13 Comments

1. Ann Widdecombe! I wonder who had it in for her? The UK has a surprising amount of political violence. Two MPs have also been murdered, I can’t remember their names, but there are plaques to them at Parliament Square at Westminster.

   I wonder what the good lefty readers of The Guardian made of this? Widdecombe was quite well-known in the UK, and divisive, sort of like Thatcher but much posher and never made it to No.10. If you’re a fan of Beyond Paradise you can sort of picture Ann’s neck of the woods. Shipton Abbott is supposed to be a Devon town but lots of the filming takes place in Cornwall, to the west, the little piece of Britain that juts out into the Atlantic. There’s a town in Cornwall called Land’s End and indeed it is. That area now is this souped-up Hamptons-like second-home mecca but it is quite beautiful and charming and there is nothing like having to rent an enclosed wicker seat when you’re on the beach in August because it’s spitting a cold steady rain and the wind off the Channel is coming at you at 70 mph or more.

   Precious memories, how they linger.

   Log in to Reply

   • The only way we can deal with the oppression of wypipo in the UK is when the wypipo community takes wypipo on wypipo crime seriously!

     /sarcasm (just in case)

     Log in to Reply

     • …just in case, you say…lotta cases, turns out

       …not trying to take advantage or imply you spoke unwisely…but the amount of unwise in that mix includes people deadpan doing the exact thing I have seen presented as a gag by americans talking about it

       …the position held by seemingly-actual supporters of nigel…some indeed who made it through the caller-filter to get to sound off at a BBC “host” of a call in response show that’s matched with a weekly panel discussion where politicians deliver responses to one another while pretending to answer questions actually posed by members of the public

       …is that the comedian wearing a bin & claiming the name on the ballot refers to someone that’s the other sort of illegal alien…from sigma something-or-other…is “the establishment”…& represents the “lefty media elite”…because…he went to cambridge, maybe…& may have cashed a cheque or two from the BBC at some point in the past while working as either a comedian or promoting someone else’s…& that just goes to show how nigel has them all worried so they’re trying to do for him

       …meanwhile…the white guy they already had under arrest in connection before they really announced that widdecome wasn’t dead so much as murdered in her own home…has since been released with apparently no expectation of getting nicked again so who or why or to what purpose brought about an unpleasant end to a lady with not a few unpleasant takes to her name but seems widely to have been considered a pretty decent person to those that knew her

       …given her last recorded public bit of speaking was in defence of the guy running against a bin for a mandate to return to the paused investigation into his dodgy money-grubbing non-disclosures & hopefully thereafter has to do another election…preferably one in which he’s been shown up hard enough to not win even in fucking clacton…but…if there were anywhere in britain more likely to scrape together a majority for that shit-weasel…he would have stood for that seat instead…so…might have to brush up on the things that can formally deny someone the right to stand to be an MP?

       Log in to Reply

       • Oh, Ann’s allying herself with Nige must have caught some (most?) members of the Conservative Party by surprise, surely. And by the Guardian readership, I meant the Dartmoor home (“Widdecombe’s Rest”) and the nephew in Cheltenham and her Conservative roots. I certainly didn’t mean to disparage—I read the Guardian myself, and though it is also a free online British media source I shy away from the Daily Mail.

         Log in to Reply

         • …yes & no, I suppose?

           …was mostly directing the you-couldn’t-make-it-up at the need-to-say-it’s-sarcasm part of the other thing than directly in response to your bit…because if I try to get into it or really think about it I’ll sound like I wrap myself in tinfoil like a toga party gone wrong on account of it being something of a perfect storm for misguided speculation?

