An evening at Royal Albert Hall

The soothing sound of Jazz

Last night I went to see Diana Krall in concert at the Royal Albert Hall. The fact that I had a ticket was already sheer coincidence and the result of some office bragging: I showed a colleague how to order tickets online - even tricking the firm's Firewall into believing that it is a site related to the world of high finance - and, for lack of better alternatives, bought said ticket to last night's concert.

It couldn't have come at a better time; the right remedy after a week of high frustrations and low morale. I have heard a lot of Diana Krall before but somehow her looks consistantly turned me away from checking out her repertoire. She simply looks too good to be a credible representative of jazz music. When I think of jazz greats, such artists like Eartha Kitt, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, etc... come to mind, not this sweet looking blonde Britney Spears look-alike. And here apologies are immediately due: Diana Krall is a fabulously accomplished artist, with a wide range of talent and of surprising perfection.

22 songs, 13 followed by nine more after the interval, helped to literally forget that you are in a metropolis and in a hall with 4,000+ fellow listeners. After her first song I just closed my eyes and let myself be enwrapped by the smooth, slightly smokey voice and the fantastic band. I felt like being placed into some intimate setting of a jazz club in Paris or New York, not in a huge concert hall at all. It is a remarkable achievement of the artists, and the venue of the Royal Albert Hall, to provide such a perfect evening for a guy who needed serious unwinding this week, on this day, at that time. It worked.

Before the concert I treated myself to a light yet fulfilling dinner in the Elgar Room. I "forgot" to return the Elgar Menu, a mix of a momento (although it was the 4th time I have eaten there) of the evening and a reminder of what I ate and drank. It all worked out fine and I am totally unwound and at ease again.

Anglochat's Finest

AOL's chatrooms are full of stylishly clad hags whose weathered skin complements the latest fashion from the skanky back alleys of Alabama:

Anglochat residents during a recent bow-wow celebrating the arrival of new fire wood in Alabama. Groundskeeper Libby (AOL member 'SugarPiHnybunch', on the right) points out to elderly Illinois visitor Victoria (AOL's "HeressChristie", centre) how far her social benefit coupons will stretch this week thanks to the reduced energy costs and the Shared Needle Program (SNP), while fellow Alabamian CarrCarter, also a SNP beneficiary (with back to the camera), listens stoically with envy.

Later the needle pushing crew gathered at CarrCarter's (AKA "No-Cash 'n' Carrie") domicile (shown below) in a remote swath of swamp 'down by the river' for a cook-out featuring 2 armadillos removed from her 23-year old pick-up truck's front bumper. Meth-Christie, who is also known on AOL as "ChristieLake63" (a pun for dissolved crystal methamphetamine, which she is dependent on) surprised the crew with 20 grammes of crack that she claimed to have nicked from her son's pants a few days earlier.

Photos courtesy of Ramona Johnson, also a Illinois campie rat who is better known in the flooded swamps of Louisiana and Alabama as Bec d'aigle, French for Hooked Nose.

Music: MARIANNE FAITHFULL - Witches' Song   Provided by: elgar.fm

Exposed: Nick Griffin, BNP

One has to be grateful to the BBC for inviting Nick Griffin, the fuehrer of the British Nationalist Party, to last night's "Question Time," a popular and long-running news debate programme in front of a live audience. The programme helped to expose the crude polemics of a devious and twisted man, stripped him of the last gloss of faked decency, discarded Griffin as an irrelevant bastion of primitivism. But it also should enrage enough the educated part of the electorate to abandon Labour, as the ruling party is the main provider of voters for the BNP - the one million who voted for the nationalists in the June elections for the European "parliament."

Among the discussion panel was also (Labour) Justice minister Jack Straw, who added to the damage by quipping, "I don't think the BNP benefits from our immigration policies; it is more the frustration over MPs' expenses." It is that kind of ignorance and lack of grasp the BBC programme helped to eradicate; with mixed results.

I was cringing with incredulity listening to the garbled salvos of low-aiming soundbites from the BNP buffoon. But unlike Labour supporters and officials, who believe that ignoring and shutting out the extremists is the way to curtail their spreading, I believe that confronting the hollow and outright false and ludicrous banter from the BNP head-on, and drag it into the public domain as a kind of freak show, is exactly the right way to deal with these brownshirts. Labour's Minister of Wales Peter Hain - equally known for displaying frequent lapses of intellect so visible in Nick Griffin - thought that blaming the BBC to provide a forum to expose the BNP's hate mongering message amounted to a legitimation of the BNP. It demonstrates the helpless daftness of Labour, who for years have nourished the BNP with their outrageous immigration policies and with a million voters as of late.

So, what did emit from the horse's arse last night?

There was for once the Holocaust. In the past, Griffin denied its very existence. He modified this criminal denial with words of painstaking evasion: "I only changed my mind on that after reading secret British intelligence cables dealing with the subject. I have never been charged in Europe for denying the Holocaust, so how can I be called a denier? How can I be called a Nazi if my father was an officer in the RAF?" Asked about a quote attributed to him in which he equated six million deaths in the Holocaust with the flat earth theory he replied that "European law" stopped him explaining.

