DRUGS

This sort of moment comes along very rarely, but today my views on a subject happened to be aligned with those of the current UK government. That subject was 'legal highs'. In the Queen's Speech (somehow even less interesting than The King's Speech) it was announced that there would be a blanket ban on all 'legal highs'. Let's get one thing perfectly clear: I support the banning of 'legal highs'. I support the shift in legislation regarding 'legal highs' away from attempting to ban individual products towards a blanket ban on any and all of them. Allow me to explain why...

'Legal highs' are extremely fucking dangerous. Not like you might have a bad trip dangerous, but like might kill you or leave you with permanent organ damage dangerous. Properly fucking dangerous. They are dangerous because they are untested and unregulated. They are unregulated because they are sold as not fit for human consumption. It is in the best interests of the public at large that such substances are banned from sale.

But it won't work. And even if it did work to some extent, it will not address the problem. And addressing the problem wouldn't work if politicians tried to do that (which they won't) because it's actually not a problem at all. Thinking of it as a problem is the real problem. But we're not even looking at the first one yet, so...we're screwed basically. Allow me to elaborate. Human beings have been taking drugs for tens of thousands of years. We've been taking drugs since before religion. We've been taking drugs since before commerce. Way before agriculture. Yep, all the way back there in the darkest recesses of human history...can you see it? Yep, it's a guy gettin' high.

FACT #1: We take drugs because drugs work! 

The human brain is an incredibly complex network and the communication within that network is done by neurotransmitters. They are chemicals that fit into neuroreceptors and make brain do thing. It's complicated and this is not the time for a biology lesson (and I'm not a biology teacher) but what you need to know is that drugs work by mimicking neurotransmitters and fitting themselves into the receptors thereby giving us the effect of the neurotransmitter without having to go through the normal procedure to get it. For example, heroin works because we already make a painkiller in our brain (some gland or something) that is way more powerful than any plant-based opiate. Opiates work because they have the same bits as our own stuff. It's just that to get our own stuff we have to be in a huge amount of pain. You can take heroin when you're not in pain, and it is, by all accounts, great. Same goes for cocaine, same goes for weed...

FACT #2: We will always take drugs! 

You cannot stop people from doing something that they want to do. You make murder illegal, that's fine, most people don't want to murder anyway. And you know what? The people who really do want to murder, they do it anyway. Most of them seem to get caught, but they've already done their murder. Whether you lock them up or kill them, they've still done their murder. Aside from retroactive punishment, the criminal law is totally useless. People commit crimes all the fucking time. Some are more serious than others. The overwhelming majority go unnoticed, let alone unpunished. I'm talking about the everyday 'crimes' that we all commit. You want to see everyday criminals, drive at 70mph on a British motorway. Fuck it, just drive around. You'll see plenty of shit that's both dangerous and illegal, and you'll see people getting away with it in their fucking millions. Cocaine is illegal, but does that stop people from taking it? No. If you popped out a gram of coke at a party and started chopping out a few lines, unless it was a particularly straight party (but those sort of people don't throw parties...), you will have people gladly relieving you of the drugs that you have generously supplied. Spark a joint, offer to pass it, someone else will almost always take it off you. I could go on, but I won't. The point I'm making is this: you murder someone and you're a murderer, you steal shit for a living and you're a thief; in theory, and by the letter of the law, if you pass a joint you're a drug dealer.

FACT #3: Drugs should be legal! 

If the powers that be had even a gram of pure common sense, then we wouldn't be in this mess. The law only functions as long as the majority of people don't want to break it. If too many people want to break it, then it ceases to be viable to punish them all. Somewhere, there is probably a formula for that... This is where unwritten laws, rules of thumb, if you like, come into it. The speed limit is 70, but you are unlikely to be done for speeding unless you're going above 80. Unless it's near the end of a quota period and the police are down on their fines targets in which case you'll get the book thrown at you (at an extra book-throwing cost) for doing 71... So, if the law doesn't make any difference to behaviour, then why should it matter that drugs are illegal? People are going to take them anyway and they're almost guaranteed to get by unnoticed by the law. Well, that's where the 'legal high' rears its ugly head once again. And it brings us nicely round to that real problem that we were talking about earlier. People take 'legal highs' because they want to get high. They want to get high, but are afraid that if they buy an eighth of weed then they'll get kicked out of uni, sent to prison and their life will be ruined forever. So they go onto some dodgy as fuck website and order some synthetic cannabis substitute that, while officially not fit for human consumption, will get them high without the inherent and implied risks of illegal cannabis.

The fact that otherwise intelligent people will ingest a substance that is not fit for human consumption in order to get high should be a massive fucking hint that people are going to get high regardless of the risk factors attached to the process. Drugs should be legal because making them illegal does not work on any level in terms of reducing the number of people who take them. It just makes them more dangerous. It makes the whole process more dangerous. But here's the other thing, as dangerous as those 'legal highs' were that those students at Lancaster Uni took, they all survived. And for every one of the drug-related admissions to English A&E departments that day, how many alcohol-related admissions were there? My guess would be into the hundreds. I'm not going to get into the hypocrisy of having legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco and at the same time making weed illegal when it's less harmful to society than the former and to the individual than the latter... Because we all know that story backwards and forwards. We need to ban 'legal highs' because they are staggeringly dangerous, but we also need to de-criminalise recreational use of the real thing. If we did that, then our society would be safer and happier. Our police force would be unburdened of the responsibility of having to in some way wage an unwinnable war.

But what am I saying? That's never going to happen. It won't happen because none of our elected officials want it to happen. It won't happen because no one will ever run for parliament on a message of drug legalisation. That won't happen because they wouldn't get in if they did. So we're stuck with a government whose policies in no way reflect our wishes. That's democracy.

Formula 1 Rethink

Apparently, according to Seb Vettel, Formula 1 needs to 'bring back the fear factor'...

Ok, Seb, might I venture a few suggestions on that front? The last time someone died in Formula 1 was 1994. Ayrton Senna at the San Marion Grands Prix. Tragedy. Everyone (well, more or less everyone) in the world remembers, or at least knows, the name Ayrton Senna. They know that he was a racing driver and they know that he died. Roland Ratzenburger was also a racing driver and he also died at the 1994 San Marino Grands Prix. No one really outside of Formula 1 remembers his name. No documentary entitled Ratzenburger ever won the award for best documentary at Sundance. Roland Ratzenburger had, by all accounts, a bright future ahead of him. I'm not sure what point I'm making here, it's late and I'm tired, but I think there is a hypocrisy here. In fact I'm sure there is.

It's been 21 years since the last time a Formula 1 racing driver died during a Grands Prix. Apparently, that is how long it takes for people in the sport to start wanting the death back. There is a fantastic documentary about the dark days of F1 featuring lots of interviews with drivers and crew who had worked in the sport during the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s and they all had vivid and upsetting accounts of watching friends and loved ones die - sometimes in truly horrific ways - more or less every week. Between 1953 and 1994, fifty drivers died in Formula 1.Ok, so I'll grant you, I don't think Vettel was talking directly about death. He was talking about the fear of death. But you can't have smoke without fire.

There is no denying that F1 is in a bad way at the moment. It is less exciting now than it's ever been, so dull in fact that even the drivers are finding it tedious. And as someone else pointed out, if you're driving a 900hp racing car at 190mph and you're bored: something is badly wrong. Recently, and for the first time in my living memory, Formula 1 asked fans for their thoughts on how to improve the sport. This was patently ridiculous. A Bad Idea in the grand tradition of Bad Ideas but at least we can be assured that nothing will come of it. I think what we have to accept, and this is something that the presenters of Formula 1 on the BBC consistently refute at every available juncture, is that Formula 1 is dying and that we should pull the plug.

Formula 1 is a relic of the time before oil shortages and climate change. As a spectacle it is hideously vulgar. This weekend is the most vulgar spectacle of them all: the Monaco Grands Prix. It's not even a race. No one can overtake on the track because it's too narrow and twisty. It's boredom incarnate to watch and it's ultimately just a thinly veiled advertisement for tax evasion. Formula 1 insists (and it can insist because it's a company run by a single octogenarian) that it moves with the times, and yet Monaco will always have a Grands Prix. It follows fashion in one breath while ignoring it with the next. And, like any attempt by an 80 year old man to be fashionable, its flirtations with it are usually misguided and always unpleasant to watch. Take the hybrid engines that we now have (and are apparently stuck with). That was an attempt to more the sport forward, yet it has backfired. The sport is now vastly more expensive to participate in and, unless you can afford one of the good engines made my Mercedes, you don't have a hope in hell of getting near the front of a race. And even if you did, you'd still lose to the Mercedes team because they don't just have the best engine, but they have a better version of that engine and a better car around it. This, we are told, is the price of progress.

Formula 1, we are told, is the pinnacle of motorsport. It is the testing ground for technology that will improve road cars of the future. It is the point, way high up in the clouds, from which progress in all areas automotive trickles down. And, you know what? I'd be fine with that. An anything-goes technological battle royale. With mad experimentation happening all the time, it would be crazy, but vividly entertaining, I have no doubt. But that's not what F1 is. It is the pinnacle of motorsport as decided upon by an 80 year old man. There are rules (thousands upon thousands of rules) and they're all in place to try and make sure this artificial playground in the sky is as level as possible, while also making sure that Mercedes still win almost every race. There has to be a clear hierarchy to the level playingfield. Maybe something Orwellian would do here. All playingfields are equal, just some are more equal than others? But let's face facts here. The most inconsistent component to an F1 car isn't the silly tyres that are designed to be awesome, then ok and then terrible at precise intervals... no, it's the driver. Why not take the drivers out of the equation all together? Make it a battle between algorithms! Whoever has the best algorithm wins! You wouldn't even have to stage a race. You could just decide each on on a computer and announce the victor there and then.

