This is interesting in the context of my last entry:
Born in ..., X came from a poor family, his father being a railway clerk. An exceptional intelligence enabled him to rise quickly in the officer ranks of the ... army. He joined the counter-espionage service and rose to become its chief. During his tenure in office he greatly improved the methods used by the ... counter-espionage service. But at the same time he himself was a spy for ..., ...'s enemy, and his exposure was largely due to the improvements he had developed himself.
X's motives for treason are still unclear. He may have been caught in a compromising position by ... agents, since he was homosexual and being exposed as such would have been fatal to his career prospects. Actually, ... military intelligence had discovered X's homosexuality as early as 19XX, information that was used to blackmail him into revealing classified information.
He was paid well for his services, and had a lifestyle far above what his official salary could cover. It would appear that there was also a strong element of vanity involved, as well as a taste for the dangers. A ... report of 19XX describes X as "more sly and false than intelligent and talented", a cynic "who enjoys dissipation."
This is from German television. While commenting on the World Cup going-ons (goings-on?) with sports anchor Gerhard Delling, ex-international Günter Netzer, one of the best passers in football history and a German icon second only to Franz Beckenbauer, is overcome by a giggling fit. This is specifically funny, because Netzer, different from Beckenbauer who comes across as dour, vague and arrogant, is known to be extremely serious, down to earth, straight to the point and sober - in brief: as dry as dust.
Delling: The Spaniard Alonzo said, totally seriously, that he was "not amused", that it interferes with concentration, which makes proper football playing impossible.
Netzer: I can't understand it ... the players ... one isn't used to this and it is distracting as well. I don't find it particularly good because there are no highs and lows ... the enthusiasm we know, the spectators who are LIVING football, SUFFER football, tragedies, drama, joy, everything cramped into so small a space, different from second to second. Here, NOTHING is different ... starts laughing ... simply EVERYTHING is the same, that hooting, this abhorrent stuff ... laughs ... well...this is not for me ... can't stop laughing ... inaudible, something like this abo(minable)...
Delling: Intoxication through and through... one can say that...
Netzer:(Back to his normal sober self) Yes.
Delling: Let's see whether the Mexicans will become intoxicated as well (guffaws briefly) they have an interesting trainer history...
I am retrieving this one-year-old entry from the blog bilges because of the re-started discussion in the comment section. In the context of this blog entry, I strongly recommend FPB's article on military style.
I happened to find the following by mere chance, while searching for some information on Piper Bill Millin and Lord Lovat at Flickr and it had me floored. I think it fits brilliantly the ongoing discussion about what makes men and women tick so differently.
La Style Anglais
Bad behaviour is more interesting, more downright entertaining, than goodness and rectitude. This is a great gift to the Devil of course, but there's no getting away from it. Who ever heard of a soap opera about sober, sexually continent people who go to bed early and take their holidays in Redcar?
I think this explains why the generals of the Wehrmacht High Command, with their whiff of arrogance, cruelty and romantic evil, have always received more attention than their equivalents on the "good" Allied side. For every biography or television documentary about Viscount Slim, or Alexander of Tunis, there must be a dozen about Guderian or Von Rundstedt and a hundred about Rommel. Yet there were some eccentric and flamboyant characters among the commanders of the wartime British Army...
Guderian? Rundstedt? And -- of all unlikely people -- ROMMEL as examples for "romantic evil"? For heaven's sake, Rommel looked exactly like what he was, the son of a small-town schoolteacher, Rundstedt looked exactly like what he was as well, namely the scion of a family of generations of dour Prussian career officers and Guderian, the only one of the three who shows a smidgeon of dash, looks basically too like what he was, namely the son of another Prussian officer, albeit from a lesser family. All three of them, whatever they may have in fact been, look like the archetype of sober, sexually continent men who go to bed early and take their holidays maybe not in Redcar, but in Warnemünde.
Rundstedt
Rommel
Guderian
The discussion following the "La Style Anglais" picture at Flickr may serve as a key to such an (I think) obvious misconception:
Well, thats a DSO and bar, OBE, MC, 4 ww2 stars (one with a bar, maybe 8th army?), ww1 pair with an MiD, and probably the silver jubilee medal. Don't think there are too many out there with that combination. He looks like a poof but the medal bar proves he's solid English oak.
Alas, with the red hackle on his bonnet and the sword guard of his claymore poking out of the bottom right this 'solid english oak' is most likely a scotsman :) the red hackle is the regimental distinction of the Blackwatch regiment.
