Organ-grinding tweets for January 2018

Bio: Kazoo Academy & Barrel Organ Disco/Yorkshire Almanac/translator Romance & Germanic languages & Russian/old-style jazz trombone & vocals/brass bands/allotmenteer

Mon Jan 01 14:07 Slept thru 5 hours of Blade Runner 1 + 2. Summary: 2049 is some bizarre Utopia, in which we drones and workers have not been eugenicized away by a super-rich race of genetically improved hermaphrodite queens
Mon Jan 01 14:22 Comment: So nothing for it but to eat torta di uva from the leftover grapes & glug Italian mouthwash
Fri Jan 05 15:33 RT @GalicianMemes: A nice contribution from a close collaborator 👌
Sun Jan 07 11:50 Comment: @GreavsieE17 @wfcycling @hackney_cycling Met a mugger on Coppermill Lane on Dec 30 after dark
Sun Jan 07 11:52 Comment: @GreavsieE17 @wfcycling @hackney_cycling He was on a bike, obvs
Sun Jan 07 11:57 Comment: @GreavsieE17 Cop car came past - didn't stop, but yer man went his way & we went back to Walthamstow and got an Uber
Sun Jan 07 12:03 Brundibar, children's opera from Theresienstadt featuring an evil organ grinder: Tuesday in Barcelona There's also some really fine cabaret material from the camp, some of it with barrel organs
Sun Jan 07 12:04 Comment: @GreavsieE17 Glad you got thru it mate
Sun Jan 07 12:06 Comment: But they're not doing that
Sun Jan 07 12:09 My mum instilled mental arithmetic to avoid defeat by plumbers and potato vendors, but this is really cool
Tue Jan 09 09:09 Nojoda Migatta and other obscene Japanese-Mexican generals are doing the rounds again. Original source: / #BilingualPuns
Tue Jan 09 09:12 Jaén as a modern Atlántida
Tue Jan 09 09:17 Winter Olympics pictograms WTF
Tue Jan 09 20:02 Amazing how rapidly in-flight banter with a 4-yo boy turns to "My TurboPower is bigger than yours"
Tue Jan 09 20:05 "Artist" reads Tolstoy to cabbages for Russian New Year
Tue Jan 09 20:10 Kentucky Fried Communism
Tue Jan 09 20:20 French Civil Code rewritten as glum doggerel Via @_FutilityCloset
Tue Jan 09 20:25 Almost Gilbert & Sullivan: We’ve taken away the sugary drinks, we’ve taken sugary snacks out of vending machines, we’ve taken away cookies and muffins and replaced them with fruit
Wed Jan 10 11:21 Comment: @Transblawg If I ate gulls I would definitely take a dolphin as my gullfriend
Wed Jan 10 12:41 Re the Broomfield doc: only idiots care if Whitney married a buffoon & smoked crack; the real stuff is in the Robyn Crawford tribute in Esquire & in listening to her & her mum making music (& bugger the snide comments about gospel jaw)
Wed Jan 10 16:26 Comment: @tombcn I guess I tended to associate her with the shouty dance numbers, but she's absolutely incredible on some of the slow stuff.
Wed Jan 10 16:28 Seville oranges arrived, but we're short of jam pots due to a Stakhanovite summer
Wed Jan 10 16:36 Dipped into Polybius over the years & didn't realise quite how extraordinary the Histories are: war + landscape (Hannibal/Carthage is sensational), state formation, even enjoyed the bloody Greek tribes. Got the Paton translation , also out there for free
Wed Jan 10 17:05 Comment: @Transblawg I think I got the wrong sort of insomnia tablets.
Wed Jan 10 19:25 Life & death of guy round the corner A couple of the others have been convicted of murder since release
Wed Jan 10 21:47 Hitler struggled with Goethe, but Napoleon admired him - in Petersburg at Shrovetide in the 1830s;
Thu Jan 11 09:51 Glad to see Her Majesty's Constabulary joining the movement to recover early musical performance practice. (The name is actually said to derive from the Latin castrum rather a soprano tendency in the fine Albanian hamlet of Kastrat.)
