Are You Irish?

A friend passed this tale along to me and I thought it might raise a laugh:




Everyone seems to be in such a hurry to scream 'racism' these days.


A customer asked, "In what aisle could I find the Irish sausage?"

The assistant asks, "Are you Irish?"

The guy, clearly offended, says, "Yes I am. But let me ask you something


If I had asked for Italian sausage, would you ask me if I was Italian?

Or if I had asked for German Bratwurst, would you ask me if I was German?

Or if I asked for a kosher hot dog would you ask me if I was Jewish?

Or if I had asked for a Taco, would you ask if I was Mexican?

Or if I asked for Polish sausage, would you ask if I was Polish?"


The assistant says, "No, I probably wouldn't."


The guy says, "Well then, just because I asked for Irish sausage, why did you ask me if I'm Irish?"



The assistant replied, "Because you're in Halfords."

The Christmas Rush!

I don't want to cause a panic, but do you realise that it is only a month to Christmas Day?

Ho! Ho! Ho! The Christmas season is rapidly approaching, and with it all the commercialism of turkey and tinsel, Santa Clauses and reindeer etc.etc.  It seems months since the first Christmas adverts appeared on the television, and almost as long since we heard the piped Christmas music in the supermarkets.


Soon we will be seeing the harassed faces of mums as they dash around getting those last minute Christmas bits and pieces that they have overlooked in the mad headlong rush. Dads will be no doubt racking their brains as to what they can buy for "the missus" for Christmas, and the children will be demanding the latest "must have" toy/electronic gizmo that has been heavily advertised on television for the last umpteen weeks!


The gentleman below will no doubt be getting some overtime in as he loads his sleigh and sets off on his annual journey.

On December 6th I am playing the organ for the graduation ceremony for Bradford College in St George's Hall.

I have a wedding to play for at Hazlemere Castle Tadcaster on Saturday 10th December.


After that I will be up to my ears in the usual merry round of last minute rehearsals for Christmas Concerts which my Male Voice Choir will be performing. As well as singing at the Manorlands Festival of Lights on Sunday 11th December at 4.00 pm, they are singing a Christmas Concert the following evening in Allerton.

I am involved in practices for the Nativity play at one of the local schools, as well as four performances! Leading a Carol Sing in Bingley Market Square on Sat 17th December between 10.00 & 10.30. Taking our youngest daughter and her husband to Manchester Airport, (they fly out to Jamaica for a belated honeymoon), practices of carols for the usual Festival of Lessons and Carols, a Christingle Service, Midnight Eucharist and Christmas Day Communion.

Roll on December 28th when we escape for a couple of days relative peace and quiet at the King's Head Masham!

An Open Letter to Mr Cameron on how to solve the Economic Crisis

Dear Mr. Cameron,





Please find below our suggestion for fixing the UK's economy.



Instead of giving billions of pounds to banks that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan.




You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:




There are about 10 million people over 50 in the work force.




Pay them £1 million each severance for early retirement with the
following stipulations:






1) They MUST retire.
Ten million job openings - unemployment fixed






2) They MUST buy a new British car.
Ten million cars ordered - Car Industry fixed






3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage -
Housing Crisis fixed






4) They MUST send their kids to school/college/university -
Crime rate fixed






5) They MUST buy £100 WORTH of alcohol/tobacco a week .....
And there's your money back in duty/tax etc




It can't get any easier than that!






P.S. If more money is needed, have all members of parliament pay back
their falsely claimed expenses and second home allowances




If you think this would work, please forward to everyone you know.






Also.....


Let's put the pensioners in jail and the criminals in a nursing home.


This way the pensioners would have access to showers, hobbies and
walks.


They'd receive unlimited free prescriptions, dental and medical
treatment, wheel chairs etc and they'd receive money instead of paying it out.


They would have constant video monitoring, so they could be helped
instantly if they fell, or needed assistance.


Bedding would be washed twice a week, and all clothing would be ironed
and returned to them.


A guard would check on them every 20 minutes and bring their meals and
snacks to their cell.


They would have family visits in a suite built for that purpose.


They would have access to a library, weight room, spiritual counseling,
pool and education.


Simple clothing, shoes, slippers, PJ's and legal aid would be free, on
request.


Private, secure rooms for all, with an exercise outdoor yard, with gardens.


Each senior could have a PC a TV radio and daily phone calls.
There would be a board of directors to hear complaints, and the guards
would have a code of conduct that would be strictly adhered to.


The criminals would get cold food, be left all alone and unsupervised.
Lights off at 8pm, and showers once a week. Live in a tiny room and pay
£600. 00 per week and have no hope of ever getting out.






Think about this (more points of contention):






COWS (or how to solve the illegal immigration problem.....)


Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that during the mad
cow epidemic our government could track a single cow, born in Appleby
almost three years ago, right to the stall where she slept in the county of
Cumbria?




And, they even tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable
to locate 125,000 illegal immigrants wandering around our country. Maybe
we should give each of them a cow.

