The Long, the Short and the Vertically challenged.

Neil Fingleton 7"7"

Hey! 100,000 hits since I started this blog; when compared with web sites who have millions it's nothing, I know, but I'm impressed. So thank you for reading this and thanks also if you read it on a regular basis; there is an email mailing list and it automatically goes out on Twitter but I'm very pleased.

Now!!

I heard someone use the expression the other day 'vertically challenged' – what he meant was 'short.' I have to say that that's a bit much isn't it? Either you are short or tall, big or small and I'm sure that short people don't mind being called short or tall people tall.

That is politically correctness gone mad; I'm not saying that we should say all the offensive words that were used years ago but words like actress, spastic, Oriental and a lot of other words are being taken out of the English language by a kind of fascism.

I'm not very tall in fact compared to some of my tall mates I am quite short and they would think of me as short – or even small. I remember saying to one of my tall pals one day that I'd seen Noel Edmunds and I said he was quite small. He looked at me strangely as if I'd thought somehow that I wasn't short and was eliminating myself, conversationally, from being one of the short guys but Noel Edmunds is very short; he came up to my shoulder and it's quite a surprise when you see someone like that and they are shorter than you think - but Noel Edmunds wasn't challenged; nobody challenged him “Oye you! I'm challenging you; you're short!!”

But if you look up Noel Edmunds on the IMDb you will see that he's 5'8” which is about level with the top of my head not my shoulder; they have me down as 5'9” and I know at least two people who are exactly the same height as me – number one is Sylvester Stallone and number two is Steve Railsback. I was in a film with Steve and not only is he the same height as me, but all his other measurements are the same too – well the ones we can see, anyway.

I have seen Stallone a few times and he wears lifts or high heels and looks a lot taller than he is.

Now what is this thing about being closer to the sky?

I saw Richard Branson on TV in America; he was on a late night talk show and the host, Jimmy Kimmel, was sitting in a chair higher than Branson's; so Branson mentioned it and sat on the back of the chair so that he, Richard Branson, could be closer to the roof; he sat there like a perched parrot on heat. I think that about sums him up; that, and the time he cheated at Monopoly on TV when he was invited on to celebrate an anniversary of the game. The people he was playing with accused him of cheating.

“What does it matter?” he said “It's only a game.”

Only a game.

I don't know what the insecurity is about size.

Last year I worked with the tallest man in Britain, Neil Fingleton, who is 7'7” - isn't he vertically challenged. I would imagine more people ask him his height than ask me mine, in fact that's the first thing I asked him. I was probably the twentieth or thirtieth person who asked him that day!!!!

Tony Benn

When Kenny Everett chanted a little ditty of a poem about Margaret Thatcher I remember the words 'you will vote for her again/cos you won't vote for Tony Benn; and now he is dead.

He was an intellectual of the highest order, make no mistake, and an aristocrat to boot; for those that don't know this, he renounced his title so he could become an MP; he was a good MP for 50 years or so and when he retired, mainly because of his wife's illness, he said he was retiring to concentrate on politics.

A lot of people didn't like him – they hadn't met him, by the way – but it would be his politics that people didn't like. He was a socialist and because he was a committed socialist and a conviction politician he didn't stand a chance.

People would steal things from his garbage to see what they could get on him but they didn't find much.

In the Wilson Government of the sixties he was the technology wizz kid and during all those years he dictated a diary – he espoused none personality politics but his diaries reveal lots of personalities and big names.

He was a war time pilot in the RAF and his brother was killed in the same campaign; he went from Viscount Stansgate, to Anthony Neil Wedgwood-Benn and finally to Tony Benn – he wanted to be as 'common as muck' but if you look at some of the photos of him as a young man he looks like an upper class twit.

Look at this:

Looks a bit like Kenneth Williams!!

An amusing fact I found here - His great-uncle, the Rev Julius Benn, was murdered with a chamber pot by his son, who on release from Broadmoor fathered the actress Margaret Rutherford.