Leaves you speechless, eh?

But dragging the dead - friend, family or foe - through the dirt is one of Griffin's hallmarks, no matter how ridiculous it gets. No wonder then that he claims that Winston Churchill, who convinced the Americans of the utter evil of the nazis and spearheaded the Allies' thrashing of fascism, would be a supporter today of the BNP! Possibly, Mr Griffin, as we don't know the level of retardation in old age, and a 163-year old Sir Winston might fit your bill.

Showing total lack of knowledge in domestic history - he describes white Brits as Aborigines in their own country - does not stop Nick Griffin to wade deeper into his delusional quicksand morality. So he admitted sharing a platform with former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke - but described him as "almost totally non-violent". Special...

But I can feel good and right from now on to call anyone who votes for the BNP a pathological idiot.

Boys Zones: Death and Dissolution, uh-huh

British media these days bemoan the fact that two puerile gangs on stage have been disbanded; one by death and the other one for lack of success and recognition - both well deserved.
First, 33-year old Mr Gately, member of the infantile sing-along tingle tangle band Boyzone, has suffocated on his own vomit while sitting in a hotel room's armchair. It has still to be established whether Gately's barfing was the result of the night out in Majorca's sleaziest gay bar, including a massive drinking binge and consumption of cannabis, or whether it was the fact that his husband(!) was next door shagging a male Bulgarian prostitute they had just picked up at the bar.
Looks to me that a choice of lifestyle has brought upon a fate that actually is a valuable and applaudable lesson for wannabe boyz. Yes, I believe the death of Gately is a good thing, and no reason at all to lament. I save my sympathy for the many young people who die each day, without their fault.
A-ha, the Norwegian trash band from the 1880s (or was it earlier?) have declared their end. So what, eh? They had one shitty song 25 years ago which sounded old on the day it was released already. Good riddance, to both bands.

Shoot-to-kill, police or not police

SA a step closer to anarchy

When a person in South Africa finds himself/herself in a desperate enough situation to seek police assistance, that individual earns sympathy and pity indeed. While that conundrum is all but new in post-Apartheid South Africa - after all, nearly 1.5 million white South Africans have packed their belongings and left the country in the past 8 years alone - the situation has become ever more grievous during the tenures of the past 3 presidents of the nation.

Looking for help from police is a perilous venture for a white South African nowadays. Such individual is well advised to sport acute awareness for the possibility that the coppers who have been alerted to an emergency are not necessarily policemen but random thugs in stolen uniforms, and even stolen or 'adapted' private cars remodelled into patrol cars. Such 'first aiders' have become known to rob, to take hostages for ransom, to rape, to abuse and injure and even to kill victims of preceding crimes or accidents.

The common South African knows about these dangers and will try to outsmart the mayhem by approaching a police precinct. Once there the individual in desperate need for help will encounter regularly one or a combination of these scenarios:

1) Police staff is either on drugs or drunk or asleep;
2) Police station is nearly deserted or severely under-staffed (especially during the night, as regular personnel conducts clandestine operations to stop and rob drivers, ask for kick-backs or confiscate the car under pretense;
3) Staff is either incompetent or uninterested in the complaint or the call for help;
4) Staff refuses to leave the precinct to investigate "because the situation is too dangerous outside"
5) Staff interrupts to negotiate a 'fee' - in truth a bribe - to continue taking the report;
6) Assertive complainant faces arrest and will be held overnight in custody, sometimes to be released only in lieu of a payment to fatten the copper's paycheque;
7) Staff reassures the person seeking help to return at a later, more opportune time
8) Staff expresses disbelief of the person's story, subjecting him to an 'intense' interrogation paired with verbal and physical abuse;
9) Person is required to provide details of home address and personal circumstances for the purpose of giving the staff detailed indications when there will be the best time for a home invasion and burglary in future;

The reason why so many precincts in the country are either under-staffed or deserted during the hours of 6pm and 6am is that many coppers are out on the street in commission of crimes ranging from robbery of drivers - routinely at gunpoint - to murder during home invasions.

The brutal nature of crimes in South Africa - more than 18,000 people have been murdered last year - has provoked now the newly appointed chief of the nation's police - himself an ex-criminal and a crony of President Zuma - to introduce a 'policy' of shoot-to-kill for police. The policy expressively stipulates that "police need to be freed from the restraints to have to account for the use of deadly force against criminals," or whoever the police perceive as criminal.

As a result several incidents have been reported since October 1st (when the new "Shoot-to-kill" orders were given) where police opened fire on innocent and unsuspecting civilians either on foot or in a car. So far five innocents have been fatally shot, among them a mother of 2 who was in a slow moving car when police opened fire and hit the car - and its three passengers - with some 40 bullets. The driver, a pilot of the SA Air Force, lambasted the police for shooting at a car ready to stop and for them fleeing the scene after the shooting.

A core problem is that more than 4,000 unregistered vehicles belong to the nation's police force who have full powers to make random stops. Criminal gangs utilize this policy and are responsible now for nearly 60% of all incidents where a driver has been stopped (and usually harassed, abused, threatened and robbed).