The thing is, Formula 1 must decide what it wants to be. And it must not be allowed to decide on something that is inherently self-contradictory. It can either be the pinnacle of automotive technology, or a level playingfield for the world's best drivers. The hybrid tech makes no sense to me. It's so complex that a lot of the control has been taken away from the driver and handled by a computer that in 1980 would have filled a whole row of terraced houses but today would fit into a fag packet. This means the drivers are not as involved and it's less a test of their driving skill as it is their ability to communicate with a computer. I'm surprised it still has a steering wheel. It doesn't need one. It's not attached to anything. Some of them even look like iPads. This does not inspire the viewing public. But here's the thing: you can't go backwards. You can't get rid of the hybrid engine and replace it with a vastly less fuel efficient screaming V8. You can't replace the iPad with a steering wheel. Nor can you replace run-off areas with concrete walls, tyre-walls with metal... you just can't.

It is widely understood that the 1970s was the most dangerous decade in F1, in rallying it was the 1980s with the Group B death machine; in touring cars it was the 1990s. Now, all of those sports have been sanitised to varying degrees. Now, almost no one ever dies. Rallying still exists, and people even go to watch it. It's not on TV in any way that you can really watch it but in the 80s more people watched rallying than F1. Rally driving looks like a huge amount of fun and I would love to try it. Formula 1 doesn't. And I don't. Formula 1 could ditch the razzle dazzle of multi-million pound sponsorships and VIP motorhomes and £20m-odd a year for Lewis Hamilton and go back to its roots. People would still watch it. I personally preferred it when it was tobacco dollars that had their names on the back of F1 cars, but that's just how I was raised. Better Marlboro than Bank of Santander any day.

Last year, an all electric formula was introduced. There was a brief flurry of interest when it was announced, a bit more when it got going and then nothing. I assume it's still going on, but I don't know. I don't know, because no one cares. If it was up to me, I'd let F1 as we know it die. It surely will when Bernie Ecclestone shuffles off this mortal coil. But knowing our luck, the twat will live to be a hundred and fifty. Maybe he's immortal. Maybe someone should check.

Thoughts on the Future and Other Issues

I'm writing this today without access to the internet. I mean, my phone can access the internet, but only to tell me why my home broadband is down. Ok, so it's something of a first-world problem I'll grant you, but bear with me because I have somewhere to go with this. Also, I should note, I am not particularly angry but I don't have a blog called, “I'm in a thoughtful mood right now,” so this'll have to do.

Also, my internet is back. Hmm...to continue or to give up? Shakespeare would have known what to do, but then again he didn't have the distractions of the internet to contend with so it's really no surprise that he got so much stuff done.

My girlfriend recently introduced me to Netflix. I had long avoided this service for a reason that could best be characterised by an instinctive mistrust of it. A gut feeling if you will. And it's not a fear of the New. I have a smartphone now, and while I loath its presence it has come in handy more than a handful of times. No, it's not that. Now I would never personally admit to having illegally downloaded episodes of TV shows from file-sharing sites, but from what I understand it's more or less possible to watch any episode of any TV show from pretty much any era within a day of its release. It's possible to watch American shows that aren't on over here. It's possible to watch whole series that are no longer on the air. From what I understand, its benefits far outweigh its drawbacks. Netflix, on some level, promises to be something in between 'real TV' and illegal file-sharing. You can watch what they have on their service, and you can watch it immediately and without commercials. This last part is absolutely key to why I don't own a television. I hate commercials. Or adverts, as they ought to be known. For some reason I've lapsed into speaking, or at least writing, in American. I'm also splitting my infinitives, but that's a game of 'spot the poor grammar' that we can save for later.

So what's my problem? Why can't I get on board with Netflix? Well problem the first is that I do not like the user interface, or UI as I believe it is known. I don't like how items are bunched together in groups that I have to navigate through. I don't like scrolling through endless lists of things when I have no idea what is even on the list. If I don't know what I'm looking for, I'm almost certainly not going to find it like that. If you search for something that you know you want, then there arises the problem that I have with looking through someone's iPod at a party. They've plugged it into the speakers because they think their taste in music is superior, but they don't have anything I like and when I do find an artist that I like they only have one track because it's from some bullshit compilation, or worse, a mix album. Netflix is like that guy (almost always a guy). Also, I haven't been to a party in a long time.

Now, I believe that something like Netflix is almost certainly the Future of Television. People are already used to on-demand services and fewer and fewer of us are watching TV as it is aired. We like to save up a whole season and 'binge-watch' it. We've even been warned about how, much as with the other types of binge (drink, drugs, etc), this could be bad for us. But the trend shows no sign of abating. But the problem is that Netflix does not have most of my shows. And nor will it any time soon. And there arises a further problem once we unpack why this might be. We come back to commercials. Ad money pays for TV shows. Apart from the BBC which is publicly funded, at least for the time being, and networks in America such as HBO and Showtime which are funded by subscription. HBO won't let Netflix have their shows because they already have an on-demand service (that we can't watch in the UK) that is part of their subscription package. Lose that, lose their subscribers; lose them, no more HBO. And no more HBO would mean no more GoT. So no, let's not go there.

And what of commercials? Netflix does not interrupt its shows with five minutes of mind-numbing ads every ten minutes (have you seen TV in America? It's fucking insane!) so there is no ad revenue to be gained from it. Netflix makes its own shows now, too, but not enough for it to really qualify as a network and since people binge-watch its shows, any exposure of advertised product would be utterly impossible to quantify. You have a 24-episode season of a popular show on a mainstream network and you get, in an hour of TV, fifteen minutes of ad time. That's the same hour, every week. You can target your ads to key demographics because people know who watches what. Ad agencies have that information so they can buy the right slots for the right advertisers and everyone is happy. People who watch daytime TV get to find out about new brands of adult nappies or how to turn their gold into cash; children get to find out about new accessories for their toys, and everyone (by which I mean no-one) is happy.

So, how does this fit into Netflix and the Future of Television? I don't know. It's a fucking doozie. TV networks are beholden to their advertisers, so they need to keep people watching at the correct times on the correct days of the week. As it stands, this is the only way for advertisers to flog their wares to the target demographics. It wouldn't work on Netflix because there are no ads on Netflix. As soon as they start putting ads in Netflix, people will stop watching or subscribe to ever increasing levels of 'Premium' in order to avoid them. So Netflix is not the answer, because it's ultimately more like a subscription service, a la HBO, than it is anything else. And what of illegal downloading? Will Netflix make this a thing of the past? Unlikely. I'm sure it's swayed a few people away, lured them with House of Cards and other such fancies, but it lacks the extensive back-catalogue and the go-anywhere reach of the file-sharing sites. And file-sharing doesn't impact on advertisers because their shows go out, laden with ads, every week as normal. Consequently, file-sharing doesn't really impact on TV networks either. They can still churn out their derivative crap week after week, year after year because people who wear adult nappies don't know what a Pirate Bay is and wouldn't know what to do with it if they did. They're too worried about whether they just shat themselves or not. HBO's not worried, because they can probably see the big picture. If you follow illegal downloading to its natural conclusion, then everybody downloads illegally which means no one watches HBO. No one subscribes, they have no money; they have no money, there's not GoT. So illegal downloading isn't the answer either because it results in a paradox that will destroy us all and everything we love.

So what is the future of television? Notice how I removed the caps? I don't know. So the best advice I can give is from a piece of grafiti that I saw once:

Stop watching, start living.

Cyclists

As of now, this moment, right here, let it be known that I am declaring it: OPEN SEASON on CYCLISTS.

...and here's why: I have reached my limit on the sheer number of total cunts who have in some way pissed me off with their discourteous attitude to their fellow road users. I have fucking news for you, asshole, THE HIGHWAY CODE APPLIES TO YOU, TOO! The Highway Code applies to cyclists. I'll tell you what, why don't I break it down for you? Why don't I give you a list? Some selected highlights from the past year, perhaps? And you can tell me, after you've taken this into consideration, whether or not you think I'm wrong to take up arms against this menace.

1 - ON THE ROAD

So last Winter, I think it was this year so either January or February, I had cause to stop by the Co-op on Great Western Road on my way somewhere. It was the evening, so it was dark, and it was raining quite heavily. I got into my car and prepared to join the flow of traffic. There was rain on my driver's side window. There was rain on my wingmirror. There was condensation on my rear view mirror. It was fucking unpleasant. I had my lights on and I was indicating right as a warning to traffic that I was intending to pull out. A break in the traffic. Wing mirror: checked, for all the good it was. Blind spot: checked, again for what good it did me. So as I am pulling out, by some quirk of good fortune, I look back over my shoulder again. In that split second I see a person on a bicycle. No lights, no helmet, ignoring the fact that I was pulling out, oblivious to the danger inherant in their approach to road safety. I managed to stop in time. They kept going as if nothing had happened. The car infront of mine also attempted to pull out and the same thing happened. The cyclist did not even slow down. No lights, no helmet, no regard whatsoever for their own safety or that of other road users.

More recently, once again on Great Western Road. It was night-time again and this time I was turning from Great Western Road onto Belmont Street. The road was wet and shimmering, but it was not raining. The traffic broke and I started to turn onto Belmont Street from the feeder lane. As I was almost through the junction, a man on a bicycle crossed my path. No lights. No helmet. Riding on the pavement along Great Western Road, crossing Belmont Street, without slowing down to look. Had he slowed down he would have seen a car, already turning into the street. Headlights on, indicator signaling intent. But he didn't. He didn't look. He just kept on going, regardless of the consequences.

More recently still, once again on Great Western Road. This was the other day. Early evening; it was still light. No rain. Driving up the road heading west, beyond Byres Road/Queen Margaret Drive, alongside the Botanic Gardens. I was in the lane nearest the pavement with traffic in both lanes moving freely. I passed a woman cycling on the road. No helmet. I gave her the proper distance when passing and went on my way. At the next cross-street, I was stopped at the lights. There was a queue of maybe two or three cars ahead of me, cars signalling to turn right were queued in the centre lane. The woman on the bike emerges, cycling at a leisurely pace up the middle of the two lines of cars. As she was about level with my window, the lights turned green and we began to move off. I had assumed that her intention was to turn right as she had moved to the centre of the road. However, as we moved off she carried on straight and by this point was veering in front of me, moving back over to her correct position on the road. The courteous driver that I am, I waited patiently for her to return to the side and then passed her once more, again leaving the proper distance. At the next set of lights, I observed in my mirror, she repeated the manoever. Fortunately for me, this time the nightmare remained behind me and I did not have to go through the ordeal of dealing with this moron for a third time.

