Sorry, folks, the headline was half-designed to set you off down the wrong road. Because the television series Antiques Roadshow is well known both sides of the Atlantic.
No, today’s post is a lovely silly story sent to me by dear friend Richard Maugham back in England. Prompted by the guest post on Tuesday about the risks to dogs of throwing sticks for them.
This is what he sent me:
Antique Road Show.
Paddy took two stuffed dogs to the Antiques Roadshow.
”Ooh”, said the presenter. “This is a very rare set produced by the celebrated Johns Brothers taxidermists who operated in London at the turn of the last century.
Do you have any idea what they would fetch if they were in good condition?”
I’m really showing my age and cultural upbringing through the choice of this title to today’s post.
For The Goon Show was an integral part of my ‘education’ during my formative years. Spike Milligan was an outstanding actor in The Goon Show, a comedy legend, along with Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe; not forgetting the narratives from Wallace Greenslade.
The Goon Show ran from 1951 to 1960 (I was born in 1944) broadcast by the BBC Home Service.
Spike Milligan after receiving his Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1992.
What’s this all leading up to?
Simply that a recent speech by George Monbiot reveals such utter madness in the upper echelons of the United Kingdom that only reflecting on The Goon Show offers any meaning to this old Brit. Not that the USA escapes Mr. Monbiot’s analysis.
Here’s how the speech opens:
The Pricing of Everything
Ladies and gentlemen, we are witnessing the death of both the theory and the practice of neoliberal capitalism. This is the doctrine which holds that the market can resolve almost all social, economic and political problems. It holds that people are best served, and their prosperity is best advanced, by the minimum of intervention and spending by the state. It contends that we can maximise the general social interest through the pursuit of self-interest.
To illustrate the spectacular crashing and burning of that doctrine, let me tell you the sad tale of a man called Matt Ridley. He was a columnist on the Daily Telegraph until he became – and I think this tells us something about the meritocratic pretensions of neoliberalism – the hereditary Chair of Northern Rock: a building society that became a bank. His father had been Chair of Northern Rock before him, which appears to have been his sole qualification.
While he was a columnist on the Telegraph he wrote the following:
The government “is a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world. … governments do not run countries, they parasitize them.”(1) He argued that taxes, bail-outs, regulations, subsidies, interventions of any kind are an unwarranted restraint on market freedom. When he became Chairman of Northern Rock, Mr Ridley was able to put some of these ideas into practice. You can see the results today on your bank statements.
In 2007 Matt Ridley had to go cap in hand to the self-seeking flea and beg it for what became £27 billion. This was rapidly followed by the first run on a British bank since 1878. The government had to guarantee all the deposits of the investors in the bank. Eventually it had to nationalise the bank, being the kind of parasitic self-seeking flea that it is, in order to prevent more or less the complete collapse of the banking system. (2)
You can read the full transcript and look up the references over on the George Monbiot website.
However, a real bonus is that his speech (delivered without notes!), his SPERI Annual Lecture, hosted by the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Sheffield, was recorded on video.
Please set aside a quiet hour (and a tad) to listen to George Monbiot and wonder at the goon show that we are all acting out! In fact, watching his speech and his answers to a number of questions from the audience will give you something that the transcript just can’t convey. Watch it! You will be inspired!
(SPERI Annual Lecture by George Monbiot: “The Pricing of Everything” at the Octagon in Sheffield, UK, on 29th April 2014.)
Back to dear old Spike Milligan and to close with what seems like a very apt quote of his.
“All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.“
Yes, fifty-two Sundays ago, I had the idea of posting a set of photographs. That first set was published on the 30th June, 2013 and just for fun I’m going to repost them.
Plus, I can’t resist adding a photograph that Chris Snuggs sent me.
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Sit back and be amazed!
A friend from Payson, Arizona, Lew Levenson, recently sent across a set of 38 astounding photographs, all on the theme of perfectly timed shots.
They are so fabulous that I have decided that for today and the following four Sundays I will post a selection.
