This is the view from the grounds of the House of Parliament in Quebec City a couple of hours ago. The only flags I saw at half-mast around here were Canadian flags at places like the Post Office and National Parks. Everywhere else, they fly the Fleurdelisé, which I hope I’m correct in saying is the provincial flag, but since they call their provincial legislature the “National Assembly,” it may also be the “National Flag”.
Anyway, it isn’t at half-mast because the British Empire and Quebec have, shall we say, a complicated relationship.
I would think that any American wouldn’t want anything to do with venerating the royals, because we have a good 1/3 of our population who want to turn our former President into the next King. Yet, when I lost signal out in the Quebec boonies a couple of days ago, a bunch of Americans on Twitter were becoming instant royal experts, while others were running to their fainting couches because some bad (and yet, very true) things were being said by Americans about QEII and the royal family. I can only guess how vomit-inducing the US commentary surrounding her funeral is going to be, but I doubt it will be allowed to interrupt Hockey Night in Canada or whatever else the Quebecers like to watch on the bar TV, so I think I’ll be spared that miserable experience.
So, condolences to the Windsors on the loss of their matriarch. But spare me the commentary on the political leanings and intellectual insights of the new King, who, if he had been born to any other woman in England, would be currently enjoying retirement after a uninspiring career as a Chartered Accountant.
MobiusKlein
I figure we can give QEII the same honors (sorry, honours) due to any head of state of a trusted ally.
Tony Jay
A LETTER FROM BREXITANIA
‘It’s Mourning in Brexitania’
Stop all the clocks, turn off your phones,
Prevent the plebs from snarking with tearful moans,
Silence the twitters and be mawkishly glum
Bring on the coverage, make the viewers come.
Let helicopters circle filming overhead
Streaming on Sky the message, She Is Dead,
Put black throws round the set like the punditry loves,
Let the well-armed policemen wear black combat gloves.
She was our landlord, owned the seabed, no jest,
Red carpets all week, loved her paedo son best,
From dawn, past midnight, breaking news, awful song;
This can’t go on forever: BBC – “You are wrong.”
The scandals are not wanted now: strike out all but one;
The Press don’t want Charlie, so they’ll big-up his son;
No room for the hungry, starving kids are no good,
For nothing else matters, “Now that One is wormfood”.
And that’s basically all I’ve got to say about that.
This United Kingdom (for really-reals now, down with that Woke appropriation) has had an absolutely stonking time of it, and I don’t just mean my whole holiday/birthday exhaustathon. Change is in the air, but unfortunately this is Tory Britain, so that air is thick and oily and has the stench of old eggs and fracking fumes about it.
On the plus side, Flobalob is, at long, long last, finally oozing his way towards the back benches of Parliament, but only after being allowed to spend two whole months basically rubbing his pig-arsed lazy refusal to do anything as plebian as work into the nation’s collective face by jetting around the world enjoying more millionaire funded jollies than Philomena Fivefanny, the double-jointed courtesan. One thing I will say in ungrudging praise of the Windsor Woman, though; she read the room and obdurately refused to die until Cartoon Churchill was officially out of office, something I’ll bet he’s utterly fucking livid about. No terribly moving speech from the steps of Downing Street to epilogue his biography, no glittering opportunity for his flibbery-flobbity take on the vomit worthy ‘Princess of Our Hearts’ speech Blair got to give about Saint Diana the Rugger Fucker back in 1997. Biggest set piece captive audience of the past 25 years and the bottleslurping slapdick missed it by a matter of days. What a thing, eh? So sad.
On the debit side, the BBC’s coverage of his farewell tour has been as monumentally garbage as you’d expect. In lockstep with the rest of the Tory Press they’ve taken the counterfactual line that Flobby, having successfully (where that word does not mean what we think it means) completed his triathlonic mission to ‘Get Brexit Done’, ‘Send Covid Packing’ and ‘Visit Ukraine Often’, is simply ‘stepping down’ from the role of Prime Minister. Nary a peep or a squeak from the nation’s premier news network to remind its viewers that this is actually a disgraced loser who was dragged kicking and screaming from the Big Chair by his own mutinous MPs barely three years after they selected him as leader, having in the process fallen approximately seventy gazillion miles short of anything even vaguely approaching the bare minimum standard for behaviour in high office.