2 - Parks and footpaths

As I'm sure many of you know, every day Sara and I walk our dog on the Kelvin Walkway. We are but two of innumerable dog owners who use this area of park land to exercise our beloved dogs. Every single day, every time we walk there, we are confronted by a seemingly endless stream of cyclists who also use the walkway to get to and from work, or merely for leisure purposes. A sign at the entrance to the Kelvin Walkway clearly states that the speed limit for vehicles - including cyclists - is 5mph. FIVE MILES PER HOUR. Five. Now, I hear what you're saying: "five miles an hour is ludicrously slow". "That's barely faster than walking pace". "If I wanted to travel that slow, I'd just fucking walk"...

AND THAT'S THE FUCKING POINT! 

The Kelvin Walkway is not a cycle path. It is a 'mixed use footpath'. Now, here's the deal. I don't give a shit how fast you ride your bike along the Kelvin Walkway, just as long as you slow the fuck down when you're riding past people with dogs and, I don't know, small children. All I ask is that you treat us with a tiny bit of common fucking courtesy. And you know what? Some of them do. You see, when I see a cyclist approaching and I'm out with Ciara, I bring her close to heel and have her sit in front of me, usually focussed on a treat. After they're all passed, she gets the treat and we move on. And in, I would say, 10% of those instances, we receive some kind of gesture of acknowledgement from the passing cyclist that we have INCONVENIENCED OURSELVES FOR THEIR BENEFIT. In the other 90% of instances, we receive no such acknowledgement. No nod. No thank you. No much obliged. Not the faintest hint of recognition. And you know what? I don't even care about that. I'm fine with that. Just don't run over my dog. Don't you mother fucking dare even come close to running over my dog. Because when I'm down there and you're whizzing by at 10, 15, 20mph and you don't slow down when you go past me and you don't offer up a glimmer of acknowledgement that I stopped MY WALK so that you could carry on about your day... if you so much as ruffle a hair on my dog's back I will kill you. That is how stressful you fucking people make it down there. I can't tell you how many dogs I personally know that have been hit or run over by cyclists on the Kelvin Walkway. We treat you with courtesy and respect, and you throw it back in our faces.

Which brings me to today. To this morning. To the reason why I'm so fucking angry at cyclists right now. Today, Glasgow Uni organised a charity bike ride. Don't feel bad if you missed it, the signs they put up were smaller than A4 size and they afixed them at knee height to one signpost. Here's a tip: there's a reason why signs are posted higher up... IT'S SO PEOPLE WILL FUCKING SEE THEM! Glasgow University, the brains trust, Russell Group, centre for excellence in research and teaching... Glasgow fucking Uni put signs up at knee-high. Those stupid mother fuckers. So today, on my morning walk with the dog, I had to contend not with one or two cyclists, but with a whole sodding peloton streaming down a MIXED-USE PUBLIC FOOTPATH with no warning that they would be there and with no supervision to make sure that they obeyed the rules of the path that they were using. Don't worry. I got a contact email, address and phone number for the person responsible for organising this and they are next on my contact list. I just had to vent a little bit first. Of the vast number of cyclists who rode past me today,  would say their average speed was about 15mph. One guy on a racing bike rode past us at nearly 30. And when I asked the volunteer what measures they were taking to ensure the safety of the other users - both canine and human - she said that the riders had been told of the speed limit. And then she pointed to the sign. Knee-high on a signpost. Nigh on invisible in a light green against the grass in the background. Text compressed onto a sheet smaller than A4. That was the sign to warn ME that THEY were going to using OUR footpath that day. I was also told that there were police along the route who were there to make sure the riders stuck to the speed limit. There were no fucking police.

Fact is, cyclists already treat the Kelvin Walkway like it's their own personal velodrome. Today, it's like they had official confirmation that the sole right of way was theirs and damn the consequences. I counted about fifteen dogs while I was out and a greater number of small children. Both dogs and small children have two things in common: they're unpredicable at times, and they don't understand the concept of a bicycle travelling towards them silently and unrelentingly at nigh on 30mph. They don't have the first clue what that might mean. So I put it to you, dear, dear readers of my blog: Am I Wrong? Because I've got half a mind to go down there with a radar gun and a baseball bat and anyone I catch speeding on a bicycle - I won't even enforce the 5mph, I'll give them 10... - I will cave their fucking skull in. Fair deal? I fucking think so.

Ten ways to live longer or die trying...

Look at Bruce Willis. Or should I say John McClane? Look at that poor fool, he just keeps on living. They're making him do another Die Hard film. A sixth Die Hard film. What the fuck is that about? If John McClane were a real person and he read the Guardian, I'm sure he would have read with some interest the article with which I became disgruntled earlier on today. Ten ways to live longer... He would have asked, at least in my mind he would have asked, where is the companion piece, 'Ten ways to die?'

But I'll come back to that train of thought later on. Firstly, what pissed me off so much about the original piece? Was it how eye-meltingly obvious many of the points were? No. That was to be expected. It was actually how monumentally offensive the overall tone of the piece ended up being. Basically, and I'm summarising here, if you want to live to a grand old age first of all don't live in Britain. Don't have had the misfortune to have been born here and if you did, at least have had the benefit of being raised elsewhere. If you do insist upon being British and living your paltry life here, don't live outside London. Don't smoke, don't drink, don't eat fatty food. Exercise. Etc. Etc. Also don't be stressed. Don't be stressed about the fact that you work too hard in a job that pays peanuts, or worse, that you're currently unemployed at perhaps the worst moment to be so in living memory.

Don't live in the North. Don't be from the North. Exercise. Eat nuts and seeds. Eat nuts and seeds like a bird. You fucking bird. You unemployed London bird. You fucking pigeon. Move to Japan. It's fucking great in Japan. Everyone's old. And happy, everyone's happy in Japan. And Spain. Fucking Spain. It's great, they have olive oil and tapas and it's sunny and people sleep during the day. Go to Spain. Fuck off to Spain. Who is this advice even for? What was the point? Why waste that paper on this crap. Maybe it will be ironically used to wrap up a fish supper.

There exists a tiny number of people who are not already either following all of that advice and, consequently, do not need it, or are too far gone down the road of being Northern or eating chips, drinking beer and smoking fags. They exist. Honest. But they're probably too busy having opportunities to stop and read some guff in the Guardian. So, I conclude, it was for me. It was a warning. I need to stop and think about how I'm living my life. I need to quit smoking and do more exercise. I need to eat less fatty food and eat more nuts and seeds. I need to move to Japan. Or Spain. Or London. Either way, I need to move South. I need to run to the train station and get on any train going South and not get off until I'm living ten years longer.

Oh fuck. Oh fucking hell. Wait a minute here. If I'm going to live ten years longer, I'm going to have to start planning for my retirement. Or am I? If this was twenty years ago, forty years ago, whatever, and I was planning to live to 70+, I would need to plan for my retirement. But this is now, and I'm probably going to have to work until I die, even if I live to 70. So what is the fucking point? The only good thing about living longer is the possibility of taking it easy, moving to the country, enjoying grandchildren occasionally coming to visit in the Summer holidays. But I won't have that. I'll be in a cubicle, nine to five, trying to do data entry with arthritis. Trying to remember the name of my boss who's thirty years younger than me. Trying to remember where it all went wrong.

You know where it all went wrong? I gave up smoking. I ate healthier even though it made me a twat. I exercised even though everyone looks stupid when they exercise. I even moved to Japan for a while, but had to leave because everyone was speaking Japanese. I lived in Spain, but had to leave because it's shit. It's nice for a holiday, but overall, it's shit. Tapas is shit. It's too hot and it's just shit. So I moved to London. You know what happens in London? Industrialised misery. Twelve million of the angriest twats you'll ever meet all crammed into a space that most dormice would find a bit too cosy. And they're all competing with eachother for housing, jobs, food, mates. It's like living in a really badly thought out zoo.

So I ended up back in Britain. Back up North. Working til I die. I have no friends because I had to give up everything that made me a likeable human being. I became an absolute ball-acheing twat and for what? The joy of working an extra few years in some (literally) dead-end job. Fuck you Guardian. I'll take my fags and my beer and my food. I'll enjoy the years I actually have. I'm not going to mortgage the best years of my life so that the worst years can last a bit longer.

On the future of the Halt Bar...

My attention was grabbed today by an online petition to save the Halt Bar on Woodlands Road (as if you didn't know where it is...). I was unaware, prior to this, that the Halt was under threat in any way. But the more I have thought about the situation, the angrier I have become.

The thought of turning an existing pub into a 'gastro-pub' is not, in and of itself, a bad idea. Some pubs should serve food. That should be an option open to patrons. I do not object to the concept of a 'gastro-pub'. What I do object to, however, is turning a good pub into a 'gastro-pub'. Allow me to illustrate with a comparison between the Hogshead/Primary/Old Schoolhouse and Uisge Beatha/Dram!

When I first came to Glasgow, the Hogshead was a generic food-pub option that was handy if not particularly memorable. If you were hungry, but wanted a pint also, it was good to have that option available. The place had no real distinctive character, the interior is spacious and the atmosphere is pretty much non-existent. That's fine. In its various subsequent incarnations, the overall vibe of the place hasn't changed. I would not miss it if it closed tomorrow. I can't imagine many people shedding a tear over its passing.

