busker

Save the Gormleys

It's so unlike me to run anything charitable or kindly that I'm positively glowing with self-satisfied pride at giving space to the Gormley's deportation woes.

Of course, I'm only doing it to ensure that others do the same for me when my pink card expires some time in 2005 and the jackbooted lackies of the INS come for me.

Customer Focus

Email from Teresa who seems to have landed a new job she wants to taunt me about, me 'owning' customer service, and all ...

Seems like la T has landed herself a cushy number as 'Assistant Director, Customer Focus, for the London Borough of Islington. Salary (get this), £61,272 - £72,408.00 (and T ain't telling where they settled on). At £1.8104 to the almight $, I'd say she's tucking into the upper end of $36,000.00 plus nauseating add ons. Speaking of nauseating, here's how the opening was pitched:

"Do you relish the challenge of a high-profile senior role with a key strategic element, but with the benefit of a 17.5 hour week (Mon, Tue and Wed)? Due to the council's commitment to work-life balance and family-friendly policies, a job share opportunity has arisen for an Assistant Director of Customer Focus (Strategic Customer Services) ... all benefits associated with working for local government incl 27 days annual leave (pro rata) and generous final salary pension scheme."

Job share? Not if I know la tigressa Teresa - it'll be hers alone within the month.

Stormy Monday

And by Hermes, this time they called it right:

• Power-packed launch of Richard Clarke's killer exposé, Against All Enemies, (in which I include the White House scallywags)
• The stunning assassination of wheelchair-bound Sheikh Yassin as he left that Gaza City mosque after dawn prayers. I tell you, no good will come of this.

The Dick Clarke book: brilliant launch by what has to be one of the best book PR coups for many a moon. Props to that publicity team.

• Devastating "60 minutes" interview the Sunday evening before the official March 22 official publication
• Blanket coverage on The Day, incl as damaging a set of interviews I've seen by NBC 'Today', Matt Lauer this time getting it right and behaving like an adult..
  • The bizarrely-named National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was hung out to dry as she stammered and BS'd her way thru questions for which no convincing come-back exists. The best retort with which she'd been supplied was that of "retrospective rewriting of history." (There's something about that woman's hair and her slightly manic stare that makes me fear for her career path ...
  • Acute reportage in the Daily Standard
    
  • Wesley Clarke's supportive answers drove the stake home
• The UK's Guardian came thru with flying colours with a full feature, as did it with its coverage of the Israeli's chutzpah assassination using a surveillance drone and a Hellfire missile to take out Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas leader.
• The Financial Times also had its act together on this one.

Keep the change - $998,325.00

I didn't even know there was a $1M note. There isn't.

Chutzpah props to the lady who tried to pass one off.

Vienna Teng

To the trusty Moore Theatre, Friday soir of the 5th, there to see Mistress Baez perform "current" ditties but actually to hear Vienna Teng live.

A triumph: that gal is going to go far, and i'm glad to read the P-I actually having something informed and sensible to say.

Took my second choice companion, being too cowardly to risk rebuff by CB. Frivolously mentioning my regret that C and I were on different planets, SCC rounded on me with the stern reminder that only *I* was on Planet Holmes. Everyone else moves perfectly comfortably, thank you, on Earth's terra firma and should not be thought to share my flimsy grasp of reality or truth.

She's quite right: sorry, CB.

martha stew'd

I can't take it - heart-breaking verdict.

And Blodgett in Slate

March 9: Aha! but what's this? Mart's Memoirs likely to fetch a packet ... the show goes on.

All the same, I toss at night thinking of my adored Martha at the mercy of those prisonnière bulls.

Fender Bender 50th

My first glimpse of that most glorious of solid body guitars was in Hank B Marvin's hands as lead guitar with Cliff's (now Sir Cliff, the Bible-fondling old fart) band, The Shadows.

I had to have one. Cost no consideration, and four years later I splurged my entire pocket money on a second-hand beauty in sunburst.

Leo's baby is 50 this year. One of the great contributions to music.

Unglimpsed on wedding day

Bought Nick Hornby's How to be Good for Georgina who has been urging me to read it myself.

Full of good quotes and 'insights', dammit. Of which I will include a chapter when I have the time.

Swimming Pool - what happened?

Always liked Charlotte Rampling - as a Sixties icon vedette she was the ultra-sexy classy bird with the grey eyes and hooded lids who took the kinky parts.

Enjoyed Ozon's Swimming Pool with CR the older lady and Ludivine Sagnier perfect as the spectacularly bosomed and generally balls-tightening minx.

But what the hell did it mean? At the end, wha' the hell had happened?

As a post-script, we are clearly entering the years when major babes of yesteryear are now the older women: Jamie Lee Curtis in "Freaky Friday" as Ms Lohan's mom having to mouth the words "I'm the crypt keeper!" and here in 'Pool', the easy-rutting Mademoiselle Sagnier suggesting that La Rampling was a dried husk who'd never fooled around.

I age.

New(d)s Reader

It's all in the timing, innit?

Umpteen years I spent in Hong Kong and the local TV was dull as ditch water.

Soon as I leave, what do they do? Only have some tasty Asian babe disrobe as she delivers the news.

Cor! With that sort of visual, even I might even pay attention to whazzup with the world.

Sound and Fury

Don't you love stories like this? Kraut's klaxon courtship needles neighbor with hub-bub bonking.

Fat chance of the noise abating. As word spreads of our lad's 4-hour sessions, there'll be a stream of frisky fraüleins offering to keep up the cacophony.