holiday it's a holiday and the last day of the year

so yesterday horsemouth went up john smith's to practice - they did noah (it probably needs a third voice), and the seemingly related somehow if you're on your own and my feet were lost (to index them by their first lines) - at the end horsemouth was using the 3's against 2's picking pattern from the reverend gary davis's talking blues on if your on your own (but in daddad tuning tou understand) and sliding some harmonics.


worldes blisse dirge they made some progress with (a backing vocal and a tambourine). it looks like they will have more songs to add to the set and will perhaps aim to do some recording over easter, perhaps they'll get another practice in before john is back to work. broadly horsemouth's solo gig as the musician of bremen has demo-ed up two songs for the musicians of bremen set.

they wandered out to get a pint but the murder mile was shut so they tried the elderflower which was a bit rubbish before heading back to the mile for that artisan beer - they've got him. everything else just tastes like poison now. horsemouth (of course) wanted another. john did not . they shuffled off home - horsemouth via a bag of chips and a donation to a homeless dude.

this morning was bright and sunny but horsemouth slugged-a-bed with unspecified dreams, the pigeons clustered on the guttering in the sunshine but are now dispersed. horsemouth will go and do some shopping. (shopping done - cup of tea and a wander).

happy new year - see you on the other side.

bah humbug!

"how difficult it is to tell even a millionth part of the truth and how harshly one is punished for doing so." - edmond de goncourt.

so merry christmas one and all. god bless us each and every one. bah humbug. at this point horsemouth would usually be going  'having survived yet another year...' 
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having survived yet another year horsemouth is pleased to have played and recorded an album of songs with john smith as musicians of bremen, he's pleased to have released it (both online on bandcamp and as a physical cd), he's pleased to have played three gigs in this line up and a fourth as musician of bremen - combining the best of musicians of bremen with the best of his horsemouthfolk days and all in 30 minutes - and all these gigs in some kind of alignment with the heavens. he is pleased with the progress of various songs he's involved with writing and arranging (worldes blisse dirge and noah), though he really should hurry up a bit with all this. he plans to continue with it all in the new year.
horsemouth thanks the people who put them on (gertrude, tim goldie, albino).

horsemouth has blogged daily (or nearly) and continued with the promulgation of yam zombies but he has not, so far, managed to get his theoretical endeavours going again.

horsemouth has been pleased to go out and see more music this year (thanks to john clarkson mostly) in no particular order idiot saint crazy, georgina brett, the owl service, stick in the wheel, a reformed les ambassadeurs internationaux, richard skelton, the bohemianauts, pelt, richard youngs, rick tomlinson, united bible studies, aine o'dwyer, gertrude, daniel rosen, david thomas broughton, adam sherry, com(in)us, arthur brown, jonny halifax & the howling truth, tim goldie, jah wobble, various improv'ers and jazz improv'ers. (kevin davy, dreamtime etc.).

on youtube/ spotify/ i-player he made some good discoveries - judee sill, more karen dalton and robbie basho, gene clark etc. mc5, sonic'.s rendezvous band and some working musicians robert curgenven, sproatly smith.

tv wise. (not that he has a tv you understand) treme, true detective.

books? akenfield, michael jeffries - wild england, cobbett rural rides, kilvert and anais nin, diaries, john hillaby,  anna kavan - ice, albert camus  the plague, imogen holst gustav holst,  lillian hellman the unfinished woman, and a threefold cord - alex la guma, memories, dreams, recollections - marianne faithfull, the prisoner - thomas m. disch, magic hour - jack cardiff, hadrian VII - fr. rolfe. denis johnson train dreams, anton chekov letters, dubravka ugresic the ministry of pain, george lois damn good advice (for people with talent). re-reading pkd -do androids dream of electric sheep?, rousseau - reveries of the solitary walker, the lover - marguerite duras, blues people - leroi jones, beneath the visiting moon - david grubb,   ...

healthwise.  horsemouth (a vegetarian already let us remember) has reduced the amount of cheese and pastry he consumes and walked more - moving towards a term time 20 miles a week.(if only he could face the tedium of jogging).  his frozen shoulders have unfrozen and he has not been coughing his lungs up, the only downsides are that he is balding rapidly and his teeth continue to be a bit rubbish. ( but hey never look a gift horse in the mouth).

