Wrap-up of the week: W/E 19 May 2023
FREE TRIALS. YORKSHIRE. SHOCKING IMAGES. THE DISABLED. DICTION. UKRAINE. LOREEN. THE NUMBER SIX MILLION. FUNERAL FOR A STRANGER. A low-down on Linked-In
It’s Friday, it’s five to five and it’s … Wrap-up. Quite a lot of self-promotion in this week’s wrap-up. Well, if you did more, I could do less.
Test and try before you buy.
When my old mum was down at H. Meek & Son, Town Street, Horsforth, in the days when fruit was sold in paper bags, a cabbage was lowered with care into a lady’s own shopping bag, the bill was totted up on the next bag in the pile and then mentally added up to the exact halfpenny, there was one category of goods, which the greengrocer himself had tasted and approved and could give reliable, honest, true and heartfelt opinion on, and another category, for which he left the judgment to his customers. Strawberries, grapes, runner beans, cherries and the like. The customer got to cherry-pick her cherries. In every market across the land, the rule was test and try before you buy.
Now, tech companies also offer test and try before you buy but they phrase it differently: test for free.
No test costs. Testing is what you do before you decide to buy, and therefore there will never ever be a purchase in order to test. Test drive: free. Month’s trial: free. All tests and trials are free.
So, when I see try it for free and am then told that my credit card will be charged after the test period, I think: no it won’t. Because I will not test something where the trial period is intended to let me forget the date I started the trial so that the credit card gets charged anyway. And what am I supposed to do during this month? Devote my entire energies to testing the product, so that I’ve evaluated it in toto by the time it comes to coughing up? If I haven’t the time to test your product thoroughly, I haven’t the time for your product at all.
But don’t inveigle me with free offers of tests. If you do that, then I know you’re on the make.
My blog is free. When I get to 100 subscribers I will ask you to pay one euro a month. If you haven’t tested it enough by then to want to pay, I will turf you out, and your access will cease. Testing will cost nothing, because it’s testing. Test it: endlesschain.substack.com.
Graham Coath
spoke to another musician:
Nick Tudor comes from Bridlington on the east coast of Yorkshire.
Playing live since 1992, he has played with the likes of John Power, Miles Hunt, Shed Seven and Mark Morris.
Only being in three bands in 30 years, he is now fully focused on playing solo and acoustically.
Nick has been influenced by artists such as Ryan Adams, Tom Petty, Richard Ashcroft, Neil Finn, Justin Currie and Matt Deighton, come and hear for yourself.
I grew up in Yorkshire and always wondered where its west coast is.
Tax England's gays to execute Ugandan gays?
China and Russia are mounting an all-out invasion of Africa. In 2010, UK prime minister David Cameron told the Commonwealth that, if they wanted UK aid, they needed to tidy up their human rights. You would have thought that he’d announced an assault. Cries from all sides of: “How dare you tell us how to run our countries - you’re the old colonial master!”
True. But now, the UK is — at least ostensibly — trying to take a lead. After all, why should the UK, which decriminalised homosexuality in 1967, pay aid to Uganda, which now wants to make it a death-sentence crime? Take tax revenue collected from gays in England to pay for the execution of gays in Uganda?
So, Africa is turning to benefactors who don’t have such hang-ups about human rights. Who don’t demand net zero or transparent banking. You should see the annual accounts for Air Zimbabwe: they read like a kid’s arithmetic class. Guess what? Air Zimbabwe is in government control. And it flies three times a week to the place every Zimbabwean dreams of going: Dubai. Excuse me? The gold centre of the Middle East. And they mule billions of dollars worth of gold in and out (US dollars, not Zimbabwean).
Russia doesn’t demand human rights for its slush money. And it certainly doesn’t care a fig for gay rights.
And it isn’t aid funds to African countries that woos them to the west or to Eurasia. It is funds to African countries’ leaders that does that. Aid is a bet on paire and impaire, and African elites roll the ball.
Can you resist a Pickup bar?
This article doesn’t in its entirety deal with the subject on which it homes in at the end. In a way, it circles overhead in languid trajectories across the sky, and some may even wonder if it ever lands. It does. Image: a Pickup is a chocolate biscuit from the German company, Leibniz.
