Ray Chandler’s correspondence with James M. Fox (an obscure writer of crime and espionage novels) offers interesting glimpses of Chandler’s tastes and responses to the work of other authors.
In the course of their letters, he comments on, mostly disparages:
For once the Times outdoes the Telegraph in its obituary of a colorful British figure.
If you have to die, it’s nice to have so as to be memorialized like Peregrine Worsthorne.
It was said of Sir Peregrine Worsthorne that he wrote as he dressed, with style and flamboyance. His bow ties, spongebag trousers and Leander socks were combined with wavy, collar-length silver hair, giving him the appearance of an aesthete on his way to the Athenaeum Club. To complement his exhibitionist tendencies he had an amused, fluting voice and, unusually for a High Tory Fleet Street editor, he was considered something of a flaneur and a bohemian. He was also a man whose engaging recklessness was, on occasion, his undoing.
As a commentator he could be salty, moralistic, reactionary, contrary and even, on occasion, self-contradictory, but he was rarely, if ever, boring or predictable. On Desert Island Discs in 1992 he chose as his luxury item a lifetime supply of LSD. His columns, meanwhile, were less formal argument than a series of assertions, often enough strikingly original and elegantly expressed, but sometimes merely silly, or so outrageous as to disturb even his most unflinchingly right-wing readers. For much of his career he longed for an editorial chair as well as a polemicist’s pulpit; when it finally came, its sweets were short-lived. …
In 1961 he became deputy editor of the newly founded Sunday Telegraph, a post he was to hold for the next 15 years (complementing Welch, who was deputy editor of the daily from 1964 to 1980). He was then associate editor until 1986.
He wrote in the first edition of the paper and, in some ways, thereafter became its personification. The values he was to espouse in his political columns for the next 36 years were not for the faint of heart: they were to include an argument that voluntary repatriation was the answer to Britain’s supposed immigration problems, for example, as well as a vigorous defence of Ian Smith’s white minority government in Rhodesia. His views on homosexualists, as he was wont to call them, could seem especially unpalatable. Despite his experience at his public school, Worsthorne castigated Roy Jenkins in one editorial for his tolerance of “queersâ€.
It became clear that the editorship he was waiting for would never come as long as Lord Hartwell was proprietor. Hartwell admired Worsthorne as a controversialist but did not think him staid or reliable enough for the editorial chair. There was some evidence for this view, in his professional and also in his private life. He had married in 1950 Claudia Bertrand de Colasse, a Frenchwoman previously married to an RAF officer. Yet, as he described with remarkable candour in his 1993 autobiography Tricks of Memory, it was far from a conventional marriage, and he was far from a faithful husband, with many liaisons, prolonged or casual. They had a daughter, Dominique, who is married to the potter Jim Keeling.
The Worsthornes mixed in a notably raffish set, including the journalists Henry Fairlie, George Gale and Paul Johnson and the dons Michael Oakeshott and Maurice Cowling. By some of these friends’ standards Worsthorne was temperate — an early bout of jaundice made heavy drinking impossible — but his life was chequered with comically untoward incidents. Over dinner in a Brighton restaurant, he and the late Vanessa Lawson, then the wife of Nigel Lawson, later of AJ Ayer, decided to exchange shirt and blouse while sitting at their table, an episode reported back to the proprietor by a mauvaise langue among his colleagues.
When appearing on an early-evening programme in 1973 to discuss the abrupt resignation of Lord Lambton from the government, he became the second man, after Kenneth Tynan, to use a well-known monosyllable on television, lightly remarking that the public did not “give a f***†about the affair. This brought a period of suspension from the paper’s pages.
In print, Worsthorne was almost as unpredictable. He was no dialectician, no scholar, indeed, and (despite his aspirations) no intellectual. His attempts at serious political thought were repetitious but persuasive even at column length, still more so in his one book in this vein, The Socialist Myth (1971).
But he was a wonderfully readable columnist, with a feline knack of puncturing specious arguments, of seeing through humbug with a single memorable phrase. He once argued ingeniously that the advertisements in newspapers were in a sense more truthful than the news pages. In the news, houses burn down and aircraft crash, killing and bereaving. In the ads, families live securely and happily in their homes, while flights land on time reuniting loved ones, a far more accurate reflection of everyday life. And it was Worsthorne who described the mood of the Thatcherite 1980s as “bourgeois triumphalismâ€, a phrase which has lasted longer than most coined by the left.
His leaders apart, Worsthorne was at his best writing Spectator diaries where he could be as irresponsible and malicious as he chose.
Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr., one of the two surviving grandchildren of President John Tyler, passed away on September 26, 2020, at age 95. His death occurred 175 years after his grandfather left the White House in 1845.
If you know one fact about the 10th President of the United States, it’s likely that his grandchildren have survived well into the 21st century. This was a result of the Tyler men fathering children late in life.