Uisge Beatha on the other hand, instantly became one of my favourite places to go drinking in Glasgow and retained its place in my top-five for all the time I lived here until it underwent its recent evolution from pub to 'gastro-pub'. I remember walking home from town having done some Christmas shopping and I saw the 'new' Uisge Beatha and I was almost overcome with revulsion. I went inside to see if it could possibly be as bad as it looked and it was a thousand times worse. A man outside, a patron, who appeared to be American was loudly extolling the virtues of this place for all to hear. I was sickened by his display. The list of things wrong with Dram! is substantial and it's far from necessary to go into it in depth here. Suffice to say, they turned a real pub with real character into a faceless, homogenised, corporate shadow of its former self. Like when a good friend joins a cult, it's a sad, sad time.

What bothers me more than anything about this shift away from real pubs is how short-sighted it is. Yes, 'gastro-pubs' are in at the moment. People who work in marketing will tell you that it's easier to make more money running one of these enterprises than it is a traditional pub. I will tell those marketing types to FUCK OFF. I will urge like-minded people, right-thinking people, to also tell them to FUCK OFF. If I want to eat and drink in the same place I'll go to any one of the hundreds of existing establishments already dotted around the West-end. If I want to share my drinking space with a shower of arseholes, I'm sure I can find a place (Dram!) where I can do that too. But soon, the marketing types will realise, once all the pubs are 'gastro' that some people want to just go to a cool place and drink. And then they'll realise that it's a hell of a lot easier to put the 'gastro' into a pub than it is to take it out and we'll all be fucked.

Make a stand now, or say goodbye to real pubs. It's as simple as that.

Panic on the streets of London...

I read in the fashion section of the G2 the other day that polka dots are back in. It seems, much like the Pale Horse, the polka dot brings with it hell, or at least the 1980s. Maybe these two events are unrelated.

Ok, so London. Riots. We've been here before. Let's examine the evidence.

1 - Tory government? Check.
2 - Economic recession? Check.
3 - Polka dots? Check.
4 - Need I go on?

Ok, so it seems we're back at this old chestnut. People have no confidence in their government. The vast majority of people are facing up to a future that is at best uncertain and at worst really fucking bleak. Unemployment is severe, we are in a recession, and the message is austerity. Add to that a Metropolitan Police Force that, in addition to several very public fuck-ups and a poor track record for handling protest both peaceful and otherwise, has recently been implicated at the heart of a massive corruption case regarding our old friends at the News of the World, and we have a cocktail most potent.

So who is Mark Duggan? Gangster or peace-loving father of four? Both? Neither? Well, he's dead. Did he shoot first? Hard to tell. Things seem to hinge on this mysterious bullet that was lodged in a police car radio. Early investigations, reported in the Guardian, suggest that the bullet is police issue. Oh dear. But he had a gun right? He shot first? For the sake of the credibility of the Met, I hope so. But I don't really. I'm not a fan of the trigger-happy keystone cops operation that seems to be running out of Scotland Yard these days. They shoot innocent people. They beat up innocent people to the point of near death. They get away with it. They sell information to News International. No, I don't like the Met. But no one can deny, it's been a pretty bad few years for them.

Who else? Well pretty much everybody is on holiday. The prime minister is on holiday, the home secretary is on holiday and the mayor of London, the quite incomprehensible Boris Johnson, is on holiday... You'd think the people of London would at least wait until everyone was home from their vacations before starting the party, but no. Theresa May is coming home. The other two, it looks like, are staying away. Who can blame them? Perhaps the most alarming piece of soundbitery that has been shat out during this whole ordeal is that the mayor of London was advised to stay away, lest his return send the message that the rioters have won. I might not have all rhe details here, but I'm pretty sure that this is not just a "we miss Boris" riot, or a "come home Boris" riot, or even a "let's ruin Boris's holiday" riot...this is a proper riot. Fuelled by tension, heated by mistrust of the authorities and who knows, maybe that mistrust is entirely justified.

I think people are angry. I believe that their anger may well be justified. I do not think that these events are indicative, as members of the government have suggested, of base criminality. I think that it would be a grave mistake to dismiss them as such. People are angry, I say burn the whole stinking metropolis to the ground starting with New Scotland Yard.

The nuts are taking over the nuthouse...

I am, for the most part, a reasonable man. I like to think that, up to a point, people should be free to have their beliefs, no matter how strange they may seem. I believe that there's even place for dangerous beliefs in a rational and civilised society. We need them. We need them to keep us honest, as it were. We need them to maintain the balance between sanity and insanity. In an ideal world, insane people would have total freedom to believe whatever nonsense they like, and to do so in a benign way that has little impact on the functioning of society. We do not live in this world. Yes, this makes me angry, but more than that, it makes me feel disappointed. I've expressed similar disappointment in the human race before, but the feeling is starting to overwhelm me. The events in Norway at the end of last week should give us all a cause to reflect on the kind of world we have made for ourselves. I'd like to think that for the majority of people, this kind of quiet contemplation can lead to a new resolve to prevent these kind of things happening in the future. For that to have any hope of happening, there are a few nutters that need to be taken care of first.

1. Glenn Beck.

Oh Glenn, where do we begin? Devising a strategy for attacking Glenn Beck is a challenge. Very few people have ever been quite so vile in quite so many ways. I'll take the cherry-picking approach, thank you.

'Glenn Beck likens Norwegian dead to Hitler Youth'.

Oh Glenn...who else hear the words 'Summer Camp' and automatically jumps to the Hitler Youth? Who? Really, I'm genuinely interested. Who? Ok, so it was a politically orientated Summer Camp. It was organised by that great enemy to civilisation, the Left. But was it in any way similar to the Hitler Youth? No. Not in any way. But Glenn...you made the connection. I wonder why... Maybe it's because you just wish you could have grown up in 1930s Germany. And I sympathise, Glenn, I really do. There are plenty of times in the past that I kinda wish I could go back to and relive my own youth in a different circumstance. San Fransisco in the late 60s perhaps. Chicago in the early days of House music. Paris...the list goes on. For you Glenn, maybe Germany in the 1930s. You probably feel unappreciated in your time. Even Fox, who will give the name 'news' to pretty much any shit that comes out of a right wing arsehole, gave you the boot. You're reduced to radio, like that other shit-spewing arsehole Rush Limbaugh. You're a voice in the ear now; like a wasp. Like an irritating buzzing wasp just flying around getting angrier and angrier going more and more insane. Someday you'll get fired from your radio show and then you'll really be fucked. You've even managed to piss off the Tea Party Movement (henceforth TPM) and they're pretty fucking out there. And how come they're pissed at you? Even after you held a rally for them, supported their brand of insanity publicly and privately...how did you fuck that up? Well, you said that those Norwegian kids who were brutally and senselessly murdered by an individual who aside from the fact that he was born in Norway instead of America is pretty much Glenn Beck v.2.0, reminded you of the Nazi Youth. And your TPM also happen to have similar ultra-right wing Conservative hyper-Christian indoctrination camps of their own. So what happened was, you accidentally drew attention not only to the now obvious fact that you're a truly hideous human being, but also to the fact that your beloved TPM is pretty much doing the exact thing you accused the Norwegians of doing.

Well fucking done Glenn Beck.

2. Melanie Phillips.

Yeah, she's the English Glenn Beck. She's like what you would end up with if you managed to accumulate and distill all the hate and bile in the world and then fuse that with a human embryo and have it be born and then give it a pen and tell it get writing, because hate speech just doesn't write itself (that is it didn't until the News of the World phone-hack random story generator machine was invented). This woman hates gay people. She hates Arabs. She hates the NHS. She hates Barack Obama. If she weren't so prominent, she'd be a humourous parody of the political and social Right, but sadly, she is a newspaper columnist and author. People who for whatever reason don't know any better actually buy into the toxic crap that seeps out the moral wound that is her, figurative, mouth. She is like gangrene. A flesh eating bacterial infection in British print journalism. She even hates the Archbishop of Canterbury. The only people she likes are Jews. Now, obviously there's nothing wrong with liking Jewish people. Unless they're twats, in which case, it's perfectly fine not to like them. So allow me to rephrase. She doesn't so much like Jewish people as reserve the most poisonous of her toxic comment, the most bitter of her hatred, for anyone (and I mean anyone

I've singled out these two people because they fucking deserve it. They have no concept of the fact that the work that they are doing is acting to bring about hatred, war, suffering, injustice, intolerance, violence, abuse and just all the general non-specific shit of humanity. They don't seem to care that in a room full of reasonable people talking quietly amongst themselves, they're the ones naked, screaming, rubbing themselves in their own shit and scrawling "THE END IS NIGH" and "REPENT" on the walls. It reminds me of the scene towards the end of David Fincher's Se7en. Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey are all in the car driving to the scene of the film's climax. Brad Pitt asks Kevin Spacey if, in a moment of clarity, he ever stops to notice just how crazy he actually is. To me, that is the voice of the sane Left. We're just amazed at how insane the Right actually is. And yes, sometimes it is horrifying. It's horrifying when Melanie Phillips spits hateful bile over the corpse of Steven Gately. It's horrifying when Glenn Beck spits hateful bile over the corpses of innocent Norwegian children. It's horrifying Sarah Palin incited the attempted assassination of a fellow politician. You know, the list goes on.

In my brighter moments, when the world and everything in it takes a break from weighing me down, I can just about make out a glimmer of hope somewhere on the horizon. I can imagine, if I try really hard, a future where the sane people win and the Glenn Becks and the Melanie Phillipses of this world are given a pleasant space with a soap box in it and they're allowed to shout their madness for all the passers-by to ignore. And no one shoots innocent children and no one commits heinous genocide. And then, the clouds erase that hope and reality comes crushing down and I realise that the Right will win. Insanity will always triumph over sanity becasue where we sit and debate and discuss they just go out and do. And what do they do? They blow shit up. They shoot people. They don't even care who they're shooting, or who they're blowing up because other insane people are allowed to occupy prominent positions in the media so that they can turn whatever's going on into a rallying cry in support of it, but also, paradoxically, in condemnation of it. It's all a bit confusing, but they don't mind, because they're mad.

