Top Six Cheesy Songs From the 60s, That Weren't Really That Cheesy At All

Self-explanatory really. All cheesy, all good.


'I've Been A Bad, Bad Boy' - Paul Jones
Kicking off with the loveable rogue and Oxford University drop out himself, who's still going strong of course, though lost a lot his rogueishness.


'Pictures of Matchstick Men' - Status Quo
Forget what people say about them, the 'Quo rocked. Probably still do. This is an early offering in black and white, when they'd clearly briefly jumped on the psychedelia bandwaggon, and were known as THE Status Quo. Think they dropped the 'The' after this performance..


'Young Girl' - Gary Puckett and the Union Gap
Good singer. Sounds like he's having some trouble..


'Baby, Now That I've Found You' - The Foundations
This is definitely not a nod towards having a group of black dudes in the list just for the sake of it, but rather 'cos it's a good song. Same people that did the better known 'Build Me Up Buttercup'.


'Fire' - The Crazy World of Arthur Brown
A near-mandatory inclusion, as is the oft-quoted fact that he was at Reading University. Think he dropped out, which I'm sure was their loss. He also appears in 'Eyesight to the Blind' from the movie version of 'Tommy' and I'm not sure what else. Later referenced as a euphemism/term of abuse for a pedophile, in the Brass Eye pedophilia special..


'Silence is Golden' - The Trememloes
The ultimate of the ultimate. Don't know if they did any other good songs or how their vocal chords held out (and indeed how the effect was achieved).


A common thread running through this is they were more or less all on Castle Communications (as was) 'Ultimate 60s' collection, that I had about 20 years ago on CD, when these were still quite new, and the 60s were of course fresher in people's minds! In fact, all of these songs must have appeared originally within a 2 year time frame - what a time for music, I think..

How To Run A Sugar Company - Or Any Company - Seth's Blog

Great post from my big brother, how a company should be. Would that it were..

On This Day 344 Years Ago...

28th June 1666

..Strange to hear my Lord Lauderdale say himself that he had rather hear a cat mew than the best musique in the world; and the better the musique, the more sick it makes him; and that of all instruments, he hates the lute most, and next to that, the baggpipe..

Kind of the inverse of the PMC really, we'd rather hear the best 'musique' in the world rather than a cat mew, but we instead hear the latter all the time courtesy of the PMC's resident cat, Shackleton, and all too little lute and bagpipe music..

Wrong, Utterly Wrong

The words Coren, Guardian and Victoria are seldom likely to crop up here on the PMC, but we couldn't help but post about this article.

The poor girl had got into trouble for issuing a rebuttal that she didn't have, but rather someone she resembled had,  a tatoo of Ben Elton's face on their belly (as if anyone would do that) whereas in fact it had merely been his name (oh that's alright then). It gets worse.. this (the person with the tattoo) was someone she apparently knew, who subsequently tried to sue her, not for the error itself but for apologising in a 'sarcastic tone' on a phone interview on a poker podcast (it's Victoria Coren after all). I mean bloody hell.


Now, a million miles from her late father but nevertheless makes a brilliant point here - one's memory is indeed a mulch of impressions (I'm not sure now if I'm not confusing Alan Coren with Ned Sherrin now) and the idea that you can sue someone for forgetting the details of a tattoo some 11 years later is even more of a mulch.

What's worse is that people are able to do this by using, or abusing, the no-win no-fee principle, where it can cost a litigant nothing to sue someone if they lose, but on the other hand the person being sued has to pay their lawyer's fees in defending themselves even as they quite naturally won the preposterous 'case' and should never have had to defend themselves in the first place.  It's just outrageous, wrong, and evil..

So, we at the PMC, not that anyone's reading this in any case, would like to humbly, reverently and obsequiously beg our audience's (both of them) indulgence, that we would never, ever, use a sarcastic tone or get details of body adornments wrong...

Now go and get another tattoo and get a life whilst your on instead of reading the incessant ramblings of a  caffeine crazed hermit looking for his road to Damascus moment and failing ignominiously..

Thought For The Day No. 22 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

"If you talk to God you're praying. If God talks to you, you've got schizophrenia"

Thomas Szasz

(Think we've used that one already, but it's a good one - ed)

Music For Babies Isn't What It Used To Be..

