Thought For The Day No. 23 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

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

...suspicion often creates what it suspects.

CS Lewis

Doing Things The Hard Way..

An article by the inimitable Anne Applebaum (well I don't try to imitate her anyway; I can't even pronounce the hell her strange anglo-german fusion of a second name) concerning the recent spy scandal...good stuff; in short, the attitude seem to be, why bother getting freely available information from Wall Street, academics, broadsheet newspapers and journals etc when you can waste years of time and heaps of money running 'spies' to try and get the same stuff, and then f*cking up...THE COLD WAR'S OVER, GET OVER IT!!

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...