In November last year the Cumbrian town of Cockermouth suffered disastrous flooding. During the following clean-up operation it was visited by David Cameron.
"See David, it really is called Cockermouth."
Inevitably at some point during the visit Mr. Cameron was forced to cross a road. Clearly though he never saw Darth Vader’s lessons in road safety when he was a boy, because he walked straight onto the road after the crossing light had turned red. Setting off from those very traffic lights was my mother who saw him in time and resisted the urge many Britons would have to just speed up regardless.
That’s right. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland doesn’t pay attention to basic road safety.
IF he can’t even cross the road properly WHAT hope does he have of tackling a complex problem like our economy?
…Sorry, I slipped into some misleading The Sun rhetoric there. Actually I doubt the skills required to manage a financial crisis are anything like the skills required for getting from one side of a road to another without walking in front of moving vehicles.
As for my mum… I’ve forgiven her for putting the brakes on. You have to really.
Picking on editorials from consistently inaccurate, hate-filled and hypocritical “news”-paper The Sun is a bit like holding a ‘spot the arsehole’ competition during an episode of Come Dine With Me. In short, too easy. Today’s piece, entitled Democrazy (and I wish eternal fucking damnation on whoever thought that was a clever headline,) probably isn’t even the most offensive they’ll print this week. Not only that but given today’s revelations it’s unlikely that any of The Sun’s fears will be realised. So why bother? Because it’s the first I’ve read for probably close to 10 years and because every line seems to feature either a blatant manipulation of the facts or an outright lie.
IN the space of five tumultuous days, Britain has gone from democracy as we know it to the brink of dictatorship.
This is just the tagline and, frankly, it’s hard to know where to begin. I assume they’re referring to Labour in their “brink of dictatorship” line, although you can only confidently arrive at that conclusion if you have no idea about our constitution or democratic system.
A desperate stitch-up is being attempted which will mean voters’ faces being ground into the dust.
I think they mean that last part figuratively, although it’s hard to tell.
Defeated Gordon Brown intends to cling to office until he can hand over to ANOTHER unelected Prime Minister.
This pisses me off. The fundamental point of the first-past-the-post electoral system is that voters are choosing their local MP. This means the only people who vote for the Prime Minister are his constituents who elect him solely as an MP. I’m not suggesting that party allegiance shouldn’t affect the voting decision but the fact that it is the party themselves who elect their leader, and not the voter, is an important distinction. It therefore follows that Gordon Brown was an elected Prime Minister as will be the next one, whether Cameron or not.
He is brazenly selling himself at any price to Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems and a ragtag collection of MPs in Scots, Welsh and Ulster seats.
The ragtag collection of MPs The Sun refer to here are comprised of the SDP, who received more seats in Scotland than the Conservative party, and Plaid Cymru, who received the same number of seats in Wales as the Liberal Democrats. It seems The Sun is attempting to cast aspersions on a coalition government without actually being able to say so directly because doing so would also be a criticism of Cameron’s attempt to court the Lib Dems. Maybe Brown’s plan was just too coalition for their liking.
This shabby coalition would keep David Cameron out of Downing St – even though he WON the election.
He didn’t win the election. Here The Sun mistakes governing the United Kingdom for winning a “guess-how-many-pennies-are-in-the-jar” village fête competition. It’s not closest number wins, it’s majority of 326 MPs wins, whether this is formed by a single party or a “shabby” coalition.
Britain has been called the cradle of democracy.
By fucking who? By an idiot? Maybe. By the BNP? Probably. By anyone who knows even the smallest fucking thing about the history of democracy? No. A quick Google search for “the cradle of democracy” returns on the first page 7 links referring to Greece (or Macedonia), one for Viking Iceland, one for Germany and, predictably, one for the USA.
I really wish Brown would stop resigning while I type this; it’s invalidating the whole damn thing.
If this deal goes through, democracy will be in its grave.
You say democracy in its grave; I say democracy in action. Let’s call the whole thing off. No… Really.
Clegg’s price for backing Brown will be changes in the voting system designed to stop the Conservatives winning again.
Actually a system of proportional representation would represent the voters… proportionally. If the Conservatives never won again that would be a direct result of the votes of the electorate. It almost sounds democratic.
Yet the election revealed no outcry for such change, otherwise Clegg’s lot would not have done so badly.
