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My Dear FLG,
From your letter I deduce that you have spent little or no time with Roman Catholics during your lifetime (Jesuits don’t count), especially our type. I do appreciate your desire to become a member of the RCBfA, and had I known, I could have saved you the trouble of starting your own club by sending the Padre round and getting you swimming that river instanter…We have many members who took the plunge out of a desire to belong to the RCBfA. And I can’t say as I blame them. It is not to late by any means, give the word and we will have the Padre and bathing costume at your door first thing.
I agree that the membership of your club will probably tend to venture into, shall we say, sordid, vulgar and unsavory areas more likely than not, without the civilizing influence of the Church, not to mention the sharp eye and sharper tongue of the Padre. And I fear that the quality of your wine cellar, not to mention your tailoring, might be, well, lacking somewhat.
As to any type of reciprocal arrangement between clubs, that issue will have to go to the committee and be decided before the full membership (as noted by Robbo, or newest member, nice “art” by the way). And since our policy has usually been to offer heretics a hot stake or a cold chop, it doesn’t look very promising.
But good luck and God speed. And in closing I want to refresh Mr. Elk’s memory concerning the art you posted with your letter. The original painting from which that print was made has hung in our Billiards Room for many years. We call it “The Dentist”.
Of course you are always welcome to visit our club as a guest at one of our Bump Suppers. It would be a way for you to appreciate our collection of “art” and to get a better feel for what the club is all about. It is also a good way to get drunk, but that’s another story. And please, no one has evah uttered the word “nipple” inside of our club, please don’t be the first. Thank you for your interest in the RCBfA.
Sir Basil Seal
From 1066 And All That:
CHAPTER XI
WILLIAM I, A Conquering King
In the year 1066 occurred the other memorable date in English History, viz. William the Conqueror, Ten Sixty-six. This is also called The Battle of Hastings, and was when William I (1066) conquered England at the Battle of Senlac (Ten Sixty-six).
When William the Conqueror landed he lay down on the beach and swallowed two mouthfuls of sand. This was his first conquering action and was in the South; later he ravaged the North as well.
The Norman Conquest was a Good Thing, as from this time onwards England stopped being conquered and thus was able to become top nation.
DOOMSDAY BOOK AND THE FORESTS
William next invented a system according to which everybody had to belong to somebody else, and everybody else to the King. This was called the Feutile System, and in order to prove that it was true he wrote a book called the Doomsday Book, which contained an inventory of all the Possessions of all this subjects; after reading the book through carefully William agreed with it and signed it, indicating to everybody that the Possessions mentioned in it were now his.
William the Conqueror (1066) is memorable for having loved an old stag as if it was his father, and was in general very fond of animals: he therefore made some very just and conquering laws about the Forests. One of these laws said that all the forests and places which were not already Possessions belonged to the King and that anyone found in them should have his ears and legs cut off – (these belonged to somebody else under the Feutile System, anyway) – and (if this had not already been done) should have his eyes put out with red-hot irons; after this the offender was allowed to fly the country.
Another very conquering law made by William I said that everyone had to go to bed at eight o’clock. This was called the Curfew and was a Good Thing in the end since it was the cause of Gray’s Energy in the country churchyard (at Stoke Penge).
Although in all these ways William the Conqueror (1066) was a very strong king he was eventually stumbled to death by a horse and was succeeded by his son Rufus.
-1066 And All That – A Memorable History of England comprising all the parts you can remember including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates
by Walter Carruthers Sellar and Robert Julian Yeatman
“…I believe in God. God created the world. Obviously pain had to be included in God’s plan. Otherwise we’d never learn that our actions have consequences. Our cave-person ancestors, finding fire warm, would conclude that curling up to sleep in the middle of the flames would be even warmer. Cave bears would dine on roast ancestor, and we’d never get any bad news and pain because we wouldn’t be here.
