Spamalot & The Sunday Obituary
Members of staff at the Raccoon Arms are not solely engaged in serving the customers, pulling pints, changing barrels, preventing patrons from buying too many packets of peanuts merely to see if the model on the board they’re pinned to is wearing a bra, breaking-up fights, spitting in the sawdust and ensuring ‘er upstairs has a ready supply of Guinness under her mattress to keep her quiet. We also have a behind-closed-doors life that the tap-room plebs have little or no knowledge of. With this in mind, let me invite you backstage and enlighten you as to a particular irritant we deal with on a daily basis – no, not barred ex-patrons sneaking-in wearing Groucho Marx masks, not even the sound of the Dwarf singing ‘Das Lied der Deutschen’ after one too many Doppelbocks, but spam.
If you have an email account or a blog of your own, you’ll be familiar enough with spam. It’s the cyber equivalent of the crap that comes through the letter-box advertising two-for-one deals at your local pizza venue or promoting your Green candidate at the next council elections. Imagine about 200 of those landing in your lobby or hallway every day and then you’d have an inkling of the avalanche of spam this site is inundated with during an average 24-hour cycle. Every time the landlady and I check the comments, we ritually delete the spam. If either of us haven’t been online for a couple of hours, there’ll usually be about 20-odd already in the spam sin-bin. Overnight, you can be talking between fifty and a hundred. Occasionally, some spam inadvertently finds itself on the comments page and is hurriedly removed. It took a week or two of my stint as barman to instantly recognise spam as soon as I saw it, but now it’s second nature. Often, the name gives the game away. A random selection of user names taken from this week’s spam box includes the following…
Steroids Muscle Gain, Atomic Email Studio Discount, Pizza Ok Gorzow, Hair loss remedies at home, Get rid of acne…and so on.
They usually appear attached to a post from upwards of two or three years back, which is another giveaway, as is the comment itself. They tend to sound like someone speaking in broken English, who hasn’t quite got the hang of the grammar – something like ‘Hey, you is great site!’ Others pose as a genuine compliment, along the lines of ‘Just found this site. You write really well and I’ll be coming back here again.’ Then there’s the technical question one – ‘I couldn’t help but notice you use xyz formatting. Could you tell me how to access this programme, as I really love your site and would like to use it on my own?’ Some don’t even bother going that far and simply advise the reader to try a particular product in one sentence or contain half-a-dozen dodgy links to other websites, some of which are – yes, you guessed it – of a pornographic nature; and quite a few of the Ladyboy variety, oddly enough. I’ve no doubt the majority are composed by a computer or perhaps a bunch of chimps who’ve yet to get round to writing one Shakespeare play, automatically and simultaneously dispatched to a thousand websites across the globe. An example of the kind of nonsensical comment that constitutes the average spam post is…
‘Joe Buck’s garment was actually a horrible peach coloured cowboy shirt but it ha. It is also a good idea if you have to do chores outside to try to avoid the peak heating hours of andidates, bashing Tebow, election year and Legoland accounts P…’
We might naturally assume this is a phenomenon of the age in which we live, but spam has been a side-effect of cyberspace ever since the big bang of computing. The first spam email is believed to have been sent in 1978, at a time when spam to me was the type of fritter we seemed to be served at the school dinner table every bloody day. As far as computers go, I’m akin to a competent driver who opens his car bonnet and is confronted by a baffling array of machinery; and the same applies with my limited knowledge of web systems and the like. As long as I can get from A to B, I’m happy. A more detailed account of spamming and where it emanates from is out there, but I can only get so far before I feel like I’m watching an old ‘Open University’ programme on geometric mathematics (or whatever), too mesmerised by the shirt of the hirsute presenter to digest what he’s saying…
BRIAN SEWELL (1931-2015)
Harold Hobson, Milton Shulman, Kenneth Tynan, Alexander Walker – heavyweight critics specialising in specific strands of the arts from an era when the press possessed the kind of clout unimaginable today, when a play or film or exhibition could close prematurely on the strength of a bad review, when Fleet Street was an actual geographical location rather than a generic term for the manufacturers of Wapping-based dailies that no one buys anymore, when a newspaper summarised the previous day’s events with a poetic clarity that today’s 24-hour media interns fishing the web for stories could have no concept of.