As someone who has a penchant for trawling youtube for music clips from the mid-'60s to the early '80s in particular, it was only a matter of time (in fact it happened in a very short space of time) that I, along with everyone else, was going to notice the preponderance of comments that go something like this (spelling, punctuation and syntax errors intentional):

"im 14 and i feel like ive been born in the wrong generation - this is so much better than the crap we have nowadays i love the INSERT NAME OF ARTIST HERE"...

I mean, it's everywhere, recent sightings include on offerings from as diverse sources as the Box Tops, Hendrix, Blondie and surely anything by the Who and the Small Faces.

So what a cool drink of water it was to see the following pisstake on a clip of  "Venus"  by new wave founding members Television:

"I'm 8 months old and I wish more people my age listened to this kind of music instead of crap like Barney and Raffi" ..

Ha ha, I think it even may be authentic...

No Posting Today

..for today is Jaanipäev, and more important, the day after Jaaniõhtu...

For the not knowings, this is a midsummer celebration which everyone says (so it must be true) derives from a pagan celebration which has subsequently been attached to the feast of St John, all over Northern Europe. What people don't realise of course is that, when pagan religions (real religions I mean, not just watching the 'Wicker Man') were on the wane, they often moved their celebrations to coincide with the organised Church's festivals, not vice versa as is often assumed.

But that's all by the by, it's a fun celebration, so it must be pagan, and even in the temperant atmosphere of the PMC we are taking a day off today on the grounds that we might have drunk too much coffee in an effort to stay awake for the duration and are now going to sleep for the next 27 years.

Unnecessary Sign To The Nth Degree

My big brother Seth Godin has posted a poor quality pic, but we'll forgive him as he must've just snapped it on his mobile (or whatever much more sophisticated device that he has instead of the mobile that we Mr Gumby's here at the PMC use) as he was rushing through boarding at an airport.

Anyway, the picture is funny enough, a prohibition on 'snowglobes', those small, liquid filled nick nacks that you shaked and this white stuff makes a kind of winter wonderland scene. Never knew what they were called but now I do.

But how many people take snowglobes with them on to a plane? Like about three. "Oh, I knew there was something we forgot to buy on our trip, those little nick nacks that you shake and it goes all snowy...". Nah.

His bigger point is, everyone still reads this sign and thus loses a few seconds of their life, at a time when they are likely to be pressed anyway, reading something completely irrelevant. Yet how often we all do this - asking a question we already know the answer to, copying in people on emails they have no reason in the slightest to need, inventing new 'rules' which everyone has to abide by just because of one person's slight misdemeanour...

Just stop wasting people's time!

60 Years Of The PMC - Cheeky Chappie

2010 marks the 60th anniversary of the launch of the PMC. Yes, it's impossible to believe, but that's because it is impossible.

To mark this auspicious occasion the PMC will be taking a retrospective of some of the outstanding posts of the past six decades. From Cold War to Coldplay and from Ban the Bomb to Ban the Burka, every decade will be represented, and includes highlights from some of the most talked about of contributors...Bertrand Russell, Hunter S. Thompson, Roman Polanski, Roald Dahl and Limahl from Kajagoogoo,  to name but a few - none of them contributed to the PMC's pages (oh, hold on a second, Limahl had a regular section in the early 80s).
 
1970 saw the introduction of a new character to the Puumajacrew, the self-styled 'Cheeky Chappie', Kevin Cartwright.

Subsequently voted by readers of the TV Times as 'the funniest man of 1973', he  later did a volte face, becoming something of a hate figure, in part due to his increasingly xenophobic and bigoted attitude towards Britain joining the EEC, the recurrence of Dutch Elm Disease in the UK, and black footballers in the First Division.

The PMC would like to distance itself from this former 'contributor', who brought shame and infamy on our blog and attracted just the sort of readership we now try to dissuade, politically correct and liberal bunch that we are (not).

Anyway just for posterity's sake here is one of his less emetic-inducing contributions...


First Posted on October 24th 1970

Cor, that blue flame machine dosn't half shift, much better than my Anglia 105E- that'd be just the kind of motor I could do with when popping down to the Co-op.

And I bet the driver, what's his name, Grovelsnitch, gets the birds, even more than Barry Sheen I reckon.

I say, I wonder what the fuel bill is, lay-gennlemen, I suppose you don't just roll up at the texaco and say 'fill here up with four star'! eh?!, What, eh?! I mean, come on!

I wonder what happens when you need to change a tyre on that thing, I don't suppose you carry a spare in the back, no sir!

I say, how do you clean the windows, there are no windscreen wipers and the jet wash would just go flying all over the place at that speed.