So today, the first set of 8 photographs. Trust me you will love them, so a big thank you to Lew. Do say which are your best ones!
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To close here is that picture courtesy of Chris Snuggs.
By the way, if you would like see again the rest of Lew’s photographs just leave a comment to that effect.
In yesterday’s post, I closed it by saying “More on the theme tomorrow.” What I had in mind was writing about a recent essay that I read; courtesy of Naked Capitalism. However, the essay struck me as of such interest that it should be republished in full. Thus I sent off a request for permission to so do. Hopefully, permission granted in time for me to publish the essay tomorrow (and see my note later on).
That then gave me the opportunity to explain my situation for the next few weeks.
In short, as a result of a number of guests coming to stay with us from the end of July right through to the end of September, the hours that I spend pleasurably preparing and writing posts for Learning from Dogs are going to be under some pressure.
For instance!
Ahead of the arrival of our first set of guests, my mother from London and my sister from Tokyo, it has been decided to renovate the guest bathroom by upgrading the wash-basin. Naturally, something yours truly wants to do himself! (Don’t believe me? See the following photo!)
Of course, as well as still not speaking American, I’m a very long way from speaking American plumbing! I mean fancy going into a builder’s store and asking for a set of taps.
So how does one connect the hot and cold water to these taps!
I looked at what the store attendant had placed in front of me and said, “No, I don’t mean that sort of tap, I mean a tap for a bathroom basin.”
“Oh, you mean force-it!“, replied the attendant.
(Now how did this attendant know that my tool of choice for jobs around the house was a 2-pound club hammer!)
“Of course,” I replied, “You Americans call them faucets!”
So you get the message!
(By the way, the permission to republish the article from The Automatic Earth just came through – just 12 minutes after I sent off my email request – great service, peeps.)
Plus there’s another distraction! Even more bizarre than pretending to be an American plumber! I am pretending to be an American author!
I have returned to writing the book!
Long-term readers of this blog (you crazy lot) will recall that last November I signed up for NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. From that accomplishment has flowed a number of very positive outcomes. One of them was being contacted by a company specialising in self-publishing. I was told that really before I get started in earnest, I need to set out a clear idea of what I am writing about and the audience I have in mind. I called it my Statement of Purpose and after a number of weeks of being amended and revised (huge thanks to Jon and John for their help) it was finally completed just a week ago. Here are the opening sections:
Learning from Dogs
the book.
Statement of Purpose v1.51
Introduction
We live in very challenging times.
It seems rare these days to meet someone who doesn’t sense, to one degree or another, a feeling of vulnerability to today’s world. A sense that many aspects of their lives are beyond their control.
These are also times where it is widely acknowledged that the levers of privilege, power and money are undermining the rights and needs of so many. A feeling of unprecedented levels of deceit, lying and greed.
Then there’s the subject of climate change and the “end-of-world” sword just waiting to descend on us all; the so-called beat of the butterfly’s wing!
Yes, these are challenging times. As we are incessantly reminded by the drumbeat of the doom-and-gloom news industry every hour, frequently every half-hour, throughout the day. A symphony of negative energy.
Yet right next to us is a world of positive energy. The world of dogs. A canine world full of love and trust, playfulness and relaxation. A way of living that is both clear and straightforward; albeit far from being simple. As anyone will know who has seen the way dogs interact with each other and with us humans.
In other words, dogs offer endless examples of positive behaviours. The wonderful power of compassion for self, and others, and of loving joy. The way to live that we humans crave for. A life full of hope and positive energy that keeps the power of negativity at bay.
Reading audience
The book is written by ‘an ordinary bloke’, not by someone who has a specialist or professional understanding in the areas of mind and behaviour. The author is no different to the majority of people out there and, presumably, the majority of potential readers.
Readers who feel the weight of all that ‘doom-and-gloom’ and general negativity that seems to be in the air. Yet, readers who desire a positive, compassionate attitude to their own life, and to the lives of the people around them. Almost certainly readers who are animal lovers, in general, and dog lovers in particular.
