Silly jokes about Jennifer Bate – again

On my thirty-eighth birthday – and feeling how much time I have simply wasted – my visiting brother and I went into some details about how the Austrian School of economics tries to hide its funding by what he calls the “richey rich” and organisations like Socialist Alternative call more simply the “super-rich”. He says that the Austrian School simply try to hide their interest in the “super-rich” in order to gain wider appeal than they would have otherwise. I have assumed with both Austrians and Trotskyites that ignorance is the reason people do not read them and that, notwithstanding the fact that it is possible that both groups argue too much that the same solution exists for every problem, that they are committed to find genuine solutions as few others are.

After a bit of diversionary talk with my mother, who was very busy cooking our birthday dinner, Jonjo began to move onto one of his favourite – and least appealing to me – criticisms of me. He said that organist Jennifer Bate, whom he had previously ludicrously called a “cat”:

• had to have “meows” removed from her recordings!
• had to have “purrs” removed from her recordings!
• that she loved to drink milk!
• that she loved Whiskas!
• in an old joke, the the quieter parts of Messiaen organ works were Bate the cat sleeping on the organ!
• was the oldest cat ever known in the world
• At 71 Bate would be almost twice as old as the oldest certified real cat!
• that Jennifer Bate might already be dead and that a cat might be doing the work credited to her!

As I said in a previous post, there is no way any cat could perform real Messiaen organ works! It would also cost a lot of money to edit purrs from a cat playing the organ (though it is also possible that purrs and meows would not be recorded at all and the cost would be less). The possibility a cat – a terrestrial carnivore which could easily be injured killing prey – could live as long as Jennifer Bate has is incredibly remote. Even the largest and wildest “big cats” of the subfamily Pantherinae never live nearly as long as 71 years in the wild or even in captivity!

It would be wonderful for my brother to accept that recordings of Messiaen are played by real humans, but though I never had trouble liking his music and appreciating its uniqueness many people apparently are different and react in an aggressive manner against it. Maybe, maybe, ignoring is better than trying to be rude??