Rot Watch

A Dog's Life

2011-03-12T17:57:00.002Z

Read about our experience with the smelliest dog in the Western Hemisphere here in The Guardian.

Must Try Harder

2011-02-06T20:44:00.002Z

Another article by me in The Guardian Comment Is Free, this time about school reports.

Ave et vale, Vagner

2010-11-29T10:37:00.001Z

Another article in The Guardian's Comment Is Free section.

A head above the parapet

2010-10-19T14:41:00.001+01:00

Throwing myself upon the ravening lions in The Guardian's Comment Is Free section. Again.

Prizes schmizes

2010-10-09T18:05:00.002+01:00

Another piece in The Guardian today, this time about The Booker Prize.

Love Me, Don't Hate Me

2010-09-18T13:20:00.001+01:00

Another piece in The Guardian's Comment Is Free section - this time about on-line hating.

Arbeit Macht Frei, or something like that

2010-09-06T14:18:00.001+01:00

It's getting to be a bit of a habit, this. Another Comment Is Free article, this time about working from home.

A NIMBY writes

2010-08-20T15:15:00.000+01:00

Another article in Comment Is Free.

Borrowing boredom

2010-08-11T10:07:00.002+01:00

Not two weeks after my piece in The Guardian's Comment Is Free pages, Rhodri Marsden has a very similar article in The Independent. Suspicious, moi?

I wonder whether he'll be offering us any insights into the mobile phone upgrade path?

Me! In The Guardian!

2010-07-30T15:26:00.001+01:00

Please read and comment here. But try not to be unkind - it's been a long week.

Lobby Fodder

2010-03-24T10:47:00.006Z

There are a number of things to baffle the Westminster outsider about the latest scandal to embroil the government. No, not David "Playmobil" Miliband's pantomime standing up to Israel; I'm referring to the honeytrap set by Channel 4's Dispatches programme which managed to snare former ministers Stephen Byers, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt into confessing that they would shill for anyone if the price was right. According to the Dispatches website,

Dispatches set up a fictional US public affairs company and contacted several senior politicians and asked them if they were interested in a position on the advisory board of our bogus London office.

Stephen Byers memorably described himself in the programme as a "cab for hire", though I think we might agree that he meant a different noun beginning with "c". Peter Mandelson described the affair as "sad and altogether grubby" which, coming from someone with his track record for financial impropriety, is frankly a bit fucking rich.

Anyway, here are the sources of my puzzlement.

The three politicians stated that their fees were in the region of between £2,000 and £5,000 per day. Is there really anyone, anywhere, with sufficient combined wealth and stupidity to pay Geoff Hoon £2,000 a day? To do what? Answers on a solid gold postcard please.

According to the website, The programme-makers contacted 20 politicians, 15 agreed to meet and ten were invited in for interviews. Therefore 75% of politicians who were asked were prepared to leverage their privileged positions to trouser some extra-curricular cash. After the expenses row, this can hardly come as much of a surprise. But this was a fictitious company, with no real cash to play with. A genuine multi-national, prepared to ship a collection of venal fuckers out to a gin palace in Monte Carlo, might expect to snare fish much more appetising than bottom-feeders like Hoon.

I confidently predict that this is not the last we'll hear of scandalous corporate lobbying. There must be any number of Labour front and ex-front benchers who are in the process of discovering that the imminent removal of the trough to which their snouts have been so firmly connected for the past 13 years represents a hideous prospect, and for whom therefore the promise of a private, corporate money supply is simply too good to miss. Not one of them had the stones, backbone or ethics to stand up to the Iraq war, so looking for any kind of moral guidance there would be a gigantic waste of effort. And one cannot really blame the giant mega-corps, since they haven't signed up to anything like a code of conduct in public service, but are solely concerned with return on investment. Given the choice between a free call to Laurence Robertson MP and a few grand to get the ear, however momentarily, of a self-appointed grandee like Mandelson who (despite being elected by no-one) can actually Get Things Done - well, that would be few grand well spent. Not that I'm suggesting that Mandelson is for hire - oh no, no way. In any case, he's not facing an imminent loss of a job, is he.

