Media | Steve Woods

‘American’ art and architecture

27/12/2023 Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

Many years ago, your ‘umble scribe remembers a fellow pupil in German class being admonished as follows by Mr. Wreford, our teacher: “Boy, you are arrogant in your ignorance; and ignorant in your arrogance!“

That same mixture of arrogance and ignorance can still be found today: if anything more easily thanks to social media
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Which brings us to Twitter – now rebranded X by rich man-baby Elon Musk – and the account of Jesse Kelly, the conservative talk show host of The Jesse Kelly talk radio show.

Being a professed conservative, Jesse is naturally a very patriotic man, as can be seen from the following tweet.

American art and architecture, Jesse?

Somehow you failed to engage brain before tweeting and have ended up with you foot lodged firmly in your mouth.

In case Mr Walker happens to be passing, here’s a quick history lesson on the Statue of Liberty or Liberty Enlightening the World or even a Liberté éclairant le monde for reasons which will soon become all too apparent.

The statue itself is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor in New York City, which was was dedicated on October 28, 1886.

So far, so American.

Now things start to change, so pay close attention, Jesse! 😀

The statue is a figure of Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty holds a torch above her head with her right hand, whilst in her left hand she carries a tablet inscribed JULY IV MDCCLXXVI (July 4, 1776, in Roman numerals), the date of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. A broken chain and shackle lie at her feet as she walks forward, commemorating the national abolition of slavery following the American Civil War. After its dedication, the statue became a symbol of freedom and of the United States, particularly welcoming to impoverished European immigrants arriving by sea.

There are still more European connections to come, so don’t nod off just yet, Jesse!

The statue was designed by the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi the metal framework on which its copper outer skin was hung was built by Gustave Eiffel. yet another Frenchman Jesse might just have heard of due to some ironmongery he left lying about in central Paris. That’s Paris, France not Paris TX, by the way, and should not be confused with the 1984 film of the same name by German director Wim Wenders.

Just one more little history lesson on the Statue of Liberty left now, Jesse.

The heavy Gallic references might provide a hint of what it might be: the statue itself was a gift to the USA from the people of France. Where else?

Update 28/12/23

Your correspondent is not the only person to have pointed out Kelly’s mistake, as reported by Raw Story, which notes that a community note was added to the Kelly’s original post in which readers added context to Kelly’s image, stating very much the same as above, but in more temperate tones.

However, even this gentle correction did not go down well with the MAGA mouthpiece, who responded as shown below.

Your colors may not run, Jesse, but here’s a bit of free advice: when you are in a hole, particularly one you’ve excavated all on your own, stop digging and put the shovel down. 😀
“Much lover,” my luvver?

27/12/2023 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

Further evidence arrives today of the continuing decline of journalistic standards at Reach plc titles – already a bar so low it’s in danger of touching the ground.

The proof: the author of this piece in today’s Bristol (Evening) Post/Live cannot even spell one of the title’s favourite clichés – much-loved – opting for a Bristolian sounding but meaningless much lover instead.

What is even more surprising is that the author is an award-winner within the journalistic trade.

If the qualityu control for press articles is as low as that down at Bristol’s Temple Way Ministry of Truth, your ‘umble scribe wonders just how much lower it must be where gongs for hacks are involved… :-D.
Death metal meets 1950s avant garde

18/12/2023 Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities, Social Media

Courtesy of author Cory Doctorow on the Mastodon social media network, your ‘umble scribe became aware yesterday of this astounding work by the Austrian death metal band Dead Territory.

It’s their cover of American avant garde composer John Cage‘s seminal 1952 work 4’33”.

Be careful listening to it; you won’t be able to stop humming it all day! 😀
The one per cent

07/12/2023 Steve WoodsMedia, Politics, Social Media

Yesterday your correspondent arranged a poll on his social media account on Mastodon to coincide with the appearance of disgraced former alleged party-time prime minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson before the Covid-19 inquiry being chaired by retired senior judge Heather Hallett.

Needless to say, Johnson was his usual courageous self, turning up at 7.00am to avoid the crowds of bereaved relatives who’d hoped to make their feelings known to the lazy, bumbling charlatan. He did likewise today with several papers showing him arriving once again in the hours of darkness, but then again this is the same brave politician who hid in a fridge in 2019 to avoid being questions by the talentless Piers Morgan.

There is plenty of reporting and live coverage of Johnson’s evidence to the inquiry, which is also being streamed. Today’s Guardian editorial is particularly scathing of Johnson’s performance yesterday, with its byline stating:

Nothing in the former prime minister’s record or his testimony so far suggests he is a reliable witness or capable of genuine contrition.

Neither reliable nor contrite; that a damning assessment.

Anyway, back your ‘umble scribe’s social media poll. A screenshot of the result is shown below.