This is such a perverse twisting of the facts as to begger belief. The Liberal Democrats received a 23% share of the vote but only 9% of seats in the House. To me it’s the fact that “Clegg’s lot” did “so badly” that shows exactly why we need change.
Can there ever have been a more squalid spectacle than this discredited loser [Brown - obviously] scrabbling on his knees to stay in No10?
I can think of a couple of recent examples actually. The Murdoch papers’ desperate attempt to discredit Nick Clegg after the first leader’s debate springs to mind. Also this editorial.
If [Cameron] is now to be robbed of his victory, then this will have been the election that saw our idea of democracy die in Britain.
This is precisely why our idea of democracy needs to fucking die to be replaced with a better idea of democracy.
As I see it there are only two reasons a paper would allow such a piece to run: either they are genuinely stupid or this is a deliberate obfuscation of the facts and political discourse in a cynical attempt to mislead. As tempting as it is to dismiss The Sun as a collective of brash, loudmouthed morons it’s clearly the latter that is true.
And to think I nearly made it the whole election without ranting about politics.
From the ‘Equal Opportunities Monitoring’ section of a job application form I recently filled out:
Is your gender identity the same as the gender you were assigned at birth?
What a weird sentence. It seems so deliberately crafted to avoid causing any offence but, in doing so, becomes such a clunky sentence that it can’t help but draw attention to itself. Also, gender you were ‘assigned’ at birth? Assigned by what? Is this employer suggesting some sort of divine agency here.
Unless… Unless it was written by a robot… Shit, it’s started.
No matter how often the media attempts to cover the Eyjafjallajökull eruptions by running endless, tedious, “family’s life ruined as holiday delayed for a couple of weeks” stories, never forget:
ITV’s The Alan Titchmarsh Show has a good ol’ fashioned lynching of those violent video games. Here’s a run down of those involved in descending order of hatefulness:
Tim Ingham: CVG editor. Managed to remain calm throughout, even though he knew he was just there to be the bad guy. Tried to make some good points but was routinely cut-off.
Kelvin MacKenzie: The man who accused Liverpool fans of stealing the wallets of the dead during the Hillborough disaster was the second most reasonable voice there? My faith in reality has been visibly shaken. He did make a bizarrely distasteful link between games and the killing of Jamie Bulger though.
Julie Peasgood: Tiresome harpy and hypocrite. Thinks games promote racism. Also knows of a study that conclusively prove that games turn children into violent thugs… Although doesn’t seem able to name it.
Alan Titchmarsh: Surprisingly Titchmarsh seemed to be the most venomous and the most ill-informed. To the point that he seemed completely unaware that movies can be bought for home consumption on DVD.
Unsurprisingly a lot of people have reacted angrily over the Titchmarsh show. I, however, feel no anger. I feel pity. Why? Because I know the true tragic story of the life of Alan Titchmarsh. I share it with you now, in the hope of at least bringing some understanding to the bizarre outbursts of this poor man.
Alan Titchmarsh was born in 752 BC. One of the most forward thinking men of his time, throughout his life he was a firm advocate for his tribe to adopt iron in order to give them an edge over their enemies who still clung to their precious, inefficient bronze. The change wasn’t swift and Alan had to dedicate years of meticulous research to unlocking the mysterious potential of this hypnotizing ore. The tribe was dragged kicking and screaming, in some cases literally, their bloodied, cracked bodies and grotesque visages twisted in horror and pain as Alan experimented with an early form of armour – nailing huge chunks of metal directly to the torso and recoiling in professional horror as chunks of flesh ripped from the weight of the metal.
Eventually a compromise was found – smaller plates covering only essential weak spots maintained a balance between protection and unavoidable deformity – and as the tribe’s warriors charged on their enemies’ homesteads their unending screams of rage, pain and infected confusion struck terror into the hearts of their victims. Before long Alan’s tribe stood alone amidst miles of blood-red rivers and mountains piled with the corpses of the vanquished. The chief rewarded Alan with his daughter’s hand in marriage, as well as that of his daughter’s much more attractive best friend.
An artist's impression of a young Titchmarsh
Life was good. Until they came.