Hurt Blocker

2010-03-08T08:30:00.007Z

I have been lured out of semi-retirement by the news that The Hurt Locker comprehensively beat Avatar in the Oscar 2010 competition.

For once, I'm in a position to comment as I've seen both the films. I saw Avatar at the cinema in all its 3-D glory, while I watched The Hurt Locker on DVD at the weekend.

Frankly, people, I'm baffled. Avatar was by no means faultless - the characters were somewhat two-dimensional (in ironic opposition to the film); the love story was a bit soupy; the lead male character was irritating rather than heroic. But the message of the film - albeit delivered in rather a clunky way - was 24 carat gold. Exploitative colonialism is wrong, m'kay? The rights of indigenous people always trump the greed and rapine of faceless corporations. Twelve foot-tall blue aliens can be immensely sexy. An awareness of the interconnectedness of natural processes needs to be an indispensable part of human consciousness.

Leaving aside the characters, the story and the messages, the film itself, as a visual spectacle, is simply magnificent. I've seen one or two 3-D films before, and been entirely unmoved by the experience. The 3-D experience of Avatar, on the other hand, is like going from a 15-inch 405-line black-and-white TV set circa 1963 to a top-of-the-range 50" plasma screen circa 2010. For the first twenty minutes of the film I was absent my jaw - I had been entirely sucked into the computer-generated world. Normally I find that I can admire the surface of such a film - Monsters Inc, for example - without warming at all to the content. But this film was different - for me, at any rate, it was wholly believable. The objects (the dragons, for example) had a quiddity and a heft that was missing in a film like The Lord Of The Rings, whose Orcs did not come to life in the same way. How much of this was due to improvements in rendering, and how much to the 3-D I neither know nor care.

And then there's The Hurt Locker. I wanted to like this film, having enjoyed Katheryn Bigelow's Point Break and her earlier Blue Steel. But it was a truly dire, woeful film. For a start there was zero tension which, in a film that seeks to portray the perils of dealing with unexploded ordinance, is a pretty unimpressive achievement. After the first ten minutes Mrs Rot turned to me and echoed my own thoughts beautifully when she said "How are they going to stretch this out to two hours?" Stretch, I'm afraid, was the operative word. The action was stretched, but not to breaking point, more to "where's my book - I'll just finish my chapter" point. There were only three characters, about none of whom it was possible to care a jot. Had Guy Pearce survived, the film might have been a great deal better. As it was, his replacement was about as believable as Mr Incredible. Again the characters were all ciphers - the disposal expert addicted to adrenaline, his ramrod-straight, do-it-by-the-book colleague, and their underling about whom I can only remember one thing, which would spoil the "plot" (if it had a proper plot) were I to give it away. There was a blatantly tacked-on bit about an Iraqi boy who disappears, which I didn't believe at all. Also, in common with most films of the genre (The Deer Hunter, for example) there was a section dealing with life away from the conflict, which contained only one interesting fact - that one of the characters was married to Kate from Lost. Yes folks, it was that riveting. Finally, and in some ways most disappointingly, it was a deeply conservative film - unquestioning about the role of America in Iraq, simply interested in trying (and, for me at least, failing) to highlight the danger and stress of the role of bomb disposal teams.

So how did the Academy (and BAFTA before it) get it so wrong? I think there's an element of intellectual snobbery here - Avatar is already one of the most successful films in history, whereas the theatrical release of The Hurt Locker was seen by about forty two people. Much easier to big up your critical cred by voting for a small-budget semi-arthouse film over an established blockbuster. James Cameron's previous film was Titanic, which foisted that Celine Dion song on the world, and so maybe there was also an element of revenge. Cameron and Bigelow were once married, and that gave the Oscar fight all the tension that was lacking in The Hurt Locker. Finally, the Academy has form in this area, having many times ignored an obviously superior film in favour of one that is now rightly neglected.

