Richter 9

As I write this the death toll is already in the tens of thousands. And maybe a million homeless.

I think I will post no more until the New Year.

The man with no name

I chose my fifty films from those I would like to see again but of course in later viewings one is sometimes disappointed. Bearing this in mind, I excluded all the great classics of the early cinema and some later films which I knew would have dated by now.

But a more recent film got in because I remembered it as being exciting. The first of two hundred spaghetti Westerns, Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, was a remake of Kurosawa’s splendid Yojimbo.

Seeing it on TV the other day, I found it boring and silly, with the Italian cast dubbed by rotten actors speaking poorly translated dialogue. Clint Eastwood did much better things later, both as actor and director.

Anyway, out it comes, and to replace it I chose The Way Ahead, Carol Reed’s memorable wartime semi-documentary, written by Peter Ustinov and originally intended as a training film.

[By the way, the character played by Eastwood in AFOD is actually referred to as Joe, and by different names in later films]

A Gladsome Yuletide to One and All

“It's always seemed to me, after all, that Christmas, with its spirit of giving, offers us all a wonderful opportunity each year to reflect on what we all most sincerely and deeply believe in - I refer, of course, to money.”
Tom Lehrer

Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens,
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens.
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again.

But, all the same, here's a wish:
A prayer when dry: Tipsy as a charm. Amen.

But it was the way they said it…

Everyone knows a few of the classic lines from films – “Frankly, my dear…”, “Infamy! Infamy!..”, “Fasten your seatbelts…”, and most of the things Groucho said. There are certain rich veins: things said to Bogart (as well as by him), Alastair Sim's horrified yelps (e.g. "..and boys! Remember Nicky, the nark!") and, curiously, Brief Encounter which, besides the one below, has "Can I help? I'm a doctor" and the husband's remark as Celia Johnson comes out of her reverie: "I don't know where you've been, my dear, but thank you for coming back to me".

Here are a few that I treasure; some are in the popular collections of movie quotes, but most are not.

• Alastair Sim to Trevor Howard, who had called him a flat-footed copper: “The police force does not have a monopoly of fallen arches, Doctor Barnes” (Green for Danger)
• Lionel Barrymore to Greta Garbo when she had agreed to give up her relationship with his son: “Gawd bless yew, Marguerite Goad-i-ay!” (Camille)
• Katherine Hepburn to Humphrey Bogart: “Human nature is what we are put on this earth to rise above, Mr Allnutt” (The African Queen)
• Alfonso Bedoya to Humphrey Bogart, after being accused of not being a real policeman: “Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!” (Treasure of the Sierra Madre)
• Joyce Cary as the woman in charge of the refreshment room, bridling at a flirtatious remark: “I don’t know to what you’re referrin’, I'm sure…” (Brief Encounter)
• Orson Welles to Joseph Cotton: “Sure, we’re speaking, Jed. You’re fired.” (Citizen Kane)
• Marlene Dietrich to Orson Welles: “He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?” (A Touch of Evil)
• Fortunio Bonanova as the music master trying to teach Kane’s wife to sing: “Impossible! Impossible!” (Citizen Kane, again)
• Robert Newton calling his dog to be drowned: “Gammeeryeaough!”, possibly meaning “Come ‘ere you!” (Oliver Twist)
• Moore Marriott, after a train runs over his watch: “It’s stopped!” (Oh Mr Porter)
• Fred MacMurray, confessing on tape: "Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?" (Double Indemnity)
• One soldier to another: “You essence of stench!” (subtitle in a Kurosawa film)
• French soldier to King Arthur’s knights: “Go and boil your bottoms, you sons of silly persons!” (Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
• Jean Gabin to Michèle Morgan, as he lies dying in the street: “Embrasse-moi! Vite, on est pressé!” (Quai des Brumes)

If you’re called Arthur Wilkins I've no interest in you

If there is a defect in my character – and this is a matter much disputed between those who hotly maintain that there are none and those who with equal vehemence declare that there are several, citing in particular my excessive modesty, the gentleness of my nature which makes me easily cowed by stronger personalities and silenced by vociferous opposition, and, most of all, my predilection, probably stemming from exposure at too early an age to the works of Henry James, for the composing of sentences which, though perfectly coherent and of lapidary grace, develop such inordinate length and complexity that people reading them sometimes give up in the middle, believing that life is passing them by and that they would be well advised to go away and do something else – then it is my perverted romanticism or baseless xenophilia, call it what you will, which causes me to take a disproportionate interest in (or sometimes, even, feel unjustifiably attracted towards) people with exotic names.