And I wonder what the service charge is - bet it's more than the whole of Z cars put together!

Etc. Etc. ad nauseam..

Thought For The Day No. 21 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

..psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste...


There is no shame or harm in not knowing something. You should be ashamed and embarrassed when you pretend you know what you actually do not.


It is better not to read any books than to read many and believe them all. You can be a clever man without a single book, but if you believe all that is written in books, you can quickly become a fool.

L. Tolstoy

A More Interesting Way To Spend 90 Minutes

The PMC would like to mention that not everything to come out of Algeria is so desperately dull as last night's waste of time. We'd like to say we'd used the time more wisely in watching the Battle of Algiers, but that would be an arrant falsehood. Nevertheless it is a good movie about a little known subject, and was banned in France for many years so it must be really good...

Friday's Joke

Starting a pretend new tradition and ensuring it will be still born, by retelling one of some vintage and utterly lacking in liberal sensibilities...

A representative of the Chukchi tribe, from the very furthest of the Russian far east, was enrolling in a creative writing course at the Moscow State University. Wanting to ascertain his motivation, the course director asked some fairly standard questions, turning quickly to authors which the man liked or was even influenced by: "have you ever read any Tolstoy?" asked the would-be tutor. "No." replied the Chukchi. "Pushkin? Dickens?"...same response. "What about  Baudelaire"...a blank look.

Seeing he wasn't getting anywhere, the interviewer soon became exasperated, and asked "Why, then, are you enrolling in a creative writing course, if you haven't read any of the classics, in fact don't read in general?"....to which came the immortal reply:

"Chuckhi boodyet peesatyel', nee cheetatyel'..."

60 Years Of The Puumaja Crew- No. 10

It's not often here at the PMC that we review a book, still less that we review some reviews of a book and then have an excerpt afterwards. So, jumping forward somewhat in our chronological trawling of past posts, here is a review from 1996 of a novel which was all over the place at the time, and which now noone in their right or wrong mind would look at twice...

First published March 27th 1996

One, two, three, you can’t catch me!

The new novel from Francis M’gannanagan

Critical acclaim for M’gannanagan’s last novel, Cassie’s lips:

‘Brilliant…gripping…dynamite…”

TV Extra magazine

‘A tragic and often so very moving canter through the very soul of what it is and what it is not to be brought up in the most desperate of environments. M’gannanagan knows humanity, he knows suffeing, he knows what it is to feel fear. Death is his closest confidant, his most trusted servant. The reader is transfixed in a house of paranoia, loathing and confusion as M’gannanagan jolts them through life, laughing at the unlaughable-at, thinking the unthinkable, doing the undo-able. Here is a man who has dipped his ladle deep into the barrel of his soul and come up with a load of bits from the bottom, becoming dizzy with the sheer force of the horrors of his upbringing, a man who hangs on by the slightest sinew of hope, a man who walks a tightrope literally made of barbed wire. This book is nothing short of a work of art, a thing of beauty which will bring tears, laughter, reflection and silliness in equal measure. Mr M’gannanagan, I salute you’.

Diarmuid O’ S.

Irish Histrionic Review

‘Bleak, gritty, unputdownable and f*cking good. A vivid portrait of life on the edge’

Martin Chines, author of ‘You, You Prick, I’ll Smash Your Eye Off’ and ‘You C*nt’.

“Second only to Roddy Doyle in encapsulating the sheer tragedy of what it is to be alive. A triumph’.

Silly Blenkinsop, the Daily Times review of literature.

Part One

―‘Gie’ it us’ she said.

My dad was out and I was wearing my brand new t-shirt. It was brown.

― ‘Ah sah’d gie’ it uz’.

Sandy was three years older than me, but seemed somehow smaller, as though her head had been compressed inside a Swan Vestas matchbox.

― ‘ye basa – ya’ nae ge i’ us ah’ll telt mez’ granna, man..’

Shite. I’d been hiding the jazz mag under my new t-shirt for the last two hours. But my fingers were giving out. The agony was shooting through them like a forest fire being fanned by the downdraughts of hell.

― ‘Ye friggin’ jack basa – lik’ a’ wha’ ye ben deein’ man’

An awful tearing sound rent the air, like an invisible head being torn from unknowing shoulders. Sandy had the mag now in her sticky hands, and was waving it around now, above her head and beyond my reach, her lank, greasy red curls tumbling over her eyes, copper-sulphate blue eyes, as blue as neptune’s arse.