Back in the real world he’s a criminal, venal little pisspocket who spent most of his reign getting drunk, lying like a bleached rug, and shoving cash, peerages and establishment sinecures into the already bulging pockets of his wealthy backers while drawing a veil over the increasingly intimate relationship the Conservative Party has enjoyed with Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes. The term colossal failure doesn’t even begin to mist the lower windows of his towering unsuitability for any role in public service, and by memory-holing his very real legacy of incompetent, vain avarice in service to some nakedly partisan campaign of reputational whitewashing, the BBC just underlines the degree to which it has been take over by nakedly pro-Tory executives and rendered wholly unfit for its intended purpose.
Which is funny, because the BBC was already having a shocking couple of weeks. Emily Maitlis, the recently departed host of the BBC’s flagship current affairs show Newsnight, used the occasion of the MacTaggert Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival to deliver a blistering fuck-you to her former employer, not-quite-naming but definitely shaming the Tory placemen at the top of the Corporation who have enforced a conflict averse (with the Right) and ‘let’s give room to all viewpoints’ (as long as they’re rightwing) policy that I’m sure most Jackals would find familiar. Now, I’m certainly not joining the choir of innocent binary dualists who were canonising Maitlis for her “courage” and “honesty” for saying all this out loud. Far from it. She was in a position to call the BBC out for its pro-Tory bias precisely because she’d been marinating in it for so long and been very well rewarded indeed for her part in promoting and defending it. This is, after all, the woman who in 2019 (the Annus Maximus Dolo where political gaslighting was concerned) labelled anyone accusing the BBC of bias as deranged conspiracy theorists, but that was before she’d taken a well-paid job with a rival network.
Put it this way, just as Joseph Valachi was a piece of shit mobster dirtbag who nevertheless told the truth about the Mafia, and Dominic Cummings was a morally abyssal agent of chaotic destruction who nevertheless told the truth about Flobalob Johnson, Maitlis’ self-serving and altogether hypocritical truth-bombing of the BBC’s Government-appointed Gauleiters nevertheless shone a bright light into the darkened corners of British Establishment collaboration and sent them into a panicked tizzy. Anyone who flings bricks at Robbie Gibb, the long-term Tory fixer whose greasy fingerprints are all over slanted coverage of everything from the EU Referendum to the antisemitism scam, gets an asterisk next to their name in the Great Red Book of National Debt Settling, but they sure as shit don’t get anything more than that.
This was followed up by the perfect distillation of ‘everything wrong with the BBC’s current affairs output and who is to blame for it’ when Laura Kuenssberg, the British version of Access Maggie who served the Tory cause loyally as BBC Chief Political Editor until her recent transfer to Big Sunday Morning Politics Show Person, made an elementary but hilarious mistake by booking comedian Joe Lycett (alongside female Tory and female Labour bookends) to sit on a couch and provide light banter after her ‘conversation, not confrontation’ tongue-bathing of soon-to-be-PM Liz Truss. Someone obviously didn’t do their homework because Lycett, despite his maturing status as The Nation’s Gay Best Friend On TV, is well-known as an absolutely merciless troll with zero patience and NFTG where full of themselves figures of petty authority are concerned.
Kuenssberg’s adoration (verging on the sexual) for Flobalob was always creepy as fuck, but with him gone she seems to have decided to treat Dizzy Lizzie’s iron-clad loyalty to her crush’s legacy as proof that she deserves the lightest of touches. Even then, with Kuenssberg tossing her the political equivalent of “What’s your favourite sandwich?” and “How do you come up with your brilliant song titles?” questions, Truss was as wooden and uncharismatic as ever, responding to more or less everything with pre-programmed wordspurts about how she planned to deliver. Deliver on what? Well, on her promises to deliver, apparently. Whatever the issue, however wide ranging and cataclysmic the problem, Liz Truss will deliver the solutions, through delivery!
The expression of glaring, snobbish irritation on Kuenssberg’s face when Lycett had the nerve, the audacity, the sheer unmitigated cheek to raise an eyebrow and clarify (for the benefit of the BBC’s commissioning editors, no doubt) that as a very (VERY) right-wing comedian, he absolutely loved everything Truss had said, was completely clear about her intentions, and was reassured (“I’m reassured! Are you reassured? She’s so reassuring!”) that the country was in very good hands was absolutely chef’s kiss. Tory agents like Kuenssberg have spent years turning the BBC’s news and current affairs output into a pantomime with stock figures and repeated memes, but they sure as hell don’t like it when a professional piss-taker treats their garbage product with the withering contempt it deserves.
