Kimchi...Yuk!

Can I really have lived 69 years without hearing of kimchi? If you haven’t heard of it too, it is said to be a Korean superfood. I bought some the other week and ended up throwing away the entire jar. Yuk!

Having said that, I am sure I’ve actually eaten it before because certain noodles I’ve bought from a Vietnamese shop in Croydon and a shop I used at Peckham (when I visited Goodman) have that taste, only nowhere near as foul. It isn’t just the taste, it’s the red stuff.

I tried kimchi because I saw it featured in a few YouTube videos including one by a doctor whose channel has millions of subscribers. He also recommended sauerkraut, which he said is also a superfood. I’ve eaten sauerkraut before of course, but only in very small quantities. I bought a big jar of it and ended up throwing that away too. Utterly disgusting. I’ve been told it is an acquired taste. Many people say the same thing about beer; I never acquired a taste for that either.

The same people who tell us kimchi and sauerkraut are superfoods also tell us that highly processed foods like ice cream are bad for us. I really like vanilla ice cream, rather than being bad, it’s good for my palate, and frankly, at my age that is all I care about.

Fame, Fortune, And Failure

If you haven’t heard of the band featured on the screengrab below, they hail from Chicago and since 2017 have toured with Al Stewart. At some point, they became his backing band, performing a short set of their own then returning after the interval to play with Al. I saw them at London’s Cadogan Hall in October 2019 and October 2022. They may not be the best band in the world but they are a long way from the worst. Their lead guitarist Josh Solomon has written at least one classic song — Privatize The Profits; they have also had a Billboard Number 1.

On September 5, 2025, Al Stewart turned 80, and as part of The Farewell Tour, performed at the London Palladium on October 15. When I phoned the box office a week in advance, I was told there were only eight tickets left, and indeed, the concert was sold out, so how on Earth could the above video have been viewed only twice in eleven months? — asks the most shadow banned individual on the Internet! Sadly, it’s an old, old story — some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them, while some are born mediocre, achieve only mediocrity, yet are adored by millions.

There are many talented people out there in music, the arts, and other disciplines who should achieve greatness but have to settle for much less. I know, I’ve met some of them. They include Dani Clay — world famous in Brentwood, and an unknown Chinese computer technician whose cycling innovation went all but unnoticed. Best not to mention the mediocrities who fared far better than all the above.

Cousin Marriage, And...?

So we have had Pakistani grooming gangs, Pakistani jihadis, and now we have Pakistani first cousin marriages. These latter are a social problem because?

We are told they lead to genetic deformities and abnormalities, but do they? Let’s leave the statistics aside for the moment.

First though, if you find the subject of cousins confusing, here is a simple chart that explains it c/o FamilySearch dot org.

Queen Victoria married her first cousin; Albert gave her four sons and five daughters. Although she outlived four of her offspring, the only one who might have been considered physically disabled was Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany who died in 1884 at the age of 30; he suffered from haemophilia.

Studies in the UK and elsewhere show the prognosis for the offspring of first cousin marriages is only slightly worse than for non-cousin marriages. Leaving that aside, haven’t its opponents heard of amniocentesis? Iceland has virtually eliminated Down’s syndrome, so why can’t the world eliminate birth defects from cousin marriages? After all, we are constantly being told abortion is a right.

Leaving that aside, isn’t it better that Pakistanis in Britain and throughout the West marry among themselves, or do we really want their menfolk riding around with underage white girls in taxis à la Rotherham and elsewhere?

Psychic Confession

This is a documentary by a professional magician exposing a self-styled psychic. No, not James Randi this time, but Danny Korem, although Randi has also replicated Hydrick’s trick. More than three and a half decades on, Psychic Confession is also a tragic document, because it illustrates clearly what might have been.

James Hydrick had an appalling start in life, and it is little wonder that he ended up in prison. During that sojourn he pioneered an amazing magic trick; he was able to move the pages of a book or a pencil by undetectable but powerful blasts of controlled breathing. He palmed off this trick on a credulous and compliant media, using it to shoot to a fleeting fame as both a psychic and a martial arts instructor.

Sadly, it was not to last, and instead of developing a career in either martial arts or entertainment, he ended up back in prison for of all things receiving stolen guns. Why on Earth would he do that? Wherever and however he developed his martial arts talent, he had a lot of charisma and was no mean intellect. As a boy he was branded a retard (politely), and was either totally illiterate or semi-literate, but, he says, he learned to read while incarcerated, and prison could have been the making of him.

He was in prison when this documentary finished, by which time he had confessed his trick to Korem, having failed to replicate it under controlled conditions.

