the brilliantly leaping gazelle

May 16, 2025

34:63 presents “Count Arthur Strong.”

Why do some people imagine that just because their success in one field of human endeavour has afforded them some measure of celebrity, it somehow confers upon them some kind of greater a moral authority, one that the rest of us should take heed of?

Gary Crisp, who looks uncannily like Count Arthur Strong without his hat, is a serial offender who it comes to this kind of thing and like Strong, he is a someone who thinks he’s more intelligent than he is and thus fits himself in hot water as a result. Unlike Strong however, this was all done for laughs and unlike Strong, he wasn’t cancelled by the BBC years ago. Resulting in a interview in yesterdays Daily Telegraph in which he gave his opinions on two of the most divisive issues of the day, Gaza and trans.

Quite why anyone care’s what he thinks about anything other than football, I’m not really too sure. It’d be like asking Orson Welles how to bake a cake. But we live in an age where people do and where ‘celebrities’ own ego and sense of self-importance convinces them that they do. We also live in an age in which the media love to give an opportunity for someone like Crisp to say something controversial, because that will ultimately generate more revenue for them. It’s such a mutually beneficial arrangement that its essentially a digital ‘reach around’

So Crisp can say, safe in the knowledge that he’s saying the right thing – right in the sense that it won’t harm his career – “I think if you’re silent on these issues, you’re almost complicit.” The problem for him though, is that by not staying silent on these issues he is complicit in revealing himself to be a mental pigmy.

“It’s beyond depraved, what they’re going through, unimaginable. I’ve got kids. They’re grown-up now, but every day people are losing their children, their brothers and sisters. I don’t know how the world thinks this is OK.” Does he not understand what happens in a war? Does Does he not understand that Israel is surrounded by countries who wish it never existed, or that the founding charter of Hamas espouses jihad – holy war – until Israel is no more.

“Obviously October 7 was awful, but it’s very important to know your history and to study the massacres that happened prior to this, many of them against the Palestinian people.” There it is, the but. The ‘but’ that somehow transforms anti-Semitism into a bastardized moral equivalence. Is Crisp an authority in Middle Eastern history or is he just a student at the University of Twitter?

The attack by Hamas wasn’t just ‘awful. Being stuck in a traffic jam is awful. An undercooked meal is awful. Biting into a chocolate only to discover its coffee flavoured that’s awful. To suggest that the massacre of 1,141 people, the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, was ‘awful’ belies the sheer scale of its barbarity and his stupidity.

He is lives in a country where his stupidity has no cost, where his luxury beliefs are protected by democratic freedoms that the people of Gaza can only dream of. One where having different views won’t make you fearful of a knock on the door at dead of night, one where being gay isn’t seen as a crime, and in a time where one can earn an obscene amount of money by talking about an irrelevance to adults with who have yet to fully grow up.

He is a highly distilled iteration of the same combination of presumed moral authority, self-importance and entitlement that saw a a load of people most people had never heard of write a letter to The Guardian last week expressing something with some others.

Crisp also has deep feelings for these others. “They’re some of the most persecuted on the planet, trans people. You’ve got to be very careful not to have bigoted views on that. I genuinely feel really badly for trans people. Imagine going through what they have to go through in life. Is there even any issue?”

Of course he thinks that. Once again, at no point in his life will he ever be be confronted with the reality of his luxury beliefs. No man will. No man will ever find women demanding access to mens toilets, no man will themselves losing against mediocre women in sporting competitions just as no man will ever see their identity turned into little more than performative wish fulfilment by deluded women.

Its precisely because he’s so removed from the consequences of his luxury beliefs that he can afford to hold them.

What a Count.

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May 13, 2025

34:63 presents “Harold Macmillan.”

The news that was reported recently that president Donald Tangoed has ordered the US authorities to reopen and expand Alcatraz, the notorious former prison on an island off San Francisco Bay that has been closed for more than 60 years is inspired.

