Age of Stupid

Your position is indefensible you stupid stupid bitch a

Alexis Petridis’ hilarious tweets about prospective tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg

How have I previously missed prospective Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg? “In 1997, he was parodied for canvassing in Central Fife with his nanny”

He later told the Mail On Sunday: “If I’ve got a nanny, I’ve got a nanny. And if anybody doesn’t like it – tough!”

He then added: “I do wish you wouldn’t keep going on about my nanny. If I had a valet you’d think it was perfectly normal.”

More Rees-Mogg. He apparently ended his speech at his recent wedding reception by shouting “LEFTIES – GET OUT!”

…which certainly makes a change from “charge your glasses to the bridesmaids”.

Fellow pupils at Downside public school debating society proposed the motion: “This House Would Like To Exterminate Jacob Rees-Mogg”

‘He’s a clever chap,’ a friend remarked. ‘Could have gone to the top. But he shoots himself in the foot with this stuff about his nanny.’

GOCM: Good old Caitlin Moran

From an ancient Times article RE personal ads:

“The most pitiless of all phrases, however, is “GSOH” …having to tell someone that you have a good sense of humour — that you are amusing — is like having to tell someone that you are beautiful, or treading on their toes. If you are, it should be apparent to them. They, in fact, should be telling you. For the majority of profoundly humourless advertisements, the addition of “GSOH” is like finding a slipper-shaped present under the Christmas tree, hopefully, but ultimately incorrectly, labelled “bicycle”.”

Here is the rest of it.

Oh for God’s sake

It looks like I spoke too soon. As this once-dormant blog has now come to life in order for me to defend Russell Brand. I hesitate in doing so because I’ve already aligned myself too closely with him by dressing up as him last Halloween but, although I acknowledge that he is flawed in many ways, I really do like the chap.

All the hoohah that has surrounded Brand’s phonecalls to Andrew Sachs, the actor who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers, really is pretty ridiculous though. The man was supposed to be a guest on Brand’s show promoting a documentary ‘The Bill Made Me Famous’. Brand phoned him up to interview him and when he didn’t answer Brand left a message on his answerphone, during which Jonathan Ross (who was co-hosting the show in Matt Morgan’s continued – and terribly upsetting – absence) blurted out that Brand had ‘fucked’ Sachs’ granddaughter, who is a member of a sexually explicit dance troup ‘The Satanic Sluts’.

Brand then instigated a series of high-spirited (and certainly misguided) phone calls supposedly attempting to apologise but each time making it worse. It was a bit cringeworthy but nothing like as terrible as the broadsheets and Mail are making out.

I thought the most interesting aspect of the incident was Jonathan Ross seemingly showing off and acting out to try to appeal to his younger colleague.

Really, there are so many more important things in this world to get up in arms about than a stripper’s granddad finding out that she’s not whiter-than-white.

Update 28/10

Bloody hell, the internet commenters really have gone to town over this one, with 78% of Guardian readers saying that Ross and Brand should be sacked as a result of the prank. Had it been picked up by a less sensationalist paper and fairly reported I doubt anyone would give two hoots. It’s worrying how much influence the horrid Mail seems to have, even on people who don’t read it.

For Folk’s Sake

If anyone’s still reading this now dormant blog, please stop.

All my creative efforts now go towards www.forfolkssake.com.

Please check it out.

Thanks,

Lynn

Find Me the Face

Find me the face is a BBC3 program billed as a “documentary series in which two of the UK’s top model scouts, Becky Southwick and Jody Furlong, compete to find new talent.”

And I suppose it is, but the BBC’s description fails to convey what excruciating viewing it is thanks, primarily to Ms Southwick.

In the search for models (pronounced mod-duhs) who fit the show’s brief (lingerie, catwalk girl, beauty girl, etc) Becky and Jody take to the UK’s cities. Jody chuckles his way through encounters with pretty girls like a baby watching its mum making goo-goo noises and silly faces, while Becky grumpily proclaims that she’s just really pissed off because “This city is full of mingers” or “People here have been eating all the fucking pies.” Bless her.

Becky, who’s no size zero beauty herself, approaches her targets as if they were cattle at an auction. First she asks them if they’ve done any modeling before. If the answer is yes, cue a tantrum and the explanation – if the girl is lucky – “you don’t fit my brief.” Becky then talks to camera while the bemused girl wonders what just happened.

If the poor thing is lucky enough to get over that hurdle Becky will set about examining her. Sometimes their hips are a bit big, other times they have mild acne, but whatever is wrong with them, we can be sure that Becky will announce it to them, and to the audience, lovely chap that she is.

When the lovely Gok Wan – of How To Look Good Naked fame – calls a woman taking part in his show “my girl” it’s endearing. In fact, I have oft wished that one day I might be Gok’s girl (preferably without having to first experience the crippling insecurity and then the shame of stripping down to my m&s pants on TV that all his other girls endure.) But there’s something sinister about Becky calling the contestants she has picked her girls, you get the feeling she may have just taken ownership of their souls.

Anyway, the contestants are gradually whittled down to a final two. One each from the girls Becky and Jody have found. At this point Becky’s malignant attentions turn. She’s clever enough to realise there’s no point complaining about the one she’s left with. She now declares her girl the best and starts dissing Jody’s model to camera.

