Hypocrites Unleashed

As you might have expected ..... the death of Queen Elizabeth II has allowed a lot of mealy mouthed critics, in both the USA and the UK, to voice their views on the Monarchy, the British Empire, Queen Victoria, King Charles III, European Colonialism and Slavery.

African Diaspora (Alice Hunter)

Most of these critics are from the black diaspora, people living in white majority countries often as a direct or indirect result of slavery or colonialism, and consequently are in positions of privilege that their brethren still in Africa or the Caribbean can only dream of.

Another 'Gay' Plague?

Was or Is Monkeypox another 'gay plague'? ....

Monkeypox Is A Mild Skin Disease

...its  a skin disease the causes painful skin lesions, that usually clears up on its own, but not always. 

Best TV Advert?

The 2007 Cadbury chocolate advert for its Dairy Milk bar, featuring a drumming gorilla ....

Cadbury's Gorilla Drummer

 

.... was voted advert of the year and the best UK TV advert of all time in a 2015 poll.

Sailor Beware

'Oh what shall we do with a drunken sailor, what do you do with a drunken sailor, what do we do with a drunken sailor, early in the morning' is a popular children’s ditty, and an even older sea shanty.

Drunken Sailors Have Existed Since Time Immemorial

I have heard several other variants of this part of the song, including the anti-British, American version ....

'What'll we do with a Limejuice skipper? ..... Soak him in oil till he sprouts a flipper.' .... 'Limeys' was the American name for British sailors who ate lemons and limes to stop the scurvy.

Its A Scary World

The world has become a very scary and strange place of late.

This Sort of Scary Is Within Our Cultural Norms ....

For those of us lucky enough to be born into the Western world, most of the scariness in our lives comes from the external cultures being introduced into ours, often via immigration, or perhaps globalisation. And the strangeness's, well they can nearly always be explained within our own cultural contexts (even The 'Donald'). Mostly it comes from our Western freedom to do our own thing, as long as it harms no others, so eccentricities abound, and are largely tolerated.

Exit The Shadow World

As part of the occasional disappearing world series of posts on this blog, that have covered everything from Castanet making in Spain, through travelling knife sharpeners, to Spanish onion selling in the UK (I even thought about having a post on Scottish footballers, but their recent revival made me drop it .... only joking people!), I am highlighting another dying art ... the Chinese puppet show.

Chinese Shadow Puppetry

Jolly Tasty Drinkie

Globalisation's down-side can come in unexpected forms as the Chinese are discovering. They seem to  suffer from the French disease of 'language purity' (I understand that the Spanish try it was well via the Real Academia del Idioma), and are finding that in a world full of Anglo-Saxon 'English speakers' who wilfully pick up, create and drop words by the hundreds every year, its near impossible to stop these words invading the Chinese language as well.

So iPad and iTunes and YouTube (all brand names, rather than actual words), have invaded the language untouched by translations, whereas Coca Cola is 'tasty and jolly' in Chinese ... ironically many of the brand terms that are 'translated', are meaningless terms in English.

Jolly Tasty Drinkie!

In the long term, in any battle between a pictographic language and a phonetic language like English, there can only be one eventual winner. Where would English be without other people's words! - taxi, yacht, pyjama, mutton, orthodontist the list is endless ...including bamboo, Ketchup and tea. English wouldn't be the driving force that it is today if it hadn't embraced "foreign" words from just about everywhere.

In Wales, Welsh is force fed to the school population, despite it being all but dead, and they do the same nonsense with Gaelic in the Celtic fringes ... or in England, teaching French to the English. In the real world, Spanish (Americas), German (Europe) or Chinese (Trade) are the only viable alternatives to English, with "Ich bin ein Englander" (I am a monkey wrench) giving us shades of JFK's "Ich bin ein Berliner" (I am a doughnut).

Welcome to 'Globalisation' China ... you can't have your cake and eat it. Top economy, means global influences .... oh and good luck trying to export Chinese phrases or words nowadays, as you are only selling us our own inventions cheaper, not the brand new concepts that create new words.