Firstly, if it is all part of his wider strategy of ‘flooding the zone’ – a strategy that involves issuing a torrent of executive orders, controversial statements, and the like with the aim of overwhelming the opposition and the media and creating confusion – its working. The media in America are now totally unsure of what news coming out of the White House is fake, true, or worse fake that becomes true because the media endlessly bang on about it and thus it gains popular support.

It’s like when I was younger and I was caught shoplifting. Nothing serious. But my parents went mad. So I flooded the zone, except back then it wasn’t a political strategy with stupid name, it was swerve after swerve. I grassed up my brother for smoking – he was then twelve – then accused my parents of both being hypocrites because they smoked and for good measure also grassed him up for helping himself from the drinks cabinet. I really hit the jackpot when I complained that as I didn’t get any pocket money, it was really their fault.

They were so angry at this, that the shoplifting was forgotten and the discussion became instead on how lucky I was compared to their own experience of childhood in rural Ireland. All walking to school barefoot, working on the farm, yada-yada. In much the way, Tangoed has done the same, albeit on a far grander scale, so his critics constantly find themselves in a state of utter confusion and exhaustion.

From his issuing of an unusually high number of executive orders – including basing transgender girls compete in female only sports at in schools to pardoning the rioters who stormed the Capitol building – as well as him making a number of controversial statements – taking control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”, the media perpetually confused.

So maybe it is part of that strategy, to get the media all worked up about Alcatraz. But then again, maybe it isn’t, and if it isn’t, I think it’s a great idea. Why prisons are built in or near to populated areas has always baffled me, especially the high security ones, the ones that house the really mad or bad prisoners. That’s a crime in waiting, putting them near the law abiding public. No, its my belief that if certain individuals have committed a crime that so heinous that it breaks the social contract that exists between citizens and the state, then the state no longer has any obligation toward them. Some murderer’s, serial rapists, terrorists and paedophiles fall into that category.

The French had the right idea with Devils Island, an essentially uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where hardened criminals were shipped off to. It was less three meals a day than a endless quest for survival. We have our own Devils Island. Well nearly. Gruinard Island is a small, oval-shaped island just off the coast in North West Scotland. In 1942, because it was uninhabited, it was used by the military to experiment with anthrax. Theoretically decontaminated in 1990, it is remains uninhabited.

Why not just put the worst in society there? With no prospect of leaving. Food drops once a month – basic rations -, minimal accommodation and let them make the best of it. Boats patrolling the waters around the island, 24hrs a day, armed guards with orders to shoot to wound anyone attempting to escape. Yes, without proper medical treatment they’d die, but proper medical treatment is to be found in hospitals, and hospitals are part of the society whose norms of behaviour they flouted.

As a deterrent it’d be remarkably effective.

Anyway, Tangoed controls the narrative, in a way that our glorious leader can only dream about. Plonker seems to be perpetually in fire-fighting mode, responding to things, rather than making those things happen. Already the news cycle – theirs and ours -has been forced to move on, covering the more serious business of dealing with the trade deals with Britain and Saudi, proposals to drastically cut the price of prescription drugs alongside the piffle surrounding Air Farce One. There’s also the ongoing brouhaha’s surrounding tariffs, dealing with Russia in his ongoing struggle to affect peace in Ukraine.

By tomorrow though, or certainly by next week, there’ll be more things for the media to fret about, because that’s what they do. It isn’t so much ‘flooding the zone’, as creating the borders that allow there to be such a zone in the first place.

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May 6, 2025

34:63 presents “Graham Linehan”

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I saw in ‘The Guardian’ the other day that ‘More than 400 actors and film industry professionals have signed an open letter pledging “solidarity” with the trans, non-binary and intersex communities who have been affected by the recent supreme court ruling.’

Of course they did.

Why is it a such a uniquely actorly thing to do, to imagine that just because their success in one field of human endeavour has afforded them some measure of celebrity, it somehow confers upon them some kind of greater a moral authority, one that the rest of us should take heed of?

