The Devil's Organ

BITE YOUR TONGUE!
For is this blog not the very epitome of family friendly?  If, that is, your family is devoted to the civilisations of antiquity, hideous medieval poisons, military history and historical bathyspheric exploration of the abyssal deeps.*
     Thus, we do not - look this is going to take a bit of development, so go and brew a pot of hand-plucked Oolong and get back to us, okay?

Oolong.  Loose-leaf tea, that is.  Is there any other?

     Okay, let us now cast our cataratic eyes backward o'er time, to the Sixties, and Nineteen Sixty-Seven, when that international mega-hit "A Whiter Shade Of Pale" stormed the airwaves.  It really is a serious bit of musical hit, go Youtube it if you haven't heard it already.  Part of the appeal was Matthew Fisher, the organ player, which lead instrument was utterly novel in 1967.  Said instrument is referenced in "The Commitments", it being an Hammond organ, which ended up being quite popular in other rock bands of the late Sixties and into the Seventies.  Art?

The Ham.  As probably no musician ever called it.

     I think we've now estabished the link between Procul Harum and organs.  NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK!
     The thing is, Your Humble Scribe prefers a track of theirs that goes by the name "Repent Walpurgis".  An instrumental, with a quite outstanding guitar solo by Robin Trower, and an elegiac piano interlude by Gary Brooker, and this is where the Devil comes in.  Are you paying attention and clutching your china cup of undiluted, uncontaminated, unsweetened Oolong?
     "Walpurgisnacht", you see, is a festival event held on the eve of Saint Walpurga's day, when revellers build bonfires and dress up as witches, in order to fend off witches and witchcraft and evil in general, though if I were a witch I'd probably come noseying to see what all the noise and fuss was about and why are those people dressed like me?

Thus

     So!  There you have today's title and once again NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK!

An Historical Political
I know that BOOJUM! doesn't normally go into matters political, unless it's historical stuff, or we think we can get away with it, but I was reading up on a couple of political concepts a couple of millennia apart, and - you know me - any pondering gets to wondering, which inevitably gets written down.
     So here we are.
     This all stemmed from having an nosey about Pericles, an Athenian statesman of the Fifth century BC, who had an opponent ostracised.

Pericles, with hat

     Now, this Ostracism was part of a deliberate process, not lightly indulged in, and not done on a whim.  The Athenian populace would be first asked if they wanted to ostracise a person, and if enough people (i.e. a quorum) said "Yes", then a ballot would be held a couple of months later.  This gave emotions time to cool off.  The voters would then scratch the name of their nominee on a piece of clay, and all the pieces would be counted.  If your name was there, above the critical level - off you went out of Athens for 10 years.  No appeals allowed.  You did have 10 days to leave, and your property remained in your name so you still possessed an income; also, if an emergency arose, you could be called back early.
     Jolly civilised!  Remember that this is about two and a half thousand years ago.

Athenian splendour

     Let us now jump back a mere 76 years, to the waning days of the Third Reich when it was undeniably losing the war - 1943 and onwards, if you want to be precise.  The better to make it's soldiers fight, The Chicken Farmer Of Death (for thus we dub Heinrich Himmler**) invoked the barbarous concept of "Sippenhaft", whereby if you were felt to not fight hard enough, or had even deserted, then Surprise! Your family were executed.  Which was probably an unpleasant surprise to them.  "Collective Responsibility" is the idea behind it, and that horrid old cucumber Stalin practiced it also.  Of course, if you were single, then it was a lot less effective ...

"Heinrich was surprised at how featherless and large these chickens were."

     Proof positive that politics can go backwards, instead of evolving into a better thing.
     Which is unusually sombre, philosophical and serious for the blog.  Better wheel in the whimsy cannon and let loose a few blasts -
Porridge As Glue
Seriously, has this been tried yet?  The stuff sets like concrete when spread thinly and allowed to dry, as in a breakfast bowl at lunchtime; you need to soak it for ages or tackle it with a paint-scraper.  As adhesive it would be organic and non-toxic, unlike cyanoacrylate, though using it where it would get wet is a tad problematic.  Also, it wouldn't make your house smell like a chemical plant, nor make you dizzy.***

CAUTION!  Excessive use will turn you Scottish

     It must be the high starch content, you know, as in the glue you can make with flour and water, if there's nothing sticky in your box of household adhesives.
     Here an aside.  There is a tale that The Clash, when they were just starting out and were merely another starving punk band, went out putting up their own posters about themselves, doing it with flour-and-water paste.  Then they went back to their miserable squalid squat (I'm waxing poetical here, it may have been a very nice studio apartment, though the odds are against it) and - they ate the glue.  Cupboards entirely bare, one supposes.

The Clash - er - clashing.  Hard work on an empty stomach!

Finally -
Oh boy, file this one under "You Couldn't Make It Up, And If You Did People Wouldn't Believe You".  It appears that Tsar Putin's instructions to his minions about blaming Chernobyl on the CIA has come to fruition.  If you can call it that; the fruit appears to be wormy and undersized.  Art?

Hmmm.

     A trailer was leaked on Youtube and promptly deleted when people mocked it relentlessly.  Tsar Putin remains incandescently angry that the eeeeevil Americans got there first with an epic and award-winning drama, but he's going to have to try A LOT HARDER than this to shift the blame.  Perhaps try MI6?
     Okay, druki, see you later!


*  It's been a while, but I definitely wrote about this.
**  He used to farm chickens.  Oddly enough, there are no photographs of him farming chickens.  Probably not glamorous enough.
*** Unless you eat gallons of the stuff in one go.  Which would be both deplorably greedy and impressive.