But all that aside, yes, sadly, we’ve now got a new Prime Minister in Mary Elizabeth Truss. Who she, you ask? Good question, sez I.
I’ll be honest with you. I’ve found it very, almost too easy to launch broadsides of bile against Flobalob Johnson. For all of his toxic mélange of obvious personality flaws Flobby was an absolute gift for an amateur mocker. A wobbly pyramid-scheme of bolted on affectations and media-friendly quirks just begging for a kicking, a long-rotted onion of squishy layers at the core of which was a lonely and unloved child dreaming fire-edged dreams of absolute power under cold, starched boarding school bedsheets. I could call him out all day and not run out of invective, but Truss? What’s there to say about her that could fill more than a paragraph?
She’s a badly staged photo-op in search of a ‘moment’. She’s not so much the dregs of the Conservative Party as she’s the embarrassing little sister of the dregs, barging her way on stage at the end of the Community Talent Show in a too-large dress and shoes to screech out a version of “One Moment in Time” while her mortified parents weep tears of shame. Where Flobalob spent decades building the media image that would shield his inner nothingness, Truss is a cheap three-door car that’s been into the shop twice a month to have all the latest on-trend accessories bolted on, a shell of rusty bodywork with more layers of spray-paint than a Trump impersonator. Laudanum Liz, always affecting a dreamy, languid aura, like she’s propelled by a perfumed waft of dreams through a Fabio-themed Romance novel cover, when in fact she’s just mentally quite slow and habitually tracks bullshit wherever she blunders in.
More than anything she reminds me of that period during the late-Roman Empire when, in the face of existential threats and societal collapse, the State’s only solution was to offer up a clanking conveyor-belt of ever more insipid, graceless chancers whose only qualification for the Purple was the transactional loyalty of an armed gang and the funds of a wealthy backer. Be in the right place at the right time and anyone could be Emperor for a day, tin-crowned masters of three-square miles of chaos who were nevertheless lauded as the next Constantine, because while legions are expensive, choirs of eunuchs come cheap.
Truss is basically nothing. There’s no ‘Trussism’, no long-forming political manifesto to put into effect. She’s a Japanese rice-paper wall, painted but ephemeral. From her early days as an anti-monarchist Liberal-Democrat through her timely conversion to Thatcherite Tory, she’s whatever her handlers tell her to be. There’s no mystery to unearth where Diz-Liz is concerned, no secret door behind which lurks a shadowy, enigmatic Id with an urge to change the world. It’s all there on the surface with her, like a streak of Shell Oil across the top of a stagnant pond. Her backers are the Brextremists of the ERG and the Tufton Street gang, Libertarian ideologues and promoters of Pinochet-style authoritarianism who intend to strip-mine the UK of everything of financial value under cover of culture war and media propaganda, she’s just the malleable figurehead they needed to seal the deal with a few thousand xenophobic Tory Party members.
What we’ll get from her is cookie-cutter disaster capitalism and faux-populist Disneyfied patriotism. National Front style hatespeech on Immigration and ethnicity. Legally illiterate attacks on the independence of the Judiciary. Tax-cuts aimed at terrorising the very poor to enrich the 1% and legislation to cripple Unions, criminalise protest and torch half a century or more of consumer regulation. Everything you expect from a mediocre far-Right Government staffed with loyalist non-entities and goggle-eyed ideologues, that’s what you’ll get with Truss.
Fucked? You bet we are. The worst cost of living crisis in generations, energy price gouging like you wouldn’t believe, inflationary pressure, rolling strikes across most vital industries, Brexit corroding the infrastructure of, well, everything like the blood of a headshot xenomorph, and who do we have running the show? A 0.01% infusion of bacillus thatcherium who looks like an ivory-headed walking stick wearing the head from a Chucky doll.
Did I say fucked? Boy, was I optimistic.
Chief Oshkosh
Sorry, nope. I’m in Quebec City right now, too, and I’ve seen numerous Fleurdelisé flags at half mast and, oddly, numerous Canadian national flags all the way up.