This is a defect of no great consequence. I have never come to any harm through seeking closer relationships with people called, say, Chintaman Rambocus or Tarsilla Castelnuovo-Tedesco, nor did it prevent me twenty years ago from making a very sound move by marrying someone called Anne. So it is not disabling, though it is undoubtedly a misguided impulse.

I have been watching on TV an extremely silly spy series called Spooks. There are several women in the cast, including two who are both quite attractive though neither of them to such an extent as to fill me with uncontrollable lust. One of them, called Nicola Walker, is pretty in a conventional way; the other is not really pretty at all but has a vaguely sinister charm, with a slight lisp and cold, hooded eyes; her name, as I would have expected, is Olga Sosnovska. No need to ask which one I kept my eyes on.

The lunacy of my exotic-name fixation was brought home to me when, after the last episode, I examined the cast list more closely and found that I had got it quite wrong: it is the boringly pretty one whose name is Olga Sosnovska.

Musical Family

The last of the Goossens family has died at the age of 105: Sidonie Goossens was a harpist of world renown for more than half a century.

This musical family, which came to England from Belgium in the nineteenth century, included three Eugenes—grandfather, father and brother to Sidonie. Another brother, Leon, was a famous oboist; here he is playing the Tarantella from Scarlatti’s Concerto No 1.
It is absolutely not true that he gave rise to the phrase ….wouldn’t say oboe to a Goossens.

You don’t have to be pregnant

People have been rather sniffy about it, but I think the offer by the hotel group Travelodge, silly PR gimmick though it may be, is not altogether without merit. They will give a free night’s accommodation over the Christmas season to any couple named Mary and Joseph, “…to make amends for the failure of the Bethlehem hotel industry”.

Sixty years at the movies

I started to make a list of films that I have enjoyed with the intention of putting it into my profile, but I discovered that my Blogger template not only insisted on calling them Favorite Films, but limited the list to six hundred characters. This would restrict the number of films to be included to about twenty-five, and as during some decades I went to the pictures up to three times a week this would have meant leaving out many essential ones.

Anyway, for the moment I have selected fifty and put them on a separate page. They are listed HERE.

Each title has a link to a review, mostly from The New York Times, IMDb or the invaluable www.filmsite.org .

God can harm your moral health

It has been my observation that strong religious beliefs do not make anyone more virtuous; few of the really good people I have known have been particularly devout, and few of the pious ones have been notably good. There is, as statisticians would say, zero correlation. Or, to put it another way, as a force for the moral improvement of mankind the Bible simply doesn’t work.

Further, I have long suspected that there is actually a negative correlation (i.e., the more godly, the less pure in heart), and an article in The Sunday Times by Andrew Sullivan, from which I quote below, suggests that there might be some evidence for this.
What is certain is that in the United States of America the god-fearing parts where "traditional values" are upheld are not those parts where traditional values are healthiest.

Consider:

• The states with the highest divorce rates are AL, AR, AZ, FL, GA, MS, NC, OK, SC, and TX. All voted for Bush in the recent election.
• The states with the lowest divorce rates are CT, MA, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI and VT. All voted for Kerry.
• The Bible Belt divorce rate is about 50% higher than the national average.
• There is no measurable difference in divorce rates between those who are “born again” and those who are not.
• In Texas, where the religious right and its rhetoric against teen-age sex is strong, teen births as a percentage of all births are 16.1%, while in liberal, secular Massachusetts they are less than half, 7.4%.
• In America, where the religious right ferociously condemn abortion, there are 21 abortions per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44; liberal Holland has 6.4%, less than a third of this.
• The leading members of the forces of social conservatism in America are hardly exemplars of the values they purport to espouse: Rush Limbaugh has had three divorces and an addiction to painkillers, Bill Reilly has just settled a sex harassment suit that indicated a highly active adulterous sex life, and Bob Barr, the congressman who wrote the Defense of Marriage Act, has had three wives.

