Haiti

With the news of the terrible earthquake that has struck, following last year's hurricanes, there seems to be no limit to the ghastliness that the poor people of Haiti must endure.

It is heartwarming to see the massive efforts being made by numerous countries to help the suffering people in Haiti and to try address the appalling chaos that prevails there.

Situated as it is on a fault line and exposed as well to hurricanes, one would think that Haiti is indeed most unfortunate. For it to have had to put up with appalling regimes on top of these natural problems - I think in particular of the disgusting "Papa Doc Duvalier" and his revolting fat slob of a son as examples - is little short of fantastic.

Murderer "Papa Doc" Duvalier, with his fat slob of a son

Source

For those interested in reading further about the appalling Duvaliers, this link is an excellent start. Meanwhile, "Baby Doc" (born 1951) lives in Paris; to me this should be a gross embarrassment to the Republic of France. Since he has lived in France since 1986, obviously the embarrassment is insufficent to encourage the French to throw him out. Pity.

My sympathies remain with the long-suffering Haitian population.

Until the next time

HTM Hell Again

Apologies for the dark blue links; these have appeared spontaneously thanks to the usual problem I have with HTML.

I posted my last article and as quite often happens, I was advised that there were errors in the HTML! Why? I had nothing to do with HTML (I know better than to interfere with this nightmare).

Anyway, after i had deleted all the so-called bad scripts, bingo! The HTML is buggered up.

Regrettably I can do nothing except hope, that as before the blasted thing puts itself right.

Until the next time.

Film Stuff

I admit it: I am a misfit.

When I was a boy, I would, like my friends, go to the "pictures" as films or "movies" (ugh) were known at the time in England. In those days, at least in my circle, a film was usually defined by the principal actor and/or actress appearing in it e.g. "Have you seen the new John Wayne film?".

I can remember my first date: the girl's name was Diana Terry and we went to see a Gregory Peck film called "The Counterfeit Traitor." The date was a wash-out incidentally, though I do not think that Mr Peck, his supporting cast or even the director of the film (whoever he might have been) were in any way responsible for the disappointment.

At some time in succeeding years I became aware that films began (or so it seemed to me) to be identified by the name of the Director. I simply do not understand this business; I suppose that there are people who without prior knowledge, could possibly know who directed a particular film, rather as a Master of Wine could perhaps identify a year or vineyard etc. at a wine tasting. I think of a Director as a bloke with a canvas folding chair with his name on the back, a pair of riding-breeches and one of those telescope-type things around his neck. God knows what (generally) he does.

I have my favourite films of course, a number of which I have watched many times; in some cases I can name the director, but to me this is more or less a duty these days!

Anyway, one of my favourites is "The Third Man" which starred Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard and of course, its Director Orson Welles. At Christmas time I saw a documentary in two parts about Welles, and began to realise why he made such good films - that is films I enjoy.

The experience prompted me to research Welles on the Internet and whilst doing so came upon some quotes from another Director one Ingemar Bergman. Here is his opinion of Welles:

"For me he's just a hoax. It's empty. It's not interesting. It's dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of — is all the critics' darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it's a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie's got is absolutely unbelievable." Source

I once saw one of Mr Bergman's films. It was dull, depressing, unintelligible rubbish and very boring, even Truffaut's "Last Metro" (one that made little or no sense) wasn't as bad; I suppose that Bergman is to films what Pinter is to plays.

Anyway the same source provides more quotes from Bergman. The next I offer is profoundly precious and makes the man a worthy candidate for Private Eye's 'Pseuds Corner':

"I don't watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry."

Well Mr Bergman, I felt like crying too when I wasted a couple of hours on one of your efforts.

He is interesting though on Antonioni ("Blow Up" being one of my favourites):

He's done two masterpieces, you don't have to bother with the rest. One is Blow-Up, which I've seen many times, and the other is La Notte, also a wonderful film, although that's mostly because of the young Jeanne Moreau. In my collection I have a copy of Il Grido, and damn what a boring movie it is. So devilishly sad, I mean. You know, Antonioni never really learned the trade... He concentrated on single images, never realising that film is a rhythmic flow of images, a movement. Sure, there are brilliant moments in his films. But I don't feel anything for L'Avventura, for example. Only indifference. I never understood why Antonioni was so incredibly applauded. And I thought his muse Monica Vitti was a terrible actress

I do think though that he is profoundly out of order in using the adjective "boring" - to me he wrote the book on boring!

Until the next time.

The Best Job in the World

Hello,

And a happy new year to you all.

You might recall that about six months ago, a young Englishman won a world-wide competition for "The Best Job in the World." The competition was organised by the Australian state of Queensland, the idea being to promote tourism in the region.

The job involved living in a luxury house on an island, fooling about swimming etc., and writing some blog articles on the subject. For this, Mr Southall was paid $110,000. Sadly close to the end of his six-month engagement, Mr Southall received a very nasty sting from a tiny jellyfish.

