😳"MY DOG STEPPED ON A BEE!" (courtroom re-enactment)

Oh boy, this took a long time to make! I took the Monty Python "foot stomp" gif and literally grafted the image of the bee onto it, frame by frame. I didn't do a perfect job - I see stuff in the background that I swear I got rid of! But for me, it's pretty advanced animation. I couldn't use the Sousa Liberty Bell March (the Monty Python theme), so I found the next best thing, the Washington Post March (by Sousa, of course).

Monty Python - I'm Not The Messiah

Bad poetry? Oh noetry!

The Tay Bridge Disaster


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.

’Twas about seven o’clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem’d to say-
“I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.”

When the train left Edinburgh
The passengers’ hearts were light and felt no sorrow,
But Boreas blew a terrific gale,
Which made their hearts for to quail,
And many of the passengers with fear did say-
“I hope God will send us safe across the Bridge of Tay.”

But when the train came near to Wormit Bay,
Boreas he did loud and angry bray,
And shook the central girders of the Bridge of Tay
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

So the train sped on with all its might,
And Bonnie Dundee soon hove in sight,
And the passengers’ hearts felt light,
Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year,
With their friends at home they lov’d most dear,
And wish them all a happy New Year.

So the train mov’d slowly along the Bridge of Tay,
Until it was about midway,
Then the central girders with a crash gave way,
And down went the train and passengers into the Tay!
The Storm Fiend did loudly bray,
Because ninety lives had been taken away,
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

As soon as the catastrophe came to be known
The alarm from mouth to mouth was blown,
And the cry rang out all o’er the town,
Good Heavens! the Tay Bridge is blown down,
And a passenger train from Edinburgh,
Which fill’d all the peoples hearts with sorrow,
And made them for to turn pale,
Because none of the passengers were sav’d to tell the tale
How the disaster happen’d on the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

William Topaz McGonagall (March 1825 – 29 September 1902) was a Scottish weaver, doggerel poet and actor. He won notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers' opinions of his work.

He wrote about 200 poems, including his notorious "The Tay Bridge Disaster" and "The Famous Tay Whale", which are widely regarded as some of the worst in English literature. Groups throughout Scotland engaged him to make recitations from his work and contemporary descriptions of these performances indicate that many listeners were appreciating McGonagall's skill as a comic music hall character. Collections of his verse remain popular, with several volumes available today.

McGonagall has been acclaimed as the worst poet in British history. The chief criticisms are that he is deaf to poetic metaphor and unable to scan correctly. McGonagall's fame stems from the humorous effects these shortcomings generate in his work. The inappropriate rhythms, weak vocabulary, and ill-advised imagery combine to make his work amongst the most unintentionally amusing dramatic poetry in the English language. His work is in a long tradition of narrative ballads and verse written and published about great events and tragedies, and widely circulated among the local population as handbills. In an age before radio and television, their voice was one way of communicating important news to an avid public. (Wikipedia)

Please note. I have absolutely nothing to say about this McGonagall. Like the excruciating soprano Florence Foster Jenkins, he was good at being bad, and people liked it. I love bad poetry, but I was unable to find anything at all that pleased me tonight. It was either gross and full of fucks and sucks, which I didn't want, or trying too hard to be either good or bad. The truly bad has that effortless quality which we associate with greatness. 

I did a post ages ago, Valentine poems that were sublimely bad. But it's hard to find stuff on just that right frequency where you want to howl with bliss. 

A lot of the stuff featured on bad poetry web sites is just too good. Bad poems by the great poets have to be just a LITTLE bit good, because these are, after all, real poets. An awful lot of it is just boring, and if bad poetry equals boring poetry, there is entirely too much of it around. 

I remember the dialect poetry I got so stuck on a few years ago, but it too can wear out its welcome or even verge on the racist. The Sonnet on Stewed Prunes by William F. Kirk comes to mind:

Ay ant lak pie-plant pie so wery vell;
Ven ay skol eat ice-cream, my yaws du ache;
Ay ant much stuck on dis har yohnnie-cake
Or crackers yust so dry sum peanut shell.
And ven ay eat dried apples, ay skol svell
Until ay tenk my belt skol nearly break;
And dis har breakfast food, ay tenk, ban fake:
Yim Dumps ban boosting it, so it skol sell.
But ay tal yu, ef yu vant someteng fine,
Someteng so sveet lak wery sveetest honey,
Vith yuice dat taste about lak nice port vine,
Only it ant cost hardly any money, -
Ef yu vant someteng yust lak anyel fude,
Yu try stewed prunes. By yiminy! dey ban gude.

