Blake really can't draw - or write poetry...Why do we study him again?

The "human form" - Sir Isaac Newton (curiously naked) by William Blake.

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'The Blossom', by William Blake:

Merry, Merry Sparrow!
Under leaves so green
A happy Blossom
Sees you swift as arrow
Seek your cradle narrow
Near my Bosom.

Pretty, Pretty Robin!
Under leaves so green
A happy Blossom
Hears you sobbing, sobbing,
Pretty, Pretty Robin,
Near my Bosom.

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So Farewell Then Little Boy Poisoned by Religion and Old Hags,

not by William Blake

-

O little boy lost, what will you do

If I sit here all day shedding tears over you?

Will you run to the priest and be sermonised to death?

Will you run to the harlot who, for all I know, might not be permanently miserable and steeped in sin all of the time...

O! O! O! dark...wrath...fear...illicit sex...clergymen...chimneys...O O O!

The London Prodigal Exposed

Wembley

After an evening of shenanigans with The London Prodical which involved sex, drugs and rooftops, Silver Dollar Jim got a personal view of the new Wembley to see that most eagerly anticipated football match. The final... between Conference rivals Exeter and Morkham. The day was doomed from the start. I was supporting Exeter as they were the only team who's name I managed to remember. I gave the friendly beverage seller a genuine asthma attack with the cigarette I was innocently holding in my left hand. Exeter lost and the Morkham manager fell over multiple times when he ran onto the pitch after the final whistle. This lower league stuff is so undignified, at least in the premiership the hooligans managing the clubs are living in Kensington & Chelsea.

Baby guitars

Following from Dogtooth's statement of fondness for Roy Smeck I must express my own growing fascination with the George Formby school of seduction.

1 - Most importantly, always carry a small stringed instrument.

2 - When invited to give a performance (or even if not) ignore anyone else in the room, and direct your song at the most attractive woman you can see.

3 - Work in as many smutty double entredres as possible, but diffuse any sleaze-factor with a charmingly boyish smile.

4 - Give a high pitched laugh at any moments you consider particularly funny.

5- Try and have your performence cut short by some pompous male authority figure.

Personally however, if I had to pick the most dashing comic singer I'd have to go for Jake Thackray.

On an unrelated note: do we think that The London Prodigal has anything to do with this?

The Hair of a Madman...

A chemical study of Beethoven's hair suggests that his infamously stormy temperament was the result of lead poisoning. A slightly more complex way of saying - he had mental hair. Good old Ludvig Van: he could have kicked Mozart's arse any day.

The virgin story.

I viewed part of a documentary on the channel 4 tonight about a man in his late twenties who is still a virgin and has had no sexual contact with the female specimen. He apparently had "intimacy issues", these issues only became apparent when the Dutch Sex Therapist that he was forced to "go all the way with" was an elderly woman. Is gerontophilic pornography really what we should expect from a Brown government? At least under Blair c5 had good softcore straight to tv movies on after 12.

The best fitness routine.

The "Arctic" "Monkeys"

The Post-Newt seems to have become a vehicle for stock manipulation, so in an attempt to steer the conversation elsewhere, I'm going to talk vaguely and uselessly about something I noticed in the news. Gordon Brown did it in his speech at the Labour Party Conference, and - probably in direct reference to that speech - Tim Hames did it in the Times this morning. These are, in fairness, the only two examples I have, but there are surely others. It has become a very robust political half-volley to gesture publicly to the Arctic Monkeys. It is usually politicians or journalists who have given up trying to remain in touch, and have started making sport of their advancing years - playing the loveable grandparent card. The idea is that "Arctic Monkeys" is the newest metonym for pop music. Making the occasional ignorant and casual reference to the group is a clever way of trivialising popular culture and making one's own business (politics, journalism, etc) seem more important. But why the Monkeys? Why not "KT" Tunstall, Amy "Winehouse" or "Kings of Leon"? Personally, I think people just find the name "Arctic Monkeys" funny - I think it tickles the childish sense of humour. I imagine Gordon Brown chuckling on his sofa at mention of the band.

Financial Sector

Buy Easyjet shares, they're undervalued.

Disclaimer: This suggestion is provided on an as is basis and postnewt are not responsible people and have no moral compass. Easyjet may not even exist. This is not endorsed by the Coca-Cola company or any of its affiliates or sponsers.

Racist Maths

A long silence from my underwater lair. The Muted Slughorn recently declared an amnesty on stolen bar furniture and I've been having a recurring dream in which I have to escape from a lunatic asylum by extreme violence and guile.
The student publication of the place of Higher Education where I work occasionally as a test tube cleaner and find a ready market for smuggled curios and exotic 'male enhancers' recently published a headline decrying the racism within the institution. After a lifetime of casual discrimination directed at me by various small minded chordates I am sensitive to this issue, and at first the statement that 30 percent of foreign students had experienced racism seemed worrying. However, closer examination of the statistics soon reassured me. Given that one is either prone to racism or one is not (very few liberals can identify a single point of their life when they abandoned previous beliefs and shouted 'rag head curry muncher' or another such crude slur at a startled shopkeeper, and then returned to their previous tolerance) we can assume that for a given number of people who have experienced racism there are about at most a quarter as many people perpetrating racism. I can't claim maths is a strong point, but given that around seven percent of the university students are from overseas, and only thirty percent of that number have experienced racism, and assuming that on average every racist student has sinned an average of four times, only 0.525 percent of the students could be considered racist. A closer examination of the argument suggests that even this tiny percentage of students is an over estimation - staff of the university are included as well.
We seem to be doing a racism theme today, so here are two more pieces of idiocy:
Anti-Racist Maths - whoever came up with this idea clearly suffered from the delusional and in itself rather racist belief that our mathematical system was developed in Europe, which would explain why we still use roman numerals in our calculations and have no concept of zero...
Positive Hip Hop - I have never seen an article encouraging indie or rock musicians to take responsibility for the education of their listeners. This seems to me the latest in a long line of movements, headed by people of all races, which see black culture as a work in progress, in need of outside guidance.