Hitchcock - "The Trouble with Harry"

Hitchcock. What does the name suggest to you?

If you have seen any of his films it will probably suggest mystery, suspense, dark humour, crime etc. which is not surprising because Alfred Hitchcock has long been regarded as a master of his craft. The list of films he has produced, which have been hailed as classics of the mystery/suspense/dark humour/crime genre runs well into double figures.

Some months ago now I purchased a 14 DVD Set of his films, and as you can see from the photo above, these included:
The Birds, Family Plot, Frenzy, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Marnie, Rear Window, Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt, Topaz, Torn Curtain, The Trouble with Harry, Rope, Vertigo & Psycho.

I have seen "The Trouble with Harry" on television some years ago, but decided to sit down and watch the DVD of the film again.

With the film "The Trouble with Harry", if you are expecting a thrill a minute shocker, you will be disappointed.

Firstly Hitchcock's approach has always been to lead you astray with "red herrings" (what he calls McGuffins) and secondly he will let you imagine the horror rather than show you it. [Let's face it, if you have a vivid imagination you will imagine far more horrific things than what would have been permitted to have been shown in the days when the film censor was far more active than he is now!]

However, "The Trouble with Harry" is a gentle film with dark humour. It tells the tale of three people who are each convinced that they have killed Harry, and each in turn decides to dispose of the body. In the course of one night Harry's body is interred and dug up again three times!

This is the storyline......

The film follows the quirky but down-to-earth residents of a small village in Vermont in the autumn, as they deal with the freshly dead body of a man, which has inconveniently appeared on the hillside above the town. The problem of what to do with the body, and more importantly how and why he was killed, is the eponymous "Trouble with Harry".

Three of the main characters in the film imagine that they are the one who actually killed this person. Captain Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) is sure that he must have killed the man with a stray shot from his rifle when rabbit hunting. Miss Ivy Gravely (Mildred Natwick) feels that the man died after a blow from her hiking boot, and so on. Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe), an attractive and free-spirited artist, is quite open-minded about the whole event, and is prepared to help his good-natured friends and neighbors in any way he can.


It turns out that the dead man is in fact Harry, the estranged husband of an attractive and feisty young woman called Jennifer Rogers, (Shirley MacLaine), who lives in the village along with her small son Arnie (Jerry Mathers). Jennifer Rogers thinks that her husband may possibly have died after she hit him with a bottle. In any case, no-one is actually upset about what has happened.


However, none of the principal characters want this death to come to the attention of the "authorities" in the form of cold, humorless, Deputy Sheriff Calvin Wiggs (Royal Dano). The main characters conceal the body by burying it, and then have to dig it up again. This happens several times. The body is also concealed at one point by hiding it in a bathtub.


In the end we discover that Harry actually died of natural causes, and no foul play was involved. In the meantime, Sam and Jennifer have fallen in love, as have the Captain and Miss Gravely. Sam has been able to sell his paintings to a passing millionaire. The artist refuses to accept money, and instead requests a few simple gifts for his friends and himself.


Overall, the film is a light-hearted meditation on death as an intrinsic part of the natural cycle of things, within the harmonious landscape of autumn, a time of year when nature is dying, only to be reborn in spring. The Vermont town seems to be a little Utopia or one kind of paradise, where sex and death are not shocking and dramatic, but simply the natural order of things.

If you get chance do give this film a try. I promise you that you will enjoy its gentle dark humour!

Ealing Comedy - Hue & Cry

Hue and Cry was released in 1947, and is generally considered as the first Ealing Comedy, although it would probably be more accurate to describe it as  a thriller for children.it is a bit like the Saturday Matinee short films put out by the NCFF (National Children's Film Foundation).

It tells the story of a group of east end kids who manage to foil a gang of robbers who use a comic story to pass on their plans to other gang members. The kids are not believed by the police, so they take affairs into their own hands.

In some ways it uses the basis of the popular children's story of the time called "Emil & the Detectives", which had been filmed in Germany in 1931.

In the film we meet two or three actors who were to become well known in later years - Alastair Sim, Harry Fowler and Jack Warner, who would become the much loved PC George Dixon in the TV Series "Dixon of Dock Green".

This was the first of seven comedies that the screen writer T E B Clark worked on for Ealing Studios, and it shaped the way for the Ealing Comedies we usually remember today, which showed the English community spirit and mild eccentricity.

Not the funniest of the Ealing Comedies, but one which accurately reflects the time in Britain immediately after the war.

Ealing Comedies

Whilst on holiday this year (as every year) I always do a round of the local charity shops. If you are prepared to look through the goods on offer you can usually find some bargains which you have wanted.

In one of the shops I came across a 4 DVD Set of Ealing Comedies priced at £2.00! Even on Amazon (which is usually the cheapest priced) the set would have cost £5.78!)