The clarity provided by the above has been fantastic and I am now firmly committed to writing something, however small in words, each day.
Yet another drag on my blogging time; I regret.
So if over the coming weeks you read something that strikes you as familiar it may be because I have reposted the item from previous years. Or if there seems to be a string of posts that have been republished from elsewhere, then at least you will understand.
Of course even better would be for you, my dear reader, to send me stuff or point me towards material you think others would enjoy. Or write a guest post! 🙂 Now that would be splendid!
Highlights from the Monty Python Live (mostly) press conference in London, on the day before their reunion shows at London’s O2 Arena kick off. Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle and John Cleese answer questions from the press about the rehearsals, the live show and much more.
Welcome to the official Monty Python YouTube channel. This is the place to find top quality classic Python videos, as well as some special stuff that you’ll only find here – such as interviews and behind-the-scenes footage from our live shows. All the Pythons including John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones & Graham Chapman can be found here being incredibly silly
Richard M., a close friend for more than forty years, recently sent me a hilarious story. Richard prefaced the story with a quotation from the late Bernard Levin.
Some of the readers of Learning from Dogs may not be familiar with Mr. Levin. I can do no better than to quote the WikiPedia entry:
Henry Bernard Levin CBE (19 August 1928 – 7 August 2004) was an English journalist, author and broadcaster, described by The Times as “the most
Bernard Levin c. 1980
famous journalist of his day”. The son of a poor Jewish family in London, he won a scholarship to the independent school Christ’s Hospital and went on to the London School of Economics, graduating in 1952. After a short spell in a lowly job at the BBC selecting press cuttings for use in programmes, he secured a post as a junior member of the editorial staff of a weekly periodical, Truth, in 1953.
Levin reviewed television for The Manchester Guardian and wrote a weekly political column in The Spectator noted for its irreverence and influence on modern parliamentary sketches. During the 1960s he wrote five columns a week for The Daily Mail on any subject that he chose. After a disagreement with the proprietor of the paper over attempted censorship of his column in 1970, Levin moved to The Times where, with one break of just over a year in 1981–82, he remained as resident columnist until his retirement, covering a wide range of topics, both serious and comic.
Levin became a well-known broadcaster, first on the weekly satirical television show That Was The Week That Was in the early 1960s, then as a panellist on a musical quiz, Face the Music, and finally in three series of travel programmes in the 1980s. He began to write books in the 1970s, publishing 17 between 1970 and 1998. From the early 1990s, Levin developed Alzheimer’s disease, which eventually forced him to give up his regular column in 1997, and to stop writing altogether not long afterwards.
Anyway, that quotation from Bernard Levin was, “You’ll never see a thin lawyer or a fat litigant.” In the case of the following story, no doubt both lawyers were paid!
Enjoy!
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Not the cigars in the story!
This took place in Charlotte, North Carolina.
A lawyer purchased a box of very rare and expensive cigars, then insured them against, among other things, fire.
Within a month, having smoked his entire stockpile of these great cigars, the lawyer filed a claim against the insurance company.
In his claim, the lawyer stated the cigars were lost ‘in a series of small fires.’ The insurance company refused to pay, citing the obvious reason, that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion.
However, the lawyer sued and WON!
Delivering the ruling, the judge agreed with the insurance company that the claim was frivolous. The judge stated nevertheless, that the lawyer held a policy from the company, in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure them against fire, without defining what is considered to be unacceptable ‘fire’ and was obligated to pay the claim.
Rather than endure a lengthy and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid $15,000 to the lawyer for his loss of the cigars that perished in the ‘fires’.
BUT IT DIDN”T END THERE!
After the lawyer cashed the check, the insurance company had him arrested on 24 counts of ARSON!!! With his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the lawyer was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and was sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine.
(This true story won First Place in last year’s Criminal Lawyers Award contest.)
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Perhaps this offers a small clue as to why this Englishman, having now lived in America for more than four years, still finds his new homeland a little strange!
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Learning from Dogs 