When I used to be a bass player in a band I once played the vintage Burns bass guitar that was used in the recording of A Whiter Shade Of Pale. Or at least, our manager told me that’s what it was. He could have been trying to raise my game. We also used to keep our cables in a suitcase that once belonged to Chick Corea. And then, there was the Gong that… (Enough rock talk. Ed.)
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Procol Harum in copyright battle
Monthly Archive for November, 2006
I’ve always been uncomfortable with Remembrance Day. I think it’s really important to remember the horrors of war and those people who have died and are dying in wars. There’s not very much about the ceremony at the Cenotaph that does that for me. The politicians who provoke disputes for political ends, the generals who constantly lobby for more and more spending on weapons, the industrialists who will sell anything to anyone, the priests who argue that God is on our side, they’re all there. I feel sorry for the soldiers who have seen or done dreadful things, suffered terrible loss. I feel sorrier for the civilians who are increasingly the victims of war.
I love the Two Minutes’ Silence and, if I were King, I would not ban Remembrance Sunday, but I would extend it to a day of remembrance of all the victims of all wars and I would have detachments of housewives, farmers and factory workers standing in Whitehall, because those are the people who made the greatest sacrifices and they always will be.
The White poppies for peace site has a lot of interesting things to say about this subject and they also sell white poppies. I like that idea a lot. If I can’t find one to buy tomorrow I may have to make my own.
I really can’t make my point about Oliver North any better than Mark Weisbrot in Z Magazine.
Imagine Osama bin Laden visiting the United States ten or 15 years from now, telling Americans who to vote for if they want to avoid getting hurt. It would never happen, but in Nicaragua something very similar is happening in the run-up to their election on November 5.Former US Lt. Col. Oliver North, who helped organize and raise funds for a terrorist organization that decimated Nicaragua in the 1980s, returned to that country’s ground zero in late October to warn the citizens there against re-electing Daniel Ortega.
The irony doesn’t end there. Now that Ortega has won, the US will no doubt be carrying out its threat to cut off aid to Nicaragua because the people there didn’t vote for a pro-US candidate.
Do you remember back in 2004 during the US presidential campaign when the Guardian launched a letter-writing campaign, getting people from around the world to write to voters in a swing state? The campaign didn’t go down too well with our special friends, who objected vigorously to this intrusion into their precious democratic process. Need I go on?
Tip o’ the hat to James Yarker for drawing my attention to the hilarious Morse Code competition on Friday’s Today Programme. Have a Listen.
I decoded the message with a program called MultiMode because I don’t speak morse. It says -YOURE LISTENING TO THE TODAY PROGRAMME. WE HAVENT GOT WOGAN OR MOYLES AND WE CANT AFFORD BRAND, BUT ED AND CAROLYN ARE CHEFTPRTTQS
It is black history month and the year three children at my daughter’s school were all asked to make a poster about a famous black person they admire. The only famous black person my daughter knows about is Mary Seacole but she’s already done loads of things about her so her diligent mother set her to researching Nelson Mandela. She did an excellent poster but I don’t think she’ll win the prize because her friend Hiab did a poster about Pushkin who had Eritrean ancestors!
On my way out of school this morning there were two Afro-Caribbean mums, who were both double parked, screaming abuse and threats at each other at the tops of their voices. It made me laugh because they were so undignified and they were doing it right in front of the school, but then I noticed the sad, crestfallen face of another black mum who was trying to hurry her little son away. I’ve always wondered how I’d cope if I had a black son or daughter, trying to make them proud to be who they are in the context of a predominantly white society. But I’ve never really though about the problems that other black people must present for black parents.
I was driven home last week by a taxi driver from Somalia. He’s very interesting to talk to because he’s mad on news and politics. He was telling me about how he lived in Brixton when he first came to the UK. He hated it because he doesn’t like the way that Afro-Caribbean people behave. He told me that he said to a friend of his, “You people must inhale the drug from the air when you are babies or you must get if from your mother’s milk, that’s why you are so crazy.” His friend said, “You should be grateful to us, we are the front line soldiers for all black people.”
Andrew Marr made some interesting comments recently about the liberal culture at the BBC.
…the BBC is not impartial, or neutral. It’s a publicly funded urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias: it’s better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.
I think that it is a cultural liberal bias that has prevented there being a public debate about the damage that certain aspects of Afro-Caribbean culture do to the wider black community. A while ago it was considered risky to talk about the issues of Muslims and integration, until Jack Straw bravely brought the whole discussion out into the open with his comments about veils. Maybe we still haven’t gone far enough in our discussion about how Afro-Caribbean culture fits into our society. We do after all have a responsibility to all those black parents who’d like to see their children appearing on posters during Black History month.
Latest Comments
RSS