The letter is quoted as saying,“We must now urgently work to ensure that our trans, non-binary, and intersex colleagues, collaborators and audiences are protected from discrimination and harassment in all areas of the industry – whether on set, in a production office, or at a cinema.”

A few things immediately spring to mind.

The first is that actors are by quite a wide margin the one group of people I’d expect to show solidarity with trans-women, for the simple reason that their entire working life is essentially pretending to be someone else. So the idea that by simply by saying they’re someone else, they they become that someone else, isn’t that outlandish to them as it might be to a say, a mechanic.

Additionally actors – pronounced as if John Gielgud was hamming up the word for all it was worth – are on a ceaseless quest for validation, and not just from themselves either. Those big awards ceremonies are nothing more than a giant narcissism circus with frocks and because the media fawn all over them – to be granted a red carpet interview or some other content clickbait – it perpetuates their sense of overblown entitlement.

Actors are forever banging on about the research they do before embarking on a role, often living the life of the character they are going to play, sometimes even undergoing bodily modification to better achieve ‘authenticity’.

Robert de Niro is a good example of this – for his portrayal of Jake la Motta in ‘Raging Bull’, he trained for, and then fought in three professional matches. He then gained over 60 pounds – nearly 9 stones – to play the ageing La Motta. To better play Travis Bickle in ‘Taxi Driver’, he drove a taxi around New York for two weeks. We know this because de Niro himself told everyone. It’s become a benchmark for other actors to emulate. Thankfully, he has ever played a serial killer.

Actors just love going all ‘method’, often staying in character for the duration of a films shoot, even when the cameras aren’t rolling, because of some ridiculous idea of ‘honesty’, ‘of needing to fully embrace the character’. How is this anything other than a very diluted version of a trans woman and his ‘lived reality’?

So whilst the letter loftily proclaims ‘We believe the ruling undermines the lived reality and threatens the safety of trans, non-binary, and intersex people living in the UK.’, it ignores the ‘lived reality’ of actual women, their safety, their rights and freedoms. They can just shut up and quit their yapping about single-sex spaces. Female rights are all well and good, it seems, right up until men with delusions are adversely affected by women not wanting to share those rights. Then the rights of the majority of the UK population must be eroded to satisfy the nonsense of a minority of a minority.

That is the key here. This isn’t some great civil rights movement, similar to the ones fought by African Americas in in 1960’s or by lesbians and gays in Britain in the 1980’s.Those battles were about gaining the rights enjoyed by everyone else, not about taking rights by reducing other peoples.

But then actors enjoy a privileged position in an increasingly celebrity obsessed world. And just like the trans activists who expect their every whim to be unquestioningly granted, and get more than a bit stroppy when they’re not, so too actors imagine that their concerns should be everyone concerns.

Conversely, actors are only too happy to criticise others who don’t share their same ‘moral’ worldview, feeling it not only their right but their duty to tell us how they feel and therefore, we should take heed of this and act accordingly. Robert de Niro was one of the many US actors who very vocally gushed glowing tributes to Mr Magoo when he retired from the 2024 presidential campaign and with nary a heartbeat transferred their support to Kabbalah Vibe.

Did her campaign the world of good did that.

So frequently are actors given to this method of visible virtue are they that one can’t help but wonder if She Who Must Not Be Named has a point when she suggests that it is more to do with career prospects than anything else that motivates them to sign these sort of things.

Because I’ve yet to learn of a newsagent having her marriage collapse on her because of the constant harassment she was getting from other newsagents, the boycott of her shop by customers, refusal of suppliers to sell to her, for crisp, chocolate and sweet makers to publicly denounce her as someone they wanted no associate with, simply for expressing an opinion that others disagreed with.

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May 4, 2025

34:63 presets ” 1 Corinthians 13 : 11.”