No matter how much controversy he created or how much trouble he might have caused, if he was ever at a party children gathered around him; children from babes in arms to teenagers. Even children who were only children at heart would gather around to listen to his stories and in his later years he actually toured a 'one man show.'

His failures in trying to spread his ideas to everybody, his trying to influence the Labour Party were probably our failures. We were probably worried about him trying to take our posh houses away or taking our posh cars or our rights but you know . . we don't have any rights.

In Britain (believe this America) we have to pay our cell phone (mobile) companies to use an 800 number, have to pay premium rates to vote for a contestant on a TV show and lots of other diabolical liberties so what were we worried about?

The World Wide Web.

Now who are these two very attractive fellas? One of them created the world wide web and the other one said he did; one of them is famous in America but hardly known in Britain and the other one isn't well known at all – really – but he changed all of our lives.

The one with the full head of hair is Al Gore and believe it, people of Britain, that once upon a time he was the Vice President of the United States of America, and could have been the President instead of George W Bush had he not been too proud to ask for help as he thought Bill Clinton was morally beneath his holier than thou just scrubbed and washed Christian self. He also won an Academy Award for his Global Warming Documentary Film.

The other fella is Tim Berners-Lee – he actually did create the world wide web – the Internet. He is in the news today because it is 25 years to the day since he presented the first paper on the Internet.

He is hardly known at all in America but here in Britain, where he is just about known, he celebrated the 25^th anniversary with a call for a 'magna-carta' of the web. He realises, now, like Oppenheimer who invented the Atom Bomb (or led the team), that he gave birth to a monster.

Now that we have the Internet our lives, instead of being made simple, have become more complicated. Without the Internet I wouldn't be able to write this blog, wouldn't have access to a lot of knowledge, wouldn't be able to go to the best web page of them all – YouTube – which gives me access, at the touch of a button, to some of the greatest, funniest and clever films clips, old records by some great pop and rock singers and, it must be said, access to a load of crap!!

The latest nuisance to me is a series of emails I am receiving from 'sexy' girls who send me links to their web sites/cams so they can show me their sexy bodies – so they say – and what I have done about this in the past is to put them on my spam list or junk list, when I would receive them. The problem this time is that the emails arrive in my box from ME!! Yes, would you believe it. So if I put them in to the junk box I am actually putting myself in there. You see when you send an email there are a few things you can put next to the To/ address line: you can put cc – which means carbon copy and sends a copy to people and they see each other; you can put bcc – which you should do if you are sending an email to a lot of people; or you can put reply to: and that is how these emails come to me.

So if I reply and tell them to go away I am replying to myself – anybody can do it if they know someone's email addy. I will figure out how to get rid of Jessie – which is the name of the person who sends most of these emails – and I have an idea.

Here's a clip from PC World which tells you what Tim Berners-Lee is calling for:

Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the underpinnings of the World Wide Web, has called for a digital-age “Magna Carta”—new rules to protect Internet users from government interference.

Berners-Lee told The Guardian Tuesday that he believes the web now requires legalized protection. “We need a global constitution—a bill of rights,” he told the paper. The interview was conducted to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, which hits that milestone today.

He'll be lucky – it's too late!

Desert Island Discs.

Roy Plomley.

 

I often listen to Desert Island Discs on Radio 4 here in the good old UK – for those not in good old, it's a programme where a well known person chooses eight records (songs etc) that they would take to an imaginary desert island if they were stranded.

I suppose the reason why the figure is eight is that when records were played on an automatic record player, there was a maximum of eight records you could pile up.

The show has run here in the good old since 1066 and is quite popular – well some time in the 50s to be exact.

When it first started, it was devised and presented by a certain Roy Plomley (I think that was his name – still no Internet just a brief daily visit to Starbucks so can't look him up), and the guests were interviewed in the bowels of the BBC by the aforesaid 'Mister P' and later on he, 'Mister P', would edit the interview and play just a part of each song.