These poems are meant not to be read, but performed, in the fine old tradition of poets getting up and giving long windbag recitals of their work. Being an elocutionist was actually a profession then, something you made money at. McGonagall got up and performed, and so did Kirk, and that other guy, what was his name -  

You bad leetle boy, not moche you care
How busy you 're kipin' your poor gran'pere
Tryin' to stop you ev'ry day
Chasin' de hen aroun' de hay--
W'y don't you geev' dem a chance to lay?
Leetle Bateese!

Off on de fiel' you foller de plough
Den w'en you 're tire you scare the cow
Sickin' de dog till dey jomp the wall
So de milk ain't good for not'ing at all--
An' you 're only five an' a half dis fall,
Leetle Bateese!

Too sleepy for sayin' de prayer to-night?
Never min' I s'pose it 'll be all right
Say dem to-morrow--ah! dere he go!
Fas' asleep in a minute or so--
An' he 'll stay lak dat till de rooster crow,
Leetle Bateese!

William Henry Drummond, whom we "took" in school ad nauseam, the teacher actually reading these poems aloud to us in "French" dialect.

Awful.

There's always a postscript, isn't there? A couple of years ago when I wanted to find something on Drummond, there was barely anything. I couldn't even scrape together a list of his works.  Now there are entire sites of nothing but his poetry - his awful poetry - all that wretched stuff we choked down in school about "de stove-pipe hole" and all that appalling shit. Not only that - there are now dozens of YouTube videos of people reciting Drummond's awful awful poetry! I won't blight this already-too-long post with any of THAT. But it makes me realize the internet just keeps growing like a malignant fungus. And there must be an awful lot of older people like me interested in setting up poetry web sites, because surely no one under the age of 60 would be able to gag down a monstrosity  like "Leetle Bateese".

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Outrageous tourist complaints (maybe).

Thomas Cook claims these are actual customer complaints, and maybe that is so. But I do find the egg-slicer thing a bit far-fetched.

1. "On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don't like spicy food."

2. "My fiancée and I requested twin-beds when we booked, but instead we were placed in a room with a king bed. We now hold you responsible and want to be re-reimbursed for the fact that I became pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked."

3. "We went on holiday to Spain and had a problem with the taxi drivers as they were all Spanish."

4. "We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our own swimsuits and towels. We assumed it would be included in the price."

5. "The beach was too sandy. We had to clean everything when we returned to our room."

6. "We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as white but it was more yellow."

7. "It's lazy of the local shopkeepers in Puerto Vallartato close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during 'siesta' time -- this should be banned."

8. "No-one told us there would be fish in the water. The children were scared."

9. "Although the brochure said that there was a fully equipped kitchen, there was no egg-slicer in the drawers."

10. "I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local convenience store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts."

11. "The roads were uneven and bumpy, so we could not read the local guide book during the bus ride to the resort. Because of this, we were unaware of many things that would have made our holiday more fun."

12. "It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England. It took the Americans only three hours to get home. This seems unfair."

13. "I compared the size of our one-bedroom suite to our friends' three-bedroom and ours was significantly smaller."

14. "The brochure stated: 'No hairdressers at the resort.' We're trainee hairdressers and we think they knew and made us wait longer for service."

15. "When we were in Spain, there were too many Spanish people there. The receptionist spoke Spanish, the food was Spanish. No one told us that there would be so many foreigners."

16. "We had to line up outside to catch the boat and there was no air-conditioning."

17. "It is your duty as a tour operator to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel."

18. "I was bitten by a mosquito. The brochure did not mention mosquitoes."

19. "They should not allow topless sunbathing on the beach. It was very distracting for my husband who just wanted to relax."

This brought to mind the ULTIMATE tourist rant from a long-ago but still classic Monty Python sketch (and by the way, I don't post a lot of photos just to be idiotic. I cannot take in huge blocks of text myself - my eyes need a break - and besides, many newspapers and internet sites now put a paragraph break after every sentence. Yet I am sometimes dissed for illustrating my stuff. It's not faaaaiiirrrrr. The worst thing my blog was ever called was "embarrassing", but I was back at it the next day, which speaks louder than any insults. And you can always take the option of not reading it. By the way, go ahead: DO cut and paste my stuff, so long as my name is on it, and a link to my blog. I want that.

Just one more point. Why do various people snipe at bloggers for posting photos and stuff, when Pinterest pirates absolutely everything with NO restrictions?

On with our story. (By the way. I've decided to quote the Monty Python "tourist sketch" verbatim, with no commercial interruption. It's better that way, but can you read it? I'm having some trouble.)

Tourist: Yes I quite agree I mean what's the point of being treated like sheep. What's the point of going abroad if you're just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea - "Oh they don't make it properly here, do they, not like at home" - and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamari's and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White's sun cream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh 'cos they "overdid it on the first day."