Cultural Defence

I have often remarked before that its a strange world .... one of the strangest aspects of the modern world is the phenomena that holds White people to differing standards to the rest of the world, particularly in the difficult world of the 'ism's' e,g, 'racism'.

• For example, if a White politician says that its wrong for a Christian to marry a Muslim or a Jew as it lessens the numbers of Christians, that’s racism.
• If a White politician says its wrong to marry a person of colour as it diminishes the white stock, that’s racism.
• If a White politician said its OK for a Christian man to marry a non Christian woman (as long as all the children are brought up as Christians, or the woman converts to Christianity), that’s racism.
• If a White politician said its not OK for a Christian woman to marry a non Christian man, that’s racism.

 However,

• If a Muslim man says that its wrong for a Muslim to marry a Christian or a Jew as it lessens the numbers of Muslims, that’s 'cultural'.
• If a Muslim politician said its OK for a Muslim man to marry a non Muslim woman (as long as all children brought up as Muslims, or the woman converts to Islam), that’s 'cultural'.
• If a Muslim politician said its not OK for a Muslim woman to marry a non Muslim man, that's 'cultural'.

And now apparently, the Jews are also joining in the 'cultural' fun .... with many saying that any intermarriage - when Jews wed non-Jews - is a threat to the future survival of the Jewish nation. Jewish identity is matriarchal, so if a Jewish man marries a non-Jewish woman, their children would not be considered Jews. 

The Feared Future Of World Jewry - If Jews Are 'Assimilated'.

There is even a Israeli organisation Lehava, which works to prevent any assimilation, and which targets Jews who are marrying non Jews, by posting social media messages to them stating that their "grandparents are turning over in their graves, they did not dream that their grandchildren would not be Jews". They even have a name for non Jewish women who marry Jews  - 'a shikse', a very derogatory term for a non-Jewish woman, who are considered "worse than Hitler", as a threat to the Jewish survival. Apparently though, however racist this may seem to you and I, rest assured in the western PC world, this is all deemed as 'cultural'.

So seemingly, despite all the 'globalisation' and 'multiculturalism,' that we are told by Western PC politicians is the new world order (and the reason apparently why we can't close our borders), all the non-western nations don't believe in anything of the sort, and actually feel free to practise any form of 'racism' (which somehow isn’t 'racism' at all, but actually 'Cultural’ in a PC kinda way) .... It really is a strange world.   

Dalit Goddess 'Hinglish'

'Hinglish or Inglish', that peculiarly Indian language construct, much beloved by call centre managers everywhere, and as equally loathed by the misbegotten western callers to those same centres (See Dell Hell post for example), has its own goddess.

Dalit Goddess English

Yes the pantheon of Hindi gods and goddesses has gained a new goddess 'Hinglish', with her own sādhu or 'saint' in the form of the high Victorian politician 'Thomas Babington Macaulay', who introduced the idea of teaching and governance in English, to the different races of India (incidentally cementing the possibility of a united independent India).

 

La Dolce Vita or Curriculum Vitae

In a sign of the times, globalisation has reached parts, we maybe thought that it would never reach. But not everyone is very happy about it.

Milan's Politecnico di Milano - For English Speakers Only.

The 'Politecnico di Milano', a prestigious Italian University has announced that from the 2014 semester, its going to switch most of its degree courses - including all its graduate courses - to the English language.

They say that in a global market they need to compete for foreign students, especially from Asia (where Italian is all Greek to the majority of students), and to prepare their own students for the employment market, in which English is the 'lingua franca' of commerce, sciences, I.T., engineering, and communications. Ironically, Italy was of course the birth place of the worlds last great global language Latin.  

Milan, the city, is already partly equipped for the transition because on the local metro and railway, announcements are in Italian and English, and so there is already an element of 'Globalisation' in the city.

