The Unorthodox Website Blog

Now the whole series has finished, ending up in the former GDR (East Germany), I can’t help feeling what a wasted opportunity this project turned out to be.

It seemed to mainly consist of Pallin visiting wacky people, or those who were taking the opportunity of the ‘free market’ to rip off those daft enough, such as BBC license payers, to fall for their scams.

Think of just some of the people and places Pallin visited just in the last few episodes: a Russian woman in the Baltic states who ran a clinic in which she used leeches to cleanse the blood, an avant garde theater company in former Czechoslovakia where Pallin was invited to put on a grotesque mask and make an utter fool of himself, another clinic where he was rubbed with what looked like stones, then we see him lying in a plastic bag next to the Czech ‘Miss World’.

Perhaps someone from the younger generation, by which I mean anyone under about 50, can explain to me why mobile phones and all their gadgets are so popular with these age groups?

Why on Earth would I want to be talking on the phone when walking down the street, on public transport, etc.? What would I talk about and who would I be talking to anyway? I ring my friends, or they ring me, in the comfort and privacy of my own home. I have an answering machine, and there is also the 1471 service to tell you which calls you’ve missed, so what is the problem of listening to any messages and ringing them back once you get home? I don’t want to hold a conversation in public places with other people listening to what I’m saying.

Then there are the never-ending stream of gadgets or ’software’ you can get with the latest mobile phones.

I makes no bones about it, I’m a staunch European Federalist. Not least because all the good laws that have kicked Britain into the 21st Century have come about due to pressure from Brussels. I only hope now Brussels orders UK to run public transport 365 days a year, and subsidize it to the hilt. It is scandalous we have some of the highest fares in Europe, or indeed the world, and that all transport stops on Christmas Day when everyone wants to visit their friends and families, and have a drink. Hardly a way to stop ‘drink and driving’ is it, to withdraw all public transport on Christmas Day when everyone wants to travel and have a few drinks? In Paris the Metro runs all thru Christmas Day, and also in little towns in Germany.

‘I don’t believe it!’ as Victor would say, about almost everything. But we have to believe it because it’s true. As anyone over 50 certainly knows, the whole world has gone to pot. Nearly everything was done much better in the old days. They just haven’t got a clue nowadays, not a bloody clue!

I find myself thinking like this about so many things. Of course there are great innovations like the Internet which we never had 30 years ago, but in those days if you saw someone walking around talking to themselves you’d cross the road to avoid them and hope they would be locked up for their own safety and that of the rest of us. Now it will be some idiot talking on their mobile phone.

We managed perfectly well without phones at all for centuries, than Graham Alexander Bell invented the instrument, which many saw as an invasion into their private lives.

That’s a song title, a religious song actually. But I wrote and posted a blog here some days ago praising the British Cooperative movement, and saying that the Cooperative Party would be ideal as the nucleus of a new leftwing political party, were it not so entrenched inside New Labour. The blog, which also displayed a Cooperative Party logo, has since disappeared. As I sent a link to the Cooperative Party, I can only assume they somehow had it removed by the blog site hosts because they didn’t like what it said and display of one of their logos.

If this is the case, it is very disappointing. It would have been far more constructive to post a comment, and email me direct if they wanted the logo removed. It is ironic that this form of censorship, if that is what it was and not just some strange technical anomaly, was exactly the reason I suggested New Labour was a lost cause and it was time the Cooperative Party broke away and became the nucleus of a new Socialist party in which other leftwing political parties and the Trade Unions could come together to form a new, united labor movement.

I sat thru the marathon BBC 4 Bob Dylan night – nearly 5 hours. It was really mainly about the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, except for a documentary about a BBC play in which Bob sung 4 songs. This was recorded in late 1962/early 1963, but was wiped by the Beeb in 1968. Mention was made of the King and Queen folk club near the Middlesex Hospital where Bob had his first public appearance in London during this trip to UK. This is where the Tales From The Woods jam sessions are held today.

The Newport programs, featuring not only Dylan but also artists like Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and the folk trio Peter Paul and Mary, brought back nostalgic memories for me of the 1960s when I was very active in the peace movement, which was then very closely tied in with the folk music scene.

There was a repeat of last Sunday’s episode of ‘Michael Pallin’s New Europe’ on BBC 2 tonight (Saturday) in which he visits Hungary and the Ukraine, including Yalta.

I find it hard to believe Pallin is a naive as he likes to make out. Talking about one of the conferences between the three principal Allies of World War II (the other was at Potsdam a few months later) in which the victors divided the spoils between them, Pallin gives the impression that Churchill and Roosevelt were duped by Uncle Joe (Stalin) into believing he would allow Western-style free elections in Eastern Europe. What utter nonsense!

These are the facts: the Soviet Union lost some 17 million people in the war against Hitler fascism, and after turning the tide at Stalingrad the Red Army not only liberated the Soviet Union, but the whole of Eastern and much of Central Europe from the Nazi regime.

(Click on the thumbnail pictures to see them full size.)

Watching Michael Pallin’s ‘New Europe’ series when he reached the Romanian capital, Bucharest, I was taken aback by the sumptuous beauty of Ceaucescu’s extravagent Palace of the People. Unfortunately the building of this huge palace and its surrounding streets, etc. involved the demolition of many houses and historic buildings, and destroyed the old center of Bucharest.

Palace of the People, Bucharest, Romania

It got me thinking of how some of the world’s greatest and most beautiful buildings and constructions were devised and completed under some kind of authoritarian regime, be it Communist, Fascist,  Absolute Monarchy, a dictatorial Church, etc.

The Pyramids of Egypt and I believe the Taj Mahal in India were extravagent examples, built by slave labor, who were sometimes killed after the work was completed I believe.

 (Link to Victor Zammit’s website main page www.victorzammit.com)

We are living in exciting times in the worlds of science and the so-called ‘paranormal’. More and more scientists, and people of a non-religious background, are studying the evidence and coming to some startling conclusions.

I have been reading and hearing a lot about this lately via the Internet. I here will summarize some of what I have learnt just recently, though I had long come to similar conclusions myself.

First, the nature of the universe, or multi-universe. Before Einstein came along with his Theory of Relativity, it was thought that the Universe and everything in it was permeated by a substance which was termed ‘Ether’. Einstein’s Relativity Theory effectively killed off this idea, but now it seems it may have been correct after all. Orthodox scientists are mystified as to why the vast majority of the matter in the Universe/multi-universe is still undiscovered, and know that there must be some explanation for all this so-called ‘dark matter’ which we know exists due to its gravitational pull and mathematics.