August’s tweets from London’s Singing Organ-Grinder

Bit late. Twitter trouble. Apologies for any distress caused. Money-back guarantee applies.

David Star ("not gangsta, hahaha") lost his left eye & his old life when he was shot in the head on April 30 1994. This is his extraordinary mobile anti-gun-violence exhibit, featuring Margaret Thatcher giving birth to Mark. (Full image below.)

SingingOrganGrinder
@elorganillero

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

Wed Aug 01 08:07 Ministry of.
Wed Aug 01 13:37 Comment: @ibexsalad Consult the theory that Catalan is a dialect of Jiennense - dropped final consonants, swallowed vowels...
Thu Aug 02 07:36 RT @skip_sf: Bike riding: dress like a traffic cone no headphones helmet Walking: dress like a traffic cone don't look at your phone no he…
Thu Aug 02 08:00 Wendy's stealing clothes from Marks & Sparks in Bowie's All the Young Dudes, written for Mott the Hoople: More high street retailer songs from Rol:
Fri Aug 03 04:52 Small people need to eat more calories than medium-sized people in order to cope with the physical challenges of an environment constructed for the latter
Fri Aug 03 04:59 Dunno about Eskimos and snow, but why couldn't the (historical) Welsh have found a few more names for people? That's you I'm talking to, David bludy Jones
Fri Aug 03 12:03 Comment: @ibexsalad There, you managed not to relate the phenomenon to Brexit
Fri Aug 03 16:15 Comment: @Transblawg I fear the parents of my Caleb and Sapphira Joneses would have regarded Euphemia's mum and dad as well-nigh heathen. But what a name.
Sat Aug 04 19:16 Stoicism seminar apparently poorly attended today, despite airco
Sun Aug 05 08:15 Tenorist, terrorist
Mon Aug 06 08:36 Skype just installed an update that deleted all my contacts & chat history. Ta!
Mon Aug 06 09:39 £1 Shop doggerel, 28 Chatsworth Road #Clapton #Hackney Bargains galore In this walk around store Come in and look round Everythings a pound
Mon Aug 06 09:48 Stumped, Millfields Park, Lea Bridge, #Hackney I wonder if the drought is encouraging foxes to return to the pursuit of small mammals, which are pretty visible at the moment, presumably thru desperation
Mon Aug 06 11:56 Comrade George seriously thinks that Corbyn is Christ, but I still haven't lost faith in Haile Selassie
Mon Aug 06 12:17 Comment: Just waiting to see how today's Feast of the Transfiguration will be celebrated by the Labour Party.
Tue Aug 07 07:06 The red, white and black Greater Anglia trains always make me think of a Swiss toy train layout in someone's attic. Here's one crossing the Lea Navigation at the Anchor & Hope before the Alpine climb into Upper Clapton #Hackney
Tue Aug 07 15:52 Knorr Alphabet Soup to incorporate diacritics
Tue Aug 07 17:38 Heat wave's almost over for us poor cows on Walthamstow Marsh
Tue Aug 07 17:40 Family Mosaic on Marsh Hill, Hackney is taking good care of its employees
Wed Aug 08 07:55 Mona Lisa takes a break
Wed Aug 08 08:03 Millfields Park South boutique hotel, 6AM #Hackney #Clapton
Wed Aug 08 08:06 Comment: @ibexsalad Haha, still positively humid compared with the Castilian plain.
Wed Aug 08 09:06 Curious why the Spanish fertility industry promises anonymity to egg donors given mitochondrial DNA
Wed Aug 08 09:28 Found: iPhone in Wick Woodland, presumably from the Saturday night rave. What to do? I don't even know how to turn such a thing on.
Wed Aug 08 09:31 Parking place for obese men who like BBQ
Wed Aug 08 09:32 Elon Musk quiz
Wed Aug 08 09:34 23andme: "Discover how much Neanderthal DNA you inherited." Those with the most may never discover. "Mirror, mirror, on the wall"
Wed Aug 08 09:43 Comment: @Transblawg What's a web?
Wed Aug 08 10:10 Comment: @Transblawg Oh dear, I thought they were ticks.
Wed Aug 08 16:17 An unfortunate young woman named Ffly Fornication Bull, of Hailsham, Sussex
Wed Aug 08 18:05 Comment: @tombcn That (with an n) is the most absurd name I've heard in a pretty crowded Spanish field.
