Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair......

This has got to be the Omega Point of guitar technique.

And he's got a great sense of humour as well (which kind of makes it hard for me to hate his guts).

Nice to see that not all Asian musical prodigies are cardboard cut-out clones after all.

Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us

I've recently discovered Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a blues and gospel singer with a long career. Great voice, excellent attack on guitar (a Gibson SG with three (three!) humbuckers no less) and that indefinable ability to come out of the speakers and grab the listener by the throat.

Check out this YouTube clip especially the solo starting at 1:25 

Performed several years before the Bluesbreakers album and makes Eric "God" Clapton look like a simpering lily-white school-boy.

Sucking a Negro

Spotted this un-PC product in the local Coop. It's a bag of licorice from Serbia. Of course it just means "black" because licorice is after all, black duhhhh..... but somehow I feel the name just won't pass muster in the Anglosphere.

The man on the packet cover, of obvious Caucasian descent, is a chimney sweep, a job entailing getting covered in soot and ending up blackened in the course of work, hence the obvious brand-product linkage. Nevertheless, despite the total lack of reference to anything African related, any product marketing remotely approaching this in the west is almost certain to generate howls of outrage. I'm old enough to remember the original "Darkie" toothpaste packaging (a popular brand in SE Asia) before it evolved into "Darlie". Oops, that's it, I've committed a thoughtcrime by implying that progressing from a blackface minstrel to a quasi-caucasian is an example of evolution into a higher form ;-) In this case, the name change followed protests from western pressure groups to the parent company.

A metamorphosis pre-dating Michael Jackson's

The sweets themselves are rather tasty (although licorice isn't normally my candy of choice. I confess to buying them just for this blog post).

Indeterminate filling (I don't know any Serbian and the list of ingredients is in Cyrillic anyway)

I whipped one out!

Gingerly I placed the rigid, oblong Negro on the tip of my tongue. As it slowly moistened I took it into my mouth, savouring the feel of it like a welcome intruder into my moist orifice. Gradually, as my excitement mounted, I began sucking harder and harder and greedier and greedier until suddenly, it burst open, spilling its load and flooding my mouth with its exquisite white, creaminess.

Yeah, it was quite good.

Well I'll Be......

......blowed. One can dream :-). But seriously, this post is a random collection of facts with one unifying theme, they completely overthrew any pre-conceptions I had on the subject at the time. It's instructive, yet humbling to plumb the depths of ones ignorance.

First off, 

1) Russian Dolls
Everyone knows of the famous Matryoshka dolls with their unique nested design, an apparently quintessential example of Russian folk art of presumably time-shrouded origin. Right? Wrong on both counts. The dolls are neither originally Russian, and are a rather recent development. The first "Russian dolls" were created in 1890(!) by Vasily Zvyozdochkin and painted by Sergey Malyutin on a commission from a wealthy industrialist Savva Mamontov. The design was inspired by a set of Japanese religious figures of the Seven Lucky Gods (a Korean acquaintance tells me that they are in fact originally Korean, in particular the defining feature of nestedness). Mamontov's wife later exhibited the dolls at the 1900 Paris World Exposition where they won a Bronze Medal sparking off interest and demand for the dolls that over time became associated as typically Russian. Winston Churchill almost certainly had them in mind when he describe the Soviet Union as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" in a speech in 1939, showing how quickly the meme of the dolls' Russian-ness had burrowed itself into the popular consciousness.

The original 1890 Zvyozdochkin/Malyutin set

2) Are Israel and the US allies?