The traditional interpretation is that the church foundation goes back to the reign of Egica in the seventh century, having been built between 680 and before the Muslim conquest of Hispania in 711; San Pedro de la Nave would thus be one of the last works of Visigothic architecture. However, the most recent archaeological studies have proven it to be not Visigothic, but Mozarabic (so, 9th century or 10th century in date).
Mozarabic or Vizigothic, it’s still Pre-Romanesque and very, very, cool.
Ernest Hemingway posing with two trophy kudu | Africa, 1934 |
Contemporary British & American newspapers regularly get hold of a photo of a Big Game hunter posing happily with a trophy, and write up him or her as a malevolent monster who sadistically murdered the beautiful, noble, and happy wild critter, who is invariably personalized with a cutsey personal name like “Cecil the Lion.”
Their gullible urban-based readership, who characteristically think that meat grows on supermarket shelves, and that wild animals normally die peaceful deaths in retirement homes, eat up this nonsense and invariably enthusiastically participate in two-minutes of hate. Too many of these people then write checks to phony-baloney Animal Protection Societies (whose officers draw princely salaries and which devote 90% of their budgets to fund-raising) as well as to Anti-Hunting Extremist Organizations.
Hunters are not actually sadists. The hunter appreciates, understands, and cares far more for the hunted animal than the sentimental television watcher or the Animal Rights crackpot. The hunter understands how Nature actually works, and finds powerful emotional and spiritual reward in personal participation in its basic and fundamental process, the contest between the hunter and the game.
“The true trophy hunter is a self-disciplined perfectionist seeking a single animal, the ancient patriarch well past his prime that is often an outcast from his own kind. If successful, he will enshrine the trophy in a place of honor. This is a more noble and fitting end than dying on some lost and lonely edge where the scavengers will pick his bones and his magnificent horns will weather away and be lost forever.”
A $189 Chinese Bluetooth Chastity Ring designed for Domination games, or mere assured fidelity, has been shown to be vulnerable to hacking, and can be permanently locked by third parties, requiring the use of an angle grinder or other heavy power tool to cut the device off. A drastic solution, to say the least.
Additionally, its security flaws allow the hacker to steal the user’s passwords, birthday, location, and other sensitive data.
Original footage by the Lumière brothers, this snowball fight from Lyon, France in 1896 has been upscaled and colorized using the open-source AI tool, DeOldify, a deep learning-based project for colorizing and restoring old images and video.
NYPD 60th Precinct — 60 Field Intelligence Officers apprehend an individual with this illegal firearm!
The comments are great. Examples:
Kara Wynona
I actually feel less safe knowing it took 60 police officers to wrestle one old cowboy to ground on his way to show-and-tell at the retirement home.
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Krissy Weber
That gun is so old, you have to make the sounds for it when/if it shoots.
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Mike Dunger
You recovered the Lost Pistol of Indiana Jones!
The antique gun is a .38 S&W Hopkins and Allen XL double action center fire, which would be unsafe if used to fire smokeless ammunition.
is J.R.R. Tolkien spinning in his grave. Amazon has plans for its new version of his earlier Age of Middle Earth that the author would not like one bit.
Amazon Studios’ LOTR Series Heads Into Uncharted Carnal Waters with Casting Call for Nudity and an “Intimacy Coordinatorâ€
This might be a singularly surprising or even upsetting concept to present to Tolkien fans. If I were to address this reality to Star Wars, or Harry Potter, or even Miyazaki fandom it would raise eyebrows or outright alarm. But gather ’round the campfire and hear my tremulous words:
“Prepare for a newly-sexualized version of your favorite fantasy world.â€
It’s the equivalent of saying: “Get ready to watch Anakin and Padme do something onscreen that will forever alter the way you see Star Wars. Sorry about the sand. It gets everywhere.â€
Is this a real lightning rod issue? Depends on your temperament. I have to be really careful about presumed gatekeeping (which is not my intention) or any semblance of that; I just want this discussion WAY out in the open. Let’s get to the heart of this, because it is a thing now.
We must clearly ask ourselves what we want and don’t want from a billion-dollar Tolkien TV adaptation, because the tracks are laid and that train is headed straight for us, via your streaming device and paid subscription.
Babylon Bee has the latest news from Middle America:
WASHINGTON, D.C.—While battling the darkest monster from the pit of hell, known as “COVID,” Donald the Orange fell to his doom several days ago, sacrificing himself to save America from the deadly demon.
So Americans were ecstatic to learn that Donald the Orange had returned in a new, better form, now known as Donald the White. A brilliant white light shone from Walter Reed Medical Center as Donald the White emerged just in time to save America from COVID, Antifa, and the Deep State.
“I come back to you now at the turn of the tide!” he cried as he rode triumphantly out in the presidential limousine, codenamed “Shadowfax,” cutting right through the ravenous hordes of Antifa counterprotesters blocking the way.
“Donald! Donald the Orange!” cried his supporters outside Walter Reed Medical Center.
“Yes…” he said as he sat in the back of Shadowfax. “Yes… Donald the Orange… that is what they used to call me.”