But God, Sir, in Your manner of teaching us about life’s consequential nature, isn’t death a bit … um … extreme, pedagogically speaking? I know the lesson that we’re studying is difficult. But dying is more homework than I was counting on. Also, it kind of messes up my vacation planning. Can we talk after class? Maybe if I did something for extra credit?
Why can’t death — if we must have it — be always glorious, as in “The Iliad”? Of course death continues to be so, sometimes, with heroes in Fallouja and Kandahar. But nowadays, death more often comes drooling on the toilet seat in the nursing home, or bleeding under the crushed roof of a teen-driven SUV, or breathless in a deluxe hotel suite filled with empty drug bottles and a minor public figure whose celebrity expiration date has passed.
I have, of all the inglorious things, a malignant hemorrhoid. What color bracelet does one wear for that? And where does one wear it? And what slogan is apropos? Perhaps that slogan can be sewn in needlepoint around the ruffle on a cover for my embarrassing little doughnut buttocks pillow.
Furthermore, I am a logical, sensible, pragmatic Republican, and my diagnosis came just weeks after Teddy Kennedy’s. That he should have cancer of the brain, and I should have cancer of the ass … well, I’ll say a rosary for him and hope he has a laugh at me. After all, what would I do, ask God for a more dignified cancer? Pancreatic? Liver? Lung?…”
The princess of pout, the countess of come hither…
Kyril Bonfiglioli (1928-1985)
Cult classics in the UK since their first publication there in the 1970s, Kyril Bonfiglioli’s wickedly fun mysteries featuring the Honorable Charlie Mortdecai-degenerate aristocrat, amoral art dealer, seasoned epicurean, unwilling assassin, and general knave-about-Piccadilly-are favorites of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, among others.
The Strange Case of Kyril Bonfiglioli
Collected into a single volume for the first time, Don’t Point that Thing at Me, After You with a Pistol, and Something Nasty in the Woodshed chronicles the misadventures of the Honorable Charlie Mortdecai: degenerate aristocrat, amoral art dealer, seasoned epicurean, unwilling assassin, and general knave-about-Piccadilly.
Don’t Point that Thing at Me finds Charlie momentarily distracted by a police charge accusing him of stealing a priceless Goya—a nuisance that he overcomes without passing up a single glass of fine wine or plate of foie gras. In After You with a Pistol Mortdecai is roped into a marriage with a beautiful Viennese heiress, who is willing to blissfully accompany him on his life of taste and intrigue as long as he can help her with one little errand…assassinate the Queen of England. Something Nasty in the Woodshed features Charlie, exiled in London due to his growing unpopularity fueled by the aforementioned shady art deal, taking refuge on the island of Jersey. What begins as a epicurean interlude morphs into a macabre manhunt as Charlie seeks to expose a local rapist.
Kyril Bonfiglioli, the groundbreaking satirist whose writing The New Yorker described as “an unholy collaboration between P. G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming,” was truly a writer ahead of his time. In this hilarious novel, Bonfiglioli takes us back in time to an ironical maritime romp–Master and Commander by way of Monty Python.
Inspired by a shotgun blast in the seat of his breeches, young Karli Van Cleef quits his native Holland to seek his fortune. He arrives in early Victorian London and soon he is turning a pretty profit. But Karli sees that true opportunity flowers in India’s fields of opium poppies and the treaty ports of the China coast. So he takes a berth in an opium clipper hell-bent for the Indies.
It is a journey beset with perils. Karli is confronted by the mountainous seas, high-piled plates of curry, and the ferocious penalties of the Articles of War. He survives the malice of the Boers, the hospitality of anthropophagi, and the horrors of Lancashire cooking. En route he acquires some interesting diseases, dangerous friends and enemies, a fortune, and a wife almost as good as new.
Fans and newcomers alike will revel in this picaresque tale of the early years of one of the men who helped make Britain great–for a consideration.
You’ve heard of the “Great Books”?