Quite apart from the jellyfish, which sounds most unpleasant, I have to say that whilst living in a luxury house anywhere is extremely attractive, I could never imagine myself at any age, being cast in the rôle of the rather hyper-active Mr Southall.

Ben Southall
Image source

No: someone else has my dream job!

This lucky individual is Paul Lahmiesc; his job? To lie all day on a bed in a shop in Rome as a publicity stunt. How nice! Unfortunately, even were the job to be vacant, just as I could not (at any age) hope to compete with Mr Southall, I could not, for different reasons, and again, at any age, hope to compete with Mr Lahmiesc. He is very good-looking and has a fine head of hair to boot!

Paul Lahmiesc
Image source

Oh well, back to reality for me. Perhaps I'll win the lottery by way of compensation - no, wait - I said "reality"...

Ho hum!

Until the next time

Merry Christmas

Hello,

I wish you all the very best for Christmas and of course, the New Year.

Here's a little bit of silly fun from 1955:



Until next year

My Position on Climate Change

Ha-ha!

No that's not exactly it, but in some ways not far away.

Of course the climate is changing; since it has been changing since the dawn of time, where's the surprise? And yet we are harangued daily about our so-called "carbon footprints" and our CO2 emissions etc.

I am often depressed at the lack of a sense of history amongst contemporaries and the current near-panic, fuelled by the alarmist media is a classic case-in-point.

Even today the ludicrously-incorrect phrase "global warming" is still to be heard. In case you didn't know, here are a couple of facts:

1. The earth has actually been COOLING since 1998.
2. The earth was hotter in medieval times than it is now: Chaucer wrote of vineyards in northern England. (Of course if the panic brigade is correct, this hot period was due to the fact that the likes of Geoffrey Chaucer and King Richard II drove Ferraris)

The medieval hot period was followed by "The Little Ice Age" a period of low temperatures that lasted until the 18th century since when the earth has been warming. I do not believe for one minute that human activity (by which I mean consumption of fossil fuels and industry in general - I admit to concern about deforestation which might be a factor) is responsible for any change in temperature trends - or if it is, it is most likely immeasurable.

And now we are to have, starting tomorrow, the ridiculous UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Too late to stop it, since it was only recently that the balloon went up in regard to the leaked data and emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, an institution that receives very large sums of money from around the world and is supposed to be the leading authority on the subject. The leaked documentation demonstrates that so-called scientists have been "losing" and manipulating data - presumably in the interests of self-aggrandisement and perhaps to keep the money flowing in. Please read the following:

Climategate - read all about it

By Andrew Bolt

Christopher Monckton writes the first book(let) on Climategate, the greatest scientific scandal in our lifetime. The summary:

The whistleblower’s data file revealed, for the first time, the innermost workings of the tiny international clique of climate scientists, centered on the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, that has been the prime mover in telling the world that it is warming at an unprecedented rate, and that humankind is responsible… He had revealed what many had long suspected:

# A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.

# The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities.

# The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.

# The Team had conspired in an attempt to redefine what is and is not peer-reviewed science for the sake of excluding results that did not fit what they and the politicians with whom they were closely linked wanted the UN’s climate panel to report.

# They had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.

# They had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures in the paleoclimate.

# They had expressed dismay at the fact that, contrary to all of their predictions, global temperatures had not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years, and had been falling for nine years. They had admitted that their inability to explain it was “a travesty”. This internal doubt was in contrast to their public statements that the present decade is the warmest ever, and that “global warming” science is settled.

# They had interfered with the process of peer-review itself by leaning on journals to get their friends rather than independent scientists to review their papers.

# They had successfully leaned on friendly journal editors to reject papers reporting results inconsistent with their political viewpoint.

# They had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase and corrupt science for political purposes.

# They had mounted a venomous public campaign of disinformation and denigration of their scientific opponents via a website that they had expensively created.

# Contrary to all the rules of open, verifiable science, the Team had committed the criminal offense of conspiracy to conceal and then to destroy computer codes and data that had been legitimately requested by an external researcher who had very good reason to doubt that their “research” was either honest or competent.

SOURCE

The above comes from a splendid (in that I agree with its content!) website called Greenie Watch.

There is plenty of eyebrow-raising material to be read there. Recommended. I particularly enjoyed this video, although sadly it seems that the presenter is still "on-message" even using the incorrect term "global warming" several times:



"'Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented!'‏

Ho ho, about time that that appalling windbag was deflated a little.

I am not generally given to conspiracy theory, but I know for certain that if anything (God forbid) is agreed at Copenhagen, then the result will be taxes. Now we have just endured a severe world-wide recession. Any connexion I wonder?

By the way, Greenie Watch included in a temperature trend chart the following, showing the temperatures at Copenhagen since 1880. I think that the graph speaks for itself:


Until the next time.