What the fuck is up with Disney?

In the Guardian Film and Music section today, there was a piece about someone called Selena Gomez. I freely admit to having no knowledge, prior to reading that article, as to who she is or what she does. I discovered that she is the most recent creation to have rolled off the production line at Disney. And it really is a production line. Hilary Duff, Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers all came before her. Right now, in a lab somewhere, there's a foetus developing in a jar that in nine or ten years will star in a breakout role in a Disney film and then go on to recording contracts with Disney's record label, a TV show on the Disney Channel, made-for-TV movies, straight-to-video releases, and then, aged sixteen or some such, that child will be embroiled in a scandal and will be jettisoned like spent fuel from the Disney ship of dreams.

This does not bode well for Selena Gomez. Sure, it's all good now. Riding the wave of global celebrity. Well, sanitised celebrity anyway. So sex, no drugs, no rock and sure as shit no roll. A sell-out tour, legions of adoring (if barely pubescent) fans, platinum albums, a movie career, a hit TV show. For a regular human being, that is one not synthesised in Disney's secret lab, this kind of success in the entertainment industry is unheard of, impossible, the stuff of dreams and peyote hallucinations. But not for Selena Gomez. For her, this is the reality into which she was born (in a manner of speaking). Say what you like about Disney (and, be sure, I am about to) they plan ahead. Gomez is a 1992 vintage. She has, it might be argued, been aged that bit longer than normally would be the case. Perhaps this is due to the persistent success of her predecessors. Perhaps the formula was deemed to have required adjustment. Who knows? Well whoever does, they're not telling anybody about it.

So...what's my point here? Where am I going with this? Well, a lot has been written lately about News International and massive corruption, phone-hacking, political conspiracy, monopolisation of the media and so on, and I'm not going to add to that here. That dead horse has been flogged quite enough for the time being. But Disney...now there's a whole other kettle of fish. What concerns me is that I would, one day, weather permitting, like to have a child. I believe it to be a wonderful adventure and I look forward to passing on whatever wisdom or otherwise I might have gained from my own life etc, etc. But I worry. Yes, I worry that if my child was abducted and murdered that a newspaper would hack into her phone and then use that to fill me with hope that she was still alive and then print the story of my 'new hope' and so on...yes, I worry about that. But more than that, I worry that my child will fall victim to a corporation far more devious and insidious than News International...I worry that they would fall under the control of Disney.

Because you see, Selena Gomez, the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, they're not harmless entertainment for so-called 'tweenage' girls. They're marketing tools. They're machines for extracting money from parents and turning innocent children into mindless zombies. They do this through their music, TV shows, films, advertising endorsements, magazine interviews, live concerts, shows and public appearances. The article I read began with the story of three young girls who had skipped school to wait outside a London hotel for the appearance of Selena Gomez. This is what I'm talking about. This is not harmless. This is very fucking dangerous and no one seems to give a shit. It's like we've already given up on this generation. They're already lost to the power of Disney. And what kind of message are they getting from their adoptive corporate parents? Well I'm glad you asked, because this is where it gets a lot worse.

Once a child has been absorbed into the collective consciousness that is Disney, they become susceptible to the kind of messages that are encoded in all the products, songs, movies and TV shows. Their belief structure, the belief structure that as a parent, you may well have worked hard on helping them to develop, becomes Disney's belief structure. If my child came home wearing a Promise Ring, spouting that hateful nonsense, I would cry. I would scream out the name of the Beast. I would lament the loss of my child's free spirit. I would do everything in my power to undo that spell. But it's worse, because many parents see it as harmless. Some parents even see it as being a good thing. They encourage it. They buy them tickets to mass occult gatherings like Jonas Brothers concerts. They drive them there, and leave them. They willingly sacrifice their own children to the false gods of children's entertainment. Now I am no fan of organised religion, but wouldn't it be less damaging for a child to hear this crap coming out of the mouth of a Sunday School teacher, someone they're practically pre-programmed to ignore, someone boring and old who probably likes kids a little bit too much...

OK, so maybe I'm advocating handing your child over to a possible sex offender rather than take them to a Jonas Brothers concert...but I think I'm on to something here, so I'm going to run with it. To the modern child, a slightly touchy-feely priest is no figure of authority. A healthy mistrust of religion and the people who practise it is something that I would plan to instill in my own children, although allowing one of them to be molested might be going a bit far. But that's easy. Getting your child to mistrust Disney is surely much harder. The closest thing to a theme park that the Catholic Church possesses is the Vatican City aka Dullsville. The youngest priests are close to a hundred years old. The best looking ones, merely life-size puppets made out of old ball sacks. They're no competition for Jonas Brothers. Where are the friendly, down to earth, sixteen year old girl priests who seem like they live next door even though they inhabit a maximum security compound outside of Los Angeles? You get passed the collection plate in a Church, how much to you give? A pound? A few dollars? How much to you have to spend to satisfy the hunger of Disney? A tenner for a CD, twenty for a DVD, forty for tickets, not to mention the holidays to theme parks. You're talking hundreds, if not thousands of pounds. And all for a moral guardian no more suitable to the needs of a child than a paedophile.


Also, did I mention Walt Disney was an anti-Semite?

Why we should all be ashamed of ourselves, Part Three: 'Who's to blame for Gillian McKeith?' and other questions...

There can be precious little debate surrounding the fact that the more attractive you are, the healthier you will be, the longer you will live, the more successful a career you will have and so on. I can't see a counter-argument. This is why people aren't spread equally around; why you don't see fat people on South Beach and why you don't see a supermodel in Maryhill. Sadly, many of these factors are genetic. Good looking people, with good looking parents meet, fall in love and make good looking children. Since good looking people are more successful, healthier and live longer, their children will do likewise. At the other end of the scale, predictably, the opposite happens. So...what happens in the middle? And who's to blame for Gillian McKeith?

I'll get to that first question later, but first...who is to blame for Gillian McKeith? Let's get this straight: Gillian McKeith only exists in order to satisfy some obscure need that people have developed. I say developed, because there was no Gillian McKeith before, and now there are hundreds, if not thousands, of facsimiles. What is Gillian McKeith? What does it do? Well for a start it harasses fat people. It points at them and calls them fat. It finds out what they eat and forces them to acknowledge that they're fat because of it. It then forces them to change their diet, bullies them into exercise, makes them cry, vomit, shit into a Tupperware box, divulge intimate details of their elephantine sex lives and for what? The sorry individual who is the subject of this torment gains nothing. At the end they're still fat, they've just had to endure a week of torture and eating bird food at the bony hands of a woman who is not even remotely qualified to do this. So no, they don't benefit at all. What about our old friends the attractive people? Again, no. They're too busy having soirees on yachts and eating organically produced fresh food to be concerned with a 19 stone call centre operative from Crewe with a gastric band.

Well I'll tell you who's responsible... it's those people in the middle. They're not fat, or ugly or poor. But nor are they thin, beautiful or rich. They're solidly mediocre in every way, and while this is comfortable, it is also staggeringly tedious. They benefit from the long, relatively healthy life but are equally cursed by it, knowing that they have to spend the fittest, healthiest, best looking times of their lives planning for the shit times ahead. They will have no villa on the Riviera to which they can retire. No chateau in the Loire. No yacht. No cabana. This makes them...actually this makes us very fucking angry. We can't live our life in the moment like Fatty McPoverty because we're going to live to be eighty-fucking-five. We don't have the luxury of dying young. And we can't very well go around harassing rich people because they're smarter than us, better looking, and they have lawyers. So we go after Fatty. We torture Fatty for every year past retirement that we have to live in suburban misery. We torture them for every weekend we don't spend at someone's delightful little place outside of Nice. We torture them for the freedom that we are denied. And we enjoy it. Why Gillian McKeith? Because for this kind of job, she's perfect.

And it gets worse. Much worse. As if it wasn't enough to hunt down fat people and torture them in their own homes for our amusement, we hunt down unfortunate looking people who we then subject to public ridicule only to then subject them to extensive surgery so that they're less hideous. Television is pretty much an endless parade of society's rejects being expoited for entertainment. And for every variation of every format there is a Gillian McKeith. Do you wear crappy clothes? Well here's Gok Wan to cackle at you and then dress you up to look like an older, fatter version of himself. The list is endless. No stone is left unturned in our insatiable hunt for freaks to prod and poke and make fun of. And all because we're bored.

And it gets worse. Much worse. Nothing, it seems, delights us more than when someone who was once wealthy and attractive suffers some unspeakable personal tragedy and loses their money, fame and looks. They get their own channel (ITV2) where all their reality shows can run, uninterrupted, like a morphine drip into the arm of society. Reference Kerry Katona. I personally have no idea where this person came from, but without even having seen any show about her, just by existing in the same space as ITV2 and gossip magazines, I know that she's suffered cocaine addiction problems and has been in and out of rehab. What appears to me to be serious psychological problems have been mined by Heat magazine and ITV for all their pathos which is then chewed up and regurgitated, half putrefied in the process, into the gaping mouths of viewers and readers who chew it up like cud around their water coolers. It happens so often that these people blur into one amorphous blob of pseudo-celebrity gossip from which stories and hour-long Channel Five specials can be drawn at will.

And it gets worse. Much worse. It doesn't even stop when they're dead. Psychics exploit grieving family and friends and we lap that up too. Charlatans ply their sinister trade in prime-time. We love to laugh at the credulous. We might not be the brightest bunch but fuck me, at least we don't believe that John Edwards is talking to our dead mother. How shallow and insecure are we that we demand this? How insatiable is our appetite for human suffering that we need to have it televised and broadcast into our living rooms? Or, perhaps more worryingly, what are these shows protecting us from? Could it be that without Jeremy Kyle around to shout at junkies we'd all pick up a two-by-four and head out into the concrete jungle and beat one to death ourselves? If we didn't have Gillian McKeith to do our dirty work, would we resort to chasing fat people down the street with a chainsaw the second they look longingly at a McDonald's? If we didn't have '10 Years Younger' would we drag ugly people into our basements and perform the surgery ourselves? Have we lost our minds? If we didn't have John Edwards would we be forced to crash funerals and openly castigate mourners? Where does it end? Where is our sense of decency?