at work. he has been revisiting material that gave him trouble in his youth and (at last) being able to see the wood for the trees. he is generally pleased with the work-life balance, while his unemployed friends are being mercilessly fucked with by job club etc. at least horsemouth doesn't have this. sadly the ideology of capitalist austerity finally arrived in beachside donkeymule land (friends have lost their jobs already, pay and conditions have been cut and there may be further trouble ahead).

gentrification. housing wise the seaside towns continue to gentrify at an astounding rate ('how much?') but at least there have been some signs of effective resistance (e15 mums, new era, ASS), horsemouth's housing co-op has continued to lose housing and to lose people - the longer this particular can can be kicked down the road the better. he doesn't want the street food but (secretly) he quite likes the craft beer (motherfuckers - 'how much?' ).

horsemouth made 50 this year (he outranks you all) some people have left the party, some have arrived, some have got ill, people's kids continue to grow. he's off for a walk with his parents soon. merry christmas.

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'in my journal I have tried to collect all the interesting things that are lost in conversation.' - say the two goncourts (edmond and jules) united as one writer (as one I) in the process of 'dual dictation' . they would go out to the parties and make notes on the comments and on the bad behaviour - frankly their friends (the daudets mostly, theophile gautier, balzac, sand, zola, flaubert...) were glad when they stopped doing it (not that they ever did stop it really).

early on they give us the typical end of an evening - 6am, a friend drunk and in tears over a showgirl who doesn't love him, another showgirl semi-naked, drunk and vomiting, cursing loudly, the goncourts (drunk) taking notes (well jules taking notes on the cuff of his shirt).

they begin their journal with the coup d'etat of louis napoleon. in 1856 the read poe and recognise his genius. in 1857 theophile gautier tells them how he writes (he's under considerably less economic pressure than balzac clearly). their novel germinie lacerteux (a thinly fictionalised account of their housekeepers bad behaviour) paves the way for zola (but they themselves do not follow it up).

photos courtesy of Max Reeves (www.s-kollective.com)

horsemouth plays 'the golden one' (good photo this)

horsemouth and andrew minty (from the duvals)
tackle 'I still miss someone' by johnny cash.........

horsemouth struggles through to the bitter end of  'gentleman john' 

the musicians of bremen open up with 'the werewolf'

sound problems and 'the mercifully brief guitar instrumental'

the highest note of the night 

starting off into 'gentleman john' - a little nervous

introducing 'in the bleak midwinter' 

'low income londoners won't be priced out for a while'

says a headline in the grauniad (that's good to know).

horsemouth rose at 3pm (having been up earlier between 10 and 12 to see sean out of the door and off to the bus). having played the gig horsemouth proceeded to get terribly drunk and stay up late and so was hungover and vomitous in the morning. he hopes he was chatty and made sense enough at the gig because he was paying for it the next morning.

by 3pm the hangover had abated and horsemouth began to shuffle round the flat and to check out reports.

horsemouth thanks everyone who came out and commiserates with those who couldn't make it or arrived late. he particularly thanks john smith and andrew minty for singing a song each with him. horsemouth was once again cursed by feedback and microphone placement issues - he opened with the werewolf (by michael hurley) with john smith on backing vocals and then into gentleman john (lyrics by horsemouth, music by rust groat) which went tolerably well excepting that his fingers were being mutinous and he was assailed by feedback issues. really horsemouth lost the audience for a while here and took a while to recover - the mercifully short guitar instrumental went ok as did the golden one taken solo (largely written by john smith but with some input from horsemouth) , as did I still miss someone (johnny cash) wth andrew minty of the duvals singing. but recover horsemouth did with the devil song (entirely written by horsemouth) and worldes blisse dirge (a trad.arr. - a traditional 12th century song arranged by horsemouth - in fact he'd only finished working it out the morning of the gig) and with a first airing of noah (written by john smith and his good self with the aid of book divination). horsemouth fucked up the second line and so had to comp about for a bit until he could repeat the verse again (he hopes no one noticed - john smith noticed but said it sounded good). finally horsemouth indicated the approaching solstice and got the audience to sing in the bleak midwinter (they were really good) with him singing the bass and when he forgot the words again he simply got them to repeat the first verse. by reincorporation we reach the end.

horsemouth wishes he could give you a great helpful blow by blow description of the other bands but he was off getting drunk and talking shite to people - fake teak were good in a heaven 17ish, early Depeche Mode kind of way, monteagle had a good trancey americana thing going on. in between that horsemouth was mostly out in the carpark - he thanks albino for putting him on again.

