Tuesday, September 7, 2021
Thursday, September 2, 2021
Wednesday, September 1, 2021
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK! A Major Victory for Piers Morgan
PIERS
MORGAN: Ofcom's vindication of me is a resounding victory for freedom of speech
and a resounding defeat for Princess Pinocchios who think we should all be
compelled to believe every fork-tongued word they say – now, do I get my GMB
job back?
By Piers
Morgan for MailOnline
'Everyone is
in favour of free speech,' said Winston Churchill, 'but some people's idea of
it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says
anything back, that is an outrage.'
He could have been
talking about Prince
Harry and his wife Meghan Markle, two people who think they have both
the right to drop endless incendiary unsubstantiated bombshells about their
family AND the right to censor and silence anyone who dares to disbelieve or
challenge them.
Back in March, the
Duke and Duchess
of Sussex spent two hours spray-gunning the Royals to Oprah
Winfrey in an explosive interview on prime-time
They claimed a member
of the Royal
Family had been racist about their son Archie, and that their little
boy had been banned from being a Prince because of his skin colour.
Meghan also claimed
that she told several senior Palace officials she was feeling suicidal, but
they told her she couldn't have any treatment because it would be bad for the
royal brand.
Oh, and she stated
as fact that she and Harry secretly got married three days before their
official wedding, in a private ceremony conducted by the Archbishop of
Canterbury.
On ITV's Good Morning Britain a few hours later, I said I didn't believe a word Meghan Markle said.
But it was simpler
than that: I just didn't believe her.
Not least because it
was immediately established that some of her more outlandish claims, like the
secret wedding and Archie's princely ban, were provable nonsense.
As the furore grew,
a record number of 57,000 people, including Meghan Markle herself, complained
about me to the UK TV government regulator OFCOM.
ITV's Chief
Executive, Dame Carolyn McCall, responded by saying that she believed Meghan's
mental health claims, and I was then told by my employers to either apologise
for what I had said or leave the show with immediate effect.
I decided to leave.
As I explained in an
article for the Mail on Sunday several weeks later: 'I wasn't going to apologise
for disbelieving Meghan Markle, because the truth is that I don't believe
Meghan Markle. And in a free democratic society, I should be allowed not to
believe someone, and to say that I don't believe them. That, surely, is the
very essence of freedom of speech? If I said I now believed Meghan, I would be
lying to the audience, the very thing I've accused her of doing.'
Today, in a stunning
verdict, OFCOM announced that they agreed with this argument, and rejected
every single complaint against me.
Their report is
lengthy and detailed, but in the end, it came down to an unequivocal and
emphatic endorsement of my right to an opinion.
'OFCOM is clear
that, consistent with freedom of expression, Mr Morgan was entitled to say he
disbelieved the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's allegations and to hold and
express strong views that rigorously challenged their account,' they declared,
adding that their Broadcasting Code 'allows for individuals to express strongly
held and robustly argued views, including those that are potentially harmful or
highly offensive, and for broadcasters to include these in their programming.'
It concluded: 'The
restriction of such views would, in our view, be an unwarranted and chilling
restriction on freedom of expression both of the broadcaster and the audience.'
Ironically, I would
imagine that word will prompt a very chilly reaction from the self-satisfied
Make no mistake,
this is a watershed moment in the battle for free speech.
If OFCOM had found
against me, that would have signalled the end of every UK TV journalist's right
to express any honestly held opinion on air lest it upset the likes of Meghan
Markle.
The whole point of
journalism is surely to question and challenge statements from public figures,
particularly when no actual evidence is produced to support them?
Five months on from
my sudden departure from GMB, at least 17 of Meghan and Harry's claims in the
Oprah interview have now been shown to be false or disingenuous.
The poor old
Archbishop of Canterbury was even forced to publicly deny he'd conducted a
secret marriage ceremony because that would have been a criminal offence and he
might have been sent to prison for it.
More pertinently, none of the couple's most sensational and damaging statements about racism and mental health have yet been supported by a shred of evidence amid furious denials from the Royal Family.
But that's not
really the point.
This is not about
me, or Meghan Markle.
It's about free
speech and the right to have an opinion.
We now live in a
woke-ravaged era where it's become a punishable offence to say what you really
think about almost anything for fear that someone, somewhere, will be offended.
This insidious
'cancel culture' as it's been termed represents the most serious threat to
democracy in my lifetime.
People all over the world are being shamed, vilified, and even fired from their jobs for expressing an opinion that the woke brigade don't like.
