Virtual Methodist

I wonder what Simon Cowell would make of this? Being a little under the weather over the weekend I ended up watching the nonsense that is "The X Factor" and remembered again why I loathe these programmes... What passes for talent in Britain's pop culture these days is so mass-manufactured and over-produced that it has no real depth or authentic poignancy. That is occasionally subverted in the auditions and more frequently in "Britain's Got Talent" but in both, the genuinely talented is more than swamped by those who are simply wanting to ape other artificially produced celebrities and those who are more to be pitied than scolded. The following entry from "Ukraine's Got Talent" would never make it within a million miles of its British equivalent because of form, subject matter and, most importantly, its length ("Sorry dear, it has to be less than 3 minutes...")... It's long even by the standards of most of the things I post...

This morning in a brief reflection on Downtown Radio, my thoughts focused on a gentleman I had never heard of until last week. I wonder if you have heard of him? The life, and more specifically the death of Franciszek Honiok, radically affected the lives of millions of others including our own. According to the testimony of Alfred Naujocks at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trial, on the night of August 31, 1939, Honiok was taken from a German concentration camp, where he, a German Silesian and supporter of Polish independence had been interned. He was given a lethal injection, dressed in a Polish uniform and shot. His body was transported to the town of Gleiwitz on the border of Poland and Germany, where, after a staged attack on a German radio station (pictured), his body was left outside. This was then used as proof that it was Poles who had attacked that installation, which, in turn, was cited as the final straw which forced Germany to invade Poland on this day 70 years ago. This man, who...