he starts referring to himself in the third person (right to buy)

the day of the gig dawns bright and clear - horsemouth has just avoided prayer for the day (always worth doing). in the courtyard a magpie is running off the pigeons.

today is the anniversary of the bringing in of the right to buy policy. not the right to build policy or the right to have enough money to buy policy or the complete supression of the value form policy etc., but a policy that decimated social housing stock by forcing councils to sell off their housing and one that enabled the government to raid the proceeds of those sales while denying councils the right to use them to create social housing to replace (or at least ameliorate) the loss of stock.

horsemouth is conflicted on how best to faff out the day (they can't expect anything productive of him surely, he's an artist and a musician) - he could go and faff it out up in hackney or he could shuffle round the foreshore of the seaside towns.

john hillaby's journey through love has reached the point where his wife dies. his watch keeps stopping. hillaby takes to drink (he always liked drink, it gets him through rainy days when hiking). all of a sudden he starts referring to himself in the third person - horsemouth knows this one, 'who's there?' asks the cyclops, 'no-one' replies odysseus. his wife was a psycho-analyst (like lampedusa's wife), he realises he knew lots of people he could ask for help but had not. he finds a cutting in his files to distress himself with, a terrible flies trapped in a web resorting to cannibalism kafka-esque nightmare (the spider by frans vans pauen). he begins the journey down the chain of books and songs and associations and to question his walking and writing.

he travels to the US to walk the appalachian trail (5000 miles of backwoods - maine to georgia) and gets lost in his memories almost immediately. the wildlife is different it makes little sense to him. the forests are already logged out. after a brush with hypothermia and lost again he makes straight for the nearest road, bus and airport out.

augustine of hippo says 'when a thing is everywhere the way to find it is not to travel but to love.' 

apparently noah (like the vikings) first released a raven to guide him to land but it did not return - then he released a dove, the loon (or great northern diver as it is known here) was apparently one of the few birds to survive the flood independently (4004 bc according to bishop usher).

horsemouth's gig

for horsemouth everything progresses keenly -he's trying to get his 'set' together for saturday night but frankly he has far too many songs (though not enough that he's co-written or written by himself it seems to him) - he could just show up and play whatever feels right until he runs out of time. this is what he does anyway really. horsemouth has two planned guest spots that's about 7 to 10 minutes right there out of a 30 minute set. 

today is a bright sunny day unless you are in the oil industry (the 'beggar my neighbour' policy of the saudi's and the americans are having harsh effects not just in russia but though by way of compensation it looks like current oil prices will bugger the shale gas extraction industry for a bit also, rendering it unprofitable). the weather looks like it will hold - horsemouth will go for a womble and a read. horsemouth is reminded that while his life is remarkably dull and comfortable other lives are marked by drama. on the balcony horsemouth's clothes are drying. 

horsemouth has gone all festive and treated himself to a stilton.

yesterday he was out looking at houses (mob handed) then he returned and was enticed round to andrew minty's by the offer of soup. they played guitar and sang for a bit. the first rendition of I still miss someone was particularly fine. 

upon hearing robinson crusoe being read aloud

oh halcyon(andon) enablers of horsemouth's book addiction:

horsemouth has started on john hillaby journey through love - previously he read his journey through britain that minty lent him, a great solitary walk from land's end to john o' groats. here hillaby is on his home turves (if that is the plural of turf) - yorkshire, highgate, kilburn, his eckchens - his little points from which he understands the world. he worries that by telling us about them he will curse them - but he does so anyway.

he starts one evening by breaking into the old reading room, a disused hut near thorgill, there he finds the remnants of a few old adventure books, stevenson, conrad, scott that the farmers and iron miners used to read. he tells us the story of an illiterate welsh blacksmith who upon hearing robinson crusoe being read aloud in welsh decided to learn to read. he notes that those who read these adventure did not then go away but stayed (at last the ones still around to talk to).

in april the snow comes, unable to journey he reads the 'wise, dispassionate' letters of chekov (like lillian hellman he's a fan). there's the possibility of a walk and talk tv series - but the stakes are higher, we know (from reading the back cover) that his wife is about to get ill and die.



the lyke walk - the walk of the dead celebrated in the lyke wake dirge runs nearby, an old dear solemnly threatens the locals that if she's not treated right she'll come back. it's a harsh pre-christian landscape, or maybe post-christian one, a world of eco-systems and botany, of death and life intermixed.