Thu Jan 11 10:06 Comment: So not like this at all
Thu Jan 11 12:04 Female praying mantis eating male during sex, Homerton, Hackney
Thu Jan 11 12:32 It would be simply splendid if Christian Lehmann, the outstanding showman in 1820s/30s Shrovetide Petersburg, but otherwise mysterious, turned out to be the alter ego of Johann Georg Christian Lehmann, contemporaneous biologist and member of the Russian Academy in Petersburg
Thu Jan 11 12:38 Brilliant
Thu Jan 11 15:01 Tea travelled by sea, cha by land
Thu Jan 11 15:46 Favourite diarist goes Borat
Fri Jan 12 08:23 Pavement proxemics in Finland, by a Spaniard. But how does it work once they're on the bus?
Fri Jan 12 09:21 Blog: On the trail of Christian Lehmann, pioneering Petersburg Shrovetide zookeeper, Pierrot, illusionist, showman. His subsequent career in London, Europe, the USA and Australia. Also, a very curious copyright case
Sat Jan 13 10:16 Re the profusion of non-scientific medicine/therapy etc in well-off & enlightened places like Hackney, London & Gracia, Barcelona: the notion that on losing their world faith many revert to shamanism rather than embracing rationalism
Sat Jan 13 10:38 Russell Crowe Noah fails the magical illusionist test - who's going to bother suspending disbelief for out-of-the-box CGI (& general drear) when they can watch unimaginable bollocks like Starevich?
Sat Jan 13 10:41 Tommy Cooper's duck trick cunningly mixes Vaucanson's digesting duck & the tradition of small birds selecting fortune cards from the tops of barrel organs
Sat Jan 13 10:59 I'd forgotten Starevich's The Lion Grown Old/Le Lion Devenu Vieux, in which a feline organ grinder (with fortune bird) and simian ballad singer transport the old king away from the abuses & mediocrity of his subjects to dreams of youthful adventure
Sat Jan 13 11:03 Comment: Note the Tyrolean hat on the grinder. Chico Marx knew what he was up to
Sat Jan 13 19:13 Curious WWI British Regular Army expression, found perhaps amongst quartermasters: "pass on the strafe." Or am I misreading?
Sat Jan 13 19:19 Comment: I.e. the punishment, passing on the straff?
Sat Jan 13 19:31 Putting cumin into a curry is always a bad moment: reminds me of brass band guys' armpits in the days when jackets didn't get cleaned that often
Sat Jan 13 19:49 Comment: @jonno50 Seems the most logical, but surprised Google doesn't raise any ghits. Another new one for me: the enemy having a road "taped," i.e. he can put shells on it when he likes.
Sun Jan 14 09:59 @Queenoftherobot
Sun Jan 14 19:01 Probably say this every year, but boiling marmelade recalls the heavenly smell of the countryside south of Valencia in January years ago as some fool in shorts and a t-shirt cycled up onto the meseta and into a blizzard
Sun Jan 14 21:34 Another linguistic surprise from the 7th Scottish Rifles in Palestine, 1918: "that took the gilt off the gingerbread!"
Mon Jan 15 08:50 "Buy my capers! Buy my nice capers! Buy my anchovies! Buy my nice anchovies!" But why are they sold by the same person? Because they are conserved in salt? Because they work so well together? Because they both often come from the Mediterranean?
Mon Jan 15 14:27 Ex-military organ-grinder, Buchanan House, 3, St James’s Square, Holborn, London. My impression is that ex-forces grinders are less common in England than on the continent, but then the piece is retro - Newbury Trent from the 1930s
Mon Jan 15 14:30 Comment: Buchanan House is dreadful, the first modern building to break the Georgian skyline of St James's Square in a truly greedy way. The architecture makes the offence even worse by adopting a bland Queen Anne style, as if that could somehow make it fit in.
