More Boris

This week's entry for the Friday Ark and Carnival of the Cats.

A tale of penguin eggs goes on sale

Next month auctioneers Bonhams will be selling significant items of Edwardian exploration memorabilia – a 40-page handwritten account by Edward Wilson (above) of a 1911 journey to gathering Emperor penguin eggs from their remote breeding grounds.

Today’s Guardian reports on this story. Wilson, known as Uncle Bill by companions, was part of Captain Robert Scott's team. A naturalist, physician and painter, Wilson was with Scott at the South Pole in 1912, only to find Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it. When the frozen corpses of the British explorers were found in November, Scott's arm was around Wilson.

The story of the race to the South Pole has overshadowed a similarly remarkable tale the year before. The Antarctic winter expedition led by Wilson was immortalised in print by Apsley Cherry-Garrard in his book The Worst Journey in the World, who, with "Birdie" Bowers, made up the three-man team.

Cherry-Garrard's adventure account became a bestseller but he admitted: "The horror of the 19 days … would have to be re-experienced to be appreciated; and any one would be a fool who went again." In his diary Scott called the expedition "one of the most gallant stories in polar history."

Much of the trek was in silence because talking proved too difficult. At night the men had shivering fits, shaking to the point they thought bones would break. The conditions were so appalling, so unexperienced by human beings, it took them five hours per day to get out of their tent and prepare for the journey.

That the men made it to the roosting grounds was a minor miracle and Cherry-Garrard credited Wilson's "patient, self-possessed, unruffled" leadership skills. "He was the only man on earth, as I believe, who could have led this journey."

People today know all about the bizarre roosting behaviour of the Emperor penguins, gleaned from TV documentaries. But the three men who arrived, finally, at Cape Crozier were witnessing something unseen by human eyes – the male penguins incubating eggs in winter.

There were far fewer penguins than anticipated, probably only 100 or so and the explorers found some birds were so desperate to nurse an egg they incubated lumps of ice, rounded into egg shapes. Wilson had been convinced that the penguins were a kind of missing link between reptiles and birds and that studying their eggs would reap great benefits.

The manuscript, valued at £80,000 -£120,000, is quite matter-of-fact in conveying the difficulties they experienced but, says Bonhams, it "has sufficient colour for anyone with imagination”. The words have been known to historians because a transcript is held by the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, but until experts went through effects put up for sale by Wilson's descendents the original was thought lost.

Jon Baddeley, Bonhams' head of collector's department, said: "It is a remarkable document. We had absolutely no notion that we were going to come across it."

When Cherry-Garrard arrived at the Natural History Museum with three prized penguin eggs he was allegedly met by a custodian who said: "Who are you? What do you want? This ain't an egg shop." When he got someone to take the eggs, Cherry-Garrard was then forced to wait hours for a receipt.

Ah there’s nothing like a good British ending to a Boys Own adventure!

Go here for more information on Edward Wilson

Shirin Ebadi calls for new election

Yesterday Nobel laureateShirin Ebadi called for a fresh election in Iran under UN surveillance to end violence in her country and urged UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to visit Tehran.

"In order to have fair election results, there must be a re-election under UN surveillance," she told journalists during a visit to South Korea."I plead with the UN secretary general to come to Iran. He must see what's happening in Iran with his own eyes and talk to Iranians in order to write an accurate and truthful report,"

She urged Tehran to stop using violence against peaceful protesters, halt the "show trials" of political opponents, release detainees, end censorship and compensate victims of government violence.

Many Iranians had begun employing new tactics to continue protests while avoiding arrest, she said.In one instance mothers of demonstrators who were killed or arrested wear black and gather in public parks on Saturday nights for silent protests, carrying pictures of their children, she said.

Ebadi called for international pressure on Tehran but made it clear she opposes economic sanctions or military intervention."Economic sanctions would only aggravate the people's hardship," she said."It's much more important for the international community to share in Iranians' pain rather than to impose economic sanctions on them."

I wish her words would be heeded

Support bands I have seen #4

The Meteors who supported Theatre of Hate at the Portsmouth Guildhall in 1982

Burmese Junta still terrified of The Lady

The Lady

The BBC has just reported that Aung San Suu Kyi, the Lady, has been sentenced to an additional 18 months house arrest by a court in Rangoon.

Ms Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace laureate, was convicted of breaking the terms of her house arrest by allowing American John Yettaw into her lakeside home in May. She had been jailed for three years with hard labour, but this was commuted to house arrest.

Ms Suu Kyi had denied the charge but said she expected to be convicted.