The article was entitled: Where the Bible bashers are sinful and the liberals pure. This is perhaps a crude generalisation, as is the suggestion that Republicans are vociferous about sin but commit more than their share, while Democrats don’t talk about it so much but commit rather less. America is more complicated than that: as Sullivan points out, Bill Clinton was a product of a Republican state while Bush was for more than half his life a dissolute wastrel from a Democrat-state family.
Of course, all this is fairly incomprehensible from a UK standpoint. As the most secular nation of the western world, we do not expect, or even want, our leaders to be publicly devout. Religious zeal is regarded as bad form and our Prime Minister’s sanctimony is an electoral handicap (as are his wife’s dotty superstitions).

Not Very Interesting Facts

[No 162 in an occasional series]
“The best things in life are free” is an anagram of “Nail-biting refreshes the feet”.

Keeping our spirits up

Following the piece I wrote last week about Struwwelhitler, a friend has emailed to remind me of other jokes about the Nazis that were going round in the 1940s, most of which were either very feeble or excessively optimistic: we never actually did Hang Out the Washing On the Siegfried Line.

On TV in the seventies Private Pike repeated one of the childish wartime chants (“…Hitler’s barmy, so’s his army...”) in the presence of a captured U-boat commander, who angrily demanded to know his name so that retribution could be exacted after the war (“Don’t tell him, Pike!”).

Perhaps the most effective slander on the Nazi leaders was the one that was said to have been based on confidential information supplied by Unity Mitford, who knew them well; it went to the tune of Colonel Bogey:
Hitler…..has only got one ball
Goering…..has two, but rather small
Himmler…..has something simmler
And poor old Goebbels has noebbels at all.

No they don’t, and never did

If you put warm beer plus English into Google you get nearly ten thousand results. If you add John Major you still get a couple of hundred and I imagine that quite a few of the ten thousand stem from these.

In this way is a misconception perpetuated by a fatuous idiot’s misquotation.

Shock-headed Führer

I wrote recently about a Victorian children’s book called Struwwelpeter. In 1941 Robert and Philip Spence wrote and illustrated a version of it called Struwwelhitler. Not only does it cleverly adapt Dr Hoffman’s stories to a twentieth-century wartime setting, but the style of both the verse and the drawings mimics the original very closely; the booklet is a little masterpiece of parody. It was published by The Daily Sketch to raise money for the War Relief Fund which provided comforts to the armed forces and to air raid victims, and the authors took no fees or royalties.




The Story of the Inky Boys has become the Story of the Nazi Boys, and the black-a-moor has become a little bolshevik boy. Stalin is the giant and dips them into red ink. I would guess that the booklet was written after his pact with Hitler but before Operation Barbarossa when the Russians became our allies, for although he plays the good giant who teaches the Nazi boys a lesson he's not presented as the cuddly old Joe which he later became. It was a confusing time.

The booklet has a special resonance for me in that it inspired the only really successful investment I have ever made in my whole life: I bought it in a second-hand bookshop in Malvern in 2001 and after having a colour photocopy made I sold it on eBay for three times the price I paid. When first published exactly half a century earlier it cost the same as my hardback Struwwelpeter had cost five years before that: 1/6d (7½p).
A slight shadow was cast over my satisfaction when later I saw that booksellers were offering other copies of the booklet for sale at five times the price for which I had let mine go.

The ultimate question

Even the most eminent philosophers may be unaware that some complex questions have simple answers. There is an old and, sadly, apocryphal story told by a cabby: 'Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him, "Well, Lord Russell, what's it all about, then?" And, do you know, HE COULDN’T TELL ME!'

The answer is, of course: You do the Hokey-Cokey and you turn around, and that’s……

There is also the story about Larry La Prise, who wrote it. When he died in 2002 his family had great difficulty with the funeral: they put his left leg in the coffin, and it was all downhill from there…

Shock-headed Peter

Our Victorian forebears would have been completely mystified about the proposal to make it illegal for us to smack our children, for what was inflicted on theirs makes smacking seem like a caress. I don’t mean just being sent up chimneys or down mines – that was only for the children of the poor – but also the punishments that middle- or upper-class children might suffer when they stepped out of line.

The only interesting relic I have of my childhood is a battered copy of an English translation of Struwwelpeter, with the wildly inaccurate subtitle Pretty Stories and Funny Pictures.