Michael Parkinson said that when he was the guest, it wasn't any fun at all. There have been a few presenters since the original Mister P was washed up to meet his maker, and one of them was the aforementioned Mister Parkinson – another 'Mister P'; there have been two presenters since Parkie and it has evolved so they actually play all the songs all the way through, for the guests at the recording, and then edit the whole show later; so the more they speak the less of their music is played. These days the guests enjoy being on the show because of this.

At the end they are asked which one of the discs they would take if they could only save one; the mind boggles at how a real ship wreck would work with people looking for their records in the crush; then they are asked which one book they would take (they are given a Shakespeare Complete Works (I think) and The Bible) – look at that two loads of brackets – parenthesis in America – and then they get get to choose an item of luxury; well not necessarily an item of luxury more like an ordinary every day item.

A lot of very famous people have been guests – Michael Caine, Dustin Hoffman, Julie Andrews – recently they had a couple 'double acts' like Torvill and Dean, if you can count them as a double act and a couple called Ant and Dec who were as entertaining as an episode of Andy Pandy.

And they take some of the strangest things - quite a few guests take, as a so called luxury item, a pencil; others their favourite chair or even a favourite teddy bear but some push their luck and ask for things like a rowing boat - but those items are against the rules of the exercise.

Someone asked to take the Wimbledon Centre Court and – they were granted it!

The reason I mention this is that in my last post, I asked you to think which one item you would take from your home should you have to leave within one hour – as happened in Chernobyl.

I also said that I didn't like what conclusion I came to as I was thinking of a real situation.

It came about because there is a novel that's just been published, set in Chernobyl, and one of the men, who were asked to bring the one item, brought a door. As I said in my last post he did this because the door was used to lay out members of his family when they died.

So I sat and thought about what I would take; and I'm afraid it would be my lap top.

What else would I take? My guitar? My collection of harmonicas? I would be able to buy them anywhere. Some photos? They're on my lap top! My bank details? On my lap top – it's a no brainer isn't it!!

Various people have been on Desert Island Discs and I have my favourites and they are the people who chose the songs that I like; you know, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran etc – tell you what I'll put my eight discs, which I don't know yet, at the bottom of the page.

These days I listen to the conversation more than the music and I find their conversations fascinating. The retiring Governor of the Bank of England chose a song about Aston Villa – his favourite football team (and mine it has to be said) – a song that you cannot buy.

Others, like politicians and show business celebrities, have chosen what would benefit them politically or make them look good and trendy – which is a shame, really. One of my favourites was David Putman – I could have chosen all of his songs, which have gone out of my head now as it was years ago.

Okay here we go, I'll see if I can come up with eight now:

1. Peggie Sue, by Buddy Holly – I could, and do, listen to the greatest guitar break ever, from one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time, over and over again.
2. Wild Thing, by The Troggs – for some reason this is 'our song' – it seems the lead singer's voice is similar to mine!!!!
3. You Were On My Mind, by Crispian St Peters – this is a great song with, I believe, a rising fifth (like My Way) which makes it a hit.
4. Lay Lady Lay, by Bob Dylan – I find this hypnotic and have been known to play it over and again at people's parties – but not since I was a young Turk.
5. Girl Of My Best Friend, by Elvis Presley – I just love this song and I love all sings with the C, Am, F and G chord sequence and this is one of them. When it came out I knocked about with a mate and his girl friend and we kind of (me and the girl) cuddled and one day she gave me a French kiss and, to save my embarrassment, I said 'hello' during it.
6. Move Over Darling, by Doris Day – a very sexy song by one of the great virgins of cinema, which probably adds to the sexuality of the record.
7. I've Told Every Little Star, by Linda Scott – this is another three chord song and I just love it.
8. Born Too Late, by The Poni Tails - when I was sixteen I was in love with a fourteen year old girl but she was too young; she was born too late.

I suppose this list would change if I did it again tomorrow – no Beatles, I'm afraid, and, after all that, no Eddie Cochran or Bobby Vee - not much since then but each of these songs do strange things to my memory.