It was no surprise that she would be hound guilty by the sham trial. After all it would never do to let the Lady actually take place in an election again. Better for that maggot Than Shwe and his junta of vermin to prevent her from participating than having to ignore her inevitable victory.

I can’t help think that Yettaw was put up to this so as to extend her incarceration and keep her out of next year’s elections

Than Shwe - A piece of human excrement

Another Acanthus flying hand creature

This week's entry for the Tuesday and Wednesday editions of Wordless Wednesday.

Amon Thriller

Having proved last year that Elvis Presley’s career started long before the Ed Sullivan Show

“references in the Annals of Tacitus to a singer called Gyratus who sang popular songs including Tenere Me Ama, Non Adamare Non Possum and Nunc hic aut numquam. Unfortunately I am not sure we will ever determine whether Elvis is a reincarnation of Gyratus or if indeed he is immortal. Then again some things should remain within the realms of faith”

Now we have proof positive that Michael Jackson did not start his career in the early seventies in the Jackson 5. A sculpture on display at Chicago’s Field Museum, indicate that he had a career entertaining Pharaohs over three Millennia ago

According to the local pressin Chicago the Field Museum has had a limestone sculpture (above) from ancient Egypt on display since 1988. However it is only recently that it has drawn attention. This is surprising since it is a perfect likeness of Jackson right down to the disfigured nose.

“I have no idea whether Jackson ever visited the museum,” a Field spokesperson said “But it could be proof that Jackson started his career in entertainment 3,000 or so years ago. There are a number of hieroglyphic messages that we need to decode, but they seem to refer to a singer with a strange nose who walked as if he was imbued with the spirit of Thoth (the Egyptian Moon god)."

If further proof was required Jackson cast himself as an interloper in ancient Egypt in his video for “Remember the Time,” so maybe he was paying tribute to his Egyptian roots.

Darius Guppy: From prison bitch to regime apologist

The last time I heard of arrogant aristo and erstwhile member of the upper class hooligan rabble the Bullingdon Club, Darius Guppy was when he was sent down for fraud and theft in the 1990’s.

In the early 1990’s Guppy and associate Benedict Marsh staged a jewel heist at their company in Manhattan and then defrauded their insurers to the tune of £1.8m. Guppy was sentenced to five (or six depending on the source) years, a sentence that can never be “spent” under the terms of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act

And that was the last I had heard of the arrogant criminal scumbag until today when I happened on an article he wrote in the Independent last Friday. It would appear that he has gone from being a criminal to a mouthpiece for the criminal Iranian regime.

“On 21 March, The Independent published a letter in which I argued that there was no empirical evidence of the elections in Iran having been rigged, despite prolific assurances to the contrary. Driven by forces beholden to the corporate interest, nothing would please the West more than to have the Iranian masses emulate "the mindless McDonald's-munching slaves of Mammon" of my last sentence. ...To suggest that two undeniably devout men, Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr Ahmadinejad, should have engaged in such an un-Islamic conspiracy as cheating their own people (unnecessary, since the consensus of the opinion polls put Mr Ahmadinejad comfortably ahead) constitutes possibly the most serious allegation that one could level against them."

Err, not all of them by a long chalk. The list on Wikipedia indicates that the polls were all over the place, with a fair number favouring Mosaic - hardly a consensus! As for the idea that “religious men” would never stoop to maintaining their grip on the reins of power, Perhaps Lord Acton’s maxim about power and corruption does not apply to them, but somehow I think not

"The truth is that many in Iran and in the Muslim world in general have grasped Western democracy's dirty little secret: that your leaders have no real power. And if your representatives are as ineffectual as their electorate before the Dictatorship of Money, then what meaning have your votes and your democracy?"
Ah so what does that make Ahmadinejad: Oh yes a puppet of a misogynistic scumbag called Khamenei

...".For we look with horror at your anarchy and what you have become. Visit Iran and you will see a people polite, hospitable, cultured, noble and brave".

I’ll grant Guppy this one. I can describe the Iranians I know as charming intelligent, hospitable and beautiful

"Look at Britain's urban hell and you will see young girls and boys armed with knives, swearing, half naked, vomiting the previous night's attempt to stifle their pain and their emptiness. Turn on the radio and listen to laddettes boasting about what they did with their boyfriends in bed the day before, but tune in to Iran's airwaves and you will hear poetry and beautiful music."
Tarring all youth with a brush then? Hmm I wonder what would happen to an Iranian girl who boasted publicly about her sexual exploits... Prison and a beating at the very least...