Whereas God impresses upon us to do unto others as we would be done unto ourselves, the devil effectively says, “Do unto others without regard for whether that harms them and, if it does, be ready at home with a big gun.”
The religious mantra of “love others as you would love yourself” is viewed by some as a position of weakness, since you have no guarantee at the time of loving that the others whom you love will in fact love you back. No such risk is encouraged in Satanism, which decrees that you need to give nobody any love but that you may not expect love back from them, either. And, yet, a world in which we would all be satanists and live this philosophy of looking out only for one person, being ourselves, and in which we could not in any way rely on love, kindness, respect, reciprocity of sentiment being shown by any other living being, would make this world a very different place to what it is even now.
To that extent, even if we have no hard and fast guarantee that the love we receive is exactly equal in amount and intensity to the love that we give to others, it is that quasi-religious sentiment that in fact makes of our world a far safer place than it would otherwise be. Not weakness, but in fact strength.
Shocking images
I remember seeing Friday the 13th, a horror film, in which a young couple on a bed, making love, are pierced, both in a oner, by the monster wielding a spike. It gruesomely raised from some audience members cries of what I might describe as “exhilarated revulsion.” But all were safe in assuming that what we saw was a trick of cinema. No one died. Still,…
Tracey McVeigh mentions shocking images. She’s Global Development editor at The Guardian.
“Fred Harter [wrote] about the experiences of people escaping the conflict in Tigray, only to run into brutal traffickers preying on those in Sudan’s refugee camps. Some of the people he spoke to sent us photographs of their injuries that were too graphic to publish, but their words were powerful reminders of what the life of a refugee can really be about. They are not just statistics and shouldn’t be strangers.
“In a week where the home secretary, Suella Braverman, presided over eviction notices being issued to Afghan refugees in Yorkshire, the contrast between what she believes her voters want to hear – seeing people othered and dehumanised – with Syal’s story of inclusivity could not have been more stark. We all need to listen to a few more real stories.”
Sir Edward's First
“The opening theme is intended to be simple and, in intention, noble and elevating ... the sort of ideal call – in the sense of persuasion, not coercion or command – and something above everyday and sordid things.” Image: Sir Edward Elgar, 123 years ago (By Unknown author - http://www.geocities.com/hansenk69/elgar3.jpg (broken link), Public Domain, https…
Ukrainians paid Britain a great compliment by calling it their friend. They’d be paying me an even greater one, if they called Elgar their friend, too. His First is conceived “As an ideal call — in the sense of persuasion, not coercion or command — and something above everyday and sordid things.”
It’s a description I’ve not heard as yet of the Russian incursion into Ukraine. I’ve heard outrage, horror, despondency, anger, revenge, hatred. But there’s something uniquely British, and uniquely Ukrainian, too, in the phrase Elgar chooses.
On whatever day of the invasion the First’s final tympanum-like boom strikes in reality, it will not be a day too soon. Then, only then, will Ukraine be done with those “sordid” things.
Community
Thanks for reading The Endless Chain. Join the community for free to receive new posts and support my work. Or don’t, as you please. For 40 years, I’ve been a “member of the gay community”. In that time, I’ve met gay men in Italy, in Belgium, in Holland, in Germany, in Czechia, in Ireland, in the UK, in Norway, in Spain, in the US, in Canada, in Switzerl…
I’ve been told to grow up.
Because I said all lives matter and asked, “Can’t I love everyone?”
I was told to grow up because I would not indulge in divisive party politics.
I would not refuse to see the other point of view.
So, I needed to grow up.
It was in that moment, that I grew up.
Community is everywhere. Not just in bed.
No comment needed:
Diction (dik-shun): is it important?
Sasha Distel made a fortune selling records to the English housewives who loved his sexy French accent. Monsieur Distel was in the business of selling records. And sex appeal. But what he said was less important. What he sang was important.
Yes, diction is important. My German teacher — in Germany — told me that I am a “linguistic chameleon” - ein sprachliches Chamäleon. I tend to copy what I hear and “melt into the context”. I’m very lucky I can do that.