― ‘aieeeeee! Ye basa’ – ah’ll telt mez’ granna av ye.a’ swore ah’ll telt mez’ granna. Uh’ll geddat yuz fa’ this an’ ye’ll lorn’, man’

I’d delivered a stinging kick to her shins, either the right or the left, it doesn’t seem relevant any more, with my steel toecapped winkle pickers. They were the smartest winkle pickers on the estate, I used to parade up and down in them, a ghetto peacock, making all the other kids jealous. Billy Childers who lived on our estate said he was going to take them off me. Billy Childers’ dad was in prison, for murder they said, though noone said it to his face. He had a hair lip. My mam said he was a meanie kid, but I didn’t know what that meant.

― ‘ma shinnies…tha’ ficked – ah’ll fickin’ blat ye, ye basa, man!’

Sandy was bent double in agony on the playground floor. I stood over her, proud, triumphant, and now could hold the jazz mag in front of me, unmolested.

The school was old and grey. Part of it was closed now. There were two separate entrances, one saying ‘girls’ and another saying ‘boys’, but noone bothered with that any more. Sandy said that when her granna was at the school they used those different entrances, but that was in olden times. And they had the lash. Her granna was lashed 200 times once, she said, but I didn’t believe her. She was always lying. They still had the cane, but they didn’t use it as much as they used to, and you needed a special form. Once Dereck Bockerty was given one of those forms but they let him off because his dad was destroyed that day down at the shipyard, by a big falling thing. Noone like Dereck Bockerty. He smelt of cabbages.

A thick, black smog, such as you only got in our part of Garyford, hung in the air the night our Carlton ran away. Not the modern kind of smog, which is gone by lunchtime, but the old kind, which was much much thicker and blacker. We didn’t know about emphysema then, even though half the babies born in the infirmary had it. By the time people got to working in the yards they had the full blown version. There was a particular type of cough you used to associate with someone who was a long termer at the yards, like a combination of a borborygmatic lawnmower and a broken turkey on formaldehyde. My dad had that cough but he used to pretend that he didn’t. The night our Carlton ran away he forgot to pretend not to have it and started having it again. All night he went on, and by morning he could only just breathe, and then the breathing sounded like a mouse trying to attract somebody’s attention.

― ‘wha’s uz Cazza, man?’

I asked my mother the next day. She didn’t reply. She was picking oakum in the kitchen, the frail strands of unpicked flecks softly falling to the ground, describing a circular pattern as they did so, miniature parachutists in the ether of domesticity.

― ‘ah sa’, ah’d, wha’sz uz Cazza, man?’

― ‘Layz’ isz’ ooz’, man, Frankiesz, man, boy, man’

It was my other brother, Paul, two years older than me. He had been playing with the broken peg he had been given two Christmases ago.

― ‘Bosz whecz’s eesz, man?’

Paul looked furtively over to where my mother was working. She’d stopped now, her fingers lying dormant like an abandoned crematorium. I watched as a single tear accumulated in the small depression that was formed where the corner of her eye met the huge mole that dominated her face. It hung there for a moment, it seemed like an indefinite period which could have been anything from three seconds to thirty two seconds, before falling to the oakum-littered floor, exploding in a fragile crystalline coronet of sheer miniature daintiness. I was afraid.

. . . . . .

― ‘uz Cazz’sz niezs’ cuzmnz’ bacz’ man’.

Paul explained to me much later.

‘ee’s duz gannsz runszwascz taez t’navyz, man. ’llz nzz’ co’ basz. Sae jisz’ fogezzabooscsz’ ‘eezz man’.

I didn’t know where the Navy was or even what it was.

‘czklzz czsz wieczsz sczcz. Szczsc tzszcs, man’.

It was at this point, the point at which my family had started speaking to me in Polish, that I realized that a part of my childhood had been irrevocably taken from me, like a traumatized, half-dead bird being snatched from the fangs of a very ugly cat. Nothing would be the same again. I watched as an undulating froth of thick, basalt smoke relentlessly fanned out of chimneys that loomed, defiant, and satanic, over our street. In the distance the ululating screech of the factory siren pierced to my very essence, a disgraced Japanese soldier committing seppuku after a particularly bad day.

More edge-of –the-seat stuff next week (or not as the case may be) when Francis tells us more about life staring down the end of a belt buckle, more tragedies, and his special birthday present of a bucket of sand and a bucket of vinegar.

The PMC Challenge...