In the end, it doesn't really matter. Avatar will be seen by millions more people than The Hurt Locker which will enjoy a brief flurry of interest in DVD sales and rentals. I would urge you to go and watch Avatar while it's still in cinemas - it demands to be seen larger-than-life. I would urge you to watch Jarhead instead of The Hurt Locker. It may be about the previous Iraq adventure, but it's a much, much better film.

Feeble

2010-02-05T14:51:00.002Z

Blogging interst [sic] 'wanes'.

You're telling me.

Nutt Sack

2009-11-02T09:08:00.008Z

I went to the garage the other day because my car had been making some funny noises. The mechanic did some tests and told me that my brakes were in danger of failing, and that I should have new discs fitted. Not surprisingly I wasn't very happy with this finding, so I decided that, in fact, the car's absolutely fine to drive.

Which is more or less the position that's been taken by ex-postman Alan Johnson, our no-longer esteemed Home Secretary, with regard to the advice given him by the unfortunately named Professor David Nutt, erstwhile chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Professor Nutt (and the Council which until recently he chaired) were required by the government, inter alia, to "recommend classification of new or existing drugs". Having done the science and the statistics, Nutt and his colleagues determined that cannabis and ecstasy were not as dangerous as previously thought and that their classifications should be changed.

Scientifically speaking, cannabis is less harmful than tobacco and alcohol. There is some evidence that prolonged use can lead to psychotic episodes, but this only occurs in a relatively small proportion of users. Furthermore, because it is commonly mixed with tobacco for smoking, it must have some effect on lung disease. Nutt famously said that taking ecstasy was safer than horse riding. That Nutt and his council were scientifically correct in what they said is highly inconvenient for the government.

The elevation of dolts to positions of great power is one of the less comfortable facets of democratic government. Ideally, the incumbent of a great office of state realises his or her shortcomings, and places a great deal of trust in those who are paid (and, in some cases, unpaid) to advise them. Johnson, who is by no means the worst of the Labour rabble, has been at various times Health Secretary, Education Secretary and leader of the Communication Workers Union. He's obviously a bright chap, but like so many before him (most notably the much less intellectually gifted Jacqui Smith) he's fallen into the trap of equating his political importance with his fitness to make decisions.

Why else have advisors, unless to advise? In the present case the scientific advice was perfectly clear - cannabis and ecstasy are demonstrably less harmful than the "legal" drugs tobacco and alcohol, and it is indicative of a truly fucked society that we continue to turn a blind eye (while trousering the duty, natch) to the harm legal drugs do (just go into any town centre on a Friday or Saturday night), while at the same time making criminals of people who, for the most part, cause considerably less damage on E than the fighting masses do on cheap cider and vodka.

The government's policy on drugs is driven by Fear Of Tabloid - the terror that any sensible decision on reclassification, decriminalisation or legalisation will be as meat and drink to the Daily Hate and its red-topped siblings. Ann Widdecombe, writing in The Guardian, expresses this fatuous point of view best, where she writes nonsense such as reclassifying drugs might "send out a signal that we do not take the health dangers seriously". The point that none of these detached politicians seems capable of addressing is that drugs are freely available everywhere, every sleb from A-list down admits to the odd spliff or toot without any fear of prosecution (considering her prodigious intake, why is Amy Winehouse not under permanent arrest?). Not only are drugs freely available despite being illegal, but, as Widdecombe maunders on,

People have died as a result of taking ecstasy and committed crimes under the influence of cannabis.

The vast majority of crimes committed while on drugs or by habitual drug-takers are to provide money to buy more drugs. And many, many more people die from smoking fags that taking E.

The simple truth is that the "War on Drugs", like the hilarious-if-it-weren't-so-serious "War on Terror", is lost. Most of us, provided that we weren't in uniform, could buy any drug at all in any town centre in about half an hour. It might end up by being a rather fraught experience; unlike an off-licence, a drug dealer wouldn't be averse to mugging his victim. Again, unlike an off-licence, drugs don't come with verifiable labels guaranteeing the contents, or the strength. You might be in the market for cocaine and find yourself with lignocaine mixed with ground glass. Or baby laxative (if you're lucky).