The surprising answer is no, but let me qualify that. They are not formal allies, never having concluded a treaty to that effect. They are instead de facto allies, enjoying a close (some would say too close) alliance that puts Britain's much-touted "special relationship" in the shade. As someone generally well-disposed to Britain, it pains me to see how Britain allows itself to be treated so dismissively by the yanks. I just hope the current leadership (sic) would grow a pair and remember the words of Lord Palmerston "We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are perpetual and eternal and those interests it is our duty to follow". But back to US-Israeli relations, the reasons why no formal alliance has been inked have been hotly discussed/disputed on the web. It could be reluctance on the part of the US which doesn't want its hands tied in order to play a role as an honest broker in Middle-Eastern diplomacy (the Arabs would need to be really dumb to fall for that. Oh, wait...). Or it could be the Israelis wanting to keep their options open. Israel leads a precarious existence and has thrived thus far mainly through uncritical American support and largesse, often even to the detriment of US interests. This may not always be the case and perhaps Israel prefers to be unencumbered to seek another superpower patron (China, Russia?) should the need arise. Another reason is that Israel prefers to have its borders undeclared for some unknown reason (tin-hats on!). This precludes any formal alliance as allies are compelled to come to each others aid in the event of an assault on their territorial integrity (fortunately Georgia's application for NATO membership was turned down, otherwise its deserved bitchslapping from Russia could have escalated into WWIII). So why are Israel's borders undeclared? To facilitate future land-grabs? To have more chips on the table for a future land-for-peace deal? I'm not getting into this one!

3) Mandarin is an Indian word

Yes, you read that right.  The first substantial European contact with China in modern times was in the south-eastern coastal regions of Canton and Fujian. While ordinary people spoke the respective local dialects, the officials spoke the, err...."official" standard Chinese which was based on that of Beijing, the seat of imperial power (the written language is of course dialect-neutral). This is one positive feature of Chinese civilization, the system of Imperial examinations to select the brightest candidates, (regardless of background), for a lifelong appointment as a career bureaucrat. In a culture otherwise reeking of nepotism (under the guise of Confucian fidelity), the meritocracy of the civil service allowed the efficient management of a vast sprawling empire despite the lack of modern communications. This system spawned a class of scholar-bureaucrats that reached into every corner of the empire to perform the necessary  task of administration. As an institution, over the centuries it developed its own sub-culture with the adoption of the Beijing dialect as its internal lingua franca (Guanhua, "speech of officials") and communicating in a hifalutin style laden with literary allusions (well, one just can't let all those years spent mugging up on the Confucian classics go to waste after all). Back to etymology, when the first Portuguese landed in China, they referred to the officials as "mandarim", a word that can be traced back to Sanskrit (mantrin, for minister or counsellor). The Portuguese may have encountered the word from the Malay menteri, for minister. The Malay language contains a lot of Sanskrit loan-words and even today, the word for a minister (i.e. head of a government department and not a professional God-botherer) in modern Malay is menteri, which the Portuguese may well have picked up after their conquest of Malacca in 1511. Of course the Portuguese couldn't fail but notice that the mandarins communicated amongst themselves in a different dialect to that of the locals leading to a transference of the term to include the spoken language as well. And in the fullness of time, the word worked its way into the English language to denote a high-grade civil servant (e.g. Whitehall mandarins) and their particular brand of bureaucratic obfuscation.

Sir Humphrey could have been speaking in Mandarin for all the good it did the committee

Seeing is Believing?

Maybe the picture in the previous post was Photoshopped. After all, if they could change this.....

To this....

Things we're unlikely to see again

The Giffords' shooting brought this picture back to mind. Question: was that a real gun the kid was playing with right next to JFK?

What the $*%&ç§

There is no Malay word for fuck. Proponents of the Whorffian hypothesis would argue that the Malays either abstain from, or are indifferent to a bit of how's-your-father. This is however belied by the fact that Indonesia is the worlds 4th most populous nation. From personal observation, most Malay men are  unhealthily obsessed with sex, a natural backlash to the sexual repressiveness of Muslim society (Allah isn't quite so omniscient after all). In recent years a slang word, "kongkek", has crept into daily usage and become quite widely used. I am told that the word is of javanese origin and as Java is the most highly populated island in the Malay archipelago, perhaps this makes a bit of sense after all. Interestingly, Japanese society which also lacks the F-word, has nonetheless become a mecca for porn of  a staggeringly eye-watering depravity. Personally, I can vouch to whacking off on enough J-porn to strike blind the entire College of Cardinals in the Vatican.