MattF
I’ve given a try at caring about the Windsors… but… nope.
NotMax
half-staff
/pedant
trollhattan
@NotMax: Doesn’t it depend on which pole we’re discussing? :-)
SpaceUnit
I never paid much attention to the royals but Charles always reminds me of Monty Python’s upper class twit sketch.
Sometimes the aristocracy giveth, and sometimes it taketh away. Sorry England.
trollhattan
@Tony Jay: Glad to see you haven’t succumbed to an LD50 of ethanol. There’s a lot to self-dose over.
Can Truss just assume the role of a nice #10 sofa and live out several years as PM? Would anybody notice?
trollhattan
The Oryx guys who have tracked every piece of military hardware lost or captured in Ukraine, have been kept VERY busy by the Ukrainian military, recently. This is just yesterday’s list.
https://twitter.com/Rebel44CZ/status/1568717017938526216?cxt=HHwWkICw9Z_0mcUrAAAA
The shell of an empire is disintegrating before our eyes.
Abnormal Hiker
@NotMax: Perhaps in US but not in Canada
Calouste
The flags at Parliament etc are up at full mast for 24 hours after Charles has been officially proclaimed king, which happened earlier today. After that they will be half mast again until the day after the Queen’s funeral.
Jess
You know, it took me awhile to figure out that the flags at half-mast were about QEII. I was thinking it would be about the stabbing deaths the other day. And I think it should be, actually. 10 people murdered before their time should matter more than one old lady who died of natural causes after a long and coddled life.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Quebeçois? Or is that only in French?
Another Scott
@Tony Jay: Thank you. Good luck!
For those who haven’t seen it – YouTube – Joe Lycett on Sunday with Laura K (1:49).
(Longer excerpt – YouTube – What really happened on the show (8:33))
Thanks muchly.
Cheers,
Scott.
marklar
Restez chic, Premier Legault.
Mo erreur- tu es ringard.
Je ne regrette pas d’être parti en 1986 à cause de merde comme ça.
BC in Illinois
@Tony Jay:
I have been impressed by the intricate dance of MP Ian Blackford, who represents the land of the Clan C in Parliament and, as leader of the Scottish National Party in Parliament, gives periodic speeches that boil down to “Scotland hasn’t voted for a Tory government since Eisenhower was President and we want out of the UK!”
So what does he do, when protocol dictates a more nuanced message? He gives a somber and affectionate tribute to the Queen and a respectful greeting to King Charles.
But his tribute to the Queen was a masterful piece of work.
It actually was a fine public tribute to the leader of a monarchy that many people in Scotland want to be rid of (or at least have at a greater distance), but I did mention that he is the leader in Parliament of the Scottish National Party?
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
half-staff
half-mast is for a ship
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@SpaceUnit: I heard a sound bite of Charles this weekend and realized that I may not have ever heard his voice before. With luck he’ll just quietly disappear back into the shadows, cutting the occasional ribbon.
munira
Yes, it’s the Quebec provincial flag, but Quebec does like to pretend it’s a separate country even though it isn’t.
Dan B
@Tony Jay: Bravo! A badly staged photo op in search of a ‘moment’. was just one of many turns of phrase that had me chuckling. England and Russia seem headed for the rocks. Is there a link to all the Russian lucre in London?
NotMax
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Also, oddly enough, for a fly (as in zipper).
;)
Dangerman
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Even if he did so accidentally, giving TFG the bird earns him a bit of a pass for now …
… and if there is video of him doing “rolling the dice” accidentally while TFG was talking, well, a pass for life.
wegners shoppers club member mistermix
@Chief Oshkosh: I just went out to buy some beer and saw my first half staff flag along with another full staff. So I guess there are some but it sure isn’t an official decree.
Omnes Omnibus
Or it is an official decree and some are not following it.
SpaceUnit
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Yeah, not everyone is cut out for the crown. Lord knows I’m not.
NotMax
@wegners shoppers club member mistermix
Biden’s call for half staff officially applies as mandatory, AFAIK, only to federal properties.
OzarkHillbilly
Who says they’re mourning? Maybe they are celebrating.
munira
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: No circumflex. I guess it is the French, but that’s what everyone says in Quebec.