My two sons are coming up to the age when they are likely to be exposed to drugs for the first time - for all I know, they already have. Like all parents I dread them getting involved in drugs, whether it be cannabis or ecstasy, crack or heroin. Two things that I am convinced will play little or no part in their decision whether or not to try drugs, when and if they face it - that drugs are illegal, and that Ann Widdecombe disapproves of them. In fact both these seem to me more likely to provide a counter-cultural incentive to try drugs - that old teenage rebellion expressing itself. In any case, ask yourself the question - if your children wanted to try alcohol, would you rather they bought a can of Stella from a blind-eye-turning corner shop, or sourced some black-market hooch distilled from potatoes and anti-freeze supplied by your friendly neighbourhood moonshiner? A pill calling itself ecstasy made by a failed A-level Chemistry student in a garage in Bromley-by-Bow, or a quality controlled, dosage-controlled product manufactured in a state-of-the-art, governement regulated factory by a team of PhDs? Skunk, skunk and nothing but skunk (because that's all the gangsters will supply) or a choice of various strains of cannabis from around the world?

oOo-oOo-oOo-oOo-oOo

Murderland finished its three-week run on ITV last night. It was pretty good if you like that kind of thing, that kind of thing being a bleak tale of paedophilia, prostitution, murder, police corruption and revenge. It had some terrific acting as well - Robbie Coltrane was his usual watchable self as DC Hain (though whether he's watchable primarily because he takes up so much of the screen, I'm not at liberty to divulge) but the stars of the series were Amanda Hale as Carol Walsh and an extraordinary turn from Bel Powley as Carol's younger self. Kathryn Flett spectacularly missed the point in her review in The Observer, but that's Oor Kat - pointless to the last.

Fire Cole

2009-10-28T11:21:00.010Z

In the past I've blogged quite extensively about The X Factor, but I'm kinda bored with it now. I'll continue to watch it, but I haven't anything new to say about it that I haven't said before.

I would, however, like to come to the defence of John and Edward, or "The Midwich Cuckoos", or The Jedward. For those who don't follow the programme, John and Edward are twins from Dublin who, according to Cheryl Cole, "can't sing. Fact." (Which, having seen her "singing" her debut single dressed in one of Cher's cast-off leotards, is a bit rich). That the twins apparently garnered the highest number of votes last week is causing consternation in some quarters, not least because while they remain in the show, a contestant with more "talent" has to leave.

However, it might be worth pointing out that The X Factor is not a talent contest, it's a television programme. It has one aim and one aim only - to make Simon Cowell money. It has a subsidiary side-effect, which is "entertainment". If it were a genuine talent contest it would need changing in the following regard:

a) Sack Louis Walsh - he gives people with a tin ear a bad name.
b) Sack Simon Cowell - he's only in it for the money, and is nothing but a glorified Corn Flakes salesman.
c) Sack Cheryl Cole - unless you think a demonstrable paucity of singing talent is sufficient qualification.
d) Sack Dannii Miinnogue - same reason as c)

Replace the above with someone - anyone - with any critical faculty whatsoever. I'd suggest people along the lines of Guy Chambers, Trevor Horn, George Martin.

None of these three would agree to be on the panel, of course. The first two are not strangers to manufactured pop acts, but I suspect that all would subscribe to the idea that attempting to get a career in music by submitting yourself to the bear pit of The X Factor is a very poor substitute for the more traditional means of climbing the greasy pole; getting a band together, rehearsing, doing some gigs, sending demo tapes to record companies &c. Of the current crop of contenders only Jamie Archer has really been down that route - the rest are relative newcomers. It's instructive to recall the earlier programmes covering original audition process, where it was commonplace to hear children not yet out of their teens proclaim that succeeding on The X Factor was their last chance of a career as a singer. I found that deeply dispiriting.

oOo-oOo-oOo-oOo-oOo

Still, the news is not all depressing. Sir Christopher Kelly's long-awaited report on Parliamentary expenses is causing a Westminster shit-storm as MPs fight with the awful prospect of a) having to give up the perk of getting us to fund their property portfolios, and b) having to employ staff on the basis of fitness for purpose rather than, say, because they're family. The Guardian has an article that tells you all you need to know on this, with particular reference to one twit called Roger Gale, who demonstrates (as if it needed demonstrating again) just how out of touch with the rest of the country MPs are.