What have we become? How did things get so shitty? When did peeking through net curtains at our neighbours turn into butchering ugly people in the name of entertainment? When did a little curiosity turn into phone-hacking? When did our need to put a little money away for a rainy day turn into hedge-funds and sub-prime mortgage crises? How did we get here? And, more importantly, can we ever get back? Can we ever get back to a time when celebrities were either A-list or no-list? Can we get back to twitching net curtains and variety programmes? When I see clip shows of what television was like before Rupert Murdoch, before Sky, before 150 channels of base degredation, I think how innocent it looks. These people on gameshows from the 1970s look absolutely ridiculous, yet they're not being mocked or bullied or strapped into a dentist's chair to fix their overbite, they're just accepted as the way people are. Now, you end up on Deal Or No Deal being forced to perform every flickering emotion like a dancing bear (which for humanitarian reasons we banned) only for Noel Edmonds...Noel Fucking Edmonds...to sneer at you like some kind of geriatric Mephistophiles in a shirt made out of curtains. Really? Is this where we are now? And if it's not him then it's Simon Cowell who were it not for the existence of other more likely candidates (Rebekah Brooks, Rupert Murdoch, the Bush Administration, George Osborne, Sting, Glenn Beck among others) would be my bet for the current incarnation of the Devil himself. It's all our fault. We made a deal with them. We told Rebekah Brooks that hacking phones was fine as long as it was only our fake celebrities. We bought Rupert Murdoch's Sky packages, we read his newspapers, we absorb the media slurry of Fox News like it's going out of fashion. We elected Bush (once). We elected David Cameron (kinda). We allow Sting to fly about the world in a private jet hosting lavish 'fundraising events' and 'rock concerts' while at the same time permitting him to lecture us on the fucking environment. We gave Glenn Beck a platform from which to spout hate speeches against anyone who dares exercise the most basic of human freedom of expression. We created Sarah Palin for fuck's sake. And for what? Can we go back? No. We let the cat out of the bag. We opened Pandora's box. We made a deal with all of these latter day devils and they've collected our souls in return. Now we walk the Earth like zombies until we die, miserable, alone, knowing that John Edwards is pretending to contact us so he can milk our grieving relatives for all they're worth.

Why we should all be ashamed of ourselves, Part Two: Why we need the News of the World

Supply and Demand. How could something so simple, so pure, lead to so much misery? It links the smallest pleasure to the greatest pain. It is death by a thousand tiny cuts. It supports the global trade in licit and illicit materials. It upholds the questionable regimes that enable that trade. War, slavery, apartheid, holocaust can all be traced back to individual people making seemingly inconsequential decisions. But each of those decisions is taken at the expense of something. Each time we choose convenience, each time we think first and foremost of ourselves, we empower the forces in the world that when unleashed bring forth devastation. Our deference towards supposed authority has empowered crusades, holy wars, 'civilising' missions, the conquest and annihilation of indigenous peoples, the destruction of the natural world and the dominion of the machine age. We made this world in the name of convenience. We chose far too often not what was right or good, but what was easy. It is easier to anaesthetise ourselves with religion and television than it is to face the world we've made. We are appalled by the deeds of the bankers and the tabloid journalists not because of what they did, but because of what we allowed them to do. Supply and Demand.

So, the News of the World. Hacking phones. Very bad. And what was it all for? Information. Pure and simple. Information that we demanded as payment for having made the 'victims' of phone hacking - that is to say, for the most part, dubious celebrities - famous in the first place. People come along with ambition and we feed it and fuel it and make them a star, but we know all along that it's a hollow fame. We know, likewise, that they have a shelf-life. We impose it on them. We lure them in, make them comfortable, lay our trap and lie in wait and then pounce like jackals, like wild dogs on a stricken animal. Then there comes a feeding frenzy and then only a carcass, stripped bare of all its flesh, remains to testify that anything had ever happened there. Our celebrity blood lust drives the stakes of the game ever upwards. It used to be enough to have blurred photos shot with telephoto lenses from far away. But as we made more and more celebrities, as they rolled off the production lines of Big Brother and the X Factor, we demanded more and more from our bounty hunters. We began to hound them in the street, lurk outside their homes and then, eventually, inside their homes with hidden cameras.

They were paying the price of their own vacuous celebrity. We made them who they are, we should be able to know everything about them. It's only fair, right? But it all went to shit. They took it too far. The News of the World went after a 'real' person, one of us. A missing (murdered) teenage girl no less. The straw that broke the camel's back? I sincerely doubt it. More like the anvil that broke the camel's back. In a way it was bound to happen. There was no way we could control the force that we'd released upon the world. But will we learn? No.

We never learn. We never learn that if you allow banks to operate with anything other than total regulation, they will end up running amok and bringing our national, and now global economies crashing to the ground. We have never learned this. Nor have we learned that media needs to be in some way controlled in order to prevent the News of the World hacking into mobile phones and Fox News spreading actual lies twenty-four hours a day. We will not learn that when times are tough, we must think of the greater good rather than selfishly taking the easy way out. As a species, we're doomed. Doomed to be consumed by the rampant forces that we, ourselves, have empowered. Congratulations are in order I think, and more billion dollar bonuses on Wall Street.

Why we should all be ashamed of ourselves, Part One

As a species, we humans are a stain on existence. We are a cancer on this planet. Our closest similarity is with a virus, and yet in its simple, single-minded efficiency, a virus is surely the better of us. As far as I can see, America and Britain are at the vanguard of our global decay, eating our way faster than most and with more careless a disregard for our hosts than Ebola. Every conceivable economic, social, political and environmental catastrophe has been witnessed and every single one has been our own fault.

Now, I can't stand a banker. I'd rather spit in the face of a Tory or a Republican than look at them. If I had my way the CEO of BP would boil in a heated vat of his own crude product. But I don't blame them. We made them who they are. We are weak. We are pathetic. We need politicians, hedge fund managers, oligarchs. As a society they are our collective crutch. We made the News of the World. We gave them permission to invade people's lives. We rationalised it because we also made the celebrities. We sanctioned it, whether we read it with glee or dismissed it with equal and opposite glee. But why? Why did we make a kiddy-fiddling Catholic Church? What's in it for us? Does it make us who we are? Possibly.

Ok, so let's do a thought experiment. Take one of the pillars of our society and consider what the world might be like if we did it right. Take banks. What if we hadn't dismantled the regulations that were placed on the financial sector following the Great Depression? What if they weren't allowed to trade in dept, creating a parallel economy of credit and insured credit and underwritten insured credit and on, and on. What if...? Well clearly there's a problem. Take away the unregulated financial free-for-all and pretty quickly you find that there's little need for a complex stock market as we have it today. No need for different currency either. And for that matter, currency as we know it. Once you remove the unending competition, the driving force of our economic system, then the cycle of boom and bust, bubbles and burst bubbles, soaring highs and crashing lows, you get economic stability. Harmony. But it will never happen.

I always liked Macbeth. We can all empathise with Macbeth. He was promised a better life. He already had a fine life, but he was told, albeit by an unreliable source with hidden self-interests, that he could do better. And he tells his wife. She then enables him to take that first tentative steps towards his ultimate downfall. He kills the king, assumes the thrown, is wracked with guilt, murders his best friend, is wracked with more guilt and then eventually dies in accordance with the ambiguous prophecy of the very people who led him down this road in the first place. His wife, meanwhile, is driven insane and kills herself. The End. Sorry if you have never read or seen Macbeth. Spoiler alert etc.

We are Macbeth. Advertising promises us fantastic things. Material wealth beyond our imaginations. Lady Macbeth whispers in our ears, telling us that we can have it, that we should have it...she's the institution, the banks, filling us with conviction for the deed, and we do it. We sign on the dotted line and become beholden to the fates. The banks, they're mad. They go bust. They take themselves out of the equation leaving us, neck deep in blood/debt, grasping at straws, trying hopelessly to find a way out while at the same time knowing that the only way is forward into ruin and death. And who is the king? The king is harmony and order. The king is nature. We kill nature to further our own ambition.

As a society we are far past the point of no return. We are seeing what surely must be the harbingers of the coming collapse. Cycles of boom and bust are getting faster. Environmental disasters are becoming less frequent but more severe as we push our capabilities ever harder to satisfy our insane demands. We've bought into the lie wholesale and we're riding it out because really...what the fuck else are we going to do?

England Football Team...Why?

I don't usually talk about sport in this blog. I figure there are plenty of  blogs about sports, but very few that are dedicated to rage. But I'm making an exception. Today, I'm making an exception. One time only. Exception.

Fabio Capello. I like him. He seems like my kind of guy. The whole thing where he asked Ronaldo, in the shower after a Real Madrid game, with all the rest of the team watching, if he was not ashamed of being so fat...priceless. You cannot put a price on that. Or can you? Well it turns out you can. Beware, it's a bit steep. £8,500,000 annually. £708,333 monthly. £170,000 weekly. £34,000 for just one day. Yep, more than a grand an hour. That is how much Fabio Capello's personal brand of genius is worth. Is it just me, or is that a lot?

But, you know, at least he does a good job. Oh no, wait, this just in, he doesn't.

I like to think that the professional footballer is a highly specialised, but far less intelligent version of a regular human being. Regular people have little in the way of marketable talent, but are blessed, instead, with free will and ideas. Regular people can make simple decisions and they can do this several times a day. They can do all of this without even breaking sweat. A professional footballer can do none of these things. The simplest of decisions leaves him confused. Stripped of the cloak of humanity that their outward appearance implies, they are like mobile waxwork models, physically correct, but mentally vacant. They need to be corralled at all times, like sheep or horses, so that they don't get lost or eaten, or accidentally erupt in a sudden free thought and ask themselves, "who am I?". Like horses, once broken in and provided with the minimum of training, footballers will slip immediately into their instinctual activity with the merest of prompts. Dress them in the correct attire, shout simple instructions at them and send them out onto the pitch. The manager's work is done. Bark some more brief orders at them should their feeble minds start to wander, provide them with nourishment and fluids after 45min, bark some more, then send them out again to do the same thing in a different direction, and then when it's all over you put them back on the bus (may as well be a horse box) and drive them carefully back to the stable.