...short, simple but quite challenging - to find a recently-made British English-language documentary about war (two world wars, soviet war in Afghanistan etc etc) which ISN'T narrated by Kenneth bloody Brannagh...

...your reward, should you choose to accept and complete the mission - a year's supply of documentaries on virtually everything else that are NOT narrated by either a) Andrew Sachs or b) John Nettles (hint - you'll barely last through to February).

Wackypedia Entry For Today

I want something of what they're on, arf arf...


Finland.


Finland lies on the Eastern shore of the aegean sea. It formally achieved its independence (from China) in 2003, though the residents knew about that like about two weeks before.

The Finnish name for Finland is ''Suomalaisella sisulla" which translates as "sit on my face".

British actor Laurence Olivier played Finland opposite Vivien Leigh (who played Angola) in the 1947 film "peg-a-leg"

Finland is double jointed.

Finland's national composer, Jean Sibelius, was so nationalistic that he renounced his Finnish citizenship since he felt unworthy of it. He became a citizen of sea cucumber land.

Only one Finnish word has made it into international usage - the word 'Banya', which is a type of she-witch that howls when someone has recently snuffed it.


Contrary to popular lore, world war two leader Marshall Mannerheim was not a rapper, but a rather staid old-school military man who didn't even learn to speak until he was in his 50s (he had previously communicated via the gift of gyrating). He most definitely wasn't a gaylord bender.

Noone in Finland has ever seen a ghost.

Thought For The Day No. 20 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

..psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste...


"One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up....but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning."

CS Lewis


One of the contributors to the PMC would do well to bear this in mind, having recently quit alcohol, smoking and (temporarily) meat..

Green And Pleasant Land, Unpleasant Inhabitants

At this time of vile and obnoxious white and red chauvinism that I left England 5 years ago, in part to avoid, I couldn't help but fail to forget this wonderful article by AA Gill where he sets out just what is so awful about them/us...no, THEM.

In fairness he does pay them some muted compliments in places...

Kick Out The Jams Once Again...

..following yesterday's highly successful post, in which a 40 year old clip of the fantastic MC5 (that's five) on youtube was given a rambling two sentence appraisal, we simply couldn't resist returning to the scene of the crime...

You see, it's been bugging us ever since, what 'kick out the jams' actually means?! Are the 'jams' a particular segment of American society at the time, an ethnic, social or religious minority who, in the singer's opinion, ought to be ousted? (Walt Gleeson's assessment). But surely this is somewhat at odds with the band's left leaning politics?

Are they making a  prediction about the future of music and advocating the removal of a band called 'the Jams', which, with the removal of the -s, would be an astonishingly prescient heralding of the band of the same name some eight or so years prior to their appearance? (the Rabbi's take on things). If so we wouldn't be totally opposed to the sentiment.

Or are they simply lamenting the fact that a collection of jam or similar conserves has become fluffed with a light grey covering of mould, and should therefore be disposed of ? (BFK's ha'penny's worth, and the most likely explanation in our view).

Or does it have some other meaning, hidden or otherwise, which is totally beyond the rather sparse collective intellect here at the PMC. Enquiring minds want to know.

Still, however farcical some of the above may be, one of the contributors can't help but chuckle quietly upon remembering a very ex ex of his who claimed to like music, picking up a CD of the same band (from which the mighty 'jams' was the outstanding track) and asking 'who are the MCs?'. Ha ha ha..

Kick Out The Jams

Not a phrase that we would use lightly here at the PMC, this, but this group from the 60s, MC5, really did rock, regardless of the politics (which here we tend to, though it sounds counter-intuitive, keep well as well away from music as one would electricity from water).
Apparently they're still sort of going, but this is them as far from their trough as could possibly be.

Thought For The Day No. 19 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

Psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

"If one word is worth a coin, then silence is worth two. If silence sits well with those who are clever, then it should sit even better with those who are stupid."

The Talmud.


The clarion call to all of us, all over the world, who like the sound of our own voices just a wee bit too much (including most of the PMC contributors!)

Deadlines - Seth's Blog

Great post from my older brother concerning deadlines, why they work, what happens when they don't work, what effect they have on people...could be good reading for some of the little-seen contributors to the PMC, naming no names but thought at this point I'd mention the deadline-dodging Benedict Francis-Kentigern for good measure..

World Cup of All Ages

With the World Cup fast approaching, even the football mania exclusion zone that is the PMC is, if not jumping on the bandwagon (whatever a bandwagon is) then at least coughing up some of the dust thrown out behind it.