The Set consisted of Hue and Cry, Passport to  Pimlico, The Titfield Thunderbolt and a bonus 50 minute disc called Forever Ealing, which tells the Ealing Studios Story.

I have always enjoyed the Ealing Studios Comedies. They are full of gentle humour and fun - none the anarchic type of comedy we have on television today. They are usually set around the late 40's early 50's and somewhere within the plot, the ordinary fellow manages to triumph over the big important powerful persons.

Ealing Comedies were produced between 1947 and 1957, and despite their association with the studios, the comedies made up only a tenth of their output!

Three well know actors spring to mind when thinking of the Ealing actors. They are Stanley Holloway, Alec Guinness and Alastair Sim, who all went on to even greater roles (Stanley Holloway as Alfred P Doolittle in "My Fair Lady", Alec Guinness in "Bridge on the River Kwai, and Alastair Sim in the St Trinian's Series)

Various people have compiled lists of the names of the Ealing Comedies, and they differ from person to person. The phrase the Golden Age of Ealing Comedies is often bandied about, but nobody has defined which films  are included in The Golden Age of Ealing Comedies, so at the risk of being shot down in flames, here is my very own list.........

Hue and Cry (1947)
Passport to Pimlico (1949)
Whisky Galore! (1949)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)
The Man in the White Suit (1951)
The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953)
The Maggie (1954)
The Ladykillers (1955)

The Story of Liza with a "Z"

Sometime during the early 1970's I remember watching a television concert starring Liza Minnelli, which was called Liza with a "Z". I really enjoyed the zestful and lively performance of Miss Minelli, who can sell a song in the same way as our own Shirley Bassey.

Despite the success of the show -  the production won four Emmy Awards, Outstanding Achievement in Choreography (Bob Fosse, choreographer), Outstanding Achievement in Music, Lyrics and Special Material (Fred Ebb and John Kander, composers), Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy, Variety or Music (Bob Fosse) and Outstanding Single Programme - Variety and Popular Music (Bob Fosse and Fred Ebb, producers, and Liza Minnelli, star). It was nominated for a further three Emmy's in film editing, music composition and writing. The film was also won a 1972 Peabody Award and a Directors Guild of America Award. Fosse's Emmy win meant that he had won an Oscar a Tony, and Emmy all in the same year - it disappeared from the face of the earth.

Some time later an LP [12" Long Playing Record] was released of the show, and this became a best seller - in total it spent twenty three weeks in the top 40, and achieved "gold". Then after that - nothing.

Imagine my delight when I discovered that the show was to be released on DVD in a remastered print with 5.1 digital sound.

Over the intervening years, the original, which the producer had insisted should be filmed on 16 mm film, and not the fairly recently utilised videotape, had been carefully stored in the vaults of NBC. Liza Minnelli had bought the rights to the film, and only occasionally had she screened it for her own private use.

In the 1980's the original negatives of the film were lost, and feared destroyed, but in 1999 they were tracked down and found in Los Angeles and New York! In 2005 Liza Minnelli revealed that with the assistance of Michael Ackrick she was having the film restored!

Bob Fosse, John Kandar and Fred Ebb, who had been involved in the original film introduced her to Robert Greenblat (The President of entertainment for "Showtime"), and he agreed to finance the restoration of the film, broadcast it, and release a DVD of the film.

The newly restored film was accepted as an entry into the Toronto International Film Festival and the  Hampton's Film Festival in 2005, and broadcast on Showtime 0n 1st April 2006.

A Quick Visit to Harrogate

I haven't done much on my blog during the last ten days or so, but I have had a request from Dean & Ros to "keep up the blog"

So here goes...........

Since we got back from our holidays, Dot has had two pictures she wanted framing. One of them is a poster she got from Betty's.

Last week we took the poster in to a picture framing shop in Harrogate, and it was ready to collect today.

On the way to Harrogate we pass a building called "The Blue Barn", which supplies all kinds of animal and bird food. During the years we have bought cat food, rabbit food, chinchilla food, and dog food from them. As it is getting nearer to the season of Winter we decided that we would stock up on our wild bird seed. Initially we purchased a 5 Kg bag of seed and ten fat balls, although the man who served us said I have put twelve balls in because the firm that used to supply us no longer does, and the new supplier produces slightly smaller balls.

Just as we were leaving the shop I noticed that they had larger bags of wild bird seed, so went back and exchanged the 5 kg bag for a larger one.

We then travelled on to Harrogate to collect the framed picture. I parked on a road off the bottom of Montpelier (outside the parking meter zone), whilst Dot popped into Marks and Spencer's food department.

When she got back to the car we pulled up on the Stray and Ruby got a nice walk on the grass there!

Tomorrow I have a Wedding Preparation Morning, when we gather all the couples who have booked a wedding at church during the next six months, and they are taken through the wedding service. The bell ringers and the verger are there, and I usually do a 45 minute session on choosing wedding hymns and wedding music.

No Comment!

I have to thank my fellow blogger Barry for this one