BBC: Playboy’s Hugh Hefner to marry Playmate Crystal Harris
Hugh Hefner, the 84-year-old founder of Playboy magazine, has announced that he is to be married for the third time.
In a message to his Twitter followers on Christmas Day, Hefner said he had given his 24-year-old girlfriend, model Crystal Harris, a ring.
Can’t see what he sees in her myself.
It’s that time of year again. 24th December. So did I make it up Moel Famau for the 23rd consecutive Christmas Eve today?
You betcha!
Carolyn and me on top of Moel Famau this afternoon.
More photos here.
(You will let me know if this starts to become boring?)
So, Vince Cable has declared war on Rupert Murdoch.
Me too.
I’ve got him worried. He’s on the ropes, and he knows it. While Murdoch has had to resort to the desperate measure of locking his so-called content behind a pathetic paywall, my low overheads mean that Gruts remains—and always shall remain—resolutely free. While Murdoch’s online readership plummets, my readership has risen by at least 10% in the last week alone. While Murdoch has tired, old hack commentators like Clarkson and Gill and Applethingy churning out pap, Gruts has Nite Owl and Zimscribe and Yoghurt and Kenny and Keith and the rest of you (you know who you are).
I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but News International’s big-nob lawyers recently approached me pursuant re. a merger. I told them where to get off.
Not interested, Murdoch. Prepare yourself for a hostile takeover.
There can be only one winner in this game.
I just realised that, every time the Pope holds mass:
…we get to see his altar ego.
[I'm here all week, folks.]
It’s a question you must have pondered a thousand times over: What would happen if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to draw a pig while blindfolded?
Ponder no longer. This would have happened:
The delightfully named Cat’s Meat Shop takes up the story.
Following the announcement of the death of Captain Beefheart yesterday, regular Gruts commenter Nite Owl writes:
As I sit to type this, the numbness is starting to ease. Along with Frank Zappa, Don Vliet was a very big part of musical upbringing from age 13. I bought my copy of Safe as Milk (with 2 tracks missing) on the Marble Arch label & wore it out quickly. (I should have bought a better stylus).
To listen to interviews with Don was like listening to an alternative comedian who was so far out that nobody instantly got the joke. Even now, when I watch the Letterman shows, I hear things I missed before. A simple sideways look would speak volumes.
It’s really not the time to say he will be sadly missed because that happened in 1982 when he jumped ship (sorry) & replaced his microphone for a paintbrush.
As a teenager I felt that Don lived outside a world that didn’t make sense and he was saying something to me… & that meant everything. I think of myself as one of that small elite group who couldn’t wait to buy Troutmask Replica the week it came out (Peel played a track a week) & not just because it was fashionable to own a copy.
There will now be a rush of obituaries in the music press from those who only smirked at the weird man & his weird music. The rest of us will simply bow our heads & whisper ‘thanks Don’.
John Peel said it all when he said that he heard Don’s influence in so much music. Bless you Andy Partridge, P.J.Harvey, Mark Lanegan, Edgar Broughton, John French et al for believing in his music.
As Frank Zappa once said… ‘be quiet & listen to this man’s music, because if you don’t, you might miss something important & we wouldn’t want that to happen to you’.
Thank you, Richard for this opportunity. I am now going to listen to Ant Man Bee with the volume all the way up, just like I did in my old bedroom, except this time there are no neighbours to bang on the wall!
… and Hitchin writes:
When I was about 13 a girl (yes, not a male only pursuit) at my school had the names of the Magic Band albums written all over the covers of her books. They were obviously great titles, but I didn’t get round to buying my first one, Trout Mask Replica, for several years. In common with most listeners I didn’t get it all to begin with. But perseverance paid off.
There’s nothing else remotely like it. Some reviewers have said that the Magic Band sounded like they came from another planet. Not to me; they were born in the desert, came on up from New Orleans.
I think it was me that introduced the proprietor of this web site to the Captain. I believe, in an effort to put him off the scent, it might have been the loony-voiced Pena, “her little head clinking like uh barrel of red velvet balls” exclaiming “that’s the raspberries”. It didn’t work of course, as Gruts amply demonstrates.
I’ve loved Captain Beefheart’s music for 30 years and am more upset than I can say (or would have imagined) by his passing.
The dust blows forward ‘n the dust blows back.
It was indeed Hitchin who introduced me to the Captain (performing Pena) back in 1984. I thought it was dreadful. But it was my own musical tastes (if tastes is the right word) that were truly dreadful back in those days. A short while later, I discovered The Blues Brothers and asked Hitchin to do me a ‘bluesy’ mix tape. I dubbed the result the Hitchin Connection. Hitchin took the opportunity to sneak in four Beefheart tracks (all three of which were from Trout Mask Replica): Click Clack, Neon Meate Dream of a Octafish, Pena and The Old Fart at Play. My ears stood up when I heard that sound. I was hooked.
When Jen and I bought each other iPods for Christmas five years ago, I had mine engraved with a quote from my favourite Beefheart song (and, therefore, my favourite song full-stop), Gimme Dat Harp Boy. The same song is the ring tone on my phone. It always gets a laugh when it goes off in meetings. I’m playing it now, with the volume set to 11.
I still have Hitchin’s tape. It changed my life.
The last words should, of course, go to the great man himself. Here he is with the Magic Band singing Sure ’nuff ‘n Yes I Do—and demonstrating beyond any doubt that a harp (harmonica) ain’t no fat man’s toy. Brace yourselves…
Captain Beefheart(1941–2010)
Genius is such an inadequate word.
Suddenly, the world is a less wonderful place.