A Dutchman once accused me (Emile Zola-fashion) of being de kleine Limburger. He thought my Dutch accent made me a man from our province of Limburg. He was wrong. But my flat-mate was from Hamont-Achel. When I played Coriolanus on stage (you can watch it below), one of the other actors was a boy with a Swiss father and a Jamaican mother. His mum asked me after the show, “Was Coriolanus Jamaican?”
So, how do you get diction? If I’m your model, you get it by listening. Exposure. Watch your second language's movies or TV shows, the news: it’s a very good exercise. Newsreaders are trained speakers, who speak in a measured manner for understanding. There may be jargon or special advanced expressions, but not literary English — it’s meant to be understood by average people. Try to say words as the newsreader says them. Note the words you don’t know and look them up in your dictionary. If you’re still confused - ask! Nabil is a young friend of mine, and his parents are from Morocco. He speaks Dutch (he’s from Antwerp) and he speaks faultless English. He has never been to England or anywhere else that speaks English. He learned every last word from the TV.
A chameleon is a creature that adapts its colouring to its surroundings in order to ensure its survival. Its life can depend on that. When we aspire to being a linguistic chameleon, we don’t do that in order to survive, but to be understood better. To be understood for what we have to say and what and who we are.
A chameleon is, after all, still a chameleon, whatever colour he might adopt.
Clip: Coriolanus as performed by the Brussels Shakespeare Society.
I am just going outside and may be some time
Captain Lawrence Oates was a hero. On several counts, but for one of which he is most fondly remembered. Injured and proving a burden to the immense task facing the failed Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, he spoke these words, including an admonition to not come after him, before quitting their hopeless situation and being lost in a blizzard of s…
The owners of many of the voices that utter outrage at the horrors inflicted by ordinary men of Russia on the ordinary folk of Ukraine themselves scramble, with their boots in the faces of those who follow, to achieve a perceived pinnacle of existence that, perhaps less brutally, nonetheless dismisses in disdain the lives and existences of their fellow man.
They do not behold the faces and cries of those they rape and murder, and they return home like Edward Bond’s airman high in the clouds, who embraces his children and own progeny, having destroyed those of them who would oppose him.
What holds men and women back from revolution is not their will to cling to the chains they perceive as being able to cast off; it is their fear of the devil they don’t know, rather than the devil that they do. For, absent enlightenment, both are devils.
The smoke screen of sanctions
Sanctions are, I’m afraid to say, a smoke screen. The sanctions in Europe against Russia are the harshest ever imposed against any hostile state. And EU trade with Russia in 2022 was up. And that was just the legit stuff, not that which was ferried in by candlelight.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ukraineua_theunitywave-activity-7063797028086001664-Zs-P
What’s in a name; what’s in a woman?
This woman is Swedish. She’s a bit of a star, because she won an international singing contest recently. She is in TV and she is on TV. If you don’t know her name yet, then find it out.
But her name is not important. Unless you need to call her. They called her in Azerbaijan and they called her in Belarus. And she answered and she spoke to them and she spoke out about them.
She thinks about everyone else before she thinks about herself. Because many others don’t.
She is a shining example of leadership, but she isn’t a leader: she doesn’t look to see who’s following her before she leads. She just goes. Because she tells herself that that is what she needs to do.
She sings beautifully on stage. But she sings most beautifully when she’s off stage.
I admire her; and people to admire are thin on the ground. She’s not on the ground right now. She is soaring in the air.
The next time you tell someone that you’re a team leader or a company director or a policy manager, don’t look to see who’s following you. This is not a class excursion. Lead as a leader should.
If you do the right thing, they will follow. If they don’t, you need to think again about where you’re going. Or fire those who don’t follow. They may just thank you for that.
Leading where the heart leads is called enlightenment. Pushing from the back is called slave-driving.
Who'd be a humble delivery driver?
Robert V. posted a video that took my breath away.
They come to me, from Amazon and the post office. You know they’ll be smiling — with nothing less than certainty — so you smile too. And then they leave you - with a smile.
The man in the vid strode up the driveway bent on doing his duty, when a flag fluttered in his face. First things first, he delivered the package.
But what about the pesky flag? He considers the flag. He regards the flag. He reaches for the flag. See what happens next. Because it took the wind out of me.