Stepping out of a blinding vision of light, The Focus Group appeared. These colossi, a perfect fusion of organic matter and mechanical enhancements, stood towering in front of the villagers, disrupting one of their many pagan fertility rituals. In that moment Alan, overcome with awe, gazed upon the terrible iron-clad apparitions (Note for historical posterity: they were actually wearing a matte painted steel, but Alan wasn’t to know this having no concept of what steel was) and saw his folly. He renounced iron (again: technically steel) and all its possible applications.
But it was too late. Coldly the Focus Group moved from villager to villager. For each they would stop and utter a phrase, “unappealing graphical fidelity” or “inefficient animation patterns” or “evidence of programming glitches,” before using their angular weapons to vaporise the assessed in a shower of molten bone and cartilage. Soon only Alan and a handful of others remained, deemed adequate by their captors.
And so they were taken back with the Focus Group to the nightmarish vision of the future they inhabited and deposited into the holding cells of the Publishers. For weeks Alan was pumped with noxious experimental chemicals and subject to torturous implants before finally he was deemed to be of ‘Release Build’.
For the next 10 years Alan was forced nightly into arena combat. Given only basic weaponry and armour he had to defeat legions of unspeakable demons clamouring for his blood and limbs. These soulless monstrosities of carnage, all twisted extrusions and endless orifices, would stalk him night after night. Countless times he was overcome with an urge to end it all, charging headlong into the braying pack to be torn asunder, only to awake the next night, physically unharmed. Had he been aware of it, he would have likened the experience to Groundhog Day but, in doing so, would have grossly ignored the emotional core of the film.
If there's one lesson to be learned from all of this: Groundhog Day was a great film.
This endless precession of misery continued until, one day, a particularly imaginative C4 trap Alan had constructed for his monstrous foes ripped out a panel, already weakened by years of neglect by the heavily unionised maintenance crew, from the walls surrounding the arena. As the fire subsided and the smoke settled Alan, for the first time since his capture, saw beyond his small world and into the inner workings of his prison. There, in a darkened room, he saw the frail, atrophied body of a child, arms resting on a keyboard.
Fearing for the destruction of their infrastructure the Publishers did the only thing they could think of and disabled Alan’s optical implants. The demonic visions that had plagued him for a decade were finally shown for what they really were; the villagers that had been captured alongside him. As Alan looked between the lifeless bodies of his former tribesmen and the empty expectant stare of the childlike figure before him he realised it was all a game. All this time children just like the one he now saw had been using him as a marionette in their twisted game of violence, the most realistic war game the world had ever seen. In that moment of horror and the complete degradation of the moral fabric of society he felt no anger. He just fell to his knees and wept.
Incidentally, he was wrong. The child, actually an empty shell, was merely a conduit through which players, who were all over the age of 18, could connect through. A partially organic dedicated server chosen to resemble a child because the designer realised that omniscient children were creepy as fuck, thereby dissuading competitors from rigorous corporate espionage. Of course, there was no way Alan could have known this.
Children are creepy at the best of times.
But what to do with the man Titchmarsh? The Publishers had a problem. His awareness of the system would limit their ability to control him. If they killed him within the compound he would just respawn to their respawn vats. Kill him outside of the compound and the chemicals infused in his body would cause a violent explosion (again, corporate espionage countermeasures.)
They decided the only feasible option was to return him to his own time. Unfortunately his original details had been long lost to administration, so instead they sent him to the one place everyone was guaranteed to be too self-obsessed to care: 1983. Disorientated he stumbled the streets of London in a daze. While his body was in great shape from years of battle his brain wasn’t used to having full control of its limbs and he lurched awkwardly. On his initial travels he caught visions of people using their brand new computers. To us these seem like primitive devices. To Alan they were achilling reminder of the future.
Eventually he was found, having somehow made his way into the Blue Peter garden. Presenter Sarah Greene discovered him in a corner which had become inexplicably overgrown. Initially mistaking him for a vagrant, she attributed the unnatural vigour of the plants to a particularly virulent strain of Scrumpy Jack infused hobo urine. On attempting to forcibly remove Alan from the garden, vines shot from the ground and wrapped around her arms legs and neck, an attack that left her for years in a coma from which only Phillip Schofield could wake her. This was how Alan’s affinity for plants, a strange side-effect of the chemicals in his body, was discovered.