All that can be said is that your correspondent is shocked to learn one per cent of respondents would sooner trust a man never known to have had an intimate relationship with something known as the truth.
Bizarre feudal remnants

24/11/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

News arrived today of a bizarre feudal remnant – one used by a human bizarre feudal remnant line his own already well-stuffed pockets.

The human bizarre feudal remnant is none other than Mr Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor, alleged to be the head of state of the English Empire (which some still call the United Kingdom. Ed.), who generally masquerades under the alias of “King” Charles III.

Today’s Guardian reveals that Mr Mountbatten-Windsor is stealing the estates of people who die intestate – i.e. without leaving a will – or with no known relatives in the territory of the Duchy of Lancaster, which consists of consists of 18,433 hectares of land holdings, including rural estates and farmland, urban developments, historic buildings, and commercial properties across England and Wales, particularly in Cheshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Savoy Estate in London. Its principal purpose of the estate is to provide a source of independent income for Mr Mountbatten-Windsor and his heirs and successors.

This theft of other people’s assets is covered by the legal term ‘bona vacantia‘, meaning unowned property. The same practice of ‘bona vacantia‘ is employed by the Duchy of Cornwall to provide an income for the so-called ‘Prince’ of Wales, one William Arthur Philip Louis Mountbatten-Windsor.

The rich and powerful of this backward medieval country have been stealing the assets owned or used by others for centuries. From 1604 onwards the Inclosure Acts created legal property rights for the rich to land previously held in common in England and Wales, particularly open fields and common land. Between 1604 and 1914 over 5,200 individual acts enclosing public land were passed, affecting 28,000 km².

These thefts of common land were commemorated in a popular poem in the early 18th century.

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own,
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

This practice of appropriating land owned and used by others reached its zenith during Britain’s colonial expansion under the concept of ‘terra nullius‘, literally nobody’s land. How could allegedly primitive people claim ownership of land when nothing concerning property rights was written down, was the flawed logic behind these seizures, which reached their height in Australia, where people now commemorated by street names and public artworks were responsible for the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people, who have no public monuments by which to remember the victims. This was documented in all its brutality by the three part 2022 TV series The Australian Wars.

Anyway, back from nobody’s land to nobody’s property in the north of England. The Guardian has found out that the Duchy of Lancaster has been secretly using the bona vacantia funds to renovate properties owned by the alleged king and rented out for profit. The Duchy’s accounts suggest it has collected £61.8m in bona vacantia funds over the last decade. Of those, only £9.3m or 15% of the total has gone to charities, which the Duchy maintains is the main reason for collecting the funds.

Needless to say, this news has not gone down well in areas subject to the Duchy of Lancaster’s writ.

Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester is on record as saying:

I think many people in the north-west will be surprised to learn that the savings and assets of friends and neighbours are being taken in this way. I don’t recall this archaic system ever being explained to anyone here nor public consent for it being given.

Burnham furthermore added that:

This appears to be a bizarre remnant of feudal Britain. While we await the public acts of levelling up that we have been promised, it seems this country still has silent mechanisms of levelling down at work, redistributing wealth in the wrong direction.

Furthermore, friends of some of those whose assets have been stolen have described their use to fix up Duchy properties for future rental as ‘unethical, ‘shocking and ‘a disgrace.

The worst decision this country ever made was to readmit Charles Stuart (son of the late tyrant) in 1660. That would have avoided any future regal robbery of people’s property either in this country or around the world.
Bristol City Council & the English Language

16/11/2023 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Politics

Bristolian may exist as a dialect with its own idiosyncrasies, but within the city and county of Bristol itself, there’s one place where English is used in a peculiar way: the Counts Louse (as pronounced in the local vernacular; some call it City Hall – or a variant thereof – after its renaming by the then Mayor George Ferguson in 2012. Ed.). In his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote the following:

Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Down at the Counts Louse, the English language has been used to conceal what is really going on behind its mock Georgian façade, particularly where funding cuts and redundancies are planned, usually couched in terms such as redeployment, restructuring and the like.
Perhaps the most famous use of such obfuscatory language occurred in 2013 when it was discovered – as reported by The Bristolian – that £165,000 in cash was missing from the council’s loss-making markets department (a department that’s supposed to make money for the local authority. Ed.). This was duly recorded in an internal report as ‘material income misappropriation‘.
We ordinary mortals have a much more succinct phrase than material income misappropriation. We call it theft.

That infamous bit of council-speak has now been joined by another phrase by Councillor Craig Cheney, the elected member in charge of the city’s purse strings, which was duly reported by the Bristol Post in relation to the evacuation of Barton House in Barton Hill due to structural defects.

Barton House. Image courtesy of Google Street View.

What Cllr. Cheney said to the local press while commenting on Barton House included the sentence below.

There’s perhaps not as much concrete as there should be.

Perhaps? Most definitely not as much concrete, plus ignorance and non-observance of the building plans, according to your colleague Councillor Kye Dudd.