Today is “Star Wars Day.

Of course it is.

All because a load grown-ups who have’t fully adjusted to the fact their no longer children, think that when they says the date out loud, it reminds them of the line, ‘May the force be with you’. I know, I feel bad for even acknowledging it’s a thing. Don’t misunderstand me. ‘Star Wars ‘ was a great film. Was, not is, as Yoda might say.

I was 10 when I saw it and it was like nothing I’d ever seen. But then I was 10, and at 10 it doesn’t take much to excite a boy. Well maybe not in 2024 but in 1977? The main thing I remember about it though – apart from the bit near the end where the rebel ships attack the Death Star, which was easily the best part – was queuing up around the block beforehand and having to keep our coats on in the cinema because there was a heating strike.

But quite why it has become some kind of revered cultural artefact, as opposed to the entertaining yet ephemeral piece of tat it was, is a constant source of bemusement to me. It has spawned sequels and prequels, standalone films set within its own universe and television shows. In fact the only truly innovative thing that ‘Star Wars’ ever did was to create a lucrative world of merchandising opportunities, where all manner of ways to induce pester power from children to divorce parents from their money were dreamt up.

Some of these children have never quite recovered from their childhood and even though they look like adults, are desperate to recreate it. But just like an addict nothing searching to recreate the feeling of their first hit, nothing will ever be as good as the first time. So despite being powerful studio heads, movie executives or other equally valuable members of society, they keep on churning out more of the same in the mistaken belief it is has deeper meaning beyond simply funding their coke habit.

So of course today is ‘Star Wars Day’.

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May 3, 2025

34:63 presents “Asterix”

I must confess to feeling slightly disappointed upon waking this morning to discover that the sky hadn’t fallen in. Because yesterday, the media were full of either grim pronouncements or jubilant celebrations about exactly what Reforms UK’s performance in Thursdays elections meant for the future of British politics.

Brexit, as it is for most things nowadays, was involved, being the catalyst that lay behind this wholly predictable, and indeed, widely predicted drubbing. Indeed, in all the coverage I’ve read, what is striking is just how much opinions are shaped by Brexit. In a tangential yet unremarked way, Brexit was but a symptom of a greater, more fundamental problem confronting democracy, not just in the UK, but elsewhere. One that moreover, has the capacity to fatally undermine it by using its own inherent flaws to achieve this, voter turnout, or more accurately, voter absence.

In all of the mayoral elections contested on Thursday, not one of them had a voter turnout of more than 34% and neither of the ones that elected Reform UK mayors managed even 30%. Why no media attention is being given to this problem is beyond me, especially as a little over a year ago the dangers were revealed to exist.

Remember George Galloway’s campaign in the Rochdale by-election last year? Where he made it clear from the outset that he was targeting the Muslim community in Rochdale – 30% of its population – and instead of focusing on local or even national issues, but rather on Israel/Gaza? It was an act of effectively strategic masterstroke, resulting him getting 40% of all the votes cast, which sounds impressive, until you realise only 39.7% of voters actually bothered to. And then suddenly that 40% seems even less impressive, especially when you realise that that once impressive 40% translates into 12,335 actual votes.

This trick – targeting a specific community and focusing on an issue not directly related to their daily lives – was repeated a few months later at the 2024 general election. Whilst George Galloway wasn’t re-elected, five candidates were, all pandering to concerns of a minority but crucially, a minority who turned out to vote. Together with Jeremy Corblimey, they formed the Independent Alliance and their ranks could easily have been increased to nine, because three candidates, standing on a similar platform were narrowly defeated.

It isn’t that surprising that Labour is so quiet on this issue – low voter turnout – because it suited them very well at the 2024 general election. Despite the fact there was a load of guff in some of the media about how constituency boundary changes and the need for voter I.D would work against Labour, like so much political speculation, that didn’t happen. Voter turnout was about 60%, and despite Labour getting a lower share of that, 34%, somehow they got 412 seats or 63% of them.

