if you've only just painted your nails ...

Boring stuff again, and after this we will resume normal service ... but for now I'm drawing your attention to one of Steve Bell’s cartoons in The Guardian, and to what I think might have been Margaret’s Two Big Contributions to British Culture.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/cartoon/2013/apr/09/margaret-thatcher-greatest-achievement-cartoon

Back in the bad old days, following the Thatcherites’ sell-off of so many council houses, and their decision to let market forces and the private sector re-house the poor, it was only a matter of time before young people without jobs became refugees in their own country, and many of the enterprising and adventurous went off to live on the margins of society in old vans and buses.  perhaps they thought they were buying into a culture of freedom of choice.  They became what were commonly known as the New-Age Travellers.

But freedom of choice probably didn’t have a lot to do with it.  For most it was a rational decision taken in the face of a new certainty … that in practical terms, they were no longer welcome in their own communities.  In time, faced with enduring poverty and squalor, many who were trapped in that lifestyle found themselves in cultural isolation, and in a perpetually relocating mobile ghetto.  Their children, and their children's children still suffer.  Thanks for that, Margaret.

I’ve often wondered why Mrs Thatcher allowed the Argentines to invade the Falklands in the first place.  Was it a failure of military and diplomatic intelligence gathering ?  To me this seems unlikely because anyone who was reading a serious daily newspaper at that time knew all about the Argentines’ belligerent rhetoric ... so why on Earth didn’t Mrs Thatcher just pick up the phone and tell them not to even think about it ?  To me it seemed then like a massive dereliction of the Churchillian precept of protecting freedom with eternal vigilance, and her inaction amounted to a truly criminal neglect of her duty of care for distant friends.

So, having got herself into such very hot water she was then forced to re-invent herself as the glorious leader of a military nation, and in doing so she committed us all to paying for an unnecessary war that should never have happened, and then to reinforcing a newly self-important and self-serving military-industrial complex that still holds the UK’s bankrupt economy in a less than fully creative form of abeyance.  Later, the scoundrel Blair was to follow her example.  Thanks for that, Margaret.

'Nuff said.

sorry if football bores you, but this was a one-off, and is possibly the best of all time ... well, er-um, since statistics began !

http://www.thescore.ie/xavi-100-pass-completion-psg-865585-Apr2013/

perhaps its time they introduced a nobel prize for football

trouble at mill ...

Stravinsky's unconventional major-minor seventh chord in his arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner" led to an incident with the Boston police on 15 January 1944, and he was warned that the authorities could impose a $100 fine upon any "rearrangement of the national anthem in whole or in part".^[45][46] The incident soon established itself as a myth, in which Stravinsky was supposedly arrested for playing the music.^[47]


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHYCqFfpNGQ
























another unsavoury migrant ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNw1ZPzqP9Q


POSTSCRIPT:

of course, it hasn't all been one-way traffic and here's another naughty boy ... through whom the river of music rushed all too briefly ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2ALNd3kIH0

hurrah ! our government is raising it's standards, effortlessly ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/mar/31/schools-hiring-unqualified-teachers-money

gold mine in tibet ... an idle cynic speculates ...

i've been using the excellent google earth, trying to locate the high altitude mining area in tibet where a landslide killed a large number of miners last week

this site is in the right area according to some of the vague news descriptions

the wide valley running along the top of the first picture has surprisingly good roads and the river runs down towards lhasa about forty miles to the west

the narrower mining valley branches off to the southern side of it and then runs up to a ridge at the east





the second picture shows the upper valley that runs from the processing plant up to the open air quarries

the mountain sides here aren't solid rock

they are just a mass of dust and rubble as far as i can see and that will be held together by permafrost