The soldier in question is a Commanding Officer from the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment). I believe he is Lt Col Critchley a very distinguished soldier and a gentleman. his son carried on the tradition of serving in the Regiment. Neither of which were in the least bit a poof nor English.
Why couldn't he have been a hero AND a poof?
Indeed, and that's what men find so hard to understand. I see neither arrogance, nor cruelty, let alone romantic evil, in the German archetypes, just austereness, sobriety and professionalism, and I'd like to know how other women react to the different archetypes. My money is on the Brits, and not on the Germans in their demonstratively sober uniforms, who shout "straight" in marked difference to the elegant, flamboyant, dashing, bordering on the sexually ambiguous, Brits, who show more than just a whiff of arrogance, as I understand it.
Interestingly, the author of the "La Style Anglais" entry contradicts himself by quoting from Evelyn Waugh's "Men At Arms":
He was the great Halberdier enfant terrible of the First World War; the youngest company commander in the history of the Corps; the slowest to be promoted; often wounded, often decorated, recommended for the Victoria Cross, twice court martialled for disobedience to orders in the field, twice acquitted in recognition of the brilliant success of his independent actions; a legendary wielder of the entrenching tool; where lesser men collected helmets Ritchie-Hook once came back from a raid across no-man's-land with the dripping head of a German sentry in either hand.
Frankly, that is not exactly a prime example of goodness and rectitude and a scenario in which the boringly sedate mugs of neither, Guderian, nor Rommel, nor Rundstedt seem quite to fit.
At my other blog there is an entry about Rex Whistler, another one of the Brit archetype, again one who carries that sexual ambiguity, and again one who was found irresistible by many women (and men), a feeling to which I can relate.
And of course, Lord Lovat, the man who triggered off this entry, makes an excellent romantic hero as well:
There is hardly anything more endearing about the male sex, and I am not cynical or jaundiced here, than the trait, which sees something romantic, even if it is romantic evil, in Guderian, or Rommel, or Rundstedt. The great tragedy is that their women are meanwhile eloping with Evelyn Waugh's Ritchie-Hook.
A clip from German television: The Grand Final of the 1st International Military Tattoo Moscow (Kremlin Zoria 2007).
Military bands from Denmark, Germany and Russia, pipes and drums of regiments from Scotland, Australia, the Republic of South Africa, Canada and New Zealand.
If I look at Cameron and Clegg (I try not to) they look like the archetypical smooth, empty-faced and empty-headed twits Thatcherism and its aftermath has washed to the surface. Weren't it for their different ties, they'd be almost indistinguishable. One is oily, the other one greasy. (At least Gordon Brown, who belongs to a different generation, is clearly recognisable, although it isn't pleasant to do so.) However, it is interesting to have a closer look at their backgrounds.
Cameron is old establishment-upper middle class and if you go back in his pedigree, you'll find a lot of upper class men. Clegg is nothing of that sort. I am always deeply mistrustful of people who claim Russian aristocratic ancestry, it's a bit like the Shroud Christi or the formerly German property in Eastern Europe and miraculously expanded over the years, but in his case it comes from his paternal grandmother's side, so it doesn't matter so much anyway. (Women are always marrying their husband's class.) Clegg is by education (notabene that he went to a good, but lesser school than Cameron), profession and family sheer and undiluted middle class. I'd wager that, if one follows his patrilineal ancestry back, it's the opposite of Cameron's, namely that there will be middle middle- and lower middle class men soon and God knows what then. It may be a cynical view, but I think if it weren't so, we had been told in his biography.
Basically, here we have two upper middle class men, one old establishment, one the result of social climbing, who look exactly the same but come from very different backgrounds. The phenotypical versus the genotypical version, so to say.
Will it reflect on their politics? We don't know yet and I don't think so, but I found this at Clegg's Wikipedia entry :
His background has informed his politics. He says, "There is simply not a shred of racism in me, as a person whose whole family is formed by flight from persecution, from different people in different generations. It’s what I am. It’s one of the reasons I am a liberal."[13] His Dutch mother instilled in him "a degree of scepticism about the entrenched class configurations in British society".[14]
What a waffler! If suffering would make people better, Jews were bound to be the most saintly people on earth. (To "expect" that and to be "disappointed" if it turns out to be not the case, is antisemitic standard lore, by the way.) And in the last sentence he throws the people he has sworn to serve under the bus for the sake of making a few politically correct brownie points. I'd wager, too, that this is the statement of a man who ambitiously tried to assimilate to the old establishment, but hasn't quite managed to do so.