Wed Aug 08 21:11 Comment: @tombcn Which makes her sound spherical. What a terrible story.
Thu Aug 09 21:22 Who said "Today is the day. Tomorrow is another day," as transcribed on the wall of the excellent (Tommy) Flynn's at the top of the Narrow Way, Hackney?
Fri Aug 10 07:43 A more canting, lying, thievish race than the [your candidate] was never suffered by the Master of history to run so long a career on His footstool
Fri Aug 10 07:56 Why one will struggle to reproduce old-school Guinness at home. Where is the photo of me, aged two, drinking from the bottle?
Fri Aug 10 08:25 One-man band portrayed (who's playing the whistle?) by Duraid Laham as Ghawar, an ordinary guy just trying to make a living, in a 1966 Syrian-Turkish production, Gharam fi 'iistanbul. The singer is Samoura. Early example of Levantine hiphop at 06:15
Fri Aug 10 08:27 Comment: Via Full movie, featuring folkloric troupe of University of Istanbul: Marvel at the dress code before rising oil profits enabled the Saudis cum suis to export neo-medievalisms across the region
Fri Aug 10 08:37 Comment: Duraid Laham again as Carlos, a Syrian predecessor of Fawlty Towers' Manuel, doing the Train Song in the 1960 series Happy Holiday Apparently Carlos also plays the guitar
Fri Aug 10 10:21 Comment: @Transblawg Perhaps post-breakfast Denglish will become the preferred dialect.
Fri Aug 10 18:54 Huh, Vaucanson's mechanical duck defecated 300 years ago.
Sat Aug 11 07:17 Re the Sinclair Overground film: maybe there should be a rule against rambling about rambling - terse Roman itineraries of distances and times over chaotic wilderness or self-indulgent descriptions of a simple trip to the bathroom, and that's your lot
Sat Aug 11 07:41 Comment: @Transblawg Seeing them in action is much more amusing than the books. Essentially just men of a certain age wandering around saying, "Ooh, han't it change round here!" with some hard words thrown in. I think Brixton should be renamed lacuna.
Sun Aug 12 07:18 @PaulMatson_ ?
Sun Aug 12 12:01 Liverpudlian German applies for trademark in 1879: Henry Bernhardt Gross, soap manufacturer, Liverpool, "A monkey viewing its face reflected in a frying pan."
Sun Aug 12 12:02 Comment: @Transblawg Put on some phones and listen to it while recording your commentary and we'll mash it up and you'll be a YouTube sensation.
Sun Aug 12 12:04 Given clients' experience with the Bangladesh High Commission, I hear of moves to rebrand it the Bengali Disconsulate
Sun Aug 12 12:05 In our brave new world PA strength is proportional to the quality of doggerel being projected, and so the Well St Anti-Racism Festival will drown out useless old William Blake's new tombstone.
Mon Aug 13 08:27 BLOG: Great British Blake-off: William, patron saint of hatters and well-hatted bohemians? Photographs of the crowd at the Blake Society's unveiling of a new memorial on Bunhill Fields.
Wed Aug 15 00:09 Paco is back: goldfinch voice training
Wed Aug 15 00:43 Free kazoo for the Welsh speaker who can explain to me this officially stamped handwritten 1850s tract mentioning Wilberforce, Washington, Cobden, Robinson Crusoe, sums of money... (3 more pages available)
Wed Aug 15 09:08 Comment: At the cost of a year of maculae, I'm pretty sure it's a speech by Simon Jones of Bala, but palaeography in a language you don't know is a bugger
Thu Aug 16 08:14 Every time I see this logo I think of Vladimir Sorokin's shambolic eponymous trilogy about a blond-haired, blue-eyed, power-mad cult that batters "meat machines"' hearts with ice hammers to induct them or dispose of them. But FX is not at all like that.
Thu Aug 16 08:19 Comment: @Transblawg I woke up this morning wondering whether I was human, so it was good to have a quick, straightforward negative.
Thu Aug 16 08:26 Annual (non-hung-over) rant: why don't wine labels show ingredients?