Jay
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
depends how you use pronouns,//
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
That goodness the adults were in charge.
Ken
Does anyone else think that choosing to be “Charles III” is kind of tempting fate, given what happened to I and II?
TheOtherHank
The flags flying outside city-owned buildings are at half-staff in my California Bay Area town. It took me a few seconds to figure out why, but then I remembered: Lizzie’s in a box.
I lost the tweet, but the best one I saw yesterday said something to effect of “Please show some respect to Elizabeth, she was a head of state, a monarch, the mother of several pedophiles, and a devoted cousin to her husband.” I snorted when I read it.
SteveinPHX
“would be currently enjoying retirement after a uninspiring career as a Chartered Accountant.”
-how middle class.
Cacti
And remember.
Now is not the time to mention that she sat on a pile of blood money and looted treasures.
That’s just rude.
hilts
Good for Ali Velshi!
h/t https://www.mediaite.com/news/i-need-you-to-stop-msnbcs-ali-velshi-tears-brit-historian-several-new-ones-in-unbelievable-royal-smackdown/
prostratedragon
@Ken: Earlier I noted that this afternoon’s opera on the radio box happened to be I Puritani. It takes place during the English Civil War, and the heroine is saved from a dire fate at the end by the victory of Oliver Cromwell.
Cameron
Has Donald Trump offered up a site on his golf course in Scotland for Her Majesty’s burial ground? For a modest fee, of course.
p.a.
As long as Chucki3 doesn’t break our alliance to join Eurasia I don’t care.[edited]
Condolences to those who want condolences. Budget save the King(ship).
SpaceUnit
@Ken:
I’m not a student of the succession so I have no clue. As an American royalty strikes me as quaint.
Closest thing we’ve got is Dolly Parton.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ken: What happened to II that was so terrible? Aside from the London fire.
citizen dave
@TheOtherHank: I saw that one too Thursday night, same reaction. Out of respect I waited a day to share it with my wife.
Jay
eachother
@trollhattan: Some of these poles have prior commitments. ;-)
@Tony Jay: As the world turns, it seems we are roundly f**ked
Thanks for the infill.
Jay
@SpaceUnit:
Closest?
Better than,…………
All Hail Queen Dolly, First of Her Name,……….
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@munira: Ah, ok. The only place I’d seen the word for people from Quebec was in commentary by French people on what’s wrong with Canadian French. And I never noticed there was no circumflex there.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@SpaceUnit:
We did have Aretha Franklin who was the Queen of Soul
Ken
@Omnes Omnibus: I was thinking of the upheavals and new government in England caused by the Restoration. I’m wondering if the name will work its revolutionary magic a third time — maybe we’ll see the breakup of the UK?
Ken
@Jay: Excellent, as recipient of a title from a foreign government he is now constitutionally ineligible to hold any U.S. office. Truly the greatest gift Elizabeth could have given the United States.
SpaceUnit
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
Michael Jackson was the King of Pop and look how that turned out.
Ohio Mom
@TheOtherHank:
LOL. Prince Andrew is pedophile #1 obviously but who else makes it “several”?
Are you counting Charles since he married a young virgin? (I was thinking earlier on how creepy it is to know that a public figure is a virgin, and then to know when they changed status. TMI!).
And isn’t there another son? How come we never hear about him? Lucky guy to be so far out of the limelight.
Cameron
@Ken: And what about those classified documents?
Chacal Charles Calthrop
Tony Jay, glad to hear from you.
All I can say about QEII is that, despite spending her life in a job that attracts narcissists, by all accounts she wasn’t one. Does that reflect the bigotry of low expectations? Maybe.
However, I’ll take it.
Kent
I gotta say, moving to the UK is the only thing that could turn me into a republican.
ColoradoGuy
@Tony Jay: As awful as Flobalob was, it sounds like he was considerably better than T****. TFG’s sheer maliciousness and burn-it-all-down nihilism (400,000 dead!) was in a class of its own, with Putin the only comparable figure. From across the pond, it looks like the real economic and social damage was/is Brexit combined with zombie Thatcherism.
It’s tragic the Labour Party is stuck in neutral, with no relief in sight.
jayne
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
‘Quebecois’ refers the french-speaking people of Quebec and their culture.