However, this is not more than a moderately interesting play with socio-historic notions. At the end of the day, Cameron will be the bigger traitor because he has sold out conservative principles to please the hedonistic whims of the politically correct, nihilistic crowd for whom the LibDems cater. Not that this was a very difficult thing for him to do, mind you.
Despite the fact that earlier tech support guy, whose name was Muhammad, gave a wrong prognosis, I don’t want to put him down, as he was trying to do a good job. But the language problem, or rather pronunciation problem, was something. Not only did I have to keep asking him to repeat himself, but on a couple of occasions when I still didn’t understand him I had to ask him to spell the word. Once he was telling me to look at the “landbots” on the back of my wireless router. I had no idea was he was saying (“bots? what is a bot?”), and finally asked him to spell the word. It was “ports.” Talk about being separated by a common language.
Of course, this is THE opportunity to post the absolutely hilarious, side-splittingly funny "Cleopatra Jefferson" video from jtf.org here:
Since I am living in Saxony I have been asked countless times when it came to spelling my family name (which starts with B): "With B or with B?" The Saxon dialect is somewhat painful to listen to. P becomes B, T becomes D, K becomes G and all vowels become umlauts. I once met a man who walked his Beagle. Beagle was called "Gölümbö". I twigged much later that it was actually "Columbo". However, the Saxons, the lovely people they are, are totally unchippy about it and don't mind if you can't help laughing. I always say then: "B like Berta", which clarifies the matters.
"Ladies and gentlemen, your President is a robot. Or a wax sculpture. Maybe a cardboard cutout. All I know is no human being has a photo smile this amazingly consistent.
On Wednesday, the Obamas hosted a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, during which they stood for 130 photographs with visiting foreign dignitaries in town for the UN meeting. The President has exactly the same smile in every single shot. See for yourself — the pictures are up on the State Department’s flickr. And, of course, compressed into 20 seconds for your viewing pleasure."
I sent the below e-mail to my favorite neocon champion (meaning, of course, my favorite champion of neocons, not my favorite neocon champion of myself)...
That is exactly the sort of qualification I would make in such a grammatical and syntactic context -- and to then think I am too fussy because I am not a native English speaker.
Great minds think alike! This is from The Onion, one of my my favourite sites in the Internet. The piece is from May 2001. Doesn't reality always beat satire in the end?
Lowest Common Denominator Continues To Plummet
WASHINGTON, DC–The lowest common denominator (LCD), the leading cultural indicator for American mass-market tastes, continued its precipitous drop last week, fueling worries about the future of the U.S. marketplace for ideas and stoking fears of a long-term cultural recession.
The ill health of the LCD, in steady decline since the advent of television, has been cause for concern among the intelligentsia for decades. But double-digit drops in the LCD since October 2000 have alarmed even the most pandering members of the entertainment industry.
"Quite simply, the collective intelligence level is dropping so rapidly that it's becoming increasingly difficult for producers to insult the intelligence of the American public," said News Corp president and COO Peter Chernin. "Without a way to set a floor for the lowest common denominator, even the stupidest material we can develop is not stupid enough for audiences to enjoy."
As examples of the accelerating descent of the LCD, experts cite Chyna's bestselling wrestling biography, the elephant-sperm-filled Tom Green film Freddy Got Fingered, and MTV's Dude, This Sucks, in which performers defecate explosively onto audience members. Despite efforts to raise national interest rates in more sophisticated fare like The Sopranos, Memento, and Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay, the demand for increasingly inane cultural output has rendered efforts futile.
"We face a real crisis in mainstream society's media preferences," said James W. Northrup, special appointee to the recently established LCD Emergency Federal Task Force. "Things that were once base enough for the notoriously undemanding American public are now considered too highbrow for mass consumption. The bar is on the floor, but everyone still wants it lowered."
As the LCD drops, competition for the stupidity dollar grows ever more fierce. Entertainment Tonight, once the nation's standard-bearer for hollow, insipid celebrity journalism, has been rendered respectable by the likes of National Enquirer TV and E!'s Mysteries And Scandals. Survivor, derided by critics upon its debut last year, now stands as the Old Gray Lady of reality television, towering over such crass knock-offs as Boot Camp and Chains Of Love. Even Hollywood, America's primary provider of sub-literate pabulum for nearly a century, must compete with hyper-violent video games, Internet sites featuring foul-mouthed animated genitalia, and mail-order Girls Gone Wild: Sexy Sorority Sweethearts videos for the lucrative stupid-person market.
"It's a real nightmare," said Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of such critically reviled smashes as The Rock, Con Air, and Armageddon. "These days, it's getting harder and harder to underestimate the intelligence of the American public."