If the unthinkable should happen and Jody should win, Becky manfully takes it on the chin… along with cries of “they’re not looking for the right thing,” “I’ve been in this business for 12 years,” and “it’s just not FAIR.”

I’ll do my own morals, thanks.

Apparently, this year’s triumphant low-budget indie flick Juno is A Bad Thing For Society. In it 16-year-old Juno has sex, gets pregnant, has her baby adopted by a loving mother and goes back to her normal, happy life. Do you see that? See what they did there? She had underage, unprotected sex with little or no negative consequence! Where’s the mother-effing retribution?!

All manner of people are up in arms about poor old Juno. The pro-choicers think that she should have had an abortion. The pro-lifers think it’s great that she chooses to have her baby. But concerned lunatics everywhere think she sends out the message that kids getting pregnant is okay.

What Juno actually does is provide a brilliant 120 minutes of entertainment. The film is truly excellent. Juno, played by Ellen Page, is bright, independent and really really funny. She forgoes an abortion when she didn’t want a child and instead finds a couple looking to adopt a baby, carries her child to term then gives it away, quite happily. And no, there is no divine retribution (isn’t childbirth punishment enough?) but what we all have to understand here is that this is just a film.

It’s a made up story about one person. This film knows that it isn’t its job to make judgements on the character’s decisions, it just tells the story and well. The naysayers from different groups have one thing in common: they imply unquestioningly that films guide the morals of their viewers.

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Update 04/04

For the sort of intelligent, thoughtful commentary on this subject that I am unable to provide, take a look at Mike Monypenny’s blog here

A thoroughly good sort of Chap

Michael “Atters” Attree esq. is a true eccentric. He doesn’t like the term because, in his own words, “it has connotations of people excreting in ladies handbags and eating candles.” But an eccentric he is. The best sort.

Atters is a stallholder at the magical ‘Snoopers Paradise‘ market in Brighton. His stall – or Emporium as he calls it – sells old stuff. Pre-Victorian if possible. “It’s a way of being like a museum curator and I can hoard all sorts of junk,” he says, “I do the real dead people’s stuff. Fossils and, yes, dead people. That’s what I specialise in.”

As well as running his Emporium Atters is Editor of Roguishness for The Chap, a satirical magazine which laments modern day values and calls for a revolution of panache. A publication that I urge anyone with a sense of humour to seek out.

Because of Atters’s charming affectations and my new-found love of the magazine I am seriously considering becoming a Chappette. Life could be a lot more fun with an injection of manners, tweed and cucumber sandwiches. And, as a worshipper at the alter of Hendricks Gin, I think I’m a prime candidate.

Kim Hollamby and the online audience

Are we all lazy, disloyal and impatient? Kim Hollamby thinks so. Crudely put, that is his opinion of online audiences. And, as Digital Development Director of magazine publishers IPC media he should know a thing or two about them.
It’s a bit of a worry. If we, as bloggers and web editors, are ever lucky enough to get an audience we can’t rest on our laurels as they’re likely to jump ship at the slightest sign of inactivity. My blog stats (something I used to check daily, and now happen across every so often) would tend to agree.

Additionaly Hollamby mooted the idea of the 1:10:100 rule of online journalism saying that one person writes something, ten interact with it, and a further 89 passively read it. (Of course, strictly speaking, that’s the 1:10:89 rule…) It’s a rather heartening thought for anyone with a blog. Spending hours honing a blog post only to have one paltry comment, a month later (from your mum), is less pitiable if you can convince yourself it means 10 other people read it.

Guardian 1 Times 0

I don’t know why it took me so long to get into Charlie Brooker. I’ve long read his Guardian column Screen Burn, loads of my friends are big fans and I’ve been on constant look-out for another journalist to “hero worship” (as Tom so churlishly puts it).

Well now, unlike Maggie, I have turned. Times columnist India Knight no longer resides in my handy firefox bookmark bar, she has been replaced. By Brooker.

See, India used to be pretty amusing. She wrote a brilliant book – My Life on a Plate – 8 years ago, and since then I’ve read her column, first in Ma and Pa’s Sunday Times and latterly online, but she seems to be getting quite unpleasant in her old age. It has been a gradual decline but now her articles are unnaccepting and cynical. They’re about schools, or the demise of the family, or her scorn about Hilary Clinton crying. And worst of all they aren’t funny.

It’s not just because I got a free mug with it today, but I really bloody love the Guardian. It doesn’t deride, it’s not vitriolic and it’s the polar opposite of The Mail, which is my main requirement in a paper.

So India is out, and Brooker’s self-depricating, bad-tempered satire is in. I can’t see myself ever losing faith in Caitlin Moran, but I live in hope that she will defect to the good ol’ Guardian.

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UPDATE 13/02

Comments below made me realise I should probably mention Nathan Barley, Brooker’s hilarious TV series about the rise of the idiots starring Julian Barratt of Mighty Boosh fame also featuring Noel Fielding and that guy out of the IT Crowd whose name no-one can pronounce. Also BBC4’s Screen Wipe which Brooker presented. Both are available on youtube in their entirities.

Nathan Barley really deserves a post of its own. Cos it’s bloody brilliant.