It tells of appalling things that happened to naughty or merely foolish children: Frederick, who was cruel to animals, was savaged by his own dog; Harriet played with matches and burned to death; Augustus wouldn’t eat his soup and died slowly of starvation, while Robert went out with a red umbrella on a windy day and was never seen again. Most frightening of all, when Conrad’s Mamma was out and he sucked his thumb, the “great, long, red-legg’d scissor-man” came crashing through the door and snipped it off, then did the same to the other one. I must have been given this book when I was about six, and it says much for the happy security of my childhood that although I was a nervous and timid little boy I don’t think I was at all terrified by the truly dreadful pictures.


One of the stories strikes me today as being very salutary: three little racists torment a “woolly-headed black-a-moor”, singing “Oh! Blacky, you’re as black as ink” and so on. A neighbourhood giant called Agrippa remonstrates with them but they take no notice, so he “foams with rage” and dunks them in his “mighty inkstand”.



“The black-a-moor enjoys the fun” and a final picture shows him marching perkily along while the three boys march behind him:
Quite black all over, eyes and nose,
And legs, and arms, and heads, and toes,
And trowsers, pinafores and toys,
The silly little inky boys.

So perhaps the bloodthirsty Dr Hoffman's heart was really in the right place, though many doctoral theses have been written about his castration complex and the phallic symbolism of his themes.

I shall write in a later post about a version called Struwwelhitler.

Banning the “sport”

“We intend to eradicate this cruel, barbaric practice”, said a civil leader. More than 80% of the public supports an outright ban, and the government is on the way to outlawing it. But there are many who say that banning it will destroy a way of life and cause thousands of job losses, and that it’s an urban versus rural issue which many townspeople simply do not understand.

It is true that it originated before the birth of Christ and was popular in England, along with bull-baiting with dogs, for hundreds of years, but nowadays we are much less interested in it; few people enjoy watching two cocks fitted with sharp spurs slash at each other until one is dead or dying.

In England cockfighting was forbidden by Queen Victoria, but it is still legal in two American states, Louisiana and New Mexico, though there is a renewed effort being made to wipe it out altogether. However, there has been a petition to Congress, inspired by Gamefowl Breeders Of The U.S, to legalise it throughout the country, asserting that legalisation would “bring in millions of much needed tax dollars”. This is an argument which must be very attractive to the present administration.

Which one is he, then?

It has been brought to my attention that even some of my literate, cultured, sharpwitted readers are having difficulty keeping up with the news from Ukraine, where there is headline strife and the possibility of worse to come. This is not because the situation is particularly complex, but simply because we are used to discussing world leaders who have nice crisp names like Blair or Bush, and while we could manage the World War II two-syllablers - Stalin, Churchill, Hitler - the troubles in Ukraine are requiring us to remember which protagonist is the one to cheer and which the one to boo-hiss when they are both called Viktor and both have surnames beginning with Y containing a joint total of SEVEN SYLLABLES.
But Other Men's Flowers is The Blog That Makes Everything Easy, so pay attention and don't fidget:

Viktor Yanukovitch is the official winner of the election for President, but this is disputed by the supporters of the opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, who say that the poll was fixed, while the still acting President Leonid Kuchma is keeping a low profile, as well he might, and the situation has been complicated by the arrival of dear old Lech Waleska (pron. Vawensa) of Solidarity (or Solidarnosc), who addressed the vast crowd in Polish.

Oh, and the colour of the revolution (opposition) is ORANGE, while the other side favours BLUE and WHITE, which are also the colours of the Ukrainian football club Dynamo, but Dynamo fans are wearing orange because the club is owned by the unpopular Kuchma supporter Grigoriy Surkis.

All clear now? Carry on, then.

Watch out, Columbia SC

Yes, well, in the previous post I set out to report on a clever plan devised by an American religious organisation to enable their adherents to gain political power, but when I started to write about their target – South Carolina – I got sidetracked into going on about dining cars and Eartha Kitt. I shall start again:

The project is called Christian Exodus and if you find what follows hard to understand their website explains it in some detail. They believe that the US government under President Bush is committing atrocities by being soft on abortion, allowing the discredited theory of Darwinian evolution to be taught in schools, celebrating sodomy, and planning to outlaw the preaching of Christianity.

They are not at all pleased about this and have devised a strategy whereby, rather than spending resources in continued efforts to redirect the entire nation, they will redeem States one at a time. As they quite rightly point out, “millions of Christian conservatives are geographically spread out and diluted at the national level”. Therefore, they will concentrate their numbers in a geographical region with a sovereign government they can control through the electoral process.