"Now while you may have traded Turner for Emin, Shakespeare for Rushdie, Mozart for Madonna, people who think very much like me will never allow such a thing to happen to their nation. You offer us Puff Daddy but we have Hafez, thank you very much. You offer us Hollywood when we have perhaps the finest modern cinema on earth. You may have jettisoned a once great European and God-fearing civilisation, but your moral poison must never be allowed to insinuate its way into one of the greatest and oldest cultures on the planet."
The sheer arrogance of the man! So Rushdie is a writer of trash fiction? I will agree that the Satanic Verses was poor but perhaps Guppy also sneers at Midnight’s Children.

As it happens I am greatly enamoured by Persian culture. Regular readers of this blog will have seen numerous posts on Iranian poetry and art.

HOWEVER...try and publish something that the Iranian authorities don’t like... Go and have a nice word with Shahrnush Parsipur whose masterpiece Women without Men was banned by the Iranian authorities. Parsipur, who had previously been incarcerated for political dissent, faced another sentence as a result of this book. She chose exile instead. Parsipur is not alone in having works banned.

As for Iranian cinema, yes it is excellent but you won’t see them all in Iran... ask Jafar Panahi when many of his films get a screening in his homeland!
"...The events in Iran of the past 30 years must be seen for what they really are, not a revolution at all, but a counter revolution; not a negation of a nation's grand past as occurred in France or Russia or China, but an affirmation of it; a realisation that the experiment you call the Enlightenment, or secular liberalism, far from being the triumph of your comfortable certainties, has been the opposite – a bringing low of all that once made Europe great."

So brutal executions and the treatment of women as third class citizens is an affirmation rather than a descent into mediaeval misogyny? Give me secular liberalism any day!
"Iran is set irreversibly on a course towards independence and will never adopt the position of servility towards Mammon and America which has earned for England the appellative not of the "the Great Satan", a term reserved for the United States, but "shaytan-e-kuchek" or "the little Satan".

The UK has been the agent of plenty of misfortune in Iran/Persia and is that not why it has that title? On the other hand it is too easy to become an “Uncle Napoleon” and blame the UK for every misfortune that befalls Iran

"God willing, she can then become what Huntingdon refers to as a "core state" around which other nations that cherish freedom can coalesce. As one of the few countries that has consistently dared to stand up to Mammon, she must be a bastion in the coming clash – not of civilisations, as Huntingdon puts it, but between civilisation on the one hand and the barbarism that is now synonymous with secular liberalism in the minds of so many Muslims, and others disillusioned with the fruits of the West, and not just in the imagination of one particular old Etonian, former member of the Bullingdon."

Yada, yada, yada, so this is what happens when a supremely arrogant criminal leaves the UK (he lives illegally in Cape Town if the Mail is to be believed and yes I know it is a stretch to believe that ugly rag ... He effectively lives in South Africa on on tourist visas) and becomes born-again, as a fanatic mouthpiece for the country of his mother’s birth, regardless of its glaring injustices. In this sense Guppy makes useful idiots like Seumas Milne or George Galloway of the SS (see below) seem tame.

To be honest, there are plenty of things wrong with this country and there are plenty of things that are good about Iran, particularly its people and its culture (regular readers will know my love of Iranian poetry and art) but I won’t be lectured by a member of the criminal class like Darius Guppy.

NOTE In this case SS stands for Stalinist Shitheadery and not Schutzstaffel. I am not calling Galloway a Nazi, just a political dinosaur of a particularly vile sort.

Different faces, same bastard

The smug face of Saeed Mortazavi, Iranian chief prosecutor at the Tehran show trials



The face of fanatic Nazi Roland Freisler, president of the the German People's Court in WWII

What is the difference between them? Freisler got blown to hell by an allied bomb in February 1945. As present Mortazavi is still alive. One hopes that he does not die peacefully in his bed at a great age

What a scumbag

Keith Griffin of Jensen Beach, Florida has been charged with ten counts of possession of child pornography after finding more than 1,000 images on his personal computer.

Griffin denies that he has actually downloaded any child pornography. He explained that he had been downloading music, and that his cat jumped on the keyboard when he left the room. He said
"strange things" appeared on the computer when he returned.

Along with the vast majority of people I find the idea of child pornography utterly revolting but to try and pin the blame for your disgusting predilections on your cat? Now that really is the lowest of the low.

I hope for his sake that his future cell mate isn't a cat lover, doesn't weigh 300lbs and isn't very, very sex starved.....