Pop, pop, shoo-wop

Off to the hospital again this morning, for a CT scan. Oh, the joys...

Time, methinks, to distract ourselves with another little selection of some of the "newer" music that has caught my ear of late:

First up, darling Robbie hits the dancefloor - with a vengeance!

Robbie Williams and Miss Monique - Beauty In Us

One of the best of all British girl-bands is back again, with another banger - and a suitably gothic flavoured video for the Hallowe'en season [just around the corner]:

Sugababes - Ghost

Speaking of "the best" - Our Glorious Leader teams up with another currently dominant force of nature, combining their storytelling into one faboo number!

Madonna & Charli xcx - Danceteria (Afterhours Mix)

In complete contrast, another house favourite set of divas prove you can't keep a good libido down, no matter your age...

Fascinating Aïda - Let's Fuck

Also getting "down-and-dirty", the "junior Princess" teams up with a band of fellow Aussies [best known for rock music], on what is definitely what I call an earworm!

Rogue Traders and Dannii Minogue - Dirty Dirty Disco

Saving (possibly) the best to last - let's finish with perhaps the dirtiest-of-dirty dancing queens of the lot! Love this:

Troye Sivan - Party

As ever dear reader, I love to hear your thoughts...

The devil’s candyfloss will get into your hair

Autumn is the favourite season of the arty and pretentious while being a bloody horrible time of year decent people abhor. This is why:

Rotting leaves
Girlfriend babbling on about the vivid carpet of colours autumn brings? Those leaves are the scarlet of death. Trees shed all their foliage, not giving a shit about the mess they’ve made, and a few days’ rain on those crisp leaves and they’re a mushy, slippery sea of rot.

Dark evenings
Every day brings an earlier reminder the long, hot summer is over and the next few months are to be suffered through. Soon it’ll be dark when you wake, dark when you come home, grey all day and the sun a stranger. You might as well have been born a bat and use sonar to navigate to and from your desk.

Hallowe'en
In more sensible days unravaged by this hideous American holiday you called it "begging" when ragged little brats whined for sweets on your doorstep rather than fucking off while you watched the telly in peace. But now you have to keep a bowl of treats by the door and pretend to be terrified by a five-year-old in a witch costume from B&M.

Fireworks
Which overlaps with four weeks of explosions outside your home, making you sympathise with those poor Ukrainians or Iranians or whoever. It would be worth the celebration if the Gunpowder Plot has been successful, instead of leaving us with the curse of politics to this day.

Spiders’ webs at face height
Why do spiders build webs at the perfect height for you to run into? Because they’re bastards. You can wave a hand ahead of you like Dumbo’s trunk but you’ll still get caught and the devil’s candyfloss will get into your hair while the spiders hide in a corner pissing themselves laughing.

Christmas advertisements
Still tastefully avoiding the season at present, but in a month they’ll have unleashed a heartwarming, jingling hell. The commercially-driven reminders you’ll soon have no money in the company of relatives you despise will be omnipresent. The only positive of Hallowe'en is at least it holds this back for a bit.

The Daily Mash

Of course.

They read my mind!

Magic? Not so much

Did you miss me, dear reader?

Apologies for my uncustomary absence for the last couple of days. A "slight medical emergency" of the most annoying kind...

We were having a fun time at our friends Jim & Jude's home on Saturday night (they're lovely people, and perfect hosts), when it was time for the BBQ main course, steak with all the trimmings. Smelt delicious, looked delicious, I took my first bite, swallowed, and it got stuck. Fast. Not going up [I tried all that], and definitely not going down [nothing would pass it, no liquids - even saliva immediately came back up]. Dammit.

I spent the rest of the evening on their patio, spluttering and hoping it might eventually shift. It didn't. Nor did it shift overnight after we got home. Finally, yesterday morning at around 10.30am I decided - it's off to A&E after all...

Knowing those places are tantamount to one of Dante's Gates of Hell, I'm glad we didn't head there on a Saturday night. Sundays, it seems, are relatively quieter. Of course, even with a "fast-track" ticket, everything takes forever, and it wasn't until 4pm that we were transferred with great fanfare [literally: blue-light flashing, traffic parting, the lot! How exciting!] to another hospital further out that specialises in ear, nose and throat. It's at this point that we should all say "gawd bless the NHS" [it's all free], but FFS! Why different hospital trusts are completely incapable of corresponding with each other is a pain in the arse. Thus (apart from bloods), I had to go through a load of procedures (x-ray etc) I had already had done at the other place. Waiting around to get all that sorted wasted another few long hours [hospitals are not the sort of place anyone in their right mind wants to be longer than they need to], before I finally got to the point where an operation was possible - and went in for anaesthesia at 10pm! Ironically, the whole op only took the team half-an-hour to complete, before they bedded me down in the recovery room overnight and poor Madam Arcati - who had also not eaten all day - went home.

Suffice to say, now I'm finally out and back home again, I'm feeling a lot better. I shan't be eating steak ever again in my life..!

---

MEANWHILE:

We need something to make us smile on this Tacky Music Monday - and really, only today's birthday girl Mrs Miller will do on an occasion like this!

Mrs Miller - It's Magic [from The Cool Ones, 1967]

An uncanny knack for landing squarely between the beat - read my post about her from back in 2017 for more [if you dare]!

Have a good week, dear reader.

I wanna be tall, tall, tall

Slowly, slowly, the weekend is coming...

We have some jolly japes to look forward to, as tomorrow we're off en famille to leafy Fulham for a barbecue day at our chums Jim & Jude's place.

Meanwhile - it's time to get the party started!