Some awfully clever people have worked out that the you take into account the number that did vote for them, the number that didn’t and the number of people who could have voted but chose not to, combine all of that and only 20% of the UK electorate did so. Of course the media are predicting all manner of things, because that’s what the media do. Political forecasting is as good at predicting the future as reading tea-leaves, checking ones horoscope or listening to a clairvoyant.

Its much easier than them questioning why this keeps happening, why political parties have consistently failed to engage with voters the way seem all to happy to do with lobbyists. And by not doing this, they’re not only perpetuating the problem, they’re failing to do their job. Nearly as much as the politicians.

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May 2, 2025

34:63 presents “Mari Wilson.”

As with all things, the devil is in the detail, and there is a lot of detail for Farrago to dwell on, following the overnight constituency, local council and mayoral elections. It is now Friday afternoon and more grim tidings are expected to be heading Plonkers way. But the results are just as troubling for Farrago, albeit in a different way, one replete with potentially longer term damage.

First of all, a quick shufti at the actual results. The Reform UK candidate, Sarah Poitin, won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election by six votes, overturning a majority that rights, shouldn’t have been vulnerable. However, as stunning – and widely predicted – as her victory undoubtedly was, she only got 38.7% of the votes cast and only 42.6% of the voters actually bothered to vote. And even that was lower than the turnout less than a year ago. at the general election.It’s not like there hadn’t been any publicity, media interest and speculation about it or anything.

Which means a few things, none of them good for her glittering parliamentary career, which may or may not happen or for Reform UK’s positioning of itself as a viable electoral proposition. Firstly, with a majority that is the very definition of ‘by the skin of their teeth’, and with such a low turnout to boot, a better result for her would’ve been to have lost by six instead. Because you can bet that the local Labour Party will scrutinise her parliamentary attendance record, forensically examine her expenses claims, flood her constituency surgery with labyrinthine constituent problems, all designed to portray her as bad MP at the next election. They’ll also be all over her social media content – especially in her youthful postings – for any damaging content, and trying to unearth anything in her past that might be used against her. So basically what every political party handed such opportunity would do.

The situation in Greater Lincolnshire, where Dame Angela Jenkins became Reform UK’s first mayor, is if anything, potentially even worse. Yes, she’s a former Conservative MP so she knows how the game is played and yes, as mayor of newly formed super council, essentially overseeing three smaller councils each represented two senior councillors each, – given as how all of whom are Conservative,- this in theory doesn’t pose as much of a problem as if they were Labour. I didn’t know this, but prior to last night, over 65% of Reform UK’s local councillors were defectors from the Conservatives. But be that as it may, Ange got her gold chain with a vote share of 42.2% – good -, a majority of nearly 40,000 – double good -, on a voter turnout of, er, 29.9%.

So her election has succeeded in highlighting the flaws in our voting system and nothing else. As the mayor of a new super council, she needs the support of six others to ratify any policies she wants to introduce. They in turn are at the mercy of local officials, in town halls and council departments to make those policies real. And successful implementation of her policies will, even if they succeed in permeating down through the layers in bureaucracy, rely on council staff and contractors, who might be instinctively opposed to Reform UK. They won’t want her mayoralty to become a shining example of good governance should Farrago enter No.10.

And this is why the greater the electoral success that Reform UK has, the greater the threat to Reform UK has of suffering irreperable reputational damage. It can only present themselves as the change Britain needs for so long. At some point, they’ll have to deliver that change, and whilst bemoaning the structural unfairness of the first-past-the-post voting system chimes with people who care about such things, if potholes are left unrepaired, schools face staff shortages, or social care is pared back even further, nobody will much care.

They won’t care that central government has cut the councils budget, but they will care the their council tax bill goes up or that they have to buy a residents parking permit. They won’t care that the council is barely meeting its statutory obligations but they will care when those statuary obligations are perceived to be applied discriminatorily. They won’t care when council run things that they never use are closed, but they will care when things that they do use close. Then they’ll care, then they’ll care a lot.