Toasting the great man with Laphroaig (what else?) as I type. Think I might play some music before I go to bed. It is likely to be a very, very late night. [Postscript: It was.]
Liverpool manic street preacher this lunchtime (using megaphone): We are all lost without Jesus Christ… WE ARE ALL LOST!!
Me: You’re in Church Street, mate.
One-nil to the atheists, I think.
When you think about it, if everyone ate something containing garlic at least once per day:
A winner all round.
BBC: I’m A Celebrity: Stacey Solomon crowned ‘queen of jungle’
Stacey Solomon has been crowned “queen of the jungle” in ITV1 reality show I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!
No, me neither.
While Stense was in town on Friday, we paid an obligatory visit to our favourite Welsh bookshop. Here’s a video I made. Stense has an unwitting walk-off part 1:50 in.
Soundtrack: Riding the Banshee (Instrumental), free royalty-free music by DanoSongs.com
As regular readers of Gruts will know, I am an excellent photographer.
“Yes,” they might say, “but that’s because you have an excellent camera.”
Whilst it is true that I do indeed have an excellent camera, it is pretty easy to take superb photographs with the simplest of photographic equipment, provided you use a bit of common-sense, and follow a few simple guidelines.
For example, here are a few simple guidelines if you plan to take a portrait of yourself and an old friend who happens to be visiting from out-of-town:
As it so happened, Stense was visiting from out-of-town yesterday, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to illustrate the sort of thing that can happen if you attempt to take a portrait of yourself and an old friend, and you don’t follow the simple guidelines listed above:
Piece of cake, really.
BBC: Hebden Bridge wins top award as best town in BritainHebden Bridge has been named as the best town in Britain and Ireland at the Urbanism Awards.
Take that, Buxton! In yer face, Hay-on-Wye! Better luck next time, Whitby!
Smug? Us? Nay, lad!
Your host finally loses it.
The lovely couple yesterday.
I see Prince William has finally plucked up the courage to propose to Kate Winslet. I’m no royalist, but I have to say they make a lovely couple.
It is reported that William sought Kate’s father’s permission to marry his daughter. Evidently, Mr Winslet neglected to enquire whether there was a history of madness in William’s family.
Far be it from me to raise a touchy subject at this early stage, but I do hope the Powers That Be at Buckingham Palace will be urging Kate not to get her tits out during the wedding ceremony. Let’s face it, she does have something of a reputation. But, like them or loathe them, royal weddings are supposed to be dignified occasions.
Put ‘em away, Kate, we’ve seen them before!
BBC: Councils lobby government to raise parking fines
… The British Parking Association argues that the differential between the cost of parking all day and the penalty charge for not paying it must increase in order for there to be a deterrent.
For one point, children, can you think of any other way of increasing the difference between the cost of parking all day and the penalty charge for not paying, other than by increasing the penalty charge?
As at 00:45am this morning, I was 400,000 hours old.
That’s 24 million minutes.
Or 1.44 billion seconds.
Or Gas Mark 8.
Like you, I suspect, when I was at school, they used to send me and my classmates to swimming lessons. I never did get the hang of swimming. It seems to me that we left the water 380 million years ago for very good reasons, and I can see no reason on Earth for wanting to go back.
When you think about it, isn’t swimming a pretty odd thing to learn at school? I mean, what are the odds of my ever needing to be able to swim? True, I suppose I might fall into a river. But rivers are usually pretty shallow near the edge, so, in all likelihood, I’d simply be able to stand up and climb out again. Little risk of drowning there. Unless I fell right into the middle of a deep river. Off a bridge, say. But what are the odds of that? Or I suppose a ship I was on could go down at sea. But exactly how much difference would being a strong swimmer make if the ship sank more that a couple of miles from the shore? And, besides, I’d almost certainly have time to don a lifejacket and get into a lifeboat.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not having a go at swimming per se. It just seems to me that there are far more useful things we could be teaching kids at school. Things which might actually come in handy in their daily lives. For instance:
So basically, swimming lessons: in the grand scheme of things, a total waste of time.
Just like French.
Compare and contrast:
Terry Eagleton, LRB, 04-Nov-2010: Children can find ambivalence hard to handle, loving their parents but also raging against them, and some of the Brontës’ fury and frustration arose from their own Janus-like situation.
Terry Eagleton, LRB, 21-Jun-2007: Orifices are seen as the places where bodies breach their boundaries and merge ecstatically into each other. Everything about the practice is ambiguous, Janus-faced, too slippery to be pinned down.
Terry Eagleton, LRB, 19-Sep-2002: This Janus-faced temporality, in which one turns to the resources of the pre-modern in order to move backwards into a future that has transcended modernity altogether, is at the heart of Modernism.
Terry Eagleton, LRB, 07-Mar-1996: It is unlikely that he would rush to endorse Angela McRobbie’s heady claims for the participatory value of Japanese team-based work practices. Hall, typically more Janus-faced, sees much late-capitalist culture as ‘commodified consumption’, but also as a chance for popular choice and control.
Terry Eagleton, LRB, 21-Sep-1995: As the aspiring daughter of a stoutly conservative farm manager from rural Warwickshire, Eliot was conveniently cusped between traditional devotion and modern development, and sought to resolve this conflict in every piece of fiction she produced. She was painfully, creatively Janus-faced in other ways too, caught between provincial and cosmopolitan, rural and urban, masculine and feminine.
I don’t know about orifices’ being the places where bodies breach their boundaries and merge ecstatically into each other, but Terry Eagleton certainly seems to have something of a Janus fixation.
New wind turbine blending unobtrusively into the moorland skyline.
Some clueless twat with more money that sense My friend’s uncle has just erected a wind turbine on the moor above our house.
More nuclear power, please.