Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Rain Stops Play and One Gentleman (and his blog) of Verona

Oops - it seems I fed you some dud information in my last post. Summertime that was unofficially declared open last weekend has now been put on hold, as of yesterday when the skies opened up and suddenly it was hoiling it doon* At one point I thought I was an extra from the Gilgamesh, it was that bad.

Not too much of a disaster, though it was a sight to see an overweight ex-General Secretary, and an overweight current Assistant Secretary of the SPGB suddenly having to get off their arses and relocate a shed load of boxes of literature from the basement to the ground floor of the Head Office. Not too much damage was done, but there is a rumour that because we didn't first put out a call for nominations for a sub-committee, and get a resolution passed at Conference endorsing the decision before relocating the boxes, we may get charged with action detrimental for displaying sponataneist tendencies. by some of the more conservative elements within the Party.

On this blogging business, through inflicting my crap jokes and cool taste in music on an unsuspecting population, my pathfinder status is secure with the emergence (or resuscitation in one case) of other *cough* world socialist blogs.

The aforementioned Assistant Secretary's blog, Reasons to be Impossible has had a second lease of life (born again blogger?). If you have a taste for high erudition and low spelling then you won't go far wrong with this blog - and every once in a while I will poke him with a sharp pointy stick to ensure that he updates his blog more regularly in the future.

Another blog emerging from the quagmire of WSM indecision and self-induced paralysis is Skookum Talk which is jointly put out by a member of the World Socialist Party of the United States and a mate of his, and I'm not saying that they are joined at the hip but apparently they are known as the "Mick and Keef" of the radical subset in Portland, Oregon, which, I'm reliably informed, is a small shipping village on the west coast of one of our former colonies. This blog not only has politics and wit, but also has a keen eye for all things cultural and easy to remember piss takes of the left wing of capitalism. What more would you want from a blog?

Both blogs are wittier and more politically informed than my own wee blog, but I am suitably magnimous enough in welcoming the talented bastards to the small still voice of revolutionary blogs. If nothing else, if both of them get their fingers out and blog regularly, at least I have some politics to link to my blog rather than me just sending posts of me going through my record collection.

There is - possibly - another World Socialist blog. This one is in Italian, but as my knowledge of the Italian language goes no further than Scuddeto, Serie A and gooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallll-ha, the jury is still out on the matter. Check it out for yourself at the following link

* I was under the mistaken impression that hoiling it doon was local Geordie dialect, but from searching the online Geordie slang dictionary it now appears it was a phrase I made up myself. It sounds canny, like ;-)