And it won’t just be Farrago regretting getting the thing he always wanted.

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April 30, 2025

34:63 presents “The Corporal Jones guide to politics.”

In recent days there has been a lot of speculation in the press concerning what exactly Plonker will do in order to nullify the threat of a Reform UK rout of Labour at the upcoming local elections tomorrow. They have pretty much conceded the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby, which voting also place tomorrow, which on paper they should win, given as how the former MP Mike Amesbury won it with a majority of nearly 15,000 at the General Election barely a year ago.

But then having a by-election forced upon you because the sitting MP had to resign after recieving a 10-week suspended prison sentence after pleading guilty to punching a constituent last year, is not a good look. But neither is it a good look for a politician to carefully finesse his public image so that him saying little about actual policy in the general election campaign – so that everyone can fill in their own hopes onto him – works only so far. Which in his case, turned out – to no-ones surprise – to be until he was elected and soon thereafter revealed himself to be as slippery as most other politicians.

Anything less than a resounding victory for Labour- an increased majority, an increased voter turnout from the general election and the other parties being thoroughly rejected by the electorate – will be a defeat. It remains to be see if its a crushing one or not. The local elections pose more of a threat, because most people will vote based on how competent or not they judge central government to be. Sad but true. Its politics. Just like when in February Local Government Secretary Angela Ratner announced that local elections in East Sussex, West Sussex, Essex, Thurrock, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Norfolk, Suffolk and Surrey would be delayed for one year to allow major reorganisations to take place. It may well be true, maybe there’s a compelling rationale behind her decision. But in order to prevent the taint of political chicanery being levelled and gaining traction, making the announcement less than three months before they’re happening, again, isn’t a good look.

But this government seems to be constantly bedevilled by events, responding to them, and being in constant firefighting mode, rather than shaping them and exuding calm. The postponement of the aforementioned is but one example of this. Another is sudden flurry of headlines this week suggesting that Plonker will take a stronger line on immigration in order to try and mitigate the threat from Reform UK. Its not because of something as old fashioned as its the right thing to do and that doing such – reducing the numbers of people being granted asylum – might have a beneficial effect on already overstretched public services. That Plonker seems unwilling to grasp this obvious political calculation is one reason why Reform UK is polling so well and why all Plonker has are desperate last minute throws of the dice. His default position on immigration is to label anyone who thinks that immigration needs tougher action as racist or bigoted or far right extremists, effectively attempting to shut down any sensible discussion on this topic.

But as Reforms growing threat, and Labours craven reaction to it amply demonstrate, while such a strategy might work in posh metropolitan circles, out in the wild, out where most of the electorate live, out where the very real consequences of immigration are being felt, that strategy isn’t working.

Don’t be thinking I’m in any way a fan of Farrago. I think he’s nothing more than a snake oil salesman, all smarm and the kind of bluster that most people mistake as plain speaking. Like a lot of people flirting with Reform UK, its only because of the lack of any other viable political alternative And like a lot of people who are considering voting Reform UK, my values and principles, my fundamental conception of what the state should do – and what it shouldn’t – and what obligations the state owed to the citizen – and vice-versa – haven’t really changed. Its the political parties who have changed out of all recognition.

Despite the many horrors that the Grocers Daughter visited on the UK, she at least had ideological underpinnings to them. There was a logic, twisted and serving the interests of a minority, yes, but a logic. The most socialist thing about Plonker is his first name, and the only thing he stands for is a piss.

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April 28, 2025

34:63 presents “Neither shaken nor stirred.”

My last few posts have not been about especially frothy and lightweight topics, so you’ll be delighted to read that I’ve decided to put my earnestness to one side and instead focus my attentions on the worlds most famous secret agent, James Bond.