Tue Jan 16 08:56 Bohemian Rhapsody minus most of the instrumentation: strengths & the v occasional weakness. I always thought it was Freddie + vocoder, but actually sounds like bludy ages monkeying with overdubs
Tue Jan 16 09:06 Death of liberalism: selfish individualism + soft bureaucratic despotism. Instead of equality, plutocracy; instead of liberty, appetitiveness + surveillance state; instead of intellectual & religious freedom, conformity & mediocrity. Next: Age of the Organ
Tue Jan 16 13:07 YouTube music vid begins with 2½ min silence
Tue Jan 16 13:36 Seems like yesterday that I, ear tenuously attached, was sitting in the Jackdaw & Stump on Homerton High St next to someone whose girlfriend had bitten off his nose. Enter pubcos, exit amputees. Now vegan, under different name obvs
Tue Jan 16 14:10 Els Joglars (1988): Spanish vs European unemployment (Marianne 04:30):
Tue Jan 16 22:45 Apparently there's hope of an extra month at the UCL/FilmItalia Italian doc series - a monthly highlight, & more folks should be aware of it @UCLSELCS @c_massaccesi
Wed Jan 17 10:00 Botín means loot, but Emilio Botín is a banker. So guess how Santander Council translated a centre named for the latter.
Wed Jan 17 10:31 Who's to say you can't put up an Xmas tree under the Gregorian calendar & take it down under the Julian?
Wed Jan 17 12:32 Yeah, AI will make docs every bit as bad as lawyers, but what about being able to present the resulting pile of poo to the client as if it were the Holy Grail? #ChutzpahDeficit
Wed Jan 17 18:58 Choose yr Mayhew character: Posturing is the distortion of the limbs, e.g. splits, & putting your leg over your head etc. Tumbling = throwing summersets & walking on your hands. Acrobating = posturing + tumbling + mounting 3 stories high & balancing each other
Wed Jan 17 21:53 Charles MacFarlane in 1846 (Popular Customs, Sports and Recollections of the South of Italy) published a predecessor of the BBC's 1957 April Fool's spaghetti harvest story
Thu Jan 18 10:44 Porcupine + barrel organ in 1831 London: daily rental price 4 shillings, of which 2/6d is for the porcupine, there only being two of this novelty item available
Thu Jan 18 12:48 A wonner is a past winner. PFI is a wonner. Tasting note: OE winnan, obtain, with a hint of wunian, dwell. "The shy wood-wonners, bright-eyed furry things, were actually wood-winners prior to their encounter with the sharp-beaked shrike."
Thu Jan 18 12:52 Comment: Original quote: Jean Ingelow, The Sleep of Sigismund: Now the shy wood-wonners steal Nearer, bright-eyed furry things, Winking owls on silent wings Glance, and float away. The light In the wake o' the storm takes flight, Day departeth: night—'tis night.
Thu Jan 18 15:17 Blog: Thomas De Quincey on the sewers as a conduit for small boys from Winchester College to the downtown pubs. With his guide to the Ziph language, and with the death of a Savoyard organ-grinder’s white mouse
Fri Jan 19 08:39 Appalled the other day to see @lambeth_council's destruction of the Andrew Carnegie library & garden at Herne Hill @FrndsofCarnegie
Fri Jan 19 13:24 Vueling employees revolt against the English present participle via @elmundotoday
Fri Jan 19 14:15 Academic claims that French dames blanches buses took their horn call from Boieldieu's La dame blanche, social implications, blah blah. Her musical example refutes the claim, & no other evidence. Whatever.