Is this really worth £34,000 a day? I know of farmers (and anyone who's ever seem One Man and His Dog will back me up on this) who could achieve the same result for £34,000 a year. It would be an improvement on the wages of an average farmer. What kind of world do we live in where Fabio Capello gets paid more in a day than an average sheep farmer, who's job is essentially the same, gets paid in a year? But it gets worse. Much worse. Fabio Capello is not doing a very good job. What is much, much worse is that he has no idea why. He cannot think of a single thing that he could be doing any better. He is, in effect, acknowledging his own failure while at the same time absolving himself of any responsibility for it. When asked if he will remain as the England manager, he said that the decision lies with his employer. "I'm shit, but it's not up to me is it?" What kind of moral vacuum can sit there, earning £24 a minute, shrugging its shoulders and refusing to take responsibility for the fact that it's failing to achieve in a job that is so simple that people have been managing to do it since the dawn of civilisation and cannot routinely claim an annual wage higher than what this man gets paid in a day? What kind of person, I ask you, can do this? Surely if he was born with even the tiniest shred of personal decency he would, upon taking realisation of his abundant failures, recuse himself of this absurdly well paid job and go wait in the queue at the job centre like everyone else.

You will say, you fans of Fabio Capello, that it is unfair to compare him to a sheep farmer. You will say that he is better than this. So, why not compare him to a fellow football manager? An international manager, of a team that Fabio Capello's England team failed to beat at the last World Cup, the manager of the USA football team, Bob Bradley? Why not? Seems like a fair comparison to me. How much does Bob Bradley get paid in a year? £307,092. No, I haven't forgotten to add a zero or two. Yes, I carried the '1'. That is Bob Bradley's annual salary. It works out at £1228 per day. Still far more than a sheep farmer, but a staggering £32,772 less per day than Fabio Capello. You could, for the price of Capello, have Bob Bradley, who by all accounts is just as good (1:1 last time) as well as 365 sheep farmers. Every year.

To put it differently, you could have Bob Bradley, who is just as good at being a glorified sheep farmer or horse wrangler as Fabio Capello, and still have enough money left over, annually, to buy thirty-five houses (based on the average house price in the UK of £232,628). But let's think about this... That's the average UK house price. What if we wanted to put that money to good use? Wouldn't it be a good idea if instead of spending £8,500,000 a year on a man who freely admits that not only is he a crap at his job, but that he has no idea why that might be, we bought houses for people in the more deprived areas, like a charity might do? The average price of a house in Middlesbrough is only £114,658. So you can get seventy houses a year in Middlesbrough, plus Bob Bradley who, as we have established is just as good as Fabio Capello. Over the course of Fabio Capello's disastrous career as England manager, the people of Middlesbrough could have received as a gift from the F.A., two hundred and eighty houses. 280 houses. Almost three hundred families could have had a new house. A new home. And, the England team of talented animals could have still had Bob Bradley, a perfectly well qualified handler who is just as good as Fabio Capello. 


What I'm basically asking here, and I'm sorry if this seems like a stretch, is how can Fabio Capello have the nerve to ask a man, who while not at his physical peak was still not far from being the best footballer in the world, how he wasn't ashamed of being so fat, when he himself makes no apology for being openly terrible at a job for which he gets paid £34,000 a day to do? How can he do both of these things and not implode under the gravity of his own hypocrisy? More to the point, where is the man from the F.A. to come and seek out Fabio Capello, while he's with his family perhaps, or with his friends, and pose to him the same question: 

"Are you not ashamed of being so shit?"

Royal Wedding Rethink: Part Deux

A few days ago, Jose Mourinho said that sometimes he was ashamed to live in this world, but that this is the world in which we must live. Today, I was ashamed to live in this world. Like Jose, however, I must understand that this is the world in which we must live.

But I say, also, why can't we change this world? Why can't we sort this shit out? Why didn't we do it today?

We just paid £20m for a wedding. We got ripped, the fuck, off. We got our pants pulled down, we got fucked in the ass, and we enjoyed it. We watched live, high definition footage of our own ass-rape and we enjoyed that too. What is wrong with us? Is the human race comprised, to so great an extent, of morons? Of idiots? Of fools? Of cretins? Are we all so credulous? Are we all so willing to be taken for a ride?

The rich. The scum. The unimaginably wealthy. The aristocracy. They're not the problem. No. Not them. Don't try and shirk the responsibility by saying that, "oh, poor me, I'm just a lowly subject, it's their fault..." . No. Don't you dare. They are a symptom of our disease. I am fucking ashamed to be alive in a time that is so bent on backwardness. I am ashamed to live in a society that permits, and even encourages apathy. Apathy. I would happily endorse ambivalence. But not apathy. And I absolutely will not endorse supporting a public expenditure of £20m of taxpayer's money spent on policing those very taxpayers at an event that has been staged in order to secure their continued collective coma. That, I will not endorse.

Let me restate. I have nothing against Prince William or Kate Middleton. They're people, and they're welcome to do as they please. But spending £20m of someone else's money at a time when front line services are being axed by local councils trying to live up to our Tory (SCUM) government's austerity measures? I have a great deal against that. These things make me feel physically ill. We are to blame. We have the cure, for this disease, within ourselves. We have power beyond our imaginations. But we daily relinquish that power and we daily drink from the cup of anaesthetic that these power-paranoid egomaniacs thrust into our hands and press into our thirsty mouths. Fuck them, and fuck their public holiday.

And shit, while we're at it, a special shout out to Kelvingrove Park's revellers. You know those police were being paid double to have a fight with you? You just cost us even more. Next time you want to throw a party, keep it quiet. Get a permit. Rent a space. Hire security. Be a fucking professional and quit being part of the fucking problem. So a shout out to my man Jose. I also feel fucking ashamed.

Action For Happiness Should Fuck Off Immediately

Firstly, I feel I should apologise. My last post was not one of anger, but more borne out of confusion. I hope to redress the matter with utmost tenacity.

Action For Happiness is no less than a cult. We should, as a society of people who respect each other's basic human right to be utterly miserable, or pissed off for no apparent reason, reject the impulse to believe anything we are told by this army of cretins. They are dangerous. And they are a cult. Do not join them. Unless you're already a brain dead moron, in which case, go right ahead. Who am I to stand in the way of destiny?

Allow me to explain something. Happiness is not something that can be achieved, it is not something that can be aspired towards, it is not something you can pay for and it is not something you will acquire by doing good things. It is a strange and mysterious thing and, above all, it is relative. This is the key fact (and they produce a lot of "facts") that Action for Happiness have neglected to mention in their vast literature. Happiness is relative. It is contingent on a staggering array of variables. It is not, simply, something you get if you want it enough.

The Guardian had this to say:

The movement's supporters say it is not just about fluffy slogans or interfering do-gooders. Founded last year, it requires members, who can sign up via a website, to set up action groups to promote happiness wherever possible: at work, at home or in the community.

I would have been sleeping more soundly if I thought that they were just a bunch of fluffy slogans and the odd interfering do-gooder. That, I can deal with. I've been dealing with those things all my life. I'm fine with it. But action groups? That, I cannot deal with. That, I am not fine with.

But what are they trying to achieve? Surely a group called Action for Happiness can't be trying to achieve nuclear holocaust, or worse, turn the entire world into a peace camp... And you would be right. They are trying to put an end to the "epidemic of loneliness and isolation". Hmm. This makes me suspicious. If I were going to set up an Action for Happiness-style organisation, I would not be taking aim at an "epidemic of loneliness and isolation", I would recognise that loneliness and isolation are symptoms of a much larger problem that has precisely fuck all to do with happiness and everything to do with the massive inequalities that are endemic within modern society. The fact is that Action for Happiness is a middle-class organisation that is preaching to the miserable working classes below them. It is condescending and worse, it is blinding people to the real issue. Action for Happiness supports the very same ideologies that create the problem for which it is the supposed cure.

As an interesting aside, Action for Happiness include on their website a rather alarming quote from Marcel Proust.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

An organisation that aims to end loneliness and isolation taking inspiration from a quote by a man who locked himself in an attic for twenty years. I'd have to check with Alanis Morrisette (the worldwide oracle on these matters), but I'm pretty sure that qualifies as ironic.

So...Action for Happiness...what a load of crap, you might say, but think on this: if we don't band together and form a united front then these crazies will take over the world and the next time you're in a bad mood, one of them will come up behind you with a piece of piano wire would tight between their fists and unceremoniously strangle the misery out of you. That is why I propose an opposing movement. I call it...

...Action For Leaving People The Fuck Alone And Minding Your Own Business.


PS. Action For Happiness are endorsed by the Conservative Party. They are as close as I can see it to the army of Satan himself.

Martin Amis...

I'm not quite sure where to start with this one. Firstly, sorry to any regular readers for not posting in a while. Don't worry, it's not that I haven't been angry, I've just been very busy.


So...Martin Amis. It would appear that Mr Amis does not like Britain. On the surface of it, I can't blame him. But why, Mr Amis? Why do you not like Britain? Britain is, according to Amis, in a state of "moral decrepitude" and has been since the end of the Second World War. Britain also, since losing its Empire, has become a "power of the second or third order". I see.

But it does not end there. Amis doesn't like the superficiality of the tabloid media. He does not like the culture of celebrity. He does, however, like our "very advanced" political system. He also likes Shakespeare and believes our civil war to have been significantly less horrible than that in France, which, he also notes, occurred 100 years later. I see.

A bit of background is probably necessary here. Martin Amis is soon to be leaving Britain, forever, to start a new life in...

