The Unorthodox Website Blog

A Channel 4 program in UK tonight spent a whole hour to say that the carbon testing of the Turin Shroud proving it to be a fake created in the Middle Ages, was flawed because the sample taken was contaminated with a cotton repair made in the 16th Century. It came to the conclusion that the worst possible area of the Shroud, part which had been repaired, was taken for carbon dating and other tests.

The rest of the program went into the history of the Shroud and various tests which proved that stains were of real blood, showing signs of the kind of stress caused by a crucifixion.

While all this may be of great significance to a Christian, and particularly to those of a Roman Catholic persuasion who place great importance in religious relics of this kind, I honestly can’t see what relevance it has to the rest of us.

Someone somewhere has obviously decreed that certain things are bad for us, are ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘politically incorrect’, so they have either banned them outright or made them very difficult to obtain. This is NOT my imagination, it is happening everywhere, and other people of my generation agree with me.

No doubt the older generation have always felt like this as things once familiar to them become relics of a distant past, but now I’m experiencing it myself and I don’t like it.

Let’s start with food. Salt has lost its flavor, so has tea (whether in bags or loose). Someone has obviously decided salt and strong tea is bad for us, so both these products have been diluted.

I’ve never been a great tea drinker myself, but whereas one tea bag was always sufficient to give a nice, strong cup of tea which actually tasted of something, now with the popularity of all these fancy herbal teas with no flavor, some bloody yuppy has decided than the traditional English cuppa has also to be diluted so that it has no flavor either.

I watched Jonathan Dimbleby’s BBC 4 series about his epic 10,000 mile journey across the Russian Federation, and had very mixed feelings.

Statues of Lenin and other relics of Communism are everywhere, and so of course are symbols of the post-Soviet era. Foreign and Russian millionaires, Western multinationals, drug-peddling, prostitution, Mafia-type criminal gangs, corruption, an atmosphere of repression and an increasing trend towards a Soviet-style dictatorship.

Indeed many Russians interviewed seemed unenthusiastic about democracy and felt a strong Russia, or even a revived Soviet Union, was what they most wanted. Moreover, the old brutal dictator Joseph Stalin is being rehabilitated everywhere, including in the new history books. A mosaic of the dictator secretly hidden beneath plaster for years has now been uncovered and put on display in one building.

I was totally against the break-up of the Soviet Union, and I must admit a new version would greatly appeal to me, but it would have to be based on true democracy as well as Socialism.

An Italian acquaintance and myself were chatting last week, and the conversation got quite political. He thought Margaret Thatcher was the greatest thing since sliced bread, whilst being an ex-Communist Party member I thought the same about Socialism.

He brought out the hoary old argument that Socialism failed because there were no incentives under that system to be productive and create good quality goods and services, whereas Capitalism due to its competitive nature and the profit motive, did provide such incentives.

This is the classic argument put by apologists for Capitalism, but it doesn’t hold water. Let’s examine exactly what kind of organizations actually provide incentives for people to work harder and produce good quality goods and services:

1. Worker/consumer cooperatives, because the workers (and consumers) share the profits.

2. Firms where there is a profit-sharing  scheme, or bonus scheme for good performances.

3. Family businesses where the family members actually work in the business.

Many who see my link to the DianaSpeaks site to the right of this article (do click on it and listen to at least one of the podcasts yourself before dismissing it as bunkum) or who have read any of my blogs on Diana, former Princess of Wales speaking thru her voice channel Andrew Russell-Davis may well think me some sort of nutter, but they are probably unaware of the huge volume of recorded voices of dead people speaking accessible on the Internet.

This is the wonderful thing about the Internet, it makes things which were once hidden away in archives somewhere available to everybody. Yes, it also means cranks and conspiracy theorists can have a field day posting their home-made documentaries on YouTube, but for serious researchers there’s an unlimited mine of real information out there at few clicks of a mouse with the help of a good search engine.

Ena Sharples (Violet Carson)

Conceived by a gay man, Tony Warren, it is perhaps not surprising that part of Coronation’s Street longevity (50 next year) is the constant stream of strong Northern women who have appeared in the serial.

The very first scene featured Ena Sharples (Violet Carson) in Florrie Linley’s corner shop. Ena was the street’s first sharp-tongued battleax, and she shared what was then known as ‘The Snug’ in the Rover’s Return with Minnie Caldwell (Margot Bryant) and Martha Harley/Longhurst (Lynne Carol). The three old ladies, all with different characters, were a mainstay of the program back then.

Ruling supreme over her Rover’s domain, determined to keep it a cut-above your average Manchester backstreet public house, was Annie Walker (Doris Speed) who talked and acted like a northern version of The Queen.