Yes, we've really sat down and thought about this for literally minutes, and the best we can come up with is this 'What if..?' scenario, using the group charts..

.so, 'what if' all the participating countries didn't have their modern names, but rather names that they went under in an earlier incarnation? For example, Estonia and Russia, neither of which qualified, would be known as 'Livonia' and 'Novgorod' respectively.

Naturally some countries are newer than others, we have done the best we can...

So:

Group A
-Cape Colony.
-Aztec Kingdom of Tenochtitlan.
-Montevideo.
-Gaul.

Group B
-Viceroyalty of the River Plate.
-Lagos.
-Southern Goryeo.
-City States of Sparta, Athens, Ephesus, Lydia, Corinth and all of Ellas.

Group C
-Albion.
-The Thirteen Colonies.
-Numidia.
-Illyria.

Group D
-The Holy Roman Empire.
-New Holland.
-Sclavinias.
-Gold Coast.

Group E
-Friesland.
-Jutland.
-The Kamakura Shogunate.
-The Bornu Empire.

Group F
-The Kingdom of Naples, Duchy of Milan, Republics of Venice,
Florence, Siena and Genoa, the Papal States and the Kingdom of Sicily.
-Asuncion.
-Aotearoa.
-Great Moravia.


Group G
-Cabralia.
- Northern Goryeo.
-French West Africa.
-Lusitania.


Group H
- Kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre.
- Helvetia.
-Copan and Cho'rti.
-Aconcagua.


..that was hard work; I think next time I'll confine it to the European Championships...

60 Years Of The PMC - Launch Of 'Consider This, This Morning'

First posted 26th March 1969, on a trial basis (the editor thought it wouldn't last and just got a part-time Rabbi in to compile the thoughts)...

"Those who criticize me behind my back are afraid of me; those who praise me to my face hate me"

Chinese proverb

60 Years Of The PMC - Definitely The End Of This Blog

First published 22 August 1968

Out of solidarity to all our brothers and sisters in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Mexico, Brazil, France, the USA and the Isle of Sheppey, we are ceremonially going to commit self-immolation in front of the PMC offices at 18.00 hours today! Vive Le (or is it 'La'?) Revolution!....


Postscript: due to the Thursday afternoon being particularly wet, and a general lack of intention to follow through the somewhat rash assertions that PMC staff had (drunkenly) made, in fact the only form of immolation happened when various staff members nicked out for one of their 20 minute-ly cigarette breaks..

Thought For The Day No. 18 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

..religious leader, psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste.. . 

"A person who loves himself has little competition".


George C. Lichtenberg

60 Years Of The PMC - The PMC Unilaterally Declares Independence

2010 marks the 60th anniversary of the launch of the PMC. Yes, it's impossible to believe, but that's because it is impossible.

To mark this auspicious occasion the PMC will be taking a retrospective of some of the outstanding posts of the past six decades. From Cold War to Coldplay and from Ban the Bomb to Ban the Burka, every decade will be represented, and includes highlights from some of the most talked about of contributors...Bertrand Russell, Hunter S. Thompson, Roman Polanski, Roald Dahl and Limahl from Kajagoogoo,  to name but a few - none of them contributed to the PMC's pages (oh, hold on a second, Limahl had a regular section in the early 80s) 

First published on 11 November 1965

"The Puumaja Crew would like to announce that it has unilaterally declared independence from the blogspot organisation, as they do things that we don't like. We are reverting to our original name, Wooden Houseshire,  and, since we feel beset by enemy blogs on all sides, expect blogspot to come in and save us when the going gets tough anyway.

We simply can't bear the idea of our civilized and productive blog being brought down by the primitive peoples in our midst until such time as they have learnt to blog properly. We are particularly disappointed that, despite all the aid to our kith and kin at blogspot, they don't seem to understand this and whilst we have some kind of rose-tinted view of what their organisation stands for and, in the final analysis are always likely ultimately to fall in line, this is not going to happen before we've enjoyed our fair share of mischief-making".


Ian 'The Leopard' Smith

Understated Farewells

At this time of year with ESL groups ending, people leaving the country and so on, it would be easy to not make any effort at all with the valedictory turns.

The only problem with that is you may end up doing something really understated and level-headed, like this offering from Doris, Leroy, Dr Zhirovsky and the gang. They might as well not have bothered!

Hopefully this salutary reminder will help all of us not to duck out of our responsibilities and end up with something so very desultory, lazy and insulting!