Friday night music: A bit of clogging and tapping

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Birdie Reece, 82, Buckdancing and playing the harmonica.



And someone a bit younger...



And now, move aside ladies, it's the wonderful Nicholas Brothers with, arguably, the greatest tap-dancing scene from any movie (after a bit of Cab Calloway, no mean dancer himself).  'Stormy Weather'.



But let's not forget some white men CAN dance...



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Andy Parfitt, happy Christmas your arse!

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BBC, pogue mahone | spiked
We are constantly sold the scare story of how the public (ie, us) is a potentially queer-bashing, race-hating lynch mob, forever on the brink. The result is that we hardly dare look at our own history any more because we could be opening a can of worms. So those in authority – such as the BBC’s surreptitious censors – have come up with a wheeze to rewrite history as: ‘We were all nice to each other. The end.’ We all know that’s nonsense. But this lie is not just about rewriting history as ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’. What is really offensive about retrospectively editing the historical record (by literally editing some historic records) is that the knockabout language of ordinary people is fingered and paraded as the pinnacle of every old-fashioned prejudice and social ill, from racism to homophobia.

This treats us as idiots with collective amnesia. It tells downright lies about where ideas such as racism and homophobia come from and whose interests such ideas serve. There are far worse evils to confront than good old-fashioned slug-it-out-with-abandon trading of insults, where a word such as ‘faggot’ is part of a name-calling armoury often uncoupled from its original meaning. Who hasn’t said ‘bitch’, ‘bastard’ or ‘bugger’ without thinking about its exact and offensive meaning? When we have a sense of ourselves as potent and capable people, such insults are just so much water off a duck’s back. It is only when we come to think of ourselves as cowering and timid - an idea the authorities seem only too happy to promote - that such name-calling appears threatening.

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Stupid and sadistic, what a combination!

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Special Needs Teens Given Electric Shocks After Hoax
Two teenagers were given electric shocks by staff at a special needs school on the orders of a crank caller, it has emerged. One of the vulnerable youngsters needed treatment for first-degree burns. Seven staff at the controversial centre have now been sacked...Staff at the Judge Rotenberg Education Centre, near Boston, had received a phone call ordering the punishment for the youngsters who, the caller falsely stated, had been misbehaving.

A report released to authorities in Massachusetts said the caller was a former resident with detailed knowledge of the staff, residents, and layout of the home. No motive was given.The centre is believed to be the only school in the US that uses two-second skin-shock punishments to change destructive behaviour. It has survived two attempts by the state to close it over allegations that its unorthodox methods amount to abuse.
Who runs this place? They should be tied to a chair and cattle-prodded until they promise never to have anything to do with the care of children again.

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'I would not only resign, I would go out and commit suicide'

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Justice denied
Omagh bombing Justice The Omagh bomb was the most terrible single event of the Troubles. The Real IRA attack in August 1998 killed 29 people and wounded hundreds more...Yesterday in Belfast the case against Sean Hoey, the only person ever charged with murder over the attack, was thrown out after the judge ruled that the police case rested on flawed evidence, the result of an incompetent and deceitful travesty of an investigation...

This would have been bad enough had failings not been reported before. It is worse that the police seem to have made little effort to correct errors exposed by the investigation of the ombudsman, Nuala O'Loan. She found that a failure of leadership ran through the police's handling of the atrocity.

Instead of accepting this, the then head of policing in Northern Ireland, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, dismissed her report. "If these [findings] were true ... I would not only resign, I would go out and commit suicide," he declared. The Police Association for Northern Ireland attempted to block the report in court. Yesterday's miserable outcome shows that Ms O'Loan was right and Sir Ronnie was wrong.
Well, what are you waiting for? You should know the drill. A walk in the country, a tree, a bottle of pills and that knife you've had since you were a boy scout...

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People-shredders

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Johann Hari - Cluster bombs are an evil we must ban outright
Welcome to Cluster's last stand – the final fight of a weapon that has shredded a hundred thousand legs and arms and eyes since it was lovingly created by the Nazis in the 1940s.

This week, the Austrian government has banned cluster bombs and begun to dismantle its stockpile of 10,000. Official delegates from 138 countries, representing two-thirds of humanity, are now on their way back from the turning-point conference in Vienna to prepare for a treaty in 2008 that will ban them outright. But a handful of superpowers – most notably Russia, the US and China – are clinging to their right to shred civilians, and the British government is dancing awkwardly between the two camps.

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Is it cos I is blue?

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Man's Skin Turns Blue After Silver Skin Treatment
A man in the US has been left looking and feeling blue after using silver extract to treat a skin condition...Mr Karason has moved from Oregon to California hoping to find acceptance but said: "I do tend to avoid public places as much as I can." But he said he was optimistic about being accepted for who he is. He said: "I think that will happen here. Where I was, I rather doubt it would have but this is a different kind of community."

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Wrap your presents in newspaper

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Meet the new Eco-nezer Scrooges - spiked
Christmas is coming, and so are all the by-now-traditional attacks on the seasonal binge of spending, eating, drinking and general consuming. But this time it’s different, thanks to the way that environmentalism has now become the default language of public debate. In the name of saving the planet, Christmas miserabilism has gone mainstream and taken the moral high ground this year...
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Gun madness

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Senate passes gun bill in response to rampage

"There's no connection between having a gun and shooting someone with it, and not having a gun and not shooting someone. There have been studies made and there is no connection at all." - Bill Hicks

The U.S. Congress, prodded by the deadliest shooting rampage in modern American history, passed legislation on Wednesday to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill. Without objection, the Senate and House of Representatives approved the measure, which would bolster background checks for gun buyers, and sent it to President George W. Bush to sign. The measure would be the first major new U.S. gun-control law since 1994. It was drafted after a gunman with a history of mental illness killed himself and 32 others in April at Virginia Tech university.

Well, that's progress I suppose. Great news for the 12,000 or so who are killed by people not deemed to be suffering from a mental illness. We won't even bother counting those injured, disabled and traumatised by guns, let alone the even higher number of suicides.

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