This was a man who
fought off the freedom-muzzling Nazis, for God's sake!
Yet now people
calling themselves 'liberal' are behaving like the worst kind of fascists.
That's why this
OFCOM ruling matters so much.
It was preposterous
that I had to leave a job I loved because I didn't believe a demonstrable liar.
But it happened
because the corporate world has been cowed into surrendering to the woke mob
whenever it bays for blood.
I was reliably
informed recently that Meghan Markle wrote directly to my ITV boss Dame Carolyn
McCall the night before I was forced out, demanding my head on a plate.
Apparently, she
stressed that she was writing to Dame Carolyn personally because they were both
women and mothers – a nauseating playing of the gender and maternity card if
ever there was one.
What has the world
come to when a whiny fork-tongued actress can dictate who presents a morning
television news programme?
So yes, I'm
obviously delighted that OFCOM has supported my right to disbelieve the
Sussexes' lurid claims against the Royal Family, many of which have failed to
stand up to even a scintilla of basic scrutiny of the kind that a woefully
enabling Oprah should have conducted.
This is a resounding
victory for free speech and a resounding defeat for Princess Pinocchios.
And when Meghan and
Harry, whose unofficially authorised biography is titled 'Finding Freedom',
lick their failed censorship wounds today, I suggest they heed the words of
George Orwell: 'If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell
people what they do not want to hear.'
Just one question remains: does this mean I get my job back?
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
πππVROOM-VROOM! PORT COQUITLAM CAR SHOW 2021!πππ
Sunday, August 29, 2021
It's the SAM DICKER SHOW!
Saturday, August 28, 2021
π·A Pig at the Opera (Pre-Code cartoon)
Thursday, August 26, 2021
Tillie the Toiler Fashion Parade!
Though most people have never heard of her, Tillie the Toiler must have been the best-dressed comic strip character of all time. Created in the 1920s by Ray Westover, the strip lasted 30 years and traced Tillie's evolution from a brainless flapper to a sophisticated Lois-Lane-type working woman. But what was really unusual about Tillie was the way she dressed - or rather, WAS dressed. Quite literally, her followers designed her clothes for her. Fans were encouraged to send in sketches for the artists to develop into haute couture. If you look carefully at these images, you will see the names and addresses of the designers included with most of the ensembles. What a thrill it must have been to see your creation modelled on your favorite paper doll!
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
Harold Lloyd: Facebook profile pics
Tuesday, August 24, 2021
Sunday, August 22, 2021
π"I'm in the Mood" (for WHAT??)π€©
Friday, August 20, 2021
π³1938: A VERY GOOD YEAR FOR TELEVISION!π²
Wednesday, August 18, 2021
π₯FEROCIOUSGUMBY UPDATE! Saying swears, Meghan Markle hair, keep cool, ge...
Tuesday, August 17, 2021
Why I HATE "mental health"
Synonyms & Similar Words
mad
nuts
crazy
maniacal
maniac
mental
gaga
paranoid
crazed
psycho
paranoidal
deranged
looney
whacky
disturbed
demented
strange
irrational
unhinged
loony
whacko
nutty
unbalanced
cuckoo
wacko
screwy
eccentric
certifiable
wacky
ballistic
batty
bonkers
cracked
bedlam
daft
unreasonable
around the bend
kooky
foolish
odd
barmy
depressed
daffy
loony tunes
obsessed
crackbrained
bughouse
meshuga
out to lunch
moonstruck
loco
crackpot
unsound
scatty
non compos mentis
brainsick
kookie
hysteric
bats
meshuggah
frantic
looney tunes
distraught
meshugah
hysterical
distracted
schizophrenic
balmy
meshugge
delusional
fruity
off
wud
paranoic
neurotic
delirious
cranky
loopy
fey
sociopathic
schizoid
out of one's mind
off one's rocker
obsessive-compulsive
paranoiac
delusionary
off one's gourd
crackers
queer
disordered
off one's head
oddball
Monday, August 16, 2021
The Troll Doll Channel: GRIM REAPER and COOL SKATER!
Sunday, August 15, 2021
π€‘CARNIVAL FROM HELLπ² (badly-damaged film)
This was one of the worst-damaged pieces of film I've ever seen. How I love the sparkling surrealism, the sense of bombs going off every few seconds, with a glimpse of "normalcy" in the background. Kind of reminds me of these times.
Friday, August 13, 2021
πGOOSE ON THE LOOSE: Canada Geese TRAMPLE Goose Barrier!π
Take a gander (or take a goose!)
