Thought For The Day No. 25 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

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

You can have no greater sign of confirmed pride than when you think you are humble enough.

William Law

Heatwave Dancing in the Streets..

Here at the PMC we've broken a fire hydrant, stripped off almost completely and are now rioting, since the temperature has risen above the critical level of 24C.

Noone is taking the slightest bit of notice, however..A

Thought For The Day No. 24 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

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

It is true that Muhammad started from the east and came to the west, as the sun travels from east to west. Nevertheless he came with war, knives, pillaging, forced enslavement, murders, and acts that are not from the good God but instigated by the chief manslayer, the devil

Gregory Palamas

I think they need a Gregory Palamas in England right now!...

60 Years Of The PMC - Finger On The Pulse Of Culture

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).

It's 1972 and a new, young film reviewer joined the PMC. Not long out of journalist school, and having been a contributor to the infamous 'Piss Off' comic, he was raring to go with some serious journalism and getting to see various films for free. Oh, his name was Wayne Shooter, for goodness sake.

First posted  30th January 1972

Went to see a great movie last night at Theatre One. It's called 'Cannibalised Day of Blood Reckoning' -  you HAVE to go and see it.

Filmed on 8mm cinemascope gives it a graniness which I can only forsee will, on its own, give it the very meaningful title of 'cult' in about 20 or 30 years time.


The maker, still in film school, assembled an excellent cast of his girlfriend, her friend, and some other friends plus one of their dad's to play the policeman, who gets massacred.

One by one, the cast members get massacred, having run out of gas in the middle of the Louisian Bayous. The bit where the guy gets his head completely smashed in is excellent - you can see his brains! Then a cannibal eats it!!

It's not at all depressing and shows just how far we've come in the field of filmmaking since such soft soapy rubbish of 'Wonderful Life', or such unrealistic, bloodless tripe such as Hitchcock's 'Rope' or bourgeoisie-pleasing offerings like 'the Godfather'  (the Studen's Union Class War rep told me to say that, just before he popped up to his parents' house near Henley on Thames).

Indeed, I feel that this new found ability accurately to present blood on-screen will lead to some vastly superior movies than what has been churned out recently, changing the face of the film industry forever.

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..