Thu Aug 16 08:46 Comment: @Transblawg This is what I see, but maybe the last person working at Twitter is keen on dot-to-dot puzzles
Thu Aug 16 10:43 Comment: @GermanAtPompey It's often called a checkout divider, so two words.
Thu Aug 16 13:49 Confusion between (1) Galicia, Spain, and (2) Galicia, the old Austro-Hungarian crown land on modern Poland-Ukraine border was already bad enough, but here's a Yiddish comic song about a Galician (2) who has learnt Spanish and become a caballero
Thu Aug 16 13:50 Monbiot's obesophobia vs Gilleland's pachyphobia
Thu Aug 16 13:57 Handy neologism: gubblement for government
Thu Aug 16 15:09 Encouraging. Maybe, one day, the Guardian will progress to doggerel.
Thu Aug 16 15:46 Most absurdly tokenist bus service in England? @Xelabus/@hantsconnect X17 Bishops Waltham-Petersfield, 2 buses on Wednesday, so Waltham users can spend 3 hours in Petersfield, or Petersfield users 1 hour in Waltham. Two pax yesterday on 13:10, surely doomed in this round of cuts
Thu Aug 16 15:48 Comment: Schrödinger's bus.
Thu Aug 16 18:24 Comment: @Transblawg I don't buy that. When I make beer in the bathroom, I can say before I start roughly what the sugar content will be. If I used weird chemicals and antifreeze then I would be able to say, as jam manufacturers do with fruit, how much of each goes into each litre of output. Issacon.
Thu Aug 16 18:29 Thomas Jones pays a couple of quid to join the Liverpool Welsh club and then figures that if he changes his name to Thomas Apsimon he'll get away from all the other Joneses and have his name printed between two people non-Joneses have heard of at the top of the list.
Thu Aug 16 20:57 Comment: @Transblawg Yeah, why not, but don't forget the Marmite.
Fri Aug 17 07:44 Edible English underleaves for sale - a type of cider apple - OED 1707 J. Mortimer Whole Art Husbandry 540 The Underleaf..is a very plentiful bearer, hath a Rhenish Wine flavour. / The best sorts for Cyder are found to be..the Olive Under~leaf Apple [etc.].
Fri Aug 17 09:52 Comment: @CecilyLeSage And to male singers in tights and padded bras. RIP.
Sat Aug 18 10:56 Farm taken from him #HighlandClearances, presumably
Sat Aug 18 19:06 Very interesting conversation with Hackney's black Jews. Will I get the gig?
Sun Aug 19 08:12 RT @notesfrompoland: And people say Polish is hard
Mon Aug 20 06:11 Beautiful notion - wheeled transport disappears in favour of camels in the Middle East & North Africa in 2nd half of 1st millennium, & with it the urge to maintain Roman infrastructure
Mon Aug 20 06:13 Doctor of Doggerel
Mon Aug 20 06:20 Lower Bostraze, around 7.30. Don't mention P------
Mon Aug 20 12:20 Rol's top 10 songs about Aretha
Mon Aug 20 14:11 I say it's a Barney (Simpsons) tree, but others see Muppets or prevailing winds.
Tue Aug 21 09:05 Sounds like African Jamaicans culturally appropriated jerk from Spanish Jamaicans, who appropriated it from Peruvians (Ordenanzas particulares para los pueblos de indios del distrito de la Paz, 1575). We sober Anglicans worry more about how the Nigerians opposite sing our hymns.
Tue Aug 21 09:40 RIP H.L. Wesseling, my idea of a historian, sacked by NRC at the beginning of this century for looking too old
Tue Aug 21 10:23 From Old Winchester Hill, Fawley Power Station chimney, used as a navigation point by sailors as well as walkers, & shortly to be demolished in favour of mortgage receptacles and "a Venice-style area boasting ornate buildings and a scenic canal."
Tue Aug 21 10:23 Comment: That is of course the Isle of Wight in the background...
Tue Aug 21 11:10 Comment: @AndrewHammel1 As long as it doesn't get confused with one's cake hole.
Tue Aug 21 15:20 Andrea Pirlo on failure
Wed Aug 22 05:46 RT @justinjerez: Any boatie friends. Pls sign. Open the doors and let Thames Tradesmen's Row! via @UKChange
Wed Aug 22 06:03 Instagram finds its destiny and justification: primitive pétomane builds oddly musical commercial (i assume there are swip-ups) empire #topfartsecurityoftheworld
Wed Aug 22 07:56 "Yeah, you were overbilled cos your rep got on Love I$land and everything got a bit out of control."