yesterday horsemouth made some progress with the worldes blisse dirge - he's playing it on the steel string guitar with a capo cunningly placed to give a buzzing noise - perhaps it's a runner. the writer, some 12th century miserablist, honestly states that life is a crock of shit and better when it's gone. it's at least mercifully brief - the song that is. (horsemouth learnt it from edward lee's music of the people - there's a version on his myspace page).

horsemouth is interested to note that cheviots being an upland sheep (and a kind of sheep increasingly popular near horsemouth's parents) are prone to scatter rather than bunch together in a flock when threatened. horsemouth wishes to surprise (and impress) the locals with his knowledge.

yesterday (bright, sunny, warm for the time of year) horsemouth walked down to greenwich (he visited the chip shop and halcyon(andon) - and then out to woolwich (via the thames barrier, seeing it from the other side as it were, turning to the river when he could), the lorries queued to use the ferry - a knackered and footsore horsemouth took the dlr home.

those books in full;
 journey through love - john hillaby - one quid
tout ubu (with illustrations livre de poche edition) - alfred jarry -one quid
pages from the goncourt journal - jules and edmond de goncourt -one quid
capitalism and material life 1400-1800 - fernand braudel - one quid.

the revelation of the sources of power to be found on the back of the clayton peacock

horsemouth is a little disturbed to find that not only did he unconsciously (honestly) lift part of john fahey's the death of the clayton peacock for his extended slide guitar piece (roughly up to 0.42), he also lifted part of his revelation on the banks of the pawtuxent (roughly 0.17 to 0.20). the first he suspected it was fahey - he just couldn't remember which one, the second he was surprised and horrified when it popped out of the speaker at him.



horsemouth's magnum opus (as recorded a few years ago in mr. nick's bathroom) goes a little something like this:
first the main theme from jean renoir's film partie de campagne (kosma/ monteiro),
an interlude from deep river (trad. arr. fahey - either a showtune adopted as a spiritual or a spiritual adopted as a showtune horsemouth can't remember which),
the statement of two themes from the death of the clayton peacock,
 an answering theme from (as horsemouth now discovers) revelation on the banks of the pawtuxent, the re-statement of the peacock themes with interpolated chords moving in minor thirds.
some (horsemouth hopes) original material involving ascending chords in minor thirds (bearing a similarity to something by the bartok influenced jonas hellborg's the word album),
a pause,
some material from gustav holst's mars -bringer of war played in four time, variously re-titled the martian war-machine stomp by hawkwind or 14-18 mechanised warfare blues by horsemouth.



horsemouth's guitar is tuned daddad (nashville).

of course the whole thing is too long and bloated with pretension - if it were a dead sheep it would float downstream.

horsemouth is reading gary klein's sources of power - an account of intuitive, or naturalised, decision making - rather than the rational choices model of peer soelberg (1967). soelberg taught a course in decision making at MIT's sloan school of management - when it came time for the students to choose their career he expected them to use a rational choice model (you know, identifying options, evaluating options, and then choosing between them, picking the one with the highest score), instead they went with gut feeling, there was one that just felt right. when soelberg asked them how it was going they pretended to have not made the decision yet or to be using rational means, or engaged in fiddling the evaluation weightings to achieve their predetermined goal.

this (of course) contrasts quite nicely with samuel smiles' (of self-help  fame) well brought up victorians and marks the rolling back of rationality - and option evaluation (think of myers-briggs). instead people simply recognise the situation and then go for a solution similar to the ones they used before or go for the first option that looks like it will work (rather than the best optimised option), visualising what the consequences will be, if the visualisation involved too many steps they will think again. only if all else fails will they retreat to a rational choices model.

outside it is a beautiful cold , chrisp and blue day. horsemouth will probably go for a walk. it looks like work is over.

'in recording the obscure labours of humble enthusiasts'

horsemouth is back from johnny and denise's in the suburbs having let himself be bullied by the transport infrastructure (or rather the limited representation of it available online) - he opted for the 'safe' route of returning via south woodford (last westbound tube 12.05) - as a result he had to leave the party just as they were putting on the dancehall, the alcohol had done its necessary work and he was beginning to re-connect with his sociability. ah well. I suppose there will always be next year (until there isn't). horsemouth didn't fancy a drunken stagger back (via unspecified night buses) or (still worse) a hungover stagger back at painful a.m.