Added to that pantheon of opinionated and impassioned inky-fingered scribes should be the name of Brian Sewell, who died yesterday aged 84. Sewell probably was the last of a dying breed that has now ceased to be. The illegitimate son of the notorious early twentieth century composer, Peter Warlock (who died before Sewell was born), Sewell spent many years as an art dealer as well as an expert in old masters at Christie’s before becoming a critic; he was mentored by the former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Anthony Blunt, and was first exposed to the public glare during Blunt’s 1979 exposure as the fourth man in the Cambridge Spy Ring.
Five years later, Sewell became art critic for the London Evening Standard, following a stint on Tatler magazine. He had an immediate impact, not mincing his words when he took a dislike to something, but how those words flowed with a florid eloquence reflected in his lyrically lucid and deliciously archaic version of the Queen’s English, of which Sewell himself said, ‘People always say I sound like a 1930s lesbian’. By the late 1990s, this speaking voice was being aired on television and radio, bringing Sewell’s uncompromising views on art to an audience whose own viewpoint had been blunted and stilted by political correctness.
Sewell’s admirable refusal to curb his acerbic tongue to suit contemporary mores made him a figure of hate for many. Accused of both misogyny and homophobia (quite ironic), Sewell was once the recipient of an unbelievably pompous letter signed by thirty-five right-on artists attacking him for daring to speak his mind. Sewell lapped-up the assault with characteristic mischievousness. He was a man who basically didn’t give a f**k, and in the era he expressed this, he was on his own. And now he’s gone. He should be mourned.
Petunia Winegum
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September 20, 2015 at 9:42 am -
A fascinating coincidence of departures – within 24 hours we hear of the deaths of Brian Sewell and Jackie Collins, a far less likely coupling than Jeremy Cobyn and Diane Abbott.
He of the erudite, acerbic tongue and most splendidly ‘queer’ diction, she of the chick-lit bonkbusters for barely-literate chavs. Both leave the world a less colourful place. RIP, separately or together.-
September 20, 2015 at 10:25 am -
Yes, I just heard about Jackie Collins. When I scanned a couple of pages of ’50 Shades of Grey’ a year or two ago, my first thought was that it resembled third-rate Jackie Collins. In a way, I suppose that’s a back-handed compliment.
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September 20, 2015 at 12:40 pm -
I’ll miss Sewell; there was always the delicious probability that he would offend someone…
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September 20, 2015 at 10:01 am -
even the sound of the Dwarf singing ‘Das Lied der Deutschen’ after one too many Doppelbocks, but spam.
I was born partially deaf, but had an op as a babe, and as a result I tend to talk L O U D L Y and couldn’t hold a tune with a Norfolk sugar beet transporter (a shipping container lorry with the top flexed off over the course of those long, dark, winter evenings…which start around 14:00 here). So no one, not even our power shower gets to hear my singing. It also means I get the intonations of common speech wrong and live in fear of offending someone unintentionally…if I don’t concentrate fully on what and HOW I am saying something I find I have just turned ,say,collecting a repeat prescription at the Chemist into a rerun of a1980’s Arnie film dialogue …trust me ‘paracetamol’ sounds far too much like ‘parabellum’ for comfort.
As a professional alcoholic who took his alcoholism seriously, I found that beer, even doppelbock (‘maibock’ is better btw), didn’t get me where I needed to be quickly enough and I hate that ‘you only rent beer’ feeling.
And you just have to love an national anthem that praises the beauty of German girls, was written on an English island and was regarded by the establishment of the day as being akin to the ‘Red Flag’. People thought Genosse (‘Comrade’)Hoffman von Fallersleben as being somewhere to the left of Jeremy Corbyn.
Only the British could turn a revolutionary anthem into a High Church hymn in praise of our Lord.