Sharing the day with another ill-assorted slew of names, including the notorious Richard III, Mahatma Gandhi, Groucho Marx, Graham Greene, Donna Karan, Rex Reed, Bud Abbott, Annie Leibovitz, Sting (who is 75 years old!), Don McLean, Anna Ford, Trevor Brooking, Mike Rutherford, Tiffany (who's 55), Robbie Nevil, and - ummm - Badly Drawn Boy...

...it's Phil Oakey of The Human League's birthday! [He's 71...]

You might argue that this is an unusual choice for my traditional end-of-week dance slot, but I used to dance my tits off to it when I was a young aspiring New Romantic - so let's Thank Disco Synthesizers It's Friday!

The Human League - Empire State Human

Have a great weekend, dear reader!

Of another sad loss, an erect bloomer, a bad boy on the High Street, wool, living pink, a sperm factory and a can-can

RIP Dame Esther Rantzen, presiding hostess of the wildly popular satirical consumer affairs programme That's Life! for 21 years, charity campaigner and national treasure.

It's another snippets post, dear reader:

• Monster plant news: For the first time in the venerable botanical gardens' 260-year history, a giant Agave montana is about to flower at Kew. It can grow to around 5m/16ft tall, so should be spectacular - but after it does so, it dies. Doomed after erecting. Like Cecil Colby or Kemal Pamuk.
• Bad boy of fashion news: In a surprising move, none other than John Galliano has designed a new collection for Spanish high street chain Zara! Judging by everything else Zara sells, you'd need to be young and really skinny to wear any of it...
• Sheep news: Happy Shetland Wool Week! Unfortunately, famous knitter Tom Daley didn't put in appearance. Dammit.

[click to embiggen]

• Think Pink! news: A bizarre pink house that has been erected in Kentish Town (near Camden in London) was recently featured on Channel 4's Grand Designs programme. I think it looks like something out of Dr Seuss's 5000 Fingers of Doctor T myself - which gives me a perfect excuse (as if any were needed!) to feature one of my all-time favourite uber-camp clips!

Hans Conried - Do-Me-Do Duds (The Dressing Song) [The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T]

• Speaking of weird homes news: A couple in Great Abington, Cambridgeshire have been forced to demolish the home they built instead of a horse semen laboratory, for which they had planning permission from the council.
• And finally: In Bordeaux today, 168 dancers attempted to set a new world record for highest number of participants in a can-can routine! [link is to a news site in French] I wonder if Buster Bloodvessel of Bad Manners was amongst them?

And the weather? Very pleasant, sunny and warm, considering we have arrived in October...

Red hot chili Pepper

You know you're getting old when...

...you discover that one of our favourite super-cool divas, Miss Angie Dickinson (remarkably) blows out 95 candles on her cake today!

As a kid in the middle of the 1970s, with power cuts, hyper-inflation and general pessimism in the UK, I loved settling down to watch some preposterous American cop show for escapism [Columbo, Banacek, Cannon, Starsky & Hutch and so on] - and Police Woman was one of the best. I often dreamed what it would be like to live in Angie Dickinson/"Pepper Anderson"'s glamorous world of sleek Halston outfits, Martini cocktails and "woman-in-peril" missions. Sigh.

By way of a little tribute, the classic theme music - and those legs:

Police Woman opening titles

...but who knew she sang [after a fashion]? I suppose, married as she was for years to Mr Burt Bacharach, it was unavoidable:

Angie Dickinson & Burt Bacharach - I'll Never Fall in Love Again

Many happy returns, Angeline "Angie" Dickinson (born 30th September 1931)

Put a big shiny ribbon on fuck all

China’s Xi Jinping has stunned rivals by bribing Trump with two adult panda bears. How are other world leaders going to beat that?

Anthony Albanese, Australia
You can’t top Oz when it comes to exotic animals, mate. We’ll give him a numbat, a duck-billed platypus, a Tasmanian devil, a breeding population of chlamydia-infected koalas, a couple of cassowaries, a dropbear and a genuine boxing kangaroo that hops around and beats shit out of people. All on the condition he leaves us the fuck alone.

Vladimir Putin, Russia
Fuck animals. I will give him what any dictator truly craves: territory. Ukraine is part of Russia obviously, nobody disputes that, but once it has been reunited with the motherland my forces will march on and when we conquer the EU we shall award him whichever countries he should choose. We just need to get past this bit we’re stuck in. Any day now.

Kim Jong-un, North Korea
From one lonely leader to another, I shall give the gift of friendship. Understanding. The empathy of another man who has hit the peak, who has climbed higher than lesser men ever could, and still craves the world’s respect. We will hold hands.

Lee Jae Myung, South Korea
Typically cheap gift. If what Trump truly desires is exotic pets, we shall give him the most exotic of all: his own K-pop band. Called QEEDTH, they will comprise four boys and five girls raised in complete isolation from all human contact, trained to perform sterile hip hop in a foreign language and never to make eye contact.

Andy Burnham, UK
Britain doesn’t have any exotic animals because it is at heart a deeply boring country. But we do have music, so I’ve given him Adele, Morrissey, Robbie Williams, Ian Astbury and Matthew Murphy, lead singer of The Wombats. Hopefully he won’t realise they all already live in LA so I’ve put a big shiny ribbon on fuck all.

Javier Milei, Argentina
I give him penguins – Gentoo, Magellanic, Rockhopper and King varieties – the steamer duck, the Cobb’s wren, and many, many sheep. And I also give him the territory these animals live upon, Las Malvinas or as you call it, the Falkland Islands. Try getting that back off him, Britain.

The Daily Mash

Of course.