horsemouth is reading two things at the moment - duncan (and linda) williamson's fireside tales of the traveller children (borrowed) which includes a variant on the musicians of bremen featuring a donkey, a sheep, a duck and cockerel. so far he's only read the story about the hedgehurst king (a kind of were-hedgehog). and the introduction to samuel smiles self-help. from whence comes the title of this piece (a description of smiles' practice).

get out of denver baby

horsemouth is reading lynsey hanley's estates: an intimate history - she moans on at them for their soldification of the english class system. but to horsemouth they represent the kind of housing he can afford and if he is very very lucky (and boxes very very clever) he can get - otherwise it's a grand a fucken' month to live in fucken' leytonstone (believe). (ok ok leytonstone's not so bad but a grand a month and the work to pay that would seriously tax horsemouth's will to live).

horsemouth is grateful to the estates - and when they have a fearsome reputation doubly grateful (it keeps the ponces off). not that horsemouth is some hardcase urban survivalist nutter you understand (he just talks that way after he's worked). lynsey shows us a photo of her grans house in the rhondda valley and expects us to tut tut at its poverty - to horsemouth it looks pretty good - it looks like the kind of terraced house most of his friends lived in.

horsemouth is a child of the suburbs - both sets of grandparents were farmers and lived in the countryside (and there were holidays with them) but horsemouth grew up on the edges of towns - just outside llansamlet near swansea then near bedwas just outside of caerphilly - the estate horsemouth's parents lived on was row after row of new build bungalows on hill overlooking what was soon to be the motorway. horsemouth (and his friends) played in fields that backed onto newer estates and on river banks blackened with coal dust.

later horsemouth's parents moved (in their minds moved back) to the deepest countryside they could find - it didn't suit him - he got the bus to the local town and to the sixth form college at 7.30 in the morning and got the last bus back out at 6.30 at night (herefordshire was an early adopter of bus privatisation) - it hardened his solitude and he read a lot of books. he hung around two years and some months and then came to the seaside towns - first to go to university and then to stay first in hackney and then tower hamlets (with stints in brixton, ladbroke grove, hoxton) ... and then back to hackney again and then away (before the full horror of gentrification hit). he likes it here - poplar - it's still fucked up, poor and boring - and despite horsemouth's gangster neighbours and a murder within 50 yards it feels fairly safe.

now horsemouth's parent's place feels like where horsemouth is from - somewhere not quite wales but nearly - horsemouth is proud of knowing about ten words of welsh - the walls of the classroom at school were covered with pictures of welsh rock bands - man, budgie, horsemouth forgets the others...

horsemouth never learnt to drive, this makes 'returning' to live in the countryside problematic.

horsemouth's parents generation was the generation that left to go to work, that tasted social mobility, as did horsemouth's father's parents who after the second world war moved down from yorkshire to devon emboldened by the nhs and the new welfare state (a plan to go help found an agricultural commune in new zealand had fallen through).

walter benjamin's post war career

horsemouth's ears pricked up when he heard of walter benjamin's post war career - there was a slight snicker in the speakers voice so possibly it could have been a joke at the expense of his listeners, or benjamin's posthumous re-writers and anthologisers perhaps. anyway. all at once horsemouth was reminded of richard rorty's remix of heidegger's career - in which heidegger fled fascism and in general came round to rorty's way of thinking and was an all round much nicer person.

horsemouth imagined walter benjamin not halting at the spanish border but spectacularly blagging his way across it by sheer charm alone, through spain to portugal to the azores and thus by flying boat to new york where he was to remain for the rest of his life. his embrace of positivist sociology and statistical methods, his falling out with adorno and the german set in L.A. his enthusiasm for jazz records, baseball cards, the mass produced ephemera of american life, his championing of be-bop and charlie parker (and later john coltrane) after being taken out to harlem by anais nin.

of course in america he got enormously fat but remained somewhat owlish behind his spectacles to the end of his days.

varese / idiot st. crazy / cameron bain

as a child varese used to escape from his difficult family life by swimming. one night he went for a swim and swam out too far. a dolphin nudged him gently back to shore. if this doesn't entirely accord in your mind with ionisation and all those sirens and rattling sheets of metal then imagine him in his workshop downstairs in his little red brick house in sullivan street in new york. a piano takes up most of the room, there are gongs and musical instruments from around the world. upstairs is the kitchen coloured green by the sunlight in the trees in the garden. from behind the workshop's door come 'thunderous olympian sounds' according the visiting anais nin. strangely she gets only one line in louise varese's varese a looking glass diary but gives 8 references to the vareses (and that's just in volume 3 of her autobiography).

idiot st. crazy comes from dunkirk and can play. horsemouth went out to see him (and others) play last night (more on this later).

