9/11/1989 + 20

"Governments crack and systems fall, because unity is powerful! Lights go out, walls come tumblin' down!"

The Style Council play Warsaw 1985

The History of the World...

The history of the world is the history of class struggle - Karl Marx
The history of the world is the history of technological progress
- Jared Diamond
The history of the world is the history of human crime
the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime - Winston Churchill
The history of the world is the history of the triumph of the heartless over the mindless - Sir Humphrey Appleby

The history of the world is the history of a small ship sailing without maps on a wide ocean much battered by storms, driven off course by half-crazed captains, crashing into unknown islands.
And the discoveries of the ship's offices.
And the lives saved by the ship's doctors.
And the hardships endured by the ship's crew.
And the lives of the peoples of the unknown islands.
And the lives of the women who were waiting at home.
And the engineering and the building of the ship, and why it was built and why it was sent: that is the history of the world.
-David Kames

A poem on the theme of study stress...

Stop the world, I want to get off...

I want the prevention that is the only cure,
the only real cure for the disease,
this little bacillus causes,
when it gets down in your guts and multiplies,
one tiny problem,
something you should have already solved,
something you should have had dealt with when you could,
something that needed attention right away,
and now the time for treatment is passed,
the medicine wont work now.
The only option left is some great,
heroic surgery,
loping off a hand to cure a paper-cut,
cutting out your guts to cure a stomach ache,
beating out your brains,
getting it off your chest.

Boring Personal stuff - Back at School

Biology, Chemistry, English, Sociology

Wow - this makes sense of everything...

...well not quite. Not in the "theories that explain everything actually explain nothing" way, but it does make a lot of sense out of all kinds of social interaction and feelings I've had. V. v. interesting and I advise you to check it out:

Connected Minds: Loneliness, Social Brains and the Need for Community - John Cacioppo

No such understanding can be reached...

And consequently...

Now I suppose we just have to set to and win.
Some of us have, in a sense, been at war since January 1933, when persecution and paganism became officially okay in Germany; but we can't sit back and say 'I told you so.'
We're all in it.
- Tom Driberg "William Hickey" in the Daily Express 4th September 1939

Isolationism revisited...

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be voluntarily rationing our purchases of consumer electronics and improving the recycling rates of old computers and mobile phones here, because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.

Appeasement Era Retrospective 2

IN OLD MOSCOW
(Tune: Clementine)

In old Moscow, in the Kremlin,
In the fall of '39,
Sat a Russian and a Prussian
Writing out the party line.

CHORUS:
Oh, my darling, oh, my darling,
Oh, my darling party line;
Oh, I never will desert you,
For I love this life of mine.

Leon Trotsky was a Nazi;
Oh, we knew it for a fact.
Pravda said it; we all read It,
BEFORE the Stalin-Hitler Pact.

CHORUS:

Once a Nazi would be shot, see,
That was then the Party Line;
Now a Nazi's hotsy-totsy,
Trotsky's laying British mines.

CHORUS:

Now the Nazis and the Fuerher
Stand within the Party Line,
All the Russians love the Prussians,
Volga boatmen sail the Rhine.

CHORUS:
Oh, my darling, oh, my darling,
Oh, my darling party line;
Oh, I never will desert you,
For I love this life of mine.

from The Socialist Songbook

finally, something we agree on...
Putin condemns Nazi-Soviet pact

Appeasement Era Retrospective

From the BBC Archives

Chamberlain returns from Munich with Anglo-German Agreement

Journey into Czechoslovakia After the Munich Agreement

From Mr. Alfred Hitchcock and Gaumont-British Films

Living in the future

'It seems to me, Mrs. Leete,' I said, 'that if we could have devised an arrangment for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and begining and ceaseing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained, and cease to strive for further improvements.'
- Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887, Tricknor & Co., 1888
quoted in The Faber Book of Utopias, edited by John Carey

Bored mindless in utopia...

Best speeches/dialogue/scenes for women in film?

Any suggestions? As a bar to get over; Maggie Smith vs. Pamela Franklin in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't seen the film / read the book...


as good / better than anyone?

Does anyone....

have a flabby, floppy haired doll that we can burn?

Just, y'know, for a bit of fun?