These are their evil opposites. From Machiavelli’s The Prince to Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, these “influential” books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, family breakdown, and disastrous social experiments. And yet these authors’ bad ideas are still popular and pervasive–in fact, they might influence your own thinking without your realizing it. Here with the antidote is Professor Benjamin Wiker. In his scintillating new book, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World (And 5 Others That Didn’t Help), he seizes each of these evil books by its malignant heart and exposes it to the light of day. In this witty, learned, and provocative exposé, you’ll learn:
* Why Machiavelli’s The Prince was the inspiration for a long list of tyrannies (Stalin had it on his nightstand)
* How Descartes’ Discourse on Method “proved” God’s existence only by making Him a creation of our own ego
* How Hobbes’ Leviathan led to the belief that we have a “right” to whatever we want
* Why Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto could win the award for the most malicious book ever written
* How Darwin’s The Descent of Man proves he intended “survival of the fittest” to be applied to human society
* How Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil issued the call for a world ruled solely by the “will to power”
* How Hitler’s Mein Kampf was a kind of “spiritualized Darwinism” that accounts for his genocidal anti-Semitism
* How the pansexual paradise described in Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa turned out to be a creation of her own sexual confusions and aspirations
* Why Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was simply autobiography masquerading as science
Witty, shocking, and instructive, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World offers a quick education on the worst ideas in human history–and how we can avoid them in the future.
A sweeping, brilliantly vivid history of the sudden end of the British Empire and the moment when America became a world superpower—published on the sixtieth anniversary of Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine.
“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Winston Churchill’s famous statement in November 1942, just as the tide of the Second World War was beginning to turn, pugnaciously affirmed his loyalty to the worldwide institution that he had served for most of his life. Britain fought and sacrificed on a global scale to defeat Hitler and his allies—and won. Yet less than five years after Churchill’s defiant speech, the British Empire effectively ended with Indian independence in August 1947 and the end of the British Mandate in Palestine in May 1948. As the sun set on Britain’s empire, the age of America as world superpower dawned.
How did this rapid change of fortune come about? Peter Clarke’s book is the first to analyze the abrupt transition from Rule Britannia to Pax Americana. His swift-paced narrative makes superb use of letters and diaries to provide vivid portraits of the figures around whom history pivoted: Churchill, Gandhi, Roosevelt, Stalin, Truman, and a host of lesser-known figures through whom Clarke brilliantly shows the human dimension of epochal events.
Clarke traces the intimate and conflicted nature of the “special relationship,” showing how Roosevelt and his successors were determined that Britain must be sustained both during the war and after, but that the British Empire must not; and reveals how the tension between Allied war aims, suppressed while the fighting was going on, became rapidly apparent when it ended. The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire is a captivating work of popular history that shows how the events that followed the war reshaped the world as profoundly as the conflict itself.
Drawing on a remarkable array of diaries, letters, memoirs, and surveys, Kynaston assembles a polyphonic history of a pivotal time. In July, 1945, Winston Churchill was swept from office in an electoral landslide, his wartime leadership already overshadowed by domestic worries like jobs and housing—seven hundred and fifty thousand dwellings had been damaged in the war, and six million lacked indoor toilets. Kynaston’s account of the six years of Labour Government that followed attends as much to daily life—often grim, with rationing still in effect—as to the top-down reconstruction that included the creation of the National Health Service and the nationalization of swaths of British industry. Support for such planning was broad, with even the arch-establishment Times of London in favor of the N.H.S., but not always deep, and Kynaston emphasizes the British people’s complex feelings about the policies undertaken in their name.
