Year: 2016

Doggerel and the death of democracy

Featuring John Taylor, the Water(man) Poet, Cornelius Cardew, Rick Astley, Luther Vandross, Michael Fassbender and someone else as Macbuff and Macdeath, Bugs Bunny & Friends, and finally John Taylor again.

Title page of John Taylor's Swarm of sectaries, and schismatiques.

Class justice

Upper-class judges in London safeguarding access to their new, cheap servant class and to their Tuscan holiday homes and in Madrid trying to frustrate publication of information about footballers’ tax evasion: surely the new right and the old left can forget their differences on this one. Ahem.

Yiddish and the Italian Welsh

Daffy-down-dilly has been and fled / Her yellow-green gown all stained in red. Featuring Google Translate’s transliteration service for unfamiliar scripts.

Napoleon meets a Welshman (1810-5). Dad's granny's granny used to recount seeing the Welsh march away to fight at Waterloo.

Did the house that Jack built come from Spain?

Or, How to cook the old lady who swallowed a fly without stooping to cannibalism. Cumulative songs (and monstrous nested stuffing recipes) in Quixote and Estebanillo González, with the grossest video you’ll see today.

Cruikshank, The progress of passion (1792).

PTSD

A friend who died recently lived his life in two halves. In his youth he was the boisterous, swaggering, electrifying bass drummer with a lederhosen band. An excellent natural lyric tenor addicted to the schlager repertoire, a fighter of German marines during wine festivals, a charmer of the ladies, he seemed destined to become an…