‘Quebeccers’ are a category of Summer People unique to North Eastern New York, Northern Vermont, and to a lesser extent, New Hampshire and Maine. They’re frequently found in luxury RVs beached in mall parking lots or driving 52 mph down the center lane on I-87.
Calouste
@Jay: Unsurprisingly of course, that is a lie. Privately awarding an honor doesn’t exist.
Sure Lurkalot
Even though I am half British (my grandparents immigrated here from London with my 3 month old father in 1920), I lost my fascination with the country except for music and fashion a long time ago. It didn’t help that my father turned down an opportunity to move to London in the 60’s…all the kids wanted to go but my mother refused.
I visited London a while back and it’s simply not one of my favorite cities by a long shot. They say Parisians are snobby but I thought Londoners were much more so. I did love the countryside around Bath and the Brecon area of Wales was quite lovely in the fall.
marklar
@Jay: He may be confused by the Queen having hit him on the head with a rolled up newspaper after he tried to grab her by the ….
Jay
@jayne:
with their left hand turn signals on, all the time,……
HumboldtBlue
@Abnormal Hiker:
And not in the UK either, half-mast has naval connotations as flags were flown on the masts.
Abnormal Hiker
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: The accent in the original post is a cedilla, not a circumflex. The cedilla changes a hard c to a soft c. Since Québécois has a hard c there is no cedilla.
Circumflex accents in French often mark a letter or letters dropped at some time. For example, gôut was goust in Old French and ultimately derives from Latin gustus
TheOtherHank
@Ohio Mom: Honestly, I don’t keep up on them enough to know. The tweet said “several” or something like that. Your theory about Chuck was the only candidate that occurred to me.
Mike in NC
I haven’t set foot in Quebec in 40 years, but I never ate so well anywhere else in my life.
dmsilev
@Jay: That’s really pathetic. He just can’t bear not being in the news, can he?
brendancalling
I really have no feelings about E2’s recent demise, having no British heritage. My Irish-American friends have different feelings, I’m sure, but as an American I find myself remembering that we fought a war to not have to give a shit about Royal anyones.
Origuy
@Ohio Mom: Third son is Edward. Seems to be scandal free.
Barbara
@Jay: Like, in his head, telepathically?
zhena gogolia
@citizen dave: why several pedophiles?
zhena gogolia
@Jay: someone replied “She didn’t knight him, she was trying to behead him.”
Spanky
@prostratedragon: Fuck Cromwell!
delphinium
I didn’t care much for London either, but didn’t find the folks particularly snobby. Prague is my favorite city so far; found the folks in Florence to be the rudest overall.
zhena gogolia
@Origuy: not really. He and especially his wife were mixed up in some shady stuff. Read Tina Brown The palace papers (although she’s unfair to Meghan IMO)
Citizen_X
@BC in Illinois: “And thanks for not beheading any of our leaders, unlike the last Elizabeth.”
Uncle Cosmo
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Quebecois. Apparently for both a resident of Quebec or the form of French spoken there. No circumflex (“^”) in evidence…and that slithery cedilla fastened like a remora beneath the “c” needs to drop right the fuck off.
ronno2018
@tonyjay thanks for the comment. hopefully you can post soon too!
I was in London a month ago and it seemed to be in good shape! Went to the Farnborough airshow as well. Military industrial complex doing great LOL! Portsmouth looked really fine as well!
Anyway I hope Labour gets back in power soon. I hope Scotland joins the EU. Lots of old tory voters are going to heaven(?) soon (peacefully expiring hopefully). Should make things easier.
Uncle Cosmo
And their license plates all say Je me souviens. which reminds me of nothing so much as the old story about the fellow was asked why he joined the Foreign Legion: To forget. And when asked what he wanted to forget? I forgot.
Maybe some (if not most) of those license plates should read J’oublie…
Ken
@BC in Illinois: Did Blackford end his speech with a toast to “the King”, while holding his glass over the water pitcher? It’s been a while…
Another Scott
@Ken: OhPleaseOhPleaseOhPlease….
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@Ken:
Charles I came to an unpleasant end, but Charles II was a successful statesman. He was brought back to a Britain that was at best lukewarm about him and only brought him back on the condition he accept Parliament’s role in running the country. He still managed to play various interests off against each other very successfully. His biggest failure was his inability to sire a legitimate male heir. It was his half-wit brother James II who was the abject failure of that generation.