Wed Aug 22 10:18 Crabbèd age and youth cannot live together
Thu Aug 23 07:32 What's @BBCRadio3 doing playing barrel organ music (Robert Farnon, After the fair, Presenter thought it was a pipe organ, so still some way to go
Thu Aug 23 08:24 My most creative sleeps ever have been in hedges
Thu Aug 23 10:55 Who more dishonest than a genealogist (m) who finds a gap in his paternal line? It's chronic, right back to the Old Testament's begetting of absurd Y trees To what advantage? How about the monkeys? Someone call Sigmund Freud.
Fri Aug 24 06:47 Today: Bill Tangye Memorial Tour of London. Hated Ken Livingstone, loved his OAP bus pass.
Sat Aug 25 10:42 @Fortnums Many thanks to Ana in Jewellery for being so nice to a small Spanish girl yesterday.
Sun Aug 26 07:31 Xenogram: Hugo Brandt Corstius' collective noun for all linguistic phenomena arising from the correct or incorrect conversion of a text from one language to another. His anthology: Arie Stronks introduced me to the genre: Joe naait het steeds/United States
Sun Aug 26 08:17 Wie heeft een kopie van Truus Wijsmuller, Geen tijd voor tranen?
Sun Aug 26 13:12 David Star ("not gangsta, hahaha") lost his left eye & his old life when he was shot in the head on April 30 1994. This is his extraordinary mobile anti-gun-violence exhibit, featuring Margaret Thatcher giving birth to Mark, & a picture of himself in King's College Hospital.
Sun Aug 26 19:51 Beheaded limericks: A nice pot of gold that was mari, Belonged to a dan that was harri, When some cals who were ras Filled their kets which were bas She put up a cade which was barri.
Sun Aug 26 20:18
Sun Aug 26 20:25 Collective action by the 8 remaining Amsterdam street organs in 1971, to protest a new prohibition on standing within 10 metres of corners, remaining in one place for more than 10 minutes, and entering the Leidsestraat - competition from the trams
Mon Aug 27 10:32 RT @JANUSZCZAK: I've approached the BBC on several occasions about Polish films. No luck. What's the second most spoken language in England…
Mon Aug 27 10:32 RT @sportive_tricks: Just gave my name in Starbucks as 'Severus is an illegitimate patriarch'. As the (Chalcedonian) barista repeatedly sho…
Tue Aug 28 09:23 Dostoevsky & Poldark, or, how to endow Exeter with meaning
Tue Aug 28 09:29 Major advantage of being an organ grinder is being able to attend this kind of do without having to dance. Still time, Theresa.
Tue Aug 28 13:49 Wanted, Liverpool Mercury, 1893: parrot, steam launch, iron chapel, disabled horses.
Wed Aug 29 08:29 Why English will never become the lingua franca (1577): the French men, who also seldome write any thing that savoreth of English trulie
Wed Aug 29 08:37 I'm still going to vote for the bread & circus guy
Wed Aug 29 10:48 Tell arts they have no soundnesse, But vary by esteeming; Tell schooles they want profoundnesse, And stand to much on seeming; If arts and schooles reply, Give arts and schooles the lye.
Thu Aug 30 06:50 Comment: @etlawlor1 @LeeValleyPark @Brenda79945380 @bats_london What's the point of the hi vis? Surely the bats aren't going to bump into you anyway.
Thu Aug 30 07:25 The neurological condition of witzelsucht is a basic requirement for Sun subs.
Thu Aug 30 08:43 RT @Spencerjakab: Vive l’arbitrage
Thu Aug 30 10:08 Comment: @Transblawg Shhh, and let me focus on my drone rage.
Thu Aug 30 17:21 There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparell'd in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream.
Thu Aug 30 18:40 Comment: @Transblawg @BohemiaStable Being his mother, that would surely have been a Magoggomobil
Fri Aug 31 07:40 The the s/h/it option
Fri Aug 31 18:32 Just demanded image rights from a Chinese tourist-with-camera on the Regent's Canal on behalf of a gent with a superb hat and fluorescent tube. Donald would be proud of me.