[JohnHuang2]

Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Quote of the Day by floriduh voter

[jocon307]

what an amazing thing. dare I say, captivity is good for them? That plus the ------ the Nazis ought to irritate the lefties enough for one day, anyway.

Go Charlie!

[dennisw]

Foul-mouth parrot mimics Churchill's wartime thoughts

Mon Jan 19,10:23 AM ET

 

LONDON (AFP) - The inner thoughts of Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill live on, thanks to the foul mouth of his 104-year-old parrot who lives at a garden centre in southeast England.

 

AFP/File Photo

"F*** Hitler! F*** the Nazis!" says Charlie, a female blue and gold macaw which Churchill bought in 1937, two years before the outbreak of World War II in Europe.

 

"Parrots are remarkably adept at mimicking sounds and voices," says an article about Charlie in the February issue of Jack, a British men's magazine, which hits the newsstands on Thursday.

 

"So when Charlie gives her opinion of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, it is rendered with a Churchillian inflection," it said.

 

Following Churchill's death in 1965, Charlie was sold to pet shop owner Peter Oram, who keeps her at the garden centre in Reigate, Surrey, where she wanders around the grounds in summer but stays indoors in the winter.

 

"She is a very old parrot," Sylvia Martin, who works with Oram, told Jack. "She has become increasingly quarrelsome -- and, if the truth be told, is now looking a little scruffy."

 

 

[SevenofNine]

OHH How cuteee Nice birdie

Birdie want cracker

F*** YOU and Nazis

HEY John any word that Parrot might be sold to Osbournes

He be perfect pet for Ozzy and his wacky family

[My2Cents]

I wonder if it refers to Ramsey MacDonald as "The Boneless Wonder."

[Squantos]

Wow ........ Churchills parrot is older than Tarzans monkey....Cheetah !

Who'd a thunk it ?

Stay Safe ya'll !

[Rainbow Rising]

She is clearly not pining for the fjords.

[Dan from Michigan]

If that bird is still alive when I make it to Ireland and England, I'm going to have to pay a visit.

[PoorMuttly]

If Muttly knew he was still alive he would have tried to collect that poker bet from him and his old boss.

I wonder if he has any cigars left......

....nah !

[11th Earl of Mar]

Good story.

I posted it twice yesterday and it got pulled by mods both times.

But the mods have no problem with "Man Shoots Off Own Testicle."

[SkyPilot]

But the London-area man was forced to remove the bird from the shop after she kept swearing at children.

Maybe one of the candidates wants to buy him?

[aristeides]

Does this mean the FCC should allow the use of the word?

[HenryLeeII]

I know its probably been posted before, but for those who haven't read the following article before, enjoy...

Breakfast With Winston
By Quentin Letts
12 June 2003
The Wall Street Journal
A16
(Copyright (c) 2003, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

LONDON -- Harold Macmillan cultivated a reputation for creaky-voiced unflappability as a senior British politician half a century ago. He certainly needed all the imperturbability at his command on Jan. 26, 1952, when he visited Sir Winston Churchill. Macmillan's newly published diaries record that he reached 10 Downing Street at 9.30 a.m., an hour when most modern premiers would be launched into perhaps their fifth meeting of the day with strategy aides. Macmillan, who at that stage was defense secretary, found Churchill still in his pajamas.

"He was in bed with a little green budgerigar sitting on his head. He had the cage on his bed and a cigar in his hand. A whisky and soda was by his side -- of this the little bird took sips later on. Miss Portal [a secretary] sat by the bed -- he was dictating. He had just got a letter from the [U.S.] president, about the atomic and hydrogen bombs.

The bird flew about the room; perched on my shoulder and pecked (or kissed) my neck; flew to Miss Portal's arm; back to the PM's head, while all the time sonorous `Gibbonesque' sentences were rolling out of the maestro's mouth on the most terrible and destructive engine of mass warfare yet known to mankind. The bird says a few words, in a husky voice like an American actress."

The one depressing thing about this wonderful scene is that it would not happen today. In part this is because Tony Blair, the current "PM," is a punctilious man little given to sloth, whisky or, for that matter, budgerigars (his wife dislikes domestic pets). Is it perhaps also because modern politicians work too hard?

There was much to be done in 1950s Britain. The country needed to be rebuilt after World War II. The postwar Labour government of Clement Attlee had increased the apparatus of the state enormously. Churchill and his cabinet ministers also had an empire to dismantle, as well as facing the threat from communism, nuclear armament and bewildering social change.

While the elderly Churchill was not trifling with his budgie he found time to paint, write books and have a stroke. Macmillan, meanwhile, spent hours reading novels, shooting game, walking in the grounds of his Sussex house and helping to run his family's publishing firm. Some days he spent all morning at the firm before tootling off to do some politics after a goodish lunch. All this was done, remember, at a time of national reconstruction.

Few days passed without Macmillan also gorging himself on books. In his diary he admits "addiction" to the fat novels of Trollope and works his way through C.P. Snow, Disraeli and Bagehot, among others. He liked to read medieval French literature in its original language, and soon after himself becoming prime minister (succeeding poor Anthony Eden in 1957) tells his diary: "I have read a good deal in recent weeks -- some Trollope, some Henry James, three volumes of Cobbett's Rural Rides. I have now embarked on R.L. Stevenson, which I have not read for very many years."

Modern statesmen would snort at such amateurism. Where are the dawn starts, the focus-group analysis meetings, the speech-writing sessions, the telephone hotline discussions, and the interminable fund-raising dinners? Where, indeed, are the regular exercise workouts? The jogs? The prayer meetings? Macmillan and his generation simply did not bother.

Or was Churchill's little green budgie evidence of despair at postwar Britain's impotence? Were the cabinets of 1950s London languid and genteel because they realized that the U.S. was now running the show?

Macmillan's diary for Sept. 27, 1952, has this to say about the U.S.: "We are treated by the Americans with a mixture of patronizing pity and contempt. They treat us worse than they do any other country in Europe. They undermine our political and commercial influence all over the world . . . . They really are a strange people. Perhaps the mistake we make is to continue to regard them as an Anglo-Saxon people. That blood is very much watered down now; they are a Latin-Slav mixture, with a fair amount of German and Irish. They are impatient, mercurial, panicky." </p?

It was enough to drive a man to breakfast whisky -- and small birds with accents like Joan Crawford's.

[E Rocc]

Charlie was purchased by a pet shop owner, Peter Oram, when Churchill died in 1965. But the London-area man was forced to remove the bird from the shop after she kept swearing at children.

I'd say her former owner was whispering in her ear telling her to do that. >:)

-Eric