Luckily for Alan, Director General Alisdair Milne stepped in before a BBC contamination team could be dispatched. He saw in Alan the potential for a rebirth of plant and flower based television. Early attempts were tough going, it was only during the Chelsea Flower Show that his handlers realised that proximity to crowds of people actually raised his intelligence levels and allowed his speech to develop beyond his pidgin English, developed during his years of imprisonment, to allow for coherent sentences. Some referred to this shared intelligence as a form of empathy, unaware that it was only because of the implants, used to render his mind ripe for psychic control. There were downsides too; Charlie Dimmock’s obsession for Japanese hentai games proved particularly troublesome for Titchmarsh’s subconscious during the filming of Ground Force.
The forced smile of a man waiting for death.
Skip forward to present day. Is it any wonder Alan behaved the way he did? He’s seen soul-crushing visions of the future, of slaves exploited for the entertainment of millions of gamers. Of course he wants to keep children away from violent games, he sees himself as Earth’s only hope of preventing the hell into which we’re descending. And obviously he doesn’t know you can buy films on DVD. He’s terrified of technology.
He is, however, completely wrong. He wasn’t taken to the future, he was taken to a parallel universe.
After 2008 began the trend of having items be easily categorised by quality I’d just assumed 2009 would settle down into the same old routine of everything being the same. How wrong I was. If you take individual elements of the year and categorise them arbitrarily you’ll notice a clear gradient of good through bad. Here, I shall demonstrate by highlighting the very top of the grading curve in these very categories.
Album of the Year Award
Florence + The Machine – Lungs
I blame Spotify for this one for allowing me to easily sample albums commitment free. Last year I probably wouldn’t have even bothered with this. This year its the one album I’ve continued to bother with. My usual method of listening to albums I really love is to consume them whole, constantly obsessing over each element, trying to disseminate some further meaning. To assimilate it into my existence and then leave it, used and exhausted, to be returned to at intervals as a reminder of that time and to finally be enjoyed on its own merits. Often there are individual tracks that can withstand this process; that retain the initial spark felt on the first listen. Rarely does a full album manage this. Lungs was the only album this year that did. With all that being said, I’m not a fan of the You’ve Got The Love cover.
Notable Mention:
Fight Like Apes – Fight Like Apes and The Mystery of The Golden Medallion: A fun pop-punk debut from Fight Like Apes. Manages to be angry yet melodic, often at the same time.
Movie of the Year Award
Slumdog Millionaire
Adam claims it doesn’t hold up as well on a second viewing. That’s understandable, the first viewing was such a rollercoaster of emotion I don’t know how you could hope to recapture it. It’s big triumph was in capturing the slums of Mumbai not as a destitute place of sorrow but as a vibrant, exciting and dangerous environment. It lost some of its momentum in the second half but that didn’t take away from the beauty of both the visuals and the story throughout.
Notable Mentions
Moon – I’ve seen this three times now and it remains among my favourite sci-fi films.
Where The Wild Things Are – Not had a chance to write about this yet but it’s an excellent reflection on the confusing nature of childhood emotions.
Gig of the Year Award
AC/DC
I was expecting them to be good, I really hadn’t expected them to be amazing. Despite their age, the energy of the gig was frantic. It was a great show from people who’ve been working at their trade long enough to know what a great show entails.
Notable Mentions
Nine Inch Nails - This year marked the hiatus of NIN as a touring entity which gave Trent the impetous to put on the show that he wanted, not the show the fans expected.
Colin Hay – Good songs with funny interludes. Not even ruined by the twat in the audience who kept shouting “What’s JD like?”
The “Where The Fuck Have You Been?” Award
Awarded to whatever old thing I only just became aware of this year.
Scott Pilgrim by Bryan O’Malley and Phonogram by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie
This was the year I started paying attention to comics again. I’m sure I’ll write about Phonogram more when the trade print of the second series is released. The first series, Rue Britannia, was a great reflection of Britpop, the first musical movement I really found myself identifying with. It wins despite being the reason I started listening to Kenickie again after over 10 years. I’ve already written about Scott Pilgrim here. I agree with what I said.
Warwickshire’s Loudest Covers Band Award
The Cookie Monsters
Same as last year. My dad’s band were recently informed they were the best thing that has happened to Lutterworth. Not the best thing that could happen to Lutterworth, mind. That would be some sort of nuclear disaster.