The US State Department is considering to issue a travel advisory for Americans, with the EU and Britain possibly to follow. This would deal a severe blow to South Africa's efforts to lure tourists and visitors for next year's World Cup into the country.

I am currently on assignment in Geneva and Paris

A Noble (prize) Departure From Tradition

The decision to award President Barack Obama with this year's Peace Nobel Prize is incomprehensible, irrational, wrong and against the spirit of the prize as stipulated by Alfred Nobel.

A sitting president, barely 10 months in office, has set out an ambitious agenda, impaired and overshadowed by a global financial crisis that has cost millions of jobs at home and abroad, led to an explosion of Federal debt to $2 Trillion and assures that at least 2 generations of Americans will have to work (and pay higher taxes) to make up for the fiscal sink hole.

Mr Obama has now received $1.4 million as a windfall profit thanks to the Prize committee in Oslo. More importantly, as a peace award recipient, the President will in future have to weigh the duties and expectations of an obscure group of Dr Strangelove's in 'peacenik' Norway with the duties and challenges of a Supreme military commander.

Predictable was the reaction from Iran - the world's gravest threat to peace - which expressed hope that the president "will take the award to heart" and to stop the push for Iranian dismantling of their nuclear armament ambition. As a winner of the Peace Prize, Mr Obama will inevitably be coaxed into a neutralist, rather than effective approach to deal with the Iranians (and North Koreans). The Nobel Prize committee has castrated the US president, unless he refuses to accept the prize for the duration of his presidency (leaving open the option he might refuse it altogether if he has to look back on a dismal record, or had been forced to go to war in the meantime).

The idea of an award is to laud someone's effort that has been crowned by universally accepted success. The Norwegian Santa Clauses grossly violated this principle, and rather resorted to a political pre-emptive strike to neutralize the US.

In my view the President, for whose agenda I have great respect and hopes - tempered by the bleak realities, has the obligation to reject the award.

AOL chats zest pool of criminals

I have extensively covered the criminal activities in AOL's Anglochat, a forum for thugs, paedophiles and welfare cheaters. AOL members Kpiper63, eviyavol, HavocsReturn, ListeriUS, Netcitizen2008, CrossOfIron and others have featured prominently as hardcore criminals preying on potential victims in that perticular chatroom. ListeriUS has been arrested twice since he ran to Connecticut in 2008, where he used Anglochat as a grooming territory to call for rape and child abuse, and to find like-minded cohorts such as Crosseykind and Kpiper63. Police confiscated the PC of ListeriUS (Simon), who is currently free on bail awaiting trial. A court prohibits him from using computers and the Internet, except in public libraries.

As despicable as these individuals have been proved to be, they all are topped in infamy by Angela Allen, better known as Crosseykind@aol.com  - a close associate of fellow AOL-ers ListeriUS, Kpiper63 (Ken(ny) Pugsley Boynton) and Eviyavol (Nicola K). For many years she 'worked' as a prostitute in the Manchester area, before plotting to go into nursing for children. There, she was involved in some of the most horrible and devilishly organised child abuse cases Britain has ever seen. Here is an excerpt from Friday's Daily Telegraph:

Angela Allen described as 'totally evil'

Angela Allen, who has pleaded guilty to child sex assaults in the Vanessa George nursery abuse case, offered a three-year-old girl as a sexual trophy to strangers she encountered on the streets of Nottingham.

'Crosseykind' Angela Allen spent years as a whore in Manchester

To Allen's disappointment, none expressed any interest in abusing the child to whom she had access. The female paedophile had no such reservations and took time and effort in coaching the child to engage in acts of depravity.

Allen, 39, spent many of her younger years working as a prostitute in Manchester. As well as appearing before the courts on six occasions on charges of soliciting, she was convicted of theft in 1992.

When police arrested Allen over her online sexual deviancy, they found her living in squalor in the Bulwell suburb of Nottingham, with little furniture and only a few scraps of food. Her house is now boarded up with steel shutters. So, too, is that of her sister who had to be moved out of the area for her own safety.

Det Supt Adrian Pearson, the head of Nottingham’s public protection unit, said Allen deserved particular mention for her depravity.

“Angela Allen is a sinister and totally evil individual,” he said. “She has shed not a tear of remorse for her victim. I cannot imagine what that young child went through at such a tender age.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6252761/Vanessa-George-abuse-case-Angela-Allen-described-as-totally-evil.html

Police are investigating the international connections of Allen with AOL members in Chicago, Alabama, Connecticut, New York, Florida, Scotland and Kentucky. Regular members of the Anglochat are encouraged to report suspicions to the appropriate authorities in the UK and US.

David Letterman Peep Show

In my opinion he is a filthy scumbag and a manipulating, cretinous abuser; his 'victims' opportunistic whores. The self-apologetic and whincing bastard should be fired by CBS, and the sluts who slept with him ought to be exposed for public ridicule for having sex with that appalling thicko.
In March the philandering jerk married his "long-term" girlfriend. Was she part of the Letterman Show's set as well? Unless she immediately walks out of that marriage she can be rightfully categorized as whore as well.

Scene of recent CBS Show