 

today is the birthday of cameron bain who died this year. freebird would be too corny (though they did play it at his wake). when he and horsemouth talked they mainly talked about heavy metal and russian and east european literature. they almost entirely met at parties and almost entirely talked at the start of the evening - for later on they would both be too drunk - he drank like a russian). horsemouth (as a child of the valleys) liked his commitment to the style of heavy rock. cameron's own guitar playing came out of the new zealand 'play...listen... play again' school. the miracle of recording means we have at least something of him - he is not gone utterly. he waves back to us from the sun from a vantage point high up in the beckton alps. we do not notice. we are too busy talking.


horsemouth will close with an epigram from sigizmund krzhizhanovsky picked (after a few tries) by bibliomancy (book divination) 'I am not alone. Logic is with me.'

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horsemouth will write up the gig he went to sunday night another time.

' a daily record of that part of one's life, which he can relate to himself without blushing.'

ambrose bierce is phlegmatic about what a diary can achieve noting its inevitable self-censorship;

hoggart is struggling with the dangers of self-censorship (and, if one should succeed in that battle, of censorship itself). hoggart notes 3 kinds of aphorism in common use - putting up with things, those concerned with tolerance, belonging and charity, ones on the value of honesty, against these he counterposes the aphorisms of the state and of management 'you're not living in the real world' and the positively bloodthirsty 'you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs' .

horsemouth is positively a fan of 'you can't make an omelette...'. this is because he is a sucker for the romance of development, he feels a positive moral need to respond to the pain and suffering of the world with some concrete action, one that is not just a repetition of eschatological revolutionary pieties (a series of token tantrums and shock slogans). or at least he used to and it is still part of his mental make-up.

strangely meszaros is concerned with the 'there's no alternative'/ 'in the real world' refusal of debate also - pointing out that if this were the case (as politicians often say) there would be no point in electing politicians as politics would have no meaning.

the hoggart book (the way we live now) is wise and sane and a little stodgy.  horsemouth was pleased to read clinical wasteman (in 2012 piece on mute) praising capitalism for its impersonalism, attempting to escape the black hole of 'community' and 'authenticity' - in capitalism (for all that it is evil) we are granted at least global rather than local opportunities. while many would welcome a retreat into community, a world reduced to a human scale, it would still be a reduction. hoggart points out that many 'community' activities are in fact often staffed by the middle-class and yet intended to make provision for the poor and so do not demonstrate community but its division.

'to all the people who have made the exodus from society and its politics' (mary celeste)

fred inglis takes hoggart to be an egalitarian authority, he enjoins would be investigators to be 'one of the people on whom nothing is lost' in the words of henry james. this seems to horsemouth something of a curse - but then he is, according to myers briggs as an introvert someone not that interested in observing and responding to the social process but more with the structure of of ideas and still more with actual outcomes.

like ranciere hoggart is resistant to theories that explain away, for instance the following quote seems perfectly reasonable to horsemouth and yet at the same time deeply wrong (hoggart takes against it too);

 'all state education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarising the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for state purposes.' - the education of henry adams, 1918. 

of course education policy in this country is not education policy but an animal husbandry policy (seeing as the ruling class do not use the schools for which they decide policy - ok the millibland twins were state educated (god bless you ralph) but otherwise not). so in theory education policy should be framed by what is best for the state - but no the picture is incredibly more complex (and even more random). like housing, education is one of the ministries where nebbishes are warehoused, portfolios for oblivion, and out of which they attempt to clamber by making a lot of noise. some even survive to make it back to the back benches.

december the fourth was the anniversary of the discovery by sailors on the dei gratia of the empty mary celeste floating unmanned. the bbc news briefing calls her the marie celeste - her fictional name in the story by sir arthur conan doyle. among the crew of the mary celeste who were lost were the captain benjamin briggs, his wife sarah, and their daughter sophia. a son arthur was left with the paternal grandmother in marion massachusetts. a lineal descendent of arthur is the physicist lyman briggs, husband to katherine cook briggs and father to isabel briggs myers - the promulgators of the myers-briggs personality test. the mary celeste was eventually (1885) wrecked off the coast of haiti in a bogus insurance claim attempt.

 this blog contains at least one lie.