Maker and Redeemer

I have been working a bit on music of late, which is maybe putting it a bit too ambitiously given that I am not very musically educated and don’t even read the notes on the staves fluently, but I just felt like a play, and some extemporaneous music came out, which I expect to record when I can play it more faultlessly.

I wanted to basically fit the words to Glory be to Jesus which has the tune shown nicely here:


which I hasten to add is not mine as you may be able to tell when they skip one of my favorite hymn verses of all time.

What is sung there is called the tune Casnell by William Henry Monk (known for having composed the best-known tunes for “Abide with me”, “All things bright and beautiful” and many others). Whoever wrote that book they are playing from I know not, but as far as I can tell the correct name of that tune isn’t Casnell, at all, as I can’t find any other mentions of such a name. The correct information is that a German Lutheran composer called Friedrich Filitz composed it in 1847 for the tune “Wem in Leidenstagen”, which I cannot find any performances of. It is sometimes called Caswall in English, but still attributed to Filitz.

Edward Caswall in turn was the person who made the English words of Glory be to Jesus having translated it from Italian.

Here are the Italian words:

Viva! Viva! Gesù! che per mio bene
Tutto il sangue verso dalle sue vene.
Il sangue di Gesù fu la mia vita;
Benedetta la Sua bontà infinita.
Questo sangue in eterno sia lodato,
Che dall’ inferno il mondo ha riscattato.
Questo Sangue si fe’ nostra bevanda
E delle anime nostre la lavanda.
Il Sangue di Gesù placa lo sdegno
Del Genitore e ci conduce al Regno.
D’Abele il sangue gridava venedetta.
Quel di Gesù per noi perdono aspetta.
Se di tal Sangue è asperso il nostro cuore,
Fugge il Ministro del divin furore.
Se di Gesù si esalta il divin sangue,
Tripudia il ciel, trema l’abisso e langue.
Diciamo dunque insiem con energia
Al sangue di Gesù gloria si dia. Amen 

Ascr. St. Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787).




I will be adding more to this later on to show the chorus I have added, both tune and words, but the refrain (i am planning for the refrain to develop over the course of the hymn but the culminating refrain, so to speak, will be:

Maker and Redeemer
Bathe us in Thy Blood!
Bring us home to Glory
Thou our Lord and God!

Watch this space for the whole thing and hopefully God willing a musical arrangement also.


Uncle Davey’s Moscow – part 2 of 2

Original YT playout date: 11 November 2009
Duration: 44:56

We finish off the footage from my October 2009 brief visit. Plenty of pancakes and a privileged view inside of one of the “wedding cake” buildings beloved of Stalin that Moscow is famous for, this one being the Moscow Hilton.

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Huliganov’s Philadelphia, part 2 – Signers’ Hall

Original YT playout date: 13 November 2009
Duration: 23:00

We go to the place where the bronze casts of the original freemasons who decided that they were “the people”, as in not just SOME people, but THE ones with a capital THEE, and could get rid of the monarchy from the colonies. Some of them were dissidents, but only because they wanted some amendments to the Constitution, not because they were loyal to “Boy” George, the English king, who was considered to have had bad, even chameleonic karma. He was a herpetologist, you see, and his herpes were known all over the world. He tried to tax the colonies to finance his requirement for Zoovirax, so that he could house his chameleons and other herpes in appropriate terrariums, and therefore is considered to have been the first ever international terrarist.

They all signed following the words “yes, we really want to hurt you” in this very hall, built some 200 years later, and in that day they split the English nation into two, forcing the British to colonise Australia instead. The Western part started to be called Americans (even though they were in the process of killing the real Americans, but this self-same thing had been done before in Prussia by the people who made up a leading cohort in the non-loyal Americans) and the Eastern Part plus Canada carried on being the British Empire, and they played cricket and gave up slavery. Officially anyway. Later on America also gave up slavery in the South, battling each other in the process, and later on still they did battle against alcohol producers, the environment and most recently of all someone else’s freedom fighting, as well as turning up close to the end of two world wars, and helping us beat the Germans, who nevertheless love them and forgive them everything.

The leader, Ben Jammer Franklinstein, who was Grand Master of Pennsylvania, even though it was supposed to be a Quaker State and they have oats rather than Grand Masters, wanted all the people to sign, not just his fellow freemasons. He said the following immoral words: “I’d like to get the world to sign, in perfect harmony, this declaration of our state of independency. I’d like to buy the world a coke, and furnish it with ice, and put some lemon in as well, if only just a slice.” however, it was a rainy night in Georgia, we feel, from which that particular soda started raining all over the world.

And such is American history in a nutcase.

In honour of this, Viktor D. Huliganov signs the Treaty of Independence, thus ratifying it and assuring its immor(t)ality. He may not be a freemason like 13 or more of those 33 those bronze figures, but he is all in favour of life, liberty and the pursuit of ice-cold soda.
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Uncle Davey’s Moscow – part 1 of 2

Original YT playout date: 11 November 2009
Duration: 44:56

Footage from a recent visit to audit one friendly auditor… This is just two parts, but each quite long, and it shows what I managed to get up to in a few days of being there.
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Snippets of Warsaw

Original YT playout date: 10 November 2009
Duration: 14:50

Here are a few odd bits that didn’t really belong anywhere else, that only had in common that they are from Warsaw. The first snow in Warsaw this year, cockroach infested Que Huong restaurant which cannot be bothered to let you know it is having a closed party until you come right up the staircase to it, the stupidly named Samsung Corby, and the ludicrous new trend in Mentos advertising. These are just some of the odd bits in this here fillum.
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