As most of you know, my wife, The Countess owns things, thus she has employees and a company HQ and all that. Now, I have an office in that building as well, where I am sometimes to be found. Rarely is the time if I can help it. Anyway, I despise the current asinine pop psychology cum motivational garbage out there, most revoltingly epitomized by Saint Oprah and Oprahism. I mean anyone who gives the world Dr. Phil really should be taken out and shot, not lionized. It is all trash and garbage which does more harm than good to the poor sheep out there. What is really irksome are those ubiquitous motivational posters and pithy sayings that one can never escape. Walking into any modern business is like being stuck in an elevator with Norman Vincent Peale. Good God, America isn’t satisfied with perpetrating the ridiculous myth that there is no class system in America and that anyone can become anything they want, doesn’t matter that they are a complete dolt, if only they try real hard, and really, really believe, you know, really build up that false self esteem…Oh, and by the way, it does help a bit if you are born into the right family, said family has the right money, money buys the right schools, etc. There is that, but really follow your dreams, and when you graduate from State U. you might get a cubicle with an extra file drawer…It is a testament to their cunning or the masses stupidity that they have been able to keep this charade going for so long.
Well, since I don’t really have anything else to do, I took it upon myself to set the appropriate tone in the office. I’m in charge of morale, after all. We’ll have no Venus Men and Martian Women on my watch, thank you. I like to set everyone on equal footing, squarely in reality. So I turned to the good folks at Despair, Inc. (love the name) and ordered great quantities of their wonderful product, which, I think, sets the appropriate tone for any productive employee. The unproductive ones get to read them as they get booted out the door by security. I mean our mission statement is that we are in business to make money. We don’t need to lie about it like everyone else just to make people think we’re sorry for taking their money. What do the stupid asses think your in business for, your health?
Despair, Inc. is great, just marvel at their wonderful mission statement:
“MOTIVATION. Psychology tells us that motivation- true, lasting motivation- can only come from within. Common sense tells us it can’t be manufactured or productized. So how is it that a multi-billion dollar industry thrives through the sale of motivational commodities and services? Because, in our world of instant gratification, people desperately want to believe that there are simple solutions to complex problems. And when desperation has disposable income, market opportunities abound.
AT DESPAIR, INC., we believe motivational products create unrealistic expectations, raising hopes only to dash them. That’s why we created our soul-crushingly depressing Demotivators® designs, so you can skip the delusions that motivational products induce and head straight for the disappointments that follow!”
I do like that. But anyway, it works for us, and if our employees don’t like it, well, they can vote with their feet. You can bet that there are no diversity workshops, anger management classes, or team building weekends and you can be rest assured that there is absolutely no casual Friday at our office. If you want casual, you can go and be casual at the unemployment office. There is no “I” in team, but there is one in “Fired” so get back to work.
I suggest that you visit their store and try this at your place of business. Unless you work for the government, in which case I can offer you nothing more than my tax dollars to waste. But for the rest of you, give it a try. You’d be amazed what a nice dose of reality will achieve in the work place.
Someone left this out in the rain and I thought it very funny. Also, since I am screamed at by a maniacal German on a daily basis, I can sympathize…Heh, indeed.
Fred Astaire by Joseph Epstein
Joseph Epstein’s Fred Astaire investigates the great dancer’s magical talent, taking up the story of his life, his personality, his work habits, his modest pretensions, and above all his accomplishments. Written with the wit and grace the subject deserves, Fred Astaire provides a remarkable portrait of this extraordinary artist and how he came to embody for Americans a fantasy of easy elegance and, paradoxically, of democratic aristocracy.
Tracing Astaire’s life from his birth in Omaha to his death in his late eighties in Hollywood, the book discusses his early days with his talented and outspoken sister Adele, his gifts as a singer (Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Jerome Kern all delighted in composing for Astaire), and his many movie dance partners, among them Cyd Charisse, Rita Hayworth, Eleanor Powell, and Betty Hutton. A key chapter of the book is devoted to Astaire’s somewhat unwilling partnership with Ginger Rogers, the woman with whom he danced most dazzlingly. What emerges from these pages is a fascinating view of an American era, seen through the accomplishments of Fred Astaire, an unassuming but uncompromising performer who transformed entertainment into art and gave America a new yet enduring standard for style.
