One of the Russian Ambassadors comes to President Putin and tells him he’d like to resign. “Why?” Putin asks him.
“Ah, Mr. President, I can’t take these time differences! I fly to another city, call home and everyone is asleep, I last woke you up at 4 in the morning, but I thought it was only evening, I call Angela Merkel to congratulate her on her birthday and she tells me she had it yesterday, I wish the Chinese President a happy New Year, and he says it will be tomorrow.”
“Well, these are just minor inconveniences,” says Putin. “Do you remember when that Polish plane crashed, killing their president? I called them to express my condolences, but the plane hadn’t yet taken off!”
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy – Ernest Benn
Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other –Â Oscar Ameringer,
We have the best government that money can buy –Â Mark Twain
A lot has been said about politics; some of it complimentary, but most of it accurate –Â Eric Idle
This was a part of Roy’s stage act back in the late sixties. Roy had many dimensions. His act contained deep poetic social epics such as McGoohan’s Blues, instrumental extravaganzas that showed off his innovative and masterly guitar skills such as One For All (a la Davy Graham), love songs such as Another Day, experimental pieces like In My Time of Water and humorous ditties like Feeling al the Saturday. He melded them all together to create a multidimensional experience. One minute we’d be intensely listening to a poetic diatribe on the state of society and the next laughing our heads off. It worked.
I remember Roy once saying to me back in the late sixties that there were a number of directions he could go off in and that maybe he should concentrate on one or the other.
There was a feeling that while all these songs worked well together on stage they might not fit the mood of a serious album like Flat Baroque and Berserk. There was a discussion about whether to include Feeling all the Saturday on the album. Roy made a suggestion that it should be included by cutting it into the cardboard of the cover so that you had to play the cover. That turned out to be infeasible. Would have been weird though wouldn’t it? I’m not sure that the cover would have been capable of turning round on a turntable without the corners catching. They would probably have had to make a round cover.
Anyway, I’m glad that Roy chose to include it. I have such fond memories of him playing it live. It is fun but there is a deepness to it as well. I love it.