Sadly, things would get much worse. While he was also handsome, and could undoubtedly have found himself an upmarket girlfriend, Hydrick appears to be homosexual. Far, far worse than that, he is also a paedophile, and in 1989, he received a 17 year sentenced for abusing underage boys. Although he could have been parolled after eight and a half years, at the time of writing he is still behind bars, though in a hospital rather than a prison. So sad. On a lighter note, the classiest line in Psychic Confession goes to Hydrick’s mother. Speaking of his father she says “He was a good provider, he was a good husband, he just happened to be a wife-beater.”

[The above review should have been published by IMDb on August 5, 2025 having been submitted with two other reviews that were published the same date. It was held up for some reason but as far as I can see has not actually been declined. Having waited long enough and then some, it was published here as dated.]

Even Zionists Can Learn

The other day I learned a new word, or rather a new phrase: slut drop. The slut who did this was Meghan Markle, currently in the news for all the wrong reasons, as usual. I find it truly amazing that now less than two years short of my allotted three score and ten I am still learning things about the English language. Someone else, a somewhat disparate group of people, don’t seem to learn anything, or rather they didn’t until October 8, 2023, the day after one of the worst terror outrages in recorded history. What they learned is that the people who really hate them are not the ones their activists and mischief-makers have been telling them hated them for decades.

This week, they have learned something else. Back in 2010, the IDF boarded a ship called the Mavi Marmara and murdered nine of its male passengers, including an American citizen. The Flotilla Massacre caused worldwide outrage, rightly so. The Israeli Government compounded the outrage by recording a song about the incident that mocked the victims. They may still not understand just why they are hated, but in the past 24 hours, the IDF intercepted another humanitarian mission, in the process arresting Gremlin of Doom, Greta Thunberg. To the cries of “How dare they!?” no doubt.

Thunberg and her equally daffy fellow travellers will now be deported. This begs the question, if this could be done without a shot being fired, why not the previous incident?

What’s A Balaclava?

Although I did five years of German and six years of French at school, English has been my only language in my sixty-eight years. I can’t remember the first time I heard the word balaclava, but it was obviously when I was very young. I’m sure I owned at least one when I was a kid.

I know American-English is very different from English proper, what might be called BBC standard English – two nations divided by a common language and all that – but it never occurred to me that Americans, especially white Americans, would not have heard the word balaclava. This came up during the Kohberger hearings. For the benefit of future readers, Bryan Kohberger is the man accused of what has become known as the Idaho Student Murders - the horrendous knife massacre of three young women and a dude in November 2022. He will stand trial later this year as things stand.

A witness who saw the killer leave the house in the small hours said he was wearing a mask, and drew a sketch of his face. At some point the word balaclava was thrown into the mix, and some people asked the question what’s a balaclava? This prompted me to ask if Americans had heard the word trousers as well, which was met with a contemptuous rebuff.

I should have been less full of it because yesterday I heard a phrase I have certainly never heard before: rainbow baby. Under other circumstances I wouldn’t have had a clue what this meant, but from the issue under discussion it was obvious, and when I looked it up, this obviousness was affirmed – a baby born after a miscarriage. For one awful moment I thought it might have had something to do with sexual perversion, be it homo or trans.

I don’t keep tally of these things but as far as I recall, I first heard the word jitty on April 19, 2022; this is a small passageway. The word shellacking requires no explaining now, having been in regular use for the past couple of years, but the first time I recall hearing it was some time in 2022.

And to cap it all, I had been misspelling the phrase ad nauseam throughout my life, something I noticed for the first time late at night or in the small hours of July 18/9, 2022.

When Is A Shed Not A Shed?

When it is a dustbin, apparently. Recently, I ordered a padded shirt through Amazon – I love these things. Everything is tracked now, which is a good thing, but only if the tracking information is accurate.

Checking my e-mails, I saw one from the courier to the effect that the package had been delivered. Thinking it might have been taken in by my neighbour, I went downstairs to look, and it wasn’t there. Rechecking my e-mail, I saw it had been left next to the shed, the one that doesn’t exist. The photograph below shows where it had really been left, stuffed next to one of the dustbins in the front garden. Why this bloke couldn’t have rung one of the bells if not mine, I don’t know, but as he appears to be both white and a native, he can hardly have mistaken the covered space where the bins are stashed for a shed.

Happily, I had better luck this afternoon when another padded shirt arrived, this one with an attached hood. When I returned from a visit to the dentist, I found the package outside my apartment door, thanks to my neighbour of nearly thirty years.