Kim Walker
Quebecers also refer to the several hundred thousand English speakers living here that Quebec prefers to pretend don’t exist, despite the hefty taxes we contribute without actually receiving much in the way of provincial services.
Another Scott
@Sure Lurkalot: I was a wee tot when I played soccer in the late ’60s in the county recreation league in Georgia when my dad worked for Lockheed. The coach was a young guy from England that my dad worked with who had a 1969 Mustang. We were horrible, but had a good time even though we would get crushed every time we played. ;-)
My understanding that the UK aviation industry was dying and shedding jobs like mad in the late ’60s, so talented young engineers were fleeing the country for opportunities elsewhere.
Your mom may have saved your family a lot of grief. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@Calouste:
I want to see a reliable source for it. All I’ve seen so far are reposts of what is alleged to be a screenshot from Trump’s Twitter knockoff but which looks suspiciously like a bad Photoshop fake. I would like to see the claim Trump said that substantiated by someone with some actual credibility.
geg6
@Ken:
LOL!
Jackie
@Calouste: I agree. Besides, if she’d had a sword handy, his head would have ended up on the floor. Alas for us, it didn’t happen.
MrKite
@NotMax: Only because the use of “half-staff” in regard to a downed zipper might give entirely the wrong impression.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, …
Well, that was unexpected.
(I assume it is from some movie that I’ve never seen.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Gin & Tonic
@delphinium: Prague would be lovely if all the fucking Brits would stay away.
Roger Moore
@Another Scott:
It looks more like something from a video game, or more likely a trailer for a video game.
Betsy
@Tony Jay: Oh, my gods, that was funny.
But as was recently observed somewhere, you’d better watch your tone, or you won’t convince anybody that needs convincing.
Gin & Tonic
@Betsy: Tony Jay and you are not in the same league.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@SpaceUnit:
I saw a picture of Edward the other day that I thought for sure must be an actor doing a comic take-off, looked like a googly-eyed mouth-breather, but it was the real thing
@Ohio Mom:
Chetan Murthy
@Roger Moore: It reminds me of that video from early in the RU-UA war, with RU missiles and planes attacking the great capitals of Western Europe — remember that? This has the same flavor. I’d bet a drink that it’s the same creators, b/c same general message, only different recipient.
rikyrah
@Tony Jay:
I appreciate your dispatches from across the ocean 😊
Chetan Murthy
I certainly don’t have Tony Jay’s right to jape or criticize Ol’ Bess, but I also don’t feel that Ali Velshi was wrong either. I was born in India, and know enough of what the Brits did to India, Kenya, and so many other places, that I can’t object to any people from former British colonies lobbing their complaints. All that said, she was a decent monarch, and Britain is (or, ahem, was until 2016) a country making amends somewhat, becoming a better place. To whatever extent she was responsible for that, she was a decent monarch. And so I can say Rest In Peace, ma’am.
But I sure can’t begrudge Ali Velshi (who apparently was actually born in Kenya, unlike President 44, ha) his criticisms.
Chief Oshkosh
@wegners shoppers club member mistermix: I think it’s important to know that I don’t know what I’m talking about other than what I’ve seen over the last couple of days, and even that is just the facts, m’am.
Chief Oshkosh
@Mike in NC: Yep. That’s been my experience so far!
HumboldtBlue
The city of Izyum is confirmed liberated
James E Powell
@MobiusKlein:
I agree, but what we are likely to get is purple hagiography in the service of some twisted agenda.
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: еще бы
Ken
So not the UAF’s latest advance in trebuchet technology returning the Moskva to its owners?
phdesmond
@jayne:
it’s well worth mentioning that maybe one million new englanders had ancestors who were Quebecois and immigrated.
Another Scott
@Chetan Murthy: I think you’re right. Some of the comments speculate it’s the Moskva being returned.
[eta:] Ken got it in one. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Ladyraxterinok
@Abnormal Hiker:
And the word for window fenetre (mark above e before t)
See German word for window Fenster and English word defenestration for throwing somebody or something out the window
Ken
@Another Scott: Oh dang, I hadn’t read the comments, but now I look like the sort of person who steals other people’s jokes. Which is fair enough…
Actually when I first saw it, I was reminded of the Dr. Who “Voyage of the Damned” episode.