Fri Jan 19 17:34 From the macaroni-eaters, industrialist Cesare Spadaccini's 1833 New and Large Pasta Works With a Bronze Man to Eliminate the Abominable Custom of Kneading With the Feet. Plus final stanza of terminal poem, tactlessly attributing invention to the Greeks
Fri Jan 19 18:26 Strauss Heldenleben by New York Phil & dedicatee Mengelberg, with his TM portamenti - fascinating
Fri Jan 19 18:39 OMG
Fri Jan 19 19:31 Marvellous description of early C19th cantastoria on the mole at Naples - Neapolitanised & serialised relative of Tasso Jerusalem Delivered
Fri Jan 19 19:32 Comment: A Sicilian Rinaldo, an old friend from Orlando Furioso
Fri Jan 19 20:09 But will Macron's national servants wear earrings in the glorious Napoleonic tradition?
Fri Jan 19 22:10 Inside No. 9/Bernie Clifton's Dressing Room: brilliant weary Harlequin vs Pierrot piece
Sat Jan 20 09:58 You know those rings on walls used in times past to tie up one's dog or donkey...
Sat Jan 20 12:44 Another cheerful Pinelli engraving, playing on the artist's inability to finish the work at hand: tutto finisce
Sat Jan 20 14:12 Comment: @jonno50 Hahaha ... but at least there's no cholera to carry you off.
Sat Jan 20 14:38 Fawley Power Station reminds me architecturally of nothing so much as Southampton University
Sun Jan 21 08:55 Headline of the day: "Putin Said To Have Golden Nazi-Resistent [sic] Gene: Mutated Russian Fighters Passed On Genetic Material" Original piece:
Sun Jan 21 08:56 My enemy's enemy
Sun Jan 21 11:01 Mengelberg + Concertgebouworkest = the mid to late Romantic of one's wildest dreams
Sun Jan 21 12:02 Blog: Winchester is the centre of English civilisation:
Sun Jan 21 15:56 So in Amazon aka UK Gov's Brave New World, will we be able to buy groceries if we don't have a smartphone?
Sun Jan 21 17:20 Blog: In praise of oranges: A First World War letter from a Palestinian orange grove, an orange (lower case) song, and this winter’s favourite orange cake recipe
Sun Jan 21 21:47 Salford's legacy of play streets
Mon Jan 22 07:52 Wikipedia article on Bohemian-Austrian writer, journalist and politician Ferdinand Stamm live: Ties into
Mon Jan 22 07:57 "the mafia arose as a response to an exogenous shock in the demand for oranges and lemons, following Lind's discovery in the late eighteenth century that citrus fruits cured scurvy"
Mon Jan 22 10:31 Carnival of the hermaphrodites? Roman engraving by Pinelli
Mon Jan 22 12:15 Pulcinella/Polichinelle/Punch applies to join the Académie française: "Purify your dictionary, which will only serve to light your ass if you leave all this garbage in it"
Mon Jan 22 17:34 Yellow Brick Road, innit #mypathtolegaltranslation #notajoke
Mon Jan 22 18:20 Comment: @Transblawg It looked quite an upmarket cliff, tho
Tue Jan 23 08:49 Už jsme doma in 1989 in Bratislava Via
Tue Jan 23 12:24 If you take things from Amazon Go, the manager will break into your house at night and steal your stuff too.
Wed Jan 24 07:53 Tesco think we can distinguish half a dozen variants of fruit, and for the rest go with "small and tangy" etc
Wed Jan 24 08:36 Omer Bartov "Anatomy of a Genocide" is brilliant - Poles vs Ukrainians vs Jews in a place called Buczacz
Wed Jan 24 08:48 Great drone footage of blowholes on the Asturian coast between Santander & Gijón
Wed Jan 24 08:49 Comment: @Transblawg I always thought that meant a corrupt copper
Wed Jan 24 09:08 Girls in the ghetto: My traditional Stamford Hill source has unfortunately retired
Wed Jan 24 11:19 Comment: @steve_guy I remember reading Wizard of Earthsea & thinking: If this is a kiddie novel, what will adult books be like? Answer: often disappointing.