I wondered if this one wasn't just a piece of nonsense, incongruous, like the wacky poems of Edward Lear or even Lewis Carroll. But no. The merest probing into Wikipedia brought up this:
Most historians believe that this rhyme refers to priest holes—hiding places for itinerant Catholic priests during the persecutions under King Henry VIII and later under Oliver Cromwell. Once discovered the priest would be forcibly taken from the house ('thrown down the stairs') and treated badly. Amateur historian Chris Roberts suggests further that the rhyme is linked to the propaganda campaign against the Catholic Church during the reign of Henry VIII.
Other interpretations exist. Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey note in Birds Britannica that the greylag goose has for millennia been associated with fertility, that "goose" still has a sexual meaning in British culture, and that the nursery rhyme preserves these sexual overtones ("In my lady's chamber").
Priest holes! Sexual connotations! It doesn't quite hang together for me, but these things can evolve over time, or exist in layers. The original version didn't even have the throwing-down-the-stairs bit:
Goose-a goose-a gander,
Where shall I wander?
Up stairs and down stairs,
In my lady's chamber;
There you'll find a cup of sack
And a race of ginger.
We won't even ask what a "race of ginger" is. It's just one of these obscure things. Some older versions include these even-sillier lines:
The stairs went crack,
He nearly broke his back.
And all the little ducks went,
'Quack, quack, quack'.
All that strange left-leg stuff ("so I took him by his left leg and threw him down the stairs") didn't seem to add up for me, until I suddenly remembered hearing the expression, "He kicks with his left foot." Just recalling that phrase jarred awake a synapse that hadn't fired since I was six and listening to my Grandmother quietly, politely eviscerate every Catholic in the neighborhood. The left foot is like the left leg or the left hand - sinister, half a bubble off plumb, "not the thing". In other words, to an observant Protestant - Catholic.
You have to ask yourself, however, why anyone would invent a children's rhyme about priest holes and the persecution of Catholics, those nasty old left-foot-kickers. Why would anyone throw in references to geese (ladies of the night) and ladies' chambers (implying high-status quarters not normally open to the goose trade)? There is Mother Goose, of course, just to complicate things. But if you really look at the structure of the rhyme, which absolutely no one does, you see that it can be interpreted entirely another way.
The narrator, the "I" who is reciting the rhyme, is actually addressing it to the goose character - asking it, in essence, "where should I go? It's kind of like "hey, you over there - yes, I mean YOU, Goosey Goosey Gander - what's a-happenin'?" But it's definitely not "Here I am, Goosey Goosey Gander, Esquire, and let me tell you all about my lady's chamber." This is in spite of the fact that every illustration I've ever seen for this thing includes a big, nasty goose, usually throwing a man down the stairs.
In fact, "Goosey Goosey Gander" might just be a collection of nonsense syllables, a blithery-blathery-tra-la-lee sort of thing.
If you take the goose right out of the equation (and that's no fun, because I love these depictions of savage geese throwing terrified men down the stairs), then you have something like this:
Dinder, dander, donder
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs, downstairs,
In my lady's chamber.
When you look at it this way, it can and does have erotic possibilities. Hmmm, let's see, where am I going to wander? (wandering being a sort of aimless idling, or even a poking-around-in-none-of-your-business thing). Maybe up here, maybe down there (whew - now that has some sexual meaning behind it!), or maybe in my lady's chamber, where I certainly do NOT belong. It has a sort of subtext of invaded intimacy.
The old man who wouldn't say his prayers kind of reminds me of the old rhyme about "I met a man who wasn't there". In any case, is it really the goose who does the "throwing down the stairs" bit? Of course not; it's the narrator of the poem. So maybe it's really by that notorious old Catholic-hater, Henry VIII. Who knows, he wrote a lot of songs, such as Greensleeves. Or maybe Anne Boleyn wrote it for something to do in the Tower before she got chopped.
Tuesday, August 10, 2021
Tell Tale Tit (your tongue shall be slit)
Margery Mutton-pie and Johnny Bopeep,
They met together in Gracechurch-Street;
In and out, in and out, over the way,
Oh! says Johnny, 'tis chop-nose day.
This rhyme is very similar to My Mother and Your Mother, and I believe you play it the same way:
You play it with a child by reciting the rhyme while gently sliding your hand down his/her face. When you get to the last line, you hold the child's nose between your thumb and forefinger, with your other hand you pretend to "chop off" the nose!