James E Powell
@Ken:
Wasn’t Charles II a good-time Charlie?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@James E Powell: The Merry Monarch. One of my favorite anecdotes about his… social circle: Charles once had concurrent maîtresses en titre, (which was in poor taste, it must be said) the high-born, French, and Catholic Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, and the good, simple, English actress Nell Gwynn
prostratedragon
@Spanky: Not a fan here either, though an American Puritan by church upbringing. (Somewhat lapsed, but that isn’t why.)
Uncle Cosmo
@Gin & Tonic: The Germans may have invented alcotourism in the 1950s** but left it to the Brits to perfect. BC (before COVID) hordes of Limeys would hop off cheap QueasyJet and LyinAir shuttles from the Midlands and stumble off a week later back in the Midlands with no fookin’ clew where they’d spent the last 7 days…
(At the Czech Beer Festival at Letnany airport a few years ago [85 brews, not a clunker in the lot!] I ran across a gaggle of such Brits, who forced me to drink with them [ow!ow!twist my arm why doncha!]. Nice fellows, mostly, but one wondered how much blood was swimming around the ethanol in their bloodstreams…)
** When they realized the beer in then-Czechoslovakia was as good as their own at 1/5 the price. Krauds of Krauts would swarm across the border on Friday nights and be poured back across it by the Czechoslovak border guards late the Sunday following…
kalakal
@Chetan Murthy: I didn’t watch the interview between Velshi and Andrew Roberts but the mere fact it was Roberts tends to make me lean towards Velshi. Roberts is a dyed in the wool Thatcherite, has spent many years working the US neocon circuit and was a major booster of the Gulf War and a Brexiter. He did, to his credit, write an excellent biography of Salisbury.
Citizen Alan
@Jay: It is a Testament to the degraded world we live in that I honestly have no idea whether this is a joke or completely legitimate. And I’m afraid to go look and find out.
Citizen Alan
@Chacal Charles Calthrop: Calling it a job sort of implies that she applied for it and was selected, as opposed to something that she would have had to trigger a constitutional crisis in order to turn down when it came to her. I would describe QE2 as the winner of the world’s largest lottery payout who nevertheless managed to conduct herself with dignity thereafter and who also never bankrupt herself or become a drug addict at any point, which is far better than the fate of most lottery winners.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Citizen Alan: based on the (I’m pretty sure fake) “truth social” post people are passing around, I’m guessing it’s a joke. trump would never be that concise about a braggadocios lie.
VOR
@Citizen Alan: I am pretty darn sure the thing about Trump being knighted by QEII is a fake. I have not seen that claim in any legitimate news source. But it just sounds like the sort of boasting we expect from TFG – making it all about himself.
And yes, US Citizens cannot accept honors like knighthood from foreign countries. There is a long list of US persons who have honorary knights honors including Steven Spielberg, Dwight Eisenhower, Rudy Guiliani (no, seriously), Alan Greenspan, Bill Gates, George Patton, and Ronald Reagan.
Matt McIrvin
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Québécois. A cedilla under the c would give it an S sound.
Steve Crickmore
Ali Velshi was born in Kenya, but only lived there two or three years, before emigrating to Canada. He chose to attend and graduate from Queen’s University- named after Queen Victoria- with a bachelor degree in Religious Studies, located in Kingston, Ontario and accepted a Queen’s University Alumni Achievement Award in 2010. In 2016, he was awarded and accepted an honorary doctorate of laws by his alma mater, Queen`s. I myself have graduated fron the same university and have never heard Ali whinge or refuse the honors and trappings of the university, named after the Queen (Victoria) that symbolized the Empire at its colonial height. Indeed, he seems to have sought all the baubles that an old revered university can provide, but I am sure if our university declines or dies, Ali will be the first to remind of us of all the past wickednesses and imperial leftover traditions, (that he personally benefited from), but it is no longer there to defend itself from.
@Chetan Murthy:
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@phdesmond: this includes almost all my maternal grandmothers family. They are mostly in Maine and Vermont. Fun fact- my grandmother spoke French before she spoke English.
sab
@Ken: What happened to II? I thought he had a rather successful reign.