Wed Jan 24 11:41 Decommissioned Florida lawyer claims to cure Parkinson's by chanting gibberish while dressed as a Boy Scout ($125/hr on Skype). FFS
Wed Jan 24 12:26 Commemorative soda bread baked & consumed. Guess we stopped eating it on coming to England - no buttermilk here, back then. Great quickie for w/kend cholesterol fix
Thu Jan 25 18:10 Can't you see by my hunch, sir, Faddeldy daddeldy dino, I am master Punch, sir, Riberi biberi bino
Fri Jan 26 08:55 Trojan bear
Fri Jan 26 11:18 Comment: @tombcn I sense a trap
Fri Jan 26 12:09 Comment: @tombcn I daren't look up what the modern world thinks of Chevy Chase.
Fri Jan 26 14:06 Rihanna on v/f: Girl, I've been reminiscing when I play that Casanova Way back when we was kissing on your grandmama's sofa
Fri Jan 26 14:47 Pome by Mr Szirtes: A young man with two flowers in his cap / Has turned away across the platform:
Fri Jan 26 17:39 My barrel organ version of the James Bond theme was always an exercise in socio-critical conceptualizing historicity
Sat Jan 27 10:27 Comeback for "to and fro" vs "back and forth"?
Sat Jan 27 10:42 But how can Armando ever return this PR favour from the @KremlinRussia_E ?
Sat Jan 27 11:37 One that got away: Rudolf Schwarz, who conducted after the war in Bournemouth, despite the best efforts of the Musicians' Union - too many foreigners already
Sat Jan 27 12:56 The commoditised translation market no longer needs translators - cheap target language editors, yep, perhaps with some source language skills, tho often guesswork on the basis of additional MT will suffice
Sat Jan 27 13:01 Comment: Fortunately I have specialised in the translation of filthy ditties from forgotten dialects for the purposes of organ-grinding
Sat Jan 27 14:01 Theme from Bleep and Booster (1964!)
Sat Jan 27 15:05 Maddicts in the cold & rain along W. St.: hello Mr Windie, incessantly muttering "dead body"; hello Mr Bengali Barker, ranting away. Maybe Victorian asylums weren't so bad after all vs community care
Sat Jan 27 15:38 Easiest & worst error when translating doggerel: murdering English syntax to accommodate prolific rhyme & insistent meter - ends up like the sub-Latin gibberish that rules Milton Paradise Lost
Sat Jan 27 21:56 How come pound shops can sell as suitable for food storage plastic tubs that are not food grade according to EC regs?
Sat Jan 27 22:00 1.5 tonne Kazakh oligarch's wedding cake Almost as impressively tasteless as the sand sculptures on Barcelona beach
Sun Jan 28 10:45 French Romantic engraving of Savoyards leaving home to show off their marmot in the metropolis. Goethe is better: Ich komme schon durch manche Land, Avecque la marmotte, Und immer was zu essen fand Avecque la marmotte
Sun Jan 28 10:47 Comment: Unusually for the 1840s music is supplied
Sun Jan 28 10:52 A relative with the 52nd Lowland Division in northern France in 1918 met a priest who had on his walls prints including the Temptation of St Anthony. One suspects it was not this one
Sun Jan 28 11:00 Byron - London & its scum
Sun Jan 28 11:01 Comment: Re solvitur ambulando: Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney is excellent
Sun Jan 28 11:29 Savoyard amanuensis for lovelorn girls at home, also showman of marmots & magic lanterns & perhaps dancing dolls
Sun Jan 28 17:54 Didn't know this Avercamp gypsy drawing...