I can't seem to work the links today, but here are the three relevent ones - perhaps a benevolent fellow newtists could sort this out for me -
http://www.nouse.co.uk/2007/05/08/are-we-a-racist-university/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-racist_mathematics
http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2006/01/30/aiming_for_an_alternative_hip_hop/?page=2

James Gordon Madonna Testes Yoda Clinton Brown door Reginald PerrinBrown

While leisurely spending my work day browsing wikipedia I stumbled upon the true name of the chancellor. See here

Update: The article has been retracted. Come back later for saucy photos of gordon brown and chirac.

Three of them, and Alleline

In spite of my not inconsiderable statephobic paranoia, the idea of the Service working undisturbed has always appealed. They clearly serve our best interests - let us hope this is not the end for MI discretion.

Sweet Charity

I have a theory about charitable donation. Hamilton and I were into the 74th hour of our bi-monthly draughts rubber at the Muted Slughorn. Me to play. But first, the important business of drenching my whistle. My round. No-one behind the bar, so I helped myself to vintage bottle of elderflower wine, noticing, in the process, a donation box sitting accusingly by the pulls. 'Please give generously in support of Dapple, an elderly shire-horse who was being bullied by other horses, and had to be removed from the field and provided for separately.' What an endearing cause, I thought, and was on the verge of popping a ripe trio of shiny doubloons into the tub, when I realised my error. Of course I was willing to give to such an appealing cause, just as I would willingly give to the RNLI, or the RSPCA. Such charities are the most rewarding by far, since you can go on featherbedding the ol' conscience without having to accept the existence of real problems in the world: Global warming, children in need, famine in sub-Saharan Africa. The Donkey Sanctuaries of this world provide an invaluable service: they offer a comfortable domestic problem about which no-one is too fussed. Giving money to Oxfam or the NSPCC, for example, forces us to recognise the afootness of very serious societal, economic and political malaises - the sort of which it is preferable to remain ignorant.

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

Alcohol related lobby groups such as Alcohol Concern, seems to have garnered quite a lot of media coverage recently. Consider the following:

Call to stop children's drinking and Call to raise drinking age to 21

The first is utterly unenforceable and the second is abhorrent. Rather than copying the highly regulatory approach favoured by MADD, I - along with many others - have always been in favour of the more sophisticated approach to alcohol demonstrated by our neighbours across the channel. So what would be the sole result of the proposed laws? They'd successfully fill the middle classes with angst as they wondered whether they'd be shopped for offering little Penelope a sip of wine or letting Rufus indulge in a glass of West Country cider to accompany his Sunday roast. Come to think of it middle-class consternation - tremendous.

William McGonagall - the 'worst poet in british history'

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

See more here

Fear, loathing and immeasurable satisfaction

Wild horses couldn't drag me away from this one: watch Hunter S. Thompson interview (after a fashion) Keith Richards.

Hardly knew thee? I never knew thee!

3287.6 people die every day in road accidents across the world. 174 people die of flu-related illness daily in the States alone. Between 1988 and 2000, 47 Oklahomans were hospitalised as a result of lawnmower-related burns; 5 ultimately perished. Now ask me why I'm not praying for the souls of the Virginia Tech. victims...no, true, because I don't believe in god - but also because they are no dearer to me than any of the figures cited above. That they happened to bite the dust at the same time in the same place does not make their death any more of a tragedy, or any less of a statistic. There hasn't been a gun massacre of these proportions in the US since 1999. The shooter was mentally unstable; but perfectly sane people veer into oncoming traffic every day of the week. Why is it that the more unusual and outstanding killings attract the most concern? I'm concerned about the quotidienne killers! the blights that are here to stay; not these trickster-reapers that pop up unexpectedly at irregular intervals and playfully drag a few unfortunates down the Styx. If campus-blanket-gun-massacre victims continue to meet their maker at a rate of 32 every 8 years, I think I can live with that, don't you?

Update: Good measured material, once again, from our friends at Spiked.

Has Hamilton the drive to be a sporting hero?

It's the question all the papers are asking.

Nappy Headed?

Predictably the liberal e-zine Spiked, of which Dogtooth is much enamoured, has taken a strong editorial line in the Don Imus affair, and initially I sided with them, being fairly keen on free speech myself (other startling facts about me: I don't like being hit on the head and I don't endorse murder) but I'm starting to have my doubts. If some form of government legislation had forced CBS to fire Imus then I would have been dead against it, but no coercion was involved. CBS fired Imus because they judged him to be, despite his large audience, to be more of a problem than an asset. Do we think that a private company should be forced to suffer financially just to defend an elderly racist's right to free speech? Just because we are glad to live in countries which allow freedom of media does not mean our media should gratuitously offend. Do I think that I should be allowed to draw Mohammad? Yes. Do I plan to do so? No. I feel no compulsion to risk my safety to exercise a theoretical right.

Breakfast of Champions:

So farewell then Kurt Vonnegut.