           …not as many people as you might think from the party side of the thing would be altogether surprised by her taking up for nige’s corner…she was always something of a more-british-than-thou contrarian & I believe what she actually said on whatever it was that asked her was pretty standard in a few ways in terms of presenting a party line she’d been presented with framed in light of being able to invoke the voice of experience to make it sound like a reasonable set of moves to put himself in a better position than he’d be in had he not asked them to hold off their pesky nosy questions about his windfalls & make out that the voters of clapton that can bothered are the only people who can say he doesn’t have the mandate of heaven to be the one who should always be allowed to get away with it or he’ll make the brexit voters come for you

           …but she was found, it seems, dead at home with “severe injuries”…& they keep saying please don’t speculate until there’s been an investigation & they made noises about it not being terrorism early doors but having released the one person they nicked for a bit in a way that seems to cast them as “assisting us with our enquiries” more than “suspect back at large”…&…without wishing to be crass

           …she was a sort of popular & respectable that farage isn’t to most people…& the way she went about a bout of appearances on strictly come dancing endeared her to plenty of people who weren’t otherwise fond of the lady…it’s hard to convey…but if you triangulated from clarkson to farage to jk rowling widdecome might have shown up as your intersection…with a dash of woodhouse Aunt in there

           …if you skip past the long past where some lone nut did for a PM once upon a time you kind of had a stretch where only the irish seemed to actually kill sitting UK MPs through to the 1980s at least & maybe into the ’90s…famously a couple the last few years…I think skipping over some police men/women here & there doing the in the line of fire thing though often as not it’s a blade…jo cox was a labour MP…& the killer that time was sort of nige’s people, if you go by ideology in common…amess…was a tory…but a fairly sympathetic character as those go & was murdered by an islamic fundamentalist while actually doing the constituency MP thing of holding a (dunno why they call them this but) surgery at which members of that get to sit face to face with their MP & ask/tell them stuff

           …making nige debate a dustbin for a while while everyone did useful stuff & didn’t forget to be ready to bring him back up on the stuff he maybe ought to go down for after the joke sham election gambit times out was going…ok…ish

           …now

           …talk about your perfect storm for obstructive bullshit going exponential

           …while mr no-no-no-let-me-speak gets to firm up his bona fides about being the most christmas-voting turkey in the shoot that needs more taxpayer funded protection than a prince of the realm

           …barely matters what the facts are by the time they come out…the grenade already went off

           …it’s tragedies all the way down as far as I can see, anyway?

           Log in to Reply

           • Have I got news for you!

             And Jimmy Carr! How perfect.

             Log in to Reply

             • …one of the things that made have I got news for you outlast angus deyton is that the combo of paul merton & ian hislop mean that at least one of those if not both will play off both the guest team-mates…& it can be illuminating who can cope with that & come off with their self-respect intact…she was the sort of ultimately-terribly-sensible personification of the establishment that could get away with telling paul merton to stop being silly without sounding like a self-parody…& that both paul & hislop could respect enough not to really try to play silly-buggers with

               …hislop makes less of a secret of it but paul merton is pretty much just as smart as he tries not to look & much as well informed…while making it nigh impossible to try to play most “common man” voice in the room when it’s a matter of bubbles that beg to be burst…much like the strictly thing…even non-fans would tend to admit she made a creditable fist of the thing & gets points for being willing to perform the rite of passage?

               Log in to Reply

2. Randolph Mantooth, the dreamboat from “Emergency” and the soap opera “Loving” (among many other things) has died 🙁

   Fun fact: he was a Seminole.

   Log in to Reply

   • Damn. He played my favorite character in my favorite non SF show as a kid.

     FYI, His partner showed up playing a white supremacist in “One Battle After Another”

     Log in to Reply

3. 
   This song plays on several levels…
   Mitch’s body
   Elaine’s love for Mitch
   Elaine… being a furriner?

   Log in to Reply

   • Elaine’s a Chinese Communist spy according to America’s sweetheart, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

     Log in to Reply

     • …I’m slightly unclear as to whether she’d already left on a trip before he took the un-hurried trip in the ambulance they carted him off in with no particular signs of urgency

       …or if she took off shortly thereafter

       …but…in the sort of movies that cast people like jason statham you’d need to lay a new floor after you busted yours open to get at the chest of in-case-of-emergency stuff it turned out you never needed…in…other movies…you might not need a chest…just a modest floorsafe cache, say

       …good thing life isn’t like the movies, I suppose?

       Log in to Reply

4. Gosh, you all are just such peasants. Such povvos.
   The rich people, the important people, you know they can’t reschedule the interior design consults.
   What’s next? Expecting someone to reschedule a botox session when a family member is in crisis?
   Time and tile waits for no (wo)man.

   Log in to Reply