TV Show of the Year Award
Better Off Ted
It was a fight between this and Community for my favourite new comedy of the year. Better Off Ted wins for being more consistent and for featuring Arrested Development’s Portia de Rossi. Neither of them are being shown in the UK yet, as far as I can tell, and annoyingly there are only trailers on YouTube. Still, you’re all tech-savvy people – you can probably work out where to get hold of an episode.
Random Moment of the Year Award
Yodelling to Hocus Pocus by Focus in Jilly’s
Jilly’s, one of the rock clubs in Manchester, has an annoying tendency to stick to its playlist. You can pretty much guarantee which songs will be played of a night. That’s why it was such a surprise to walk into one of the rooms and hear Hocus Pocus being played. Unfortunately there is no way to explain to your workmates on Monday that the reason your voice is hoarse is because you spent Friday night yodelling at the top of your voice.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
With City 16′s Top 10 games of the year feature taking over most of my spare blogging time I’m throwing up some smaller posts of things that have been going on this week. This post: snow.
I’ve been accused by some of my work colleagues of not getting into the Christmas spirit (mostly because I’m at work and it’s not bloody Christmas yet) but must admit that the deluge of frozen precipitation has led to the neighbourhood looking rather charming over the last few days. Here’s some pictures:
Also: You may have noticed, it’s now snowing on the website. Not getting into the Christmas spirit, indeed.
I’m trying to work out if this is post is more inconsequential than the tea thing.
I recently went to see the last performance of the first leg of Stewart Lee’s latest show If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One. This was pretty much all new material from Lee, after his show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle earlier this year. For those who’ve never seen Lee before, his act works with sophisticated satire, often deploying a false, sarcastic indignation with which to highlight an honest and earnestly felt point. He often uses repetition and deconstruction to work towards the punchline resulting in the biggest laughs of the performance coming in the pause just before it’s delivered, as the methodical way in which the set-up has worked through has left the audience in no doubt as to where the train of thought is heading. Needless to say the punchline is often as tangential and meandering as the point itself, constantly being re-assessed based on the audience’s reaction.
Topics included where not to take a pirate on a day out, Lee’s favourite coffee chain, the young and angry 38 year old comic Frankie Boyle, why he thinks Richard “The Hamster” Hammond is the most hateful Top Gear presenter (partly because he’s not a real hamster) and a stunning climactic piece highlighting the way advertising devalues artistic attachment, using ludicrous examples of the phrase “give it to me straight like a pear cider made from 100% pears”.
The next leg of the tour takes place in London followed by further, as yet unannounced, dates throughout the country. If you get an opportunity to see it, you really should.
And because there aren’t any videos out of the new material, here’s a clip from a couple of years back.
I was told to re-connect with you by sending a message…stupid facebook
That was the message waiting for me in my Inbox. Facebook had sent it me, claiming it had come from one my friends. Initially I was concerned; had my account been hacked? No, that didn’t make any sense. Had his account been hacked? No, I had two similar messages from other friends.
The answer turned out to be that Facebook had noticed I hadn’t had any interactions with these people over Facebook in a while and it had taken it upon itself to suggest to people that they try to ‘re-connect’ with me. The sardonic messages I started to receive from friends confirmed two things to me:
I chose the right friends
Facebook is fucking creepy
The truth is pretty simple: I’ve not had interactions with anyone over Facebook for a long time. I log in to it maybe as much as three times a year, perhaps four if I’m really going for it. That night, as I looked over the messages (admittedly only three in total) I started to feel I was involved in some sort of intervention organised by Facebook, like I was the black sheep of my social circle and it was desperately trying to integrate me back into the fold. “Come back,” it urged “look how missed you are. Wouldn’t it feel better to come and live in the warmth of constant updates about how Friend X is a fan of Skittles, how Friend Y is 9,623,258th on the leaderboards of some shitty webgame or which character from Game On Friend Z is most like?” The answer, it turns out, is no.
To highlight the stupidity of all this, the person I found out what was going on from was my flatmate, who’d also received one of these suggestions. Um, Facebook, I don’t really need to reconnect with my flatmate because I live in the same bloody house as him.
So, my friends, if you really are feeling the need to reconnect with me, I have a phone… and an email address… and a website… and a Twitter account (hey, it’s simple and hassle free alright?)… I’m not exactly hard to find.
Phil Savage posts here in the hope that one day he can fulfill his dream of usurping former Cleveland Browns' General Manager Phil Savage as the top Phil Savage on the internet.