[...]
To read the rest at The Onion click HERE. And don't forget: It's satire!
Dennis Prager is talking to Ann Coulter about the "Jews need to be perfected" very-much-non-gaffe. Warning, only for those with an extremely high vomiting-threshold!
And here was I, thinking that Dennis Prager was an ethical and intelligent man.
Listen to the recording of that mutual masturbation session, but keep your sick bag ready.
One can't be all three: First, a sucker-up to that unprincipled, intellectually dishonest, attention-seeking cackling parrot who would say anything to boost her book-sales figures, second, intelligent and third, ethical.
If one is a sucker-up to that unprincipled, intellectually dishonest, attention-seeking cackling parrot who would say anything to boost her book-sales figures AND intelligent, one is not ethical.
If one is a sucker-up to that unprincipled, intellectually dishonest, attention-seeking cackling parrot who would say anything to boost her book-sales figures AND ethical, one isn't intelligent.
Yep, simple!
Coulter has taught me a lot, generally, about American conservatives.
Let's take the video below. The fact, that this lewd display wasn't followed by any outcry by American Christian conservatives worth mentioning, speaks volumes. And they MUST have noticed what is happening here, musn't they? It's so aptly, albeit crudely, described as "prick teasing", performed here by our devoted Christian Conservative on poor Donny Deutsch. My evil sense of humour tells me, this is sidesplittingly funny, my better half that this is about one of the most undignified ostentations I have ever seen.
Is it possible that conservatism, at least mainstream conservatism, has got no content of its own anymore, no positive goals, no reasonable arguments and certainly no basic ethical consensus, apart from punching "the left" (or what is perceived as "the left"), a bag that is as empty as the puncher -- or as Ann Coulter's shrivelled black little heart, for that.
Victor Vancier aka Chaim Ben Pesach, ex-JDL-leader, Kahanist, is certainly living up to his own famous quote: "Jews need a crazy image now". He has a point. Being the good guys hasn't taken them very far.
His performances at www.jtf.org are as interesting as frightening to watch. Sheer and undiluted genius. One can't but fear that he will one day spontaneously combust. Oh yes, and did I say that he has a point?
I had an eerie experience yesterday night. I was looking for performances of my all-time favourite singer, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau at YouTube, specifically for Au fond du temple saint from Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles, the aria for tenor and baritone to end all arias for tenor and baritone, which he superbly performed together with Carlo Bergonzi at an age when both guys would never see sixty again. Well, it wasn't there. But I became intrigued nevertheless.
Same concert, different aria.
First, there popped up that performance by Roberto Alagna and Bryn Terfel, which would have been rejected by any self-respecting vaudeville show (and yes, looks DO matter!) and then I stumbled over Placido Domingo and Rolando Villazón (Rolando WHO???) and wished I hadn't.
In open-necked shirt and with straggly gray beard, Domingo performed a fair impersonation shtick of Saddam Hussein, whereas Rolando WHO sported a hairdo, that gave an entirely new depth to the epithet "greaseball" (did I mention that looks DO matter?) and the only good thing about it was that, as one of the commentators at YouTube put it, that Domingo finally sang with the baritone voice God gave him. At the Berlin Waldbühne that was, in July 2006. And better forgotten.
But then I was rewarded for my pains. There they were. At the very bottom of the page. In a recording from 1970. Alfredo Kraus, not even arguably the most underrated tenor in the history of singing and Barry McDaniel, an American baritone who never got the international acclaim he deserved, mainly because he chose to work almost exclusively in Germany. Two guys, exceedingly handsome, immaculately groomed in white ties, no popular gimmicks, no tricks. Just pure art. Boring, eh?
And here was I, thinking that nobody could ever beat Fischer-Dieskau and Bergonzi, but Alfredo Kraus is so awesome that, although his partner McDaniel can, as a baritone, not quite touch Fischer-Dieskau and although Fischer-Dieskau's partner Bergonzi is one of the all time great tenors as well, Kraus outshines all that. This performance wins by a clear head. What effortlessness, what style, what poise!
Actually, Alfredo Kraus reminds me of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in his expression, introspectiveness, total devotion to his art and in his elegant, aristocratic bearing as well (which came, due to the ethnic difference, probably easier to him than to the latter).
Comparisons, specifically between singers of different repertoires, are difficult, maybe even unfair. Other tenors certainly had a more dramatic voice. But compared to Alfredo Kraus, Franco Corelli was just a hunk with a clarion-voice, Domingo a mis-casted baritone, and Pavarotti... well, at least Maestro Alfredo has an understudy in heaven now.