I’ll try and be as brief as possible, because eventually I’m going to name the person who I think has been more of enemy to Bond than SMERSH, Blofeld and Oddjob combined and the reasons why I think that.

First of all however, I need to be clear about which James Bond it is I’m discussing. Is it the Bond of the books or the Bond of the movies?

There’s the Bond of the original looks penned by Ian Fleming. There are 12 of these and 2 books of short stories. Fleming died in 1964, and the first ‘continuation novel – which either kept a beloved character alive or kept a lucrative cash cow going , your pick – was written in 1968 by Kingsley Amis.

So far, six authors have written a total of 25 such books, some writing Bond as existing in the modern age, others writing their Bond as existing within the timeframe of gaps of Flemings originals. With me so far? Original Bond and ‘Continuation’ Bond.

Then there’s also ‘Spin Off’ Bond, the ‘Young Bond’ book series – started in in 2005, two authors and nine books – which has the schoolboy Bond doing things that only exist because of the authors guaranteed payday, the ‘Double 0’ series that doesn’t feature Bond at all but instead the lethal licence holders – one author, two books, and most bizarrely of all, ‘The Moneypenny Dairies’ one author, three books.

Therefore a compelling case could be made for suggesting that the Fleming estate, who commission these ‘continuation’ ad spin-off books, have not exactly covered themselves in glory when discussing who has tarnished the Bond of the literary world. However, they are but amateurs when it comes to disgracing the world of Bond. Reading all the guff that followed the news that the Broccoli family have upped sticks and handed full creative control to Amazon for the film rights, one might think that the Bond films were great masterworks of cinema, rather than being little more than ‘Carry On’ films, albeit with better production values. A lump of coal has more in common with a flawless diamond than the films have with the books. The films took the books title, characters names and basic plot and essentially made up the rest and not even that in the recent ones.

In the original Fleming books – two of which contained nine short stories – Bond sleeps with fourteen women. The films though turned the Bond of the books into little more than a sexually transmitted disease in a tuxedo, while avoiding all references to his borderline sadistic, clearly misogynistic and other qualities that not suited to thrilling cinematic romps. Another bugbear is that in the books Bond is often in real danger, and has only his courage to rely on. There are hardly any gadgets and the ‘Q’ in the books is simply the quartermaster who gives Bond advice on guns. The films? Things got so bad that Eddie Izzard even did a sketch about it

So in the same way as the Fleming estate, the Broccoli family can quite legitimately be accused of tarnishing the name of Bond. But even they are not the villains here. Nor is it Jeff Bezos, despite him looking like Blofeld and being a megalomaniac billionaire who controls a vast retail and media empire and dreams of conquering space. I mean, if he had a furry white cat he couldn’t be better suited to the role.

No, the person I hold uniquely and irrevocably to blame for all of the ills that have befallen James Bond since 1970 is George Lazenby.

‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ (OHMSS), the only film in which he played Bond, is by quite a wide margin easily the best Bond film ever. If you think otherwise, you’re wrong. Unusually faithful to the plot of the book, great cinematography, real emotional heft, a great soundtrack and above all, in Lazenby a Bond who could fight. Just 20 minutes in and already we are treated to two fight sequences that make one realise just how poorly served by Connery we were. Critics often suggest that Lazenby couldn’t act, as if Connery was treading the boards instead of water, using his Bond pay checks to fund his forays into doing Ibsen and Shakespeare between, rather than playing himself in every film he was in. He even played the commander of a Russian nuclear submarine with a Scottish accent in ‘The Hunt for Red October. He really put the con into Connery.

Far from being a flop, as received wisdom has it, OHMSS was a hit, not a huge one, but enough of one for Lazenby to be offered a seven movie deal. Had he accepted, we’d have got Bond out for revenge, a Bond fuelled by single-minded desire to kill the person who had killed his wife, only minutes after getting married. That Bond had talked about giving up being a spy, so more ruthless, more character driven Bond might have been ours. Audiences would have believed in a simple quest for revenge more than an implausibly far fetched scheme for world domination. But we had to wait until 1989 and Timothy Daltons ‘Licence to Kill’ to get that Bond.