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September 20, 2015 at 10:14 am -
Oh oh tell a lie, I did actually ‘sing’ for Granddaughter2 aka ‘Eichkatzl’ the other night. She was having a grizzly so ‘Opa’ (me) took her outside for a smoke and ‘sang’ her to
sleepinto a sonically induced coma. It was only after I brought her back inside , glazed eyed on my arm her little face frozen not just from the cold of a Norfolk summer night but in a rictus of sheer terror, that I actually thought about what I had been ‘singing’ to her…a traditional German lullaby..“Hoppa hoppa rider, if he falls he’ll scream, if he falls in a ditch (or ‘grave’) he’ll be eaten by ravens”
Suitably grimm I thought.
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September 20, 2015 at 10:30 am -
It sounds it! Mind you, some of those traditional English lullabys are bloody weird. Rock-a-bye-baby in the treetop? What the hell is a baby doing in a treetop?
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September 20, 2015 at 10:34 am -
What the hell is a baby doing in a treetop?
Sounds like one of those TV compo lawyer adverts. “Did your baby suffer multiple fractures falling out of a tree after a branch broke? Should the head Gardener have placed barriers around the tree top? Phone us now on 0800-LOADSAMONNEE and get the justice you deserve!”
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September 20, 2015 at 10:38 am -
‘Have you suffered a serious injury such as breaking your crown after going up a hill to fetch a pail of water? You could be entitled to compensation.’
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September 20, 2015 at 10:42 am -
Gives a whole new monetary meaning to ‘tumbling jill’….
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September 20, 2015 at 10:55 am -
English lullabys are bloody weird
“one for the Master, one for the Dame and one for the little boy who lives down the lane” sounds just wrong on so many counts…
Oh well, at least Jill came after tumbling with Jack….fifty shades of Mother Goose.
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September 20, 2015 at 11:08 am -
It doesn’t sound wrong at all if you learned your nursery rhymes from Leslie Brooke’s illustrations.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20652/20652-h/20652-h.htm-
September 20, 2015 at 11:22 am -
And here is a baby in a tree top:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20652/20652-h/20652-h.htm(see page 149)
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September 20, 2015 at 10:28 am -
Have you ever seen the film the late great architectural critic Ian Nairn made at the Munich Beer Festival? A wonderfully English reaction to Bavarian excess!
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September 20, 2015 at 10:42 am -
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b116/horta/nairndisgustin_zps18yniobc.gif
“Disgusting! These Bastards get through more beer…”
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September 20, 2015 at 11:12 am -
I shall very much miss hearing the views and the voice (what perfect diction) of Brian Sewell. Above all he was his own man. Opinionated, certainly, but his erudition formed that opinion.
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September 20, 2015 at 11:19 am -
I don’t understand anything technical, so I don’t know how you cope. When I got my first “tablet” it sort of hooked me up to various sites. I don’t know how. One was what I believe is a “dating site” called “Anastacia Dating”. Within 20 minutes I discovered that a crumbly middle aged monk was very attractive to hoards of Ann Kournikova look-a-likes from the Ukraine. Very good for my ego that was….sadly for them I have remained true to my special friend, Sister Eva Longoria
As for Brian Sewell, I agree with you completely. He was prepared to take on the “right on” arts establishment and point out when necessary that the Emperor really wasn’t wearing any clothes…for that alone he should be commended. Perhaps a little disrespectfully I shall always remember him being lampooned in the often excellent “Dead Ringer”, as in this episode at (22 minutes in if you want to fast forward).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxewFdyaW30Or for 5 minutes with Brian Sewell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EFJ_rpSAa4-
September 20, 2015 at 11:37 am -
a crumbly middle aged monk was very attractive to hoards of Ann Kournikova look-a-likes
Not surprising that Slavic girls go gooey for your type when the only approved pin up in their culture is of a geriatric midget displaying his 6pack bare chested on horseback or wrestling a tiger (Siegfried and Roy say ‘Hi Vlad’). They don’t call him ‘Vlad The Impaler’ for nothing you know.
I, for one, can understand perfectly that 18 year hot Slavic Virgins might be tired of the Gay Kommissar type and want to meet YOU.
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September 20, 2015 at 2:11 pm
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