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