Cantonese, on the other hand, suffers from an embarrassment of riches. The most common swear-word, "tiu", is cognate to the Anglo-Saxon "fokken". It is usually combined with references to the target of abuses' mother's organs of procreation and their state of feminine hygiene to form triple or quadruple-barreled insults. And thats with just ONE swear word. Cantonese (and also Hokkien)  contain multiple variants  referring to the genitals (male and female). 

In Cantonese, as in Spanish and Italian, just saying "your mother's" in the right tone and context is sufficient to be deeply insulting. It's striking that across many cultures, the mother is a surrogate target of abuse. Is this based on the belief that the maternal bond is strongest and thus would be potentially the most hurtful and offensive target? Or is this really the case? Could it be that an insult directed against the father, and by extension to the family name and honour (due to patrilineal descent), be so grave as to require bloodshed just to appease the demands of honour and hence, throughout history, we have become culturally conditioned to a more manageable and less socially destructive form of abuse?

Along the lines of moderation in swear words, in "Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)", Orwell gives the etymology of the word "barnshoot", a mild, almost schoolmarmish exclamation of exasperation that is perfectly acceptable in genteel circles. The word was brought back by Anglo-Indians and derives from the Hindustani "bahin-chut" or "sister-fucker", certainly not the sort of word that springs to the lips of a vicar's wife after spilling some Darjeeling on a Chantilly doily. Orwell was unable to explicitly provide the literal meaning due to the suffocating censorship of the time and could only vaguely allude to a similar word in Aristophanes (I'm too lazy to search through my copy of the collected plays for the reference), but take it from me (or my Punjabi friends), "sister-fucker" it is. Years later in "Animal Farm (1945)", Orwell still had to tone down a passage where the pigeons shat on the heads of the invading men to "muted upon them".

Another word that has slipped beneath the radar into polite usage is "poppycock" which comes from the Dutch "pappekak" meaning "soft shit". And, as Bill Bryson informs us, they also have a term, (in fact two), for the variety of a harder consistency, "poep" and "stront". So with respect to the Whorffian hypothesis, one expects the Dutch to be Calvinistically punctilious and extra-regular in their bowel movements. Back to the Cantonese, swearing is so rampant among the, sniff, lower-orders, that I have personally witnessed manual labourers greeting one another with a cheery "Fuck your mother, how's things?".

The power of swear words lies in their taboo nature, hence the common resort to references of a sexual and scatological nature, normally both no-no's in polite conversation. Until recently, blasphemy was also a potent taboo, hence the origin of "damn" (or God-damn for emphasis), and "bloody" (from "God's blood" i.e. the saving grace of Christ's blood shed for us on Calvary...blah, blah, blah) or even Jesus/Jeez/Gee-whiz as an example of taking the Lord's name in vain. Indeed, the blasphemy taboo was so strong that it was preferable to replace "God" when used as a swear-word with "cock"! This allowed Shakespeare to pun in Ophelia's speech, "Young men will do't, if they come to't; By cock, they are to blame". But with the waning of religious fervour, much of the potency has been drained out of these words and using them hardly raises an eyebrow these days. The only commonly "accepted" profanity that I could think of combining all three taboos is "Holy fucking shit" which I admit is pretty lame (submissions welcome!).

One thing that has always intrigued me is the use of "pussy" for vagina. Cats have always struck me as having an essentially feminine nature while dogs just seem masculine (notwithstanding that they come in both genders, the Platonic ideal of a cat, in my mind, is female and vice-versa for a dog). Is this just a personal idiosyncrasy? I'd like to know if corroboration (or counter examples) can be found in other languages.

Mrs Slocombe's pussy was always mewing for some stroking

And more. They just don't make them like they used to.

And finally, I leave you with this earhole-clearing blast of profanity from Cook and Moore

Radiator!!!!!