress. It’s still a minnow - 2 million users so far - but it only started just over a year ago.

Will I be tainted by Evil Thoughts? Unclean, unclean!

George Galloway blasts away at evil

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Gorgeous George was on top form Monday. With his staccato burst-fire oratorical phrasing he shreds four targets in this session:

1. Critics of Trump’s reinstatement on Twitter. GG reminds us that in 2016 Michael Moore called DJT a ‘human hand grenade.’ I have long seen Moore as a phony who has done nothing for the American working class but made himself a pseudo-scruffy millionaire with symbolic right-on guff aimed at white middle-class keep-your-own-hands-clean dizzyheads. As Matt Taibbi says elsewhere on this site (£$), the people who voted the egregious blond bulldozer into office ‘just saw a way to send a giant Fuck You to people they hated and distrusted more than Trump.’

2. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, now retiring. GG says she has done nothing for the US plebs but her now-billionaire stockbroker husband has had a strange facility for making great investment choices by anticipating government moves. Pelosi is another one for the empty malign gesture, tearing up her copy of Trump’s State of the Union Address behind him on live TV and by the same token ripping up the decorum that should properly characterise her noble office.

3. The unnamed US intelligence official who told CNN that the missile that exploded in Poland was Russian and so Article 5 of NATO’s Charter applied and consequently the Big War was on. This bastard (if I’m to burn in nuclear fire I must be allowed to swear) was set to get us all killed; and so was Volodomir Zelensky, calling for ‘action’ against Russia. One day there will be a tinkling all over the Western world as scales fall from eyes about that Ukrainian psychopath; but we are also overdue a deep dive into and radical reform of the CIA, the State Department and other agencies that were originally set up to advise the President but have since taken on an evil life of their own and given the slack hand of a senescent Chief Executive have slipped their leashes.

4. Human rights bloviators focusing on Qatar as the World Cup begins. What they complain about they knew long before, not to mention FIFA’s institutional corruption. But people in glass houses should not throw stones; for Julian Assange still languishes in an absurdly top-security British jail, not having tasted freedom for over ten years, yet guilty of nothing but jumping a bail that if there were such a thing as justice in this country would not have been imposed in the first place. All that our judiciary appears to be doing is preparing the sprouts and gravy before delivering him well-tenderised to a salivating American political and intelligence establishment.

Electile dysfunction in Georgia

Elections cannot be stolen. It’s official, so there.

But votes can be mislaid, and that’s official, too.

The small town of Kennesaw, Georgia (pop. 33,049) recently held an election for a city council post. The result was certified in favour of one candidate, but it then turned out that a memory stick containing 789 votes had not been successfully (or perhaps not in time) uploaded into the system. This turned the race into a marginal win for the runner-up. The Council re-tested the ballot scanners Saturday and began a recount Sunday. As at the time of writing (Tuesday a.m. UK time) we still don't know the final verdict!

The position had become available because the previous incumbent resigned in protest at the reopening of a local shop selling Civil War memorabilia:

Dent Myers opened Wildman’s in 1971. It became infamous for its display of a Ku Klux Klan robe, racist collectibles, prominently displayed Confederate flag, and storefront signs such as the one that says “White History Year.”

Some non-Americans may view that country’s racial difficulties with a kind of eagerness for the apocalypse, as the Left here appeared to hope for South Africa prior to the Presidency of Nelson Mandela.

There’s a twist in human nature that wants to see others suffer in fire and blood - it’s a major, perhaps the main theme of written and cinematic fiction. Not so funny when you have to live through it. America has had enough of violent mountebanks of all kinds.

As it happens, Georgia is also awaiting the outcome of a bigger election, that for its US Senator. The contest on November 8 was so close that neither of the main candidates achieved 50% of the total, so there will be a runoff just between those two on December 6.

Both the incumbent, Raphael Warnock (Democrat) and the challenger Herschel Walker (Republican) are ‘persons of colour.’ Good luck to them both, as the US continues its progress towards harmony at home.

Now for the same, in foreign relations.

The Robot Will Teach You Now, by Paddington

In about 2015, our department was being pressured to offer online courses. When I read around the subject, it turned out that the results of such courses in Mathematics were much worse, in terms of total pass rates and retained material, than live ones. I was told by a resident 'expert' that this was simply wrong. When we did offer such a course, the drop-out and failure rates were much higher than the live sections of the course, even when offered by the same  faculty.

Fast forward to 2020, at the start of the pandemic, when one episode of the 'Freakonomics' podcast explored how universities would adapt to online learning. A resident 'expert' at the University of Arizona expounded that the bugs had all been worked out to offer comparable courses, especially in Mathematics.

The events of the past two years and decline in student achievement seem to indicate otherwise.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Duo Del Mar, by JD

"Este es un dúo de guitarra peculiar. Son músicas del repertorio clásico español, y temas propios, más cercanos al flamenco."

Ekaterina Zaytseva/Marta Robles

Duo del Mar is a new project that unites two emergent figures of the actual musical panorama: the classical guitarist Ekaterina Zaytseva and Marta Robles, one of the few female soloist in the world of the flamenco guitar. Their repertoire mixes the pure flamenco elements and the classical music, interlacing rhythms and harmonies to show all the expressive possibilities of the Spanish guitar. Baroque sonatas that were inspired with popular rhythms and melodies, romantic works that evoke the modernist Barcelona or contemporary creation pieces where the classical language fuses with flamenco.

Duo del Mar, Ekaterina Záytseva and Marta Robles, are both members of Barcelona’s extremely active classical-guitar and flamenco scene. Záytseva grew up in Russia, but has lived in Spain the past ten years, playing as a solo artist and also in various configurations, including the Barcelona 4 Guitars. Robles is best known for her flamenco work and her folkish duo collaboration with singer Alba Carmona, but is also adept at straight classical and plays other styles.

https://www.maestrosdelaguitarra.com/ekaterina-zaytseva-2-en/

https://martaroblesguitarra.com/agenda/

COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: It's Surreal Thing, by JD

 Surrealistic brandy!

This bottle of Conde de Osborne "solera gran reserva" brandy is unique as the bottle, its label and the presentation box were designed for Osborne by Salvador Dalí who received the commission in 1964. The prototype for the milk glass decanter was handblown by Vidriera Catalana and is crowned by an indigo ceramic stopper created by potter Antoni Cumella.

https://www.macba.cat/en/art-artists/artists/a-z/cumella-antoni

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_Cumella

https://www.vidriosivc.com/

The brandy bottle you see above is one I bought at some point in the 80s in Spain. I had seen them on the shelves behind the bar in one or two of the 'up market' bars, the ones tarted up to look like a typical English pub as imagined in the minds of romantically inclined foreign persons. One day I was asking the barman to tell me the story behind the design and I asked if he would sell me a bottle which he did. (I can't remember how much I paid but they occasionally pop up on ebay and sell for £25 or so not that I want to sell mine, I was just curious.)

It is indeed a very fine brandy and the Salvador Dalí influence has undoubtedly filtered through to the bottle's contents; after two or three glasses of that very smooth liquid the world begins to look like a Dalí painting!