Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.

William Congreve. 1697

I have always found this to be true and just as well it doth because this morning my breast is really quite savage indeed. I awake to the news that Kim Kardashian  KIM KARDASHIAN has received a Woman of the Year Award from the mansmag GQ. My pre-caffeinated brain suffers a small ping. It’s a joke, right, or irony or satire or please anything that is not this Reality Television fabrication being made real.

Photos of her entirely man made (hah) face and body are everywhere online. Gowned in a corset wrapped in a see-through chain mail vest, she is a cartoon effigy of womanhood that says much about the lads at GQ and is offensive beyond description .The name of the magazine is Gentleman’s Quarterly – it has been around since 1931 and has global distribution. I have often enjoyed and its great photography and sometimes writing but these Gentlemen have lost the plot. I hope the women and women-loving men in charge of the advertising dollars, pounds, Euros, yen and shekels will take note of this GQ-anointed icon of womanhood and adjust the buying accordingly.

You Tube and Apple TV to the rescue. The Flower Duet from Lakme sung in concert by Sumi Jo and Ah-Kyung Lee in my favourite performance. Talented women with years of disciplined hard work shared in this bell-like performance that restores my breathing and my posture

Just before I close my laptop I see that Tony Blair TONY BLAIR has been awarded by the same bizarre and unfathomable criteria PHILANTHROPIST OF THE YEAR. I can’t take this before coffee so off to the barista.

It has been ghoulishly fascinating to watch Tony Blair over the years. He came in on such a wave of optimism, thoroughly convinced the British voters that he was an answer to everything that ailed Britain after Margaret Thatcher. Squandering the capital of that optimism, particularly amongst new young voters is the least of his crimes. He took Britain into a ‘war’ that was fabricated, manipulated, lied about and took many innocent lives. He broke the spirit of good people in government by insisting on their tweaking facts to suit his agenda. He lied and he lied and he lied.

And then he became a Catholic or converted to Catholicism as the expression goes. Was he forgiven all of his sins to go forth and sin again? Apparently if we look at his post-Government career as he scoops up millions and millions of pounds for his personal fortune. This money comes to him by virtue of his previous stature as Englands leader and is cloaked in the guise of internation do-gooding.

Some English journalists keep and eye on him and report in on his sickening hypocricies. Some politicians have made attempts to get him before the Courts to explain the evidence of his chicanery. He is as slippery as an eel. And now GQ has given him this award. Philanthropist of the Year. It is disgraceful to the point of decadence.

It roils me and infuriates me and I sit here in my Northwest Eden fulminating and utterly powerless to affect it. A most unpleasant feeling. I find a live 1965 concert of Joan Baez and one again my savage breast is soothed. Her crystalline voice keeping old songs alive and urging revolt is a perfect harmony of talent and purpose. .

Kim Kardashian is famous for her arse and for making a sex tape. Tony Blair is a War Criminal. WTF is going on at GQ? Maybe I will write to the magazine sponsors in protest as some assertion of my outraged humanity.