...and here I must interject. You might think that given Amis' list of dislikes, that he would be moving to a country that is better suited to his refined tastes. A place where the media is not dominated by superficial tabloids and where celebrity is not an ambition but a reward for hard work. A place that had an even less horrible civil war even earlier than we did! A place with a more advanced political system. A place where William Shakespeare is still alive, writing plays, poems and all that. Truly, a paradise. You would be wrong. Martin Amis is leaving Britain's moral decrepitude, fallen empire, tabloid sleaze and celebrity obsession to move to...

America.

America. A-merica. I see. Clearly Martin Amis has not done his homework.

Multiculturalism

OK. In the one corner, we have the English Defence League. In the other we have David Cameron. Are we about to see a celebrity death match or a right-wing love in? My gut tells me neither. I think you all probably know what I'm getting at. 'Multiculturalism has failed.' An odd statement given that I wasn't aware that the fact that we live in an irrevocably multicultural society was subject to judgement on its relative successes and failures. Nor was I aware that a multicultural society is exclusive of a strong, but civic, national identity. But perhaps I'm wrong. Stranger things have happened.
I must make a brief confession here. I'm not actually all that angry about the comments made by our, and I shudder to even write something so unpleasant, our prime minister. No, I'm just a bit confused. I'm confused about what exactly our values are. Our values as opposed to their values? What about my values? Where do I  fit in with the us and them? Are "our values" the values of David Cameron? If so, we are once again faced with some contradictory information. Allow me, if you will, to elaborate.
David Cameron appears to believe that people ought to have the right to elect their own government. This from a leader who was not properly elected, whose route to power was not at all democratic. In fact, the deals that were done behind closed doors in the week following the non-result of the last general election, culminating in a coalition government that is not really making vast numbers of people very happy, were more like the very perversion of even Britain's archaic proto-democracy. We still operate a 'first past the post' system that is at odds with the political diversity that our modern nation truly craves. Our democratic license is still at the whim of those who should be under its control. The system is backwards and it is failing, but even taking that into account, the formation of the current government was not what anyone voted for.
Moving on. What else does David Cameron believe? Oh dear. David Cameron believes in equality before the law. Which law, exactly, in this country today, holds people in equal account? Certainly not tax law. See for example Philip Green. Need we say more? Philip Green, the tax evading, sweat-shop owning, asset-stripping singular embodiment of everything that's wrong with modern Britain, far from being held accountable for his numerous crimes against all kinds of national and international laws is given a job by David Cameron's non-democratically elected coalition of the rich and infamous. I wasn't angry before, but now, I am pretty fucking angry.
Moving on. David Cameron believes that we should be encouraging integration, not separatism. What exactly does Dave think he's integrating when he's driving wide open the gap between obscene wealth and abject poverty? Is that a force for inclusion or separatism? And what about public sector cuts? What about libraries? Free to use libraries. If we are to consider the plans to close down the vast majority of these invaluable assets to a large number of communities across the length and breadth of this country of ours, then we must surely conclude that free libraries are a force for separatism. Why else would they be targeted in this way? How would that look in the battle to integrate hearts and minds?
Moving on. David Cameron doesn't think we should, as a society, be engaging with organisations which do not believe in equality before the law. He doesn't think we should be engaging with individuals or organisations which do not believe in democracy and the right of people to elect their own government. David Cameron doesn't think we should be engaging with those who propagate separatism and not integration. In short, David Cameron doesn't think we should have anything to do with him or his government. At least, that's my understanding of what he's saying.

Come Fly With Me Rethink

I've often mocked the people who watch television shows that they know, beforehand, they're going to hate but go ahead and do it anyway just to wallow in their own distaste for it and then let that hatred fester before writing in to Points of View to complain about it. I've often mocked them, and with good reason. Nor have I ever quite understood the type of person who voices opinion (both negative and positive) without having, themselves, experienced the object of their opinion. So here, I fall between these two stereotypes, but so it must be.

Come Fly With Me...

The Daily Telegraph...

Debate on racism...

What debate? Is it inherently racist to 'black up'? Yes. Yes it is.

So let's move on. I watched the full half hour of this truly staggeringly awful show. I mean this literally. I was staggered at how awful it was. We are all used to the device in comedy of the stereotype. And honestly, it can be funny. If used correctly, sparingly, inventively, subversively it can be an excellent comic turn. Subtlety, here, is the key word. Come Fly With Me is perhaps the least subtle 'comedy' show in history. What humour there is aims squarely at the lowest common denominator, does not deviate from that course, and strikes with the rapid-fire regularity of a desperate lunatic throwing handfuls of shit at a wall, hoping in vain that some of it will stick.

The show could also be criticised for sticking too closely to its reality TV parallel, Airport, which ran for a terrifying ten seasons between 1996 and 2005. Mockumentary rarely works when it is simply a rehash of an existing documentary. The appeal (however lost on me) of the original was surely that the characters were real people, the situations, real situations, the comedy, real comedy and the tragedy, real tragedy. So in this respect, what Come Fly With Me is achieving is more of an exercise in mining a particularly narrow seam of comedy that has also already been mined to death. Had Airport been an early 90s flash in the pan, a fleeting fixation, fast forgotten, then maybe Come Fly With Me would not feel so tired and unoriginal.

But could it be, to use the turn of phrase of The Telegraph's Michael Deacon, that Come Fly With Me is an exercise not in comedy, but in baiting what he calls the 'wet left'? I am not comfortable with the notion that the BBC would commission a programme under the umbrella of mainstream comedy written by and starring two of Britain's most popular TV personalities for the sole purpose of pissing off their biggest supporters. Deacon does not suggest that was the case, but adds that it 'might as well have been so', which leaves us with a real question: what was the BBC thinking when they allowed this abomination onto the air? It is not, leaving aside the fact that from beginning to end we are faced with nothing but base homophobia, racism, sexism and an overall denegration of acceptable social values, funny. It is not funny.

Back to stereotypes. Back to subtelty. Back to all those things I was talking about before. Where is the subtelty of a gay, Irish air steward with eight brothers who are all gay and all air stewards? Why do we need to be told all of this information within ten seconds of the character's introduction? The art of a sketch-based comedy show with recurring characters, as the Fast Show demonstrated, is development. Also, we can see that he's an air steward, hear from his accent that he's supposed to be Irish and can imagine (perhaps wrongly...because there's the subtelty and there's the subversion that's possible with stereotypes) that he's gay.

WE ARE NOT STUPID.

I'm not even going to get into the other ways in which this show is profoundly offensive, there's just no point.


Also, Happy New Year to the three people who follow my blog. In 2011 I'm sure we can look forward to a lot more things really pissing me off.

Student Protest Rethink

OK.
So there have been a lot of times this week when I've been angry. Many of them have been personal to me. Others have been reawakenings of old aggressions. I could, for instance have written at length about how a pipe burst above our bedroom and turned it into a paddling pool. But I won't bore you with that. I could have also written about the cold weather. I could have talked about how, since the weather has 'improved' the street outside has turned to ice and how this meant that my walk home from Waitrose tonight made me feel like a mutilated Torvil and Dean being forced against their will to perform The Human Centipede On Ice. But I won't.
Instead, I read today on the BBC News website about the most recent student protests and how they resulted in an ill-fated attack on Prince Charles and his pet horse. I'm sure I read somewhere that when Madame Tussaud's was informed that they needed a Camilla for their Royal Family section, that they just put a wig on Red Rum and assumed no one would notice.
Anyway. Moving on.
The Met Chief commended the 'fortitude' of the Royal couple. I'm pretty sure it wasn't fortitude. Confusion maybe? Bewilderment? In all fairness though, I'm confident that the job of Chief of the Met must come with a bullshit quota that needs to be filled. Anyone recall the brutal shooting of de Menezes? Fifteen bullets fired from point blank range into the head of an innocent man? Anyone? No? Ok. Moving on. So we hear about fortitude. And maybe they're right. We should commend the grotesque waste of public funds that constitutes not just Prince Charles and his pet, but the entire Royal Family, and lest we forget the destination of the 'Royal Couple', the Royal Variety Performance. I have been unable to find the cost to the public of staging this abomination, but I did find out that the cost of transporting the Queen and Prince Phillip to the last such show was £21,002. Read that bit out loud. Twenty-one thousand and two pounds. Just to get them there. Does that make it £42,004 round trip? Who knows? These people deserve our upmost respect. Really. They do.
And not just them. The Met deserve our gratitude too. After all, 'kettling' is a brilliant idea. It's up there with waterboarding. And we all know how much fun that is. Mounted riot police charging a crowd of largely unarmed demonstrators just makes you proud to be British doesn't it? I could seriously watch that all day. But most of all, a big shout-out must go to the NUS president for being the man alive with the least spine. He's actually an invertebrate. If he can't see that violence inspires violence and the police are the more frequent aggressor, then maybe it isn't there. And if he can't understand that people might want to attack a symbol of the staggering inequality that continues to blight this nation then, maybe we need to reconsider the attack on the Prince's car. After all, if an earthworm told you that the world was, indeed, flat, you'd believe it. Right?
I also read that a student protester had to have surgery on a 'brain injury' he incurred at the business end of a police issue baton. But unlike many, I'm relieved. I'm relieved to hear that the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) are looking into it. They're on the case. We can relax. After all, it's not like they managed to avoid the prosecution of the officer who caused the death of Ian Tomlinson. And all that in spite of the witnesses, who numbered more than a hundred, who reported the savage beating of yet another innocent man. In fairness, it was the Crown Prosecution Service, and its director, who perpetrated that crime against justice, but let's just say it doesn't fill me with the greatest confidence.
So, here we go. Government trebles tuition fees. Students rightly protest. Police kick the shit out of students. Students attack Prince Charles' car. Seems about right to me.

PS. I also once read somewhere, I'm sure, that once following a Royal visit to Madame Tussaud's the Queen accidentally took home the wax model of Prince Charles and didn't notice for three weeks. Good night.