... until it melts

so the whole quarrying process is very risky














the lower processing area looks as if a lot of money has been invested here in plant and buildings

almost due south there is an upper area connected with good roads and there are substantial buildings on that mountainside that might be a drift mine entrance

the main valley runs up to the east from the processing area towards two main open quarries and there are a lot of mountain roads that suggest the whole side of the mountain might be excavated in due course

at the eastern end, near the top of the valley, you can see the two areas where the mountain is being quarried

looking down through the clear air, when i zoomed in on the mountain top quarries, i was astonished at the number of lorries and diggers that could be seen

29°41'35.45"N,  91°45'14.79"E

in this picture you see where terraces are being excavated and the spoil is being dumped at one side

at top left and centre of this last picture are two little compounds where vehicles might have been parked overnight whilst their drivers slept

is this where the landslide happened ?

if so, it will have also blocked the only viable route between the open quarries and the processing plant

production would be threatened

might this explain the alacrity to begin the "rescue operation" ?

STOP PRESS : Next day ... i've only just found the mining company's own website with a full description of their plans for the valley ... http://www.chinagoldintl.com/i/pdf/E-PhaseIIJiamaResource12Nov12.pdf ... which was presented to the world six months ago as a feasibility study for investors.

the schemes for shafts and drifts beneath and beyomd the quarries are shown on pages 77 and 78

From my point of view, very interesting and very instructive.

bluesome twosome at the V&A

non-sequiturkish, to be filed under kultural krossovers

this little piggy ...

the mayfield village sign ... in a better light

only just learned that jeff bridges takes some very nice panoramic pictures ...

http://everyday-i-show.livejournal.com/203503.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widelux

apropos du nuffinque ...

The mind floats free on Sunday mornings now that Foxy has taken his long walk to the stars.

I wake to read the first forty marvellous pages of Orhan Pamuk's Museum Of Innocence, and am seduced by his smooth talk in to a mental quicksand, up to my eyebrows in other people's complexities.

Then I try to finish a letter to Linda but stumble to a halt over this question ...

How will my grandson understand the difference between a non sequitur and an oxymoron if I am not there ?

Then I discover that I can change the settings on my cheap printer to scan postcards in wonderful detail.

... all this before eight o clock.

just googled "eric morse cornwall" ... because i haven't seen him for several decades ... he was never just a pretty face

http://www.abstractinginfinity.co.uk/page43.html

... better get your headphones on !

Ah ha! I spy, with my little eye ... a little ray of sunshine !

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/forecast/wandsworth#?tab=map&map=SignificantWeather&fcTime=1363986000&zoom=8&lon=-0.20&lat=51.46

she who must be obeyed has re-established her ascendancy in the domestic milieu ... though 'tis only in a supervisory role until her recovery is complete ...

you wouldn't believe the old tatt librarians have to wear these days ...

i guess lucy is still out celebrating the rugby ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCE34Npj1AI

at sheffield park station ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Spear_Hudson

tra-la-la ! ...

... spring is nearly here !

tea for two ... twelve or thirteen sugars, please ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxadblDT6zI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WupsWuMHUg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ytok8dRGEc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VXjZu_9KmY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjYNMKvUyXI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAG_Yo8709o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY29KA1BpWg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEYvUzQrVvg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAWlyg44oIQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5KBIrFvLk8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoI_d_gQ62g

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9C83jtfOcI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4F6gpE0X04


















http://tolpuddlemartyr.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/black-basalt-teapot-english-c1800.html#comment-form

uprooted and transplanted to the back of the sofa, it would make an excellent reading lamp for my bleary old eyes

the countryside in surrey is crowded with bored looking horses

working dialogue ...

Winston, a sweet natured gentleman from Jamaica who is still working his night shift when I’m starting my early, too early, morning shift … who I once glimpsed as a shadow dancing around his car and its sound system in the dark before going home from his fifty-something hour week of hard labour … tells me how he was cornered last Sunday evening by a giant colleague with a monologue that had a notoriously predictable course to run …

“you got the complete script then ?”,  I asked him, “chapter and verse ?” 

And Winston replies … “Yesss sir !  From Genesis to Revelations !” and he roars with laughter.