What they are doing is moving thousands of Christian constitutionalists to specific cities and counties in South Carolina through a series of emigrations, believing “the values of this state to be very similar to the values held by our membership”.

The first move will begin when their organisation has 12,000 members, who will be “encouraged” to move to a selected city and county. “That number of activist émigrés, when combined with the present Christian electorate, will enable us to win the city council, the county council, elected law enforcement positions, and elected judgeships. We will then be able to protect our God-given and constitutionally protected rights within our local community.”

They reckon to move thousands into South Carolina by the end of 2008 and then start their political campaigns. This is only Phase One, of course; as migration proceeds, city, county and then state will fall, probably by 2016, and at that point there could be secession from the Union.

I can see several ways in which this plan may run into difficulties, but in a nation where, according to an opinion poll in the 1990s, 3.7 million people say they have been kidnapped by extra-terrestrials, anything is possible. It would be wrong for a foreigner to comment, but for the British there is some resonance with the 1980s misdeeds of Dame Shirley Porter, the "homes for votes" scandal, involving selling empty council houses and flats in Tory marginal wards to the professional middle classes and forcing the homeless to live outside the borough. But that of course was illegal, whereas Christian Exodus is presumably not; you couldn’t charge hundreds of thousands of migrants with gerrymandering, though the organisers might be at risk.

More brief encounters

Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo?
Track twenty-nine…Boy, you can gimme a shine
I can afford to board a Chattanooga Choo Choo
I've got my fare and just a trifle to spare
You leave the Pennsylvania Station 'bout a quarter to four
Read a magazine and then you're in Baltimore
Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer
Than to have your ham an' eggs in Carolina

I think I remember reading once that it should be ….ham and eggs in “Carolina”, because that was the name of the dining car, not the state which split into two in 1729, but I can find no confirmation of this, though if there had been a dining car so called it might have looked like this.

Then again, it might not.

Talking of the state, Eartha Kitt was born in South C. and had a pretty rotten time there. I knew her before she was famous; at least, I went to see Katherine Dunham’s dancers in London in the early fifties and read later that she had been one of the troupe. I also saw her after she was famous, as the star of a variety show at a huge cinema in CROYDON, for God’s sake. I’m not sure Orson Welles was right to say that she was the most exciting woman in the world, and it would be an exaggeration to say that these encounters played a major part in my life, but later I did go several times to see her in New Faces, a film of an American musical.
(There used to be a simple test for sophistication. You just asked the question Which would you rather be: kissed by Marilyn Monroe or bitten by Eartha Kitt? )

She had the finest diction of any singer I have ever heard, with every consonant perfectly in place, and sang rather well in several languages, unlike, for example, the boring Joan Baez who always sounded exactly the same, in whatever language she thought she was singing.

For news of Eartha in 2007, go here.

I realise that I have drifted away completely from the important matter I intended to discuss in this post, which actually has nothing at all to do with dining cars or Eartha Kitt. It will make the post too confusing if I start covering it now, so I will stop here and start again in my next post the day after tomorrow, unless some more urgent topic supervenes.

Opinion poll

Here are the results of a poll based on face-to-face interviews carried out in the south of England over three weeks last month:

Question: How do you feel about being called “colleagues” rather than “staff”?

Replies (percentage of sample)
“I think it’s silly” (or variations) 42.86%
“Well, it’s nice, really, isn’t it?” 14.29%
“Pity the pay stays the same” 14.29%
[Don’t knows 28.57%]
[Note: There was no need for statistical weighting by age, gender, ethnicity, political inclination, financial status or other variables since the sample was not random but consisted solely of representatives of the group affected, that is to say Sainsbury’s check-out staff (or colleagues). A total of seven interviews took place, six in the work environment and one in a car park. The interviewer noted in his report that all respondents replied clearly and courteously.]

Making this survey and noting the results have convinced me that only one thing matters about titles or modes of address, and that is whether the persons concerned are happy with them.

Some years ago I was working with a local medical-cum-social charity which announced that its policy was to refer to prostitutes always as sex workers. I had two problems with this: first, had anyone ever asked them whether they liked this? When I first heard of it I thought of old Lucy who (so I was told) used to do it in the recreation ground for half-a-crown, and her likely horse laugh: “Oh, I wouldn’t call it work, dearie”. Second, what do you then call their pimps: sex work supervisors?

.