Because of what he didn’t do. Because of what he did. And that last touch: “You’re doin’ alright, old girl,” before he goes back to his van. To do his duty.
The point is really this: this man is clearly an American. I myself might not have meddled with the flag, but I salute anyone who has a devotion to duty and sees no question in the duty.
My admiration is less for those who recognise their duty and engage in acts that constitute a dereliction of their duty.
This could have been in West Africa, with the flag of Senegal or The Gambia. It would not have changed what the man did one iota.
Because he did his duty and didn’t expect any recognition for that whatsoever. He maybe doesn’t even know that this film is being looked at the world over as I write.
National anthems as propaganda
When I studied German in the German town of Schwäbisch Hall in 1989, I studied, as part of the course work, the German national anthem. Many non-Germans could cite one line of it, which is now no longer sung: Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles. Germany, Germany, over everything.
Historians question why it was that
(a) Joseph Goebbels was appointed by the German government in 1933 as its Propaganda Minister, and that
(b) the German public failed to realise that meant every word he uttered in his public capacity was propaganda. “He’s on our side and you don’t tell propaganda to your own people.” They may as well have named him the Minister of Public Gullibility.
But Joseph is dead, and there are no such things as ministers of propaganda any more. Believe me, they’re all gone. Poof! Like smoke in the wind.
Like smoke and the mirror, more like.
6 million.
It’s a number. What should it not signify to you?
1. A 1932 film about Jews.
2. Jews killed in the Nazis’ Holocaust.
3. Dub Pistols’ 2005 album.
4. A school in Whitwell, Tennessee.
5. Handguns owned privately in the US.
6. Palestinians excluded from their own homes.
1. A 1932 film about Jews
Symphony of Six Million is a 1932 (the year before Hitler came to power) American film about a Jewish physician, from his humble roots to the top of his profession, and the social costs of losing his connection with his community, with his family, and with the craft of healing. Its title was conceived by David O. Selznick, and is a reference to the location of the drama, New York, and its then urban population.
2. Jews killed in the Nazis’ Holocaust
The estimate of six million victims of Nazi persecution against the Jews between 1933 and 1945 is accepted as being academically accurate.
3. Dub Pistols’ 2005 album
The Dub Pistols are a British electro band, dating from 1996. In 2005, their recycled album name Six Million Ways to Live was reissued. They’d previously issued it in 2001, with different songs. Prats.
4. A school in Whitwell, Tennessee
In 1998, Whitwell Middle School, Whitwell, Tennessee, appealed for six million paper clips, from which they wanted to create a Holocaust memorial. They did so and have 24 million paper clips over. A film was made about it.
5. Handguns owned privately in the US
Don’t be ridiculous. Six million? The last year in which the USA manufactured six million guns was 2006. Currently they produce over 16 million a year. But how many are actually in private ownership? Do I never cease with the idiotic questions? No one knows how many handguns are in legal private ownership, let alone those bandied about by low-lifes. Not even the state or federal governments know that. They want to be prepared for war by allowing everyone to have a gun. But they have no way of knowing for sure who has a gun (until they shoot it, that is). People should read constitutions; and not just frame them to put in a museum.
What we do know is that more people were killed by guns in the US between 1968 and 2015 than died in all the wars conducted by the US from 1775 to 2017. Clearly, the US needs more wars.
6. Palestinians excluded from their own homes
Yes. Over 6 million Palestinians have been illegally excluded from the land that is rightfully theirs under the Oslo Agreements. They are stuck in gulags. As are the Oslo Agreements. But, no fear, there is the United Nations, and they will sort things out, just as soon as whatever it is that stops them from sorting it out stops stopping them from sorting it out. And if that sentence sounds like a slop of slush, then it probably is, for my money.
The answer is: no 5.
Finally: spare a thought
By Victoria B. MSyl, M.ISRM, Dip Pi
Can my amazing connections spread the word to get as many people to attend this heroes funeral?
From the article:
“My 97 yr old great uncle has passed away. He is a WWII veteran but there will be 4 of us at his funeral. It’s May 22nd, 1.30pm, Haltemprice Crematorium. Would be lovely if any veterans etc. could come. Please share.”
I’ll be there in spirit.
He gave us peace. May he rest in peace.