Needless to say, this eminently sensible response to the facts of the world has not met with universal approval, and 'The 300' are a group of professors and assistant professors who have signed a petition against the change, but it seems in vain. Professor Azzone the Chancellor said "I would have preferred if Italian was the common language, it would have been easier for me - but we have to accept real-life".

I know only that all things being equal, that given a choice between a cold wet northern university, or a sunny Mediterranean one, Milan is on a winner.

Globalising Funerals

There are jobs and there are jobs ...... the bad ones seem to follow Death around as he carries out his gruesome duties. Now I am aware of the Chinese boatman who collects suicides bodies from the Yellow River and either returns them to the families (for a fee), or buries them, so I was much taken by the tale of Abdul Hakim.

Apparently, more by accident than planning he has become the body collector for the Taliban after firefights with the NATO troops (so he's a busy man then), in the southern Afghan province of Kandahar.  For over six years he has collected many many bodies on behalf of the local Taliban, even though they killed his two sons, and also his son-in-law. So far he has tallied the body count as 250 (127 were Taliban, 28 civilians, and the balance government supporters).

A fairly thankless task but I guess someone has to do it ......

What particularly drew my attention though, was the gravestones ..... it was the surprising fact that they were predominately in English.

Afghanistan Cemetery

Maybe its because they are Red Cross cemeteries (ICRC) via the Red Crescent affiliate, but I just assumed that any English would be restricted to an ID number, and that the rest of the details would be in the local language or Arabic.

Globalisation just marches relentlessly on, without us even noticing.

Sikhism's Lost Masters

Our modern world is based upon 'Globalisation' - which is the idea that peoples and ideas are travelling the world, and mixing up all cultures into one global one. But unfortunately this idea is apparently not taking the best of humanities ideas and philosphies and promoting those in to those areas, where backwardness and medievalism still prevail, but rather its corrupting the socially advanced societies, with the worst of the worlds ideas.

However, aside from this drawback, there is another victim of this seemingly unstoppable change, and that's local cultures and traditions. One such tradition under threat that was highlighted recently, was the Sikh tradition of 'Shastar Vidya' or “science of weapons” .... a warrior fighting technique very much of its time i.e. late 17th century India. In the intervening centuries it has been taught to Sikhs by masters of the technique, but these masters, like the followers of these techniques, have slowly diminished over the intervening centuries.


Fighting Sikhs -  Akali Nihang 

This has now reached the stage where as far as is known, there is only one 'master' left to pass on the knowledge, and rather funnily, he lives in in the Wolverhampton area of the English Midlands. Nidar Singh Nihang considers himself in the tenth generation of an unbroken master-student tradition, deriving from the  tradition of Guru Gobind Singh. He now travels the world teaching the archaic skills but, he has no one to follow him as the master (it takes at least ten years to get the basic skills), but fears that unless he does get an apprentice before its too late, then he will be the last true master in the full tradition of the elite warrior caste called the Akali Nihang ("the immortal crocodiles").



By the turn of the last century the Akali Nihang dress tradition
was getting a bit extreme.

It's always sad when a tradition dies out .... although it has to be said that some Sikh's think he's wrong, and there are forums discussing his brand of Sikhism.  The beliefs of the small Nihang sect, are not mainstream to Sikhism and the Nihangs still maintain some tenets of the Hindu faith, they have three scriptures rather than one and these extra books contain influences from Hinduism. Also many Nihangs also eat meat and drink alcohol, which fundamentalist Sikhs disagree with. Traditionally they also drank bhang, an infusion of cannabis, to get closer to God (sort of Rastafarian Sikhs) .

Still, despite the opposition, and he admits to over 84 death threats from other Sikhs in his first two years as a teacher alone, (sadly many Sikhs are just as violent as the other religions that currently believe in heresy ... ), the publicity he has got from the media will no doubt turn up at least one apprentice to carry on the work. But judging from the extreme forms the  Akali Nihang dress code has gone to in India he may be too late ....



There's always one who doesn't really
understand the dress code