Bounder: (agreeing patiently) Yes absolutely, yes I quite agree...

Tourist: And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners.

Bounder: (beginning to get fed up) Yes, yes now......

Tourist: And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney's Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local color and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing "Torremolinos, torremolinos" and complaining about the food - "It's so greasy isn't it?" - and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres.

Bounder: Will you be quiet please

Tourist: And sending tinted postcards of places they don't realize they haven't even visited to "All at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an 'X'.

Bounder: Shut up

Tourist: Food very greasy but we've found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets

Bounder: Shut up!

Tourist: where they serve Watney's Red Barrel and cheese and onion.......

Bounder: Shut up your bloody gob....

Tourist: crisps and the accordionist plays 'Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner'." And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type sandwiches and you can't even get a drink of Watney's Red Barrel because you're still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty and there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of "unforeseen difficulties", i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris - and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing "enterovioform" and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn't there to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet been finished. And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet. And half the rooms are double booked and you can't sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door - and you're plagued by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers' wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out. And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe - and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn't like Franco. And then on the last day in the airport lounge everyone's comparing sunburns, drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty free "cigarillos" and using up their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on "Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian Pules of Norwich" and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco, and everybody's talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique Iberian airplane...

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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Strangest sex movie I ever saw

This has got to be the strangest erotic film I've ever seen. Mainly because the imagery in it is never quite explained. And yet, and yet. It's oddly compelling, in the way all of Muybridge's stuff is. When I did that experiment of physically cutting apart his multiple time-lapse images and giffing them so that they showed in rapid succession, I found I had made a little "movie". The disjointedness of this is both jarring and mysterious, like a peep show. We're only allowed a frame or two a second, and the rest has to be imagined. Because this brought it to mind, I was going to include the famous Monty Python sex montage with Richard Nixon, and I might yet do it IFFFF my Makeagif program decides to start working again. And oh, please, don't get me started on the demise of Gifsforum, which has not been explained anywhere on the internet: it just disappeared one day and can't be tracked down, not even a complaint on a message board or on Facebook or anywhere. The golden age of making gifs, the Age of Miracles written about in that song, has passed. No longer can I turn colour into black and white in a strange reversal of the Wizard of Oz; no longer can I make them go backwards or reverse halfway; no longer can I use multiple filters for artistic effects, three speeds, make them talk, whistle, dance. It is over. I am left only with a site that doesn't work very reliably. Gifs are considered trivial anyway, but to me they are bloody magic and I will never stop making them until my hands fall off.

Yes. This is what that Giphy system looks like. Not too impressive. but you get the idea.

Monty Python - we're still not sure what happened

Monty Python comes around but rarely. Ten years can go by without it. Then I stumbled upon it on the Sundance Channel (?), which was showing Fawlty Towers and, as it turned out, Python. These are truly wretched Beta videotapes from the mid-'80s that have been badly transferred, muddy, with all that sparkly stuff on the edges. Some of them blur past me in a surrealism that is hard to hold on to, let alone laugh at. But this got me laughing so hard that tears ran down my face. I just kept howling, helplessly. Not sure why, can't analyze it at all, just lunacy. They don't make them like that any more. Maybe ever. We're still not sure what happened here.

Always look on the bright side

                                                          

Prelude

Life can be a shit-storm, but some days it's just shit.

You get one more rejection, you're in a royal snit.

You're feeling suicidal, don't find joy in anything -

But when you feel crap-awful, just lift up your heart and SING!

 

Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse.
When you're chewing on life's gristle
Don't grumble, give a whistle
And this'll help things turn out for the best...

And...always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the light side of life...

If life seems jolly rotten
There's something you've forgotten
And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing.
When you're feeling in the dumps
Don't be silly chumps
Just purse your lips and whistle - that's the thing.

And...always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the light side of life...

For life is quite absurd
And death's the final word
You must always face the curtain with a bow.
Forget about your sin - give the audience a grin
Enjoy it - it's your last chance anyhow.

So always look on the bright side of death
Just before you draw your terminal breath

Life's a piece of shit
When you look at it
Life's a laugh and death's a joke, it's true.
You'll see it's all a show
Keep 'em laughing as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you.

And always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the right side of life...
(Come on guys, cheer up!)
Always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the bright side of life...
(Worse things happen at sea, you know.)
Always look on the bright side of life...
(I mean - what have you got to lose?)
(You know, you come from nothing - you're going back to nothing.
What have you lost? Nothing!)
Always look on the right side of life...

(words and music by Eric Idle)