But he didn’t and Connery, together with acting so wooden he was fire risk, returned in ‘Diamonds are Forever’ a film that pretended that the events of OHMSS had never happened and instead reverted back to the Bond of underground lairs built out of dormant volcanoes. Had he accepted, we would have spared Roger Moores Bond, all the eyebrow acting, smutty innuendo, safari suits and the endless product placement.

Everyone wanted Lazenby. But he said no. And that’s why he’s the real villain. Because he promised so much, a glimpse of what was possible but was never to be.To make one Bond film and for it to be the best of the entire series, isn’t a really high bar. But I still daydream about how subsequent films might have focused upon Bonds quest, with him only being a secret agent incidentally, and only then when it coincided with his goal.

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April 24, 2025

34:63 presents “Different but the same.”

The idea that I posited in my last post – namely that Plonkers swift reaction to the death of the pope was best understood when viewed though the prism of self interest in this ceaseless and hyper-critical world of social media – was only half of the intended post. As I wrote then, I was eager to get back to an enjoyable daydream, so really wasn’t keen to spend too long looking at a computer screen.

The rest concerned my idea that they were both firm believers in trans ideology.

That isn’t to write that the catholic church has rethought some of its less than liberal policies and attitudes, any more than Plonker has retreated from some of his party’s more ‘progressive’ positions, but more that both are firmly of the view that simply by saying something, then that something – no matter how blatantly absurd it is – becomes true.

The showstopper part of a catholic mass is the communion ceremony, whereby thanks to the ringing of some bells, holding up some chalices up and saying a few words, some wafer biscuits and some really awful wine became the body and blood of christ. This is know as transubstantiation.

And don’t go thinking that this was is all some clever allegory or metaphor that depends on someones faith to make it real, or else a practice commonplace in 14th Century Europe, but exists now only in history books. It isn’t, it was and still is. The congregation then form an orderly queue to eat the body of christ and drink his blood as if they were pious cannibals or vampires. Really, I’m not making this up. (Click on this if you don’t believe me – its a handy guide to who says and does what at a catholic mass – and scroll down to ‘Consecration”)

Exactly how is this any different from a man claiming he’s a woman simply by saying so and pitting on a bad wig and expecting everyone else to affirm his delusion? What is the difference between burning women at the stake for being ‘witches’ and the modern day notion of cancellation, aside from 500 years and death, obviously? A fanatical mob demanding strict adherence to its own rigid beliefs has the same effect on society, irrespective of when that is or what those beliefs are.

“99.9% of women don’t have a penis.”

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April 22, 2025

34:63 presents “George Michael.”

This is only going to be a short post, as I’ve got a rather enjoyable daydream to get back to, but it just occurred to me that Plonker cares more about the death of one elderly foreigner than he does for the majority of the citizens he was elected by.

Or, being cynical, he is more worried about appearing statesman like on the world stage, than he is being actually statesman like in the UK. Actually, there is one part of his behaviour following the death of this particular foreigner that he shares with other world leaders, so in this one instance, he’s being just as shameless as the rest of them.

I think that he doesn’t much care one way or the other about this man death, but he is worried looking like he cares, looking suitably affected, issuing social media posts how he feels, about this and about, because its less to do with who’s died than the people who are upset this mans death. That’s who he’s trying to impress, to convey that he too understands their pain.

On the same day as elderly man with an increasingly worsening series of health complications succumbed to them, Plonker took to X to say something. He has since said other things, hoping like all politicians in this age of an endless news cycle, that because he says something, other people won’t start saying things about him.

Contrast this with his absence of anything following the Supreme Court ruling confirming that the term women is applies biological women. There’s been nothing. It’s been nearly a week and nothing.

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