Sun Jan 28 17:55 Comment: The Nicolich family 400 years later Kompania Nicolic I was meant to teach some of their relatives, but they didn't turn up at school
Sun Jan 28 18:00 Comment: @Transblawg Don't think they do E London, tho don't want to carp
Sun Jan 28 18:49 Comment: @Transblawg We need to stop this, or one of us will commit an orthographic indiscretion
Sun Jan 28 22:46 The gossips called [psycho Savoyard padrone Cut-in-Half] a magician... What made them believe this was that he always had with him a large red monkey called Gargousse, and who was so cunning and savage that he seemed as if possessed by the devil.
Mon Jan 29 09:08 Cheered up my Monday @thegentleauthor
Mon Jan 29 17:01 Censor got to this passage about shelling at Vimy Ridge. Had a quick bash with Photoshop brightness/contrast, but there must be tools that can figure out this kind of thing now, even with the palimpsest effect from writing on the other side.
Mon Jan 29 22:12 Not on the same scale, but made a woman in a niqab laugh tonight, though she didn't look at the joker.
Mon Jan 29 23:13 Inc a marvellous photo of a blind singing fiddler:
Mon Jan 29 23:30 Prob with Three Billboards ain't that it's excessively/insufficiently PC: the writing & plotting are just amateurish & ignorant
Tue Jan 30 08:16 Upside-down gear shift control may indicate constitutional future of Great Britain
Tue Jan 30 08:39 Did Savoyard chimney sweeps in Paris learn their skills from their marmots, famed mountaineers?
Tue Jan 30 08:54 Damn dog has copied my unique way of silencing howling children: howl louder than them in ±unison. Always works
Tue Jan 30 09:38 Of course a bizcocho borracho is a drunk tart! (Fruit cakes sans icing: bring the juice of 2 oranges, 1/3 cup granulated & 1 cinnamon stick to boil, simmer 5 minutes, remove from flame, add 1 tsp orange liqueur, cool, make forkholes in cake, pour on syrup evenly & leave to soak)
Tue Jan 30 11:30 As you make your bed, so you may lie: demonstration of the proverb by marmots in "Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux" (1842) + pedantic reflections on the Small Debts Act (1845)
Tue Jan 30 18:23 Extraordinary that there isn't a Wikipedia page for the baritone Hermann Schey - exceptional singer with a bio to match
Tue Jan 30 18:26 Mexican celebrity fitness geezer @fersagreeb (it's not a wig) tries keeping fit as an organ-grinder
Tue Jan 30 18:34 Hermann Schey clearly survived by the skin of teeth. Clipping from the memoirs of Dutch-Jewish particle physicist Abraham Pais
Tue Jan 30 21:25 Comment: @Transblawg Ah, but is it pre-45? Amusing differences between the various Wiki pages. Easy to imagine what would have happened to Schey if he hadn't become an itinerant musician, tho curiously none of his name in the USHMM. I wonder what he thought of Mengelberg.
Tue Jan 30 21:28 Comment: @Transblawg I never cycled thru there, or I'd have remembered the railway bridge. I found all of Silesia pretty spooky, tho had some very nice times.
Wed Jan 31 08:43 1 Maccabees 6:34 KJV: “And to the end they might provoke the elephants to fight, they shewed them the blood of grapes and mulberries.” Almost a happy homonym: the black mulberry is the Greek μόρον / móron @thegentleauthor
Wed Jan 31 09:22 (Invention of the) invention of the good/bad guy narrative: "Missionaries would come to the tribe of Hrothvalg The Bloody, politely ask him to ditch the War God & the Death God etc in favor of Jesus & meekness, & as often as not he would just say yes"
Wed Jan 31 09:40 @_FutilityCloset blows new life into urban legend that Turks & Caicos flag featured igloo as a result of British colonial ignorance re its location: huts made of salt bricks used to be common in the industry
Wed Jan 31 14:26 Blog: The Secret Life of Organ-Grinders: Speculation in French revolutionary fiat currency, the murder of the great British ballad-singer, & a revised date for the start of the supposedly post-Napoleonic emigration of Italian puppeteers & organ-grinders