Give yourself a pat on the back, Cllr. Cheney; that one sentence alone deserves its own special place in the annals of British understatement. 😀
In less light-hearted reporting on Barton House, it has now emerged that the government warned Bristol City Council in 2017 – six years ago – about the condition of Barton House and four other tower blocks built using the LPS building system and perhaps more scandalously that no structural survey of Barton House had been conducted since 1970, i.e. over half a century ago. Municipal neglect of the city’s infrastructure is endemic down the Counts Louse. 🙁
Lookalikes – Eric and Leonardo

15/11/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

Newsweek in the United States reports that Eric Trump’s recent comment comparing his family’s assets to the Mona Lisa amid their ongoing civil fraud trial in New York has spawned a wave of mockery across social media.

Disgraced former president Donald John Trump and his three adult children – Ivanka, Donald Jr. and the aforementioned Eric are accused of frequently inflating The Donald’s own net worth and the value of his assets by billions of dollars from 2011 to 2021 to secure better deals and loans. Trump and his children have dismissed the accusations and maintained their innocence, accusing prosecutors of being politically motivated and attempting to harm the Dunning-Kruger effect’s candidate’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Earlier this week Eric Trump – hardly one of the world’s towering intellects – claimed that the Trump family properties at play in the civil fraud trial are “worth a fortune” and called them “Mona Lisas of the real estate world.“

Below in true Private Eye style, the Trump Tower in New York and Leonardo’s famous painting are placed side by side, so readers can draw their own conclusions as to which of them are of greater value to the human race as a whole.
Dumb Britons bought property in Italy but voted for Brexit

31/10/2023 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Politics
In what clearly counts as an instance of buyer’s remorse, today’s inews carries a piece about two Britons – one in his thirties and from Bristol, the other a pensioner from Winchester, who both voted for Brexit and now seem surprised they cannot get visas to live permanently in their respective properties, as per the screenshot below of the report’s headline and byline.

Both are now suffering remorse and a feeling of betrayal (remember all those smooth-talking right-wing politicians who lied to the public saying nothing would really changed in our relationship with the EU and its member states? Ed.).

As defined by the dictionary, the phrase buyer’s remorse has two meanings:
- a sense of regret or uneasiness after having purchased a house, car, or other major item; and
- a sense of regret after having committed to an endorsement, policy, plan of action, etc.
Either of both of those definitions may be applicable in these two instances.

These stories have a moral, i.e. think before you vote (bearing in mind that all politicians lie. Ed.) and always remember the law of unexpected consequences.
Shropshire Star exclusive: donkey has waist

29/10/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities
The Shropshire Star is a local newspaper serving the county where your ‘umble scribe was born. However, its role in the field of science – and the discipline of asinine anatomy in particular – has not previously been recognised.

Until now, that is.

On Friday the Star carried a report of a donkey with its back legs and rear stuck in a storm drain somewhere undisclosed in the vicinity of Market Drayton, your correspondent’s home town.

The incident was attended by crews from Market Drayton, Telford Central and Wellington fire stations, who were able to extract the donkey called Amigo from the drain.

The Star was so pleased with its contribution to asinine anatomy and veterinary science that it incorporated it into its headline: Firefighters rush to rescue donkey stuck waist-deep in storm drain,

Here’s a donkey. Spot the waist.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

There are two dictionary definitions of waist, one pertaining to anatomy, the other to apparel. Neither mentions donkeys:
- the part of the body above and slightly narrower than the hips; and
- the part of a piece of clothing that goes around or covers the area between the hips and the ribs.
The Guardian also covered the story. Curiously, its account fails to mention Amigo’s waist. 😀
Dumb Britain abuses 999 service

24/10/2023 Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities, Social Media

According to Wikipedia, “999 is an official emergency telephone number in a number of countries which allows the caller to contact emergency services for emergency assistance“, with approximately 35 million calls being made per year.

The English Empire (which some still call the United Kingdom. Ed.) uses the emergency number to provide a certain number of emergency services – ambulance, fire brigade, police and coastguard being the main ones, as well as – depending on location – lifeboat, mountain rescue, cave rescue, mine rescue and bomb disposal.

However, and this is quite a significant however, one of the services not offered is advising the hard of thinking where they can get a haircut in the wee small hours, as the Bristol Post duly reported after reading Avon & Somerset Constabulary’s social media feed on X, formerly known as Twitter before man-baby Elon Musk spent his pocket money on the company.

The post reads:

999 call: Caller has stated he is in an emergency, as his local barbers are closed at 01:00am. Upon reflection, the caller agreed that it is unlikely that any barbers would be open at this time, and that this was not a Police matter.

The tweet was sent by Mr Plod as part of International Control Room Week which aims to highlight the work done by people working in 999 control rooms across the emergency services.

Update 28/12/23

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