Another ray of light is the news that three of the banks at the centre of the recent attempt to return us to the Middle Ages - Northern Rock, Lloyds and RBS - are to be broken up into good and bad bits, and sold off. Clearly someone at the highest reaches of government reads Rotwatch.

oOo-oOo-oOo-oOo-oOo

Finally, since this is after all Rotwatch, please allow me to introduce you to the latest member of the Totally And Deliberately Missed The Point Club - one Jean Hannah Edelstein, who tries with an apparently straight face to persuade us that Martin Amis' comments about Jordan (or Katie Price, if you prefer) are evidence of misogyny. He said, in an article in The Telegraph, that "She has no waist, no arse ... an interesting face ... but all we are really worshipping is two bags of silicone." The only word with which I would take issue is "worshipping" - otherwise, he's bang on the money. With Tanya Gold popping up earlier in the week to vouchsafe the news that she didn't really rate Michael Jackson (don't worry, love, I don't suppose he would have gone out of his way to evaluate you either, in the vanishingly unlikely event that you had found yourself within a million miles of his radar. I like to think that if he had, he might have come to the same conclusion as me: "Can't write, can't think, can type a little".) The Guardian is fighting the losing battle of print journalism one crappy, skunked article at a time. It's a rearguard action, folks, and in the best traditions of the ethos as exemplified by Peter Cook's "We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war."

Angels of Death

2009-10-21T08:20:00.008+01:00

Like Woody Allen, I don't mind dying but I don't much want to be there when it happens. Still, at least I won't be there at my funeral. Well, obviously my mortal coil will be present, or some placeholder at least, but I won't.

So why do I care what music is played during the final rites? Actually, I'm not sure I do care that much, except I find myself thinking about it from time to time. Three times at funerals I have been poleaxed by it - when singing "Jerusalem" at my mother's, singing "I Vow To Thee, My Country" at my father's, and at the end of the funeral of a very dear friend too soon taken unto the Lord, when Charles Trenet's "La Mer" brought the house down.

I mention this because the Reverend Ed (note the blokey contraction - yeah, man, this rev is right down wiv da kidz) Tomlinson is in the news complaining at the "death of death" - specifically the increasing popularity for secular pop songs at funerals. He singled out "My Way" and "Simply The Best" for particular mention, as well as a "poem from Nan".

He's had opprobrium heaped upon him from all sides - especially from the seculars and humanists. I think he's got a point. How can anyone seriously celebrate someone's life while listening to Robbie Williams spew forth "Angels", surely one of the tritest hits ever to presume to take upon itself the mantle of profundity? I suppose the whole thing comes down to a single question - for whose benefit is the funeral? The deceased? Or the relicts? In any case, I know what I'm having at mine - Angela Hewitt playing Wilhelm Kempff's transcription of J S Bach's Cantata "Wir Danken Dir, Gott" BWV 29, and to finish Jackson Browne's "Late for the sky".

*****

I have just heard that the agreement in principle to stave off tomorrow's postal strike was nixed by the management at the last moment. I cannot help but detect the dread hand of Mandy Antoinette behind this: his previous attempt to flog off the Post Office to his oligarchic chums having been stymied, he's been extra busy behind the scenes, softening it up in readiness for another go. Quite why he's so desperate that Great Britain rid itself of yet another of the shining glories of our recently ended Age in the Sun God alone knows; it could, the cynic in me suggests, be something to do with all those highly remunerated non-exec. direc.s that will be on offer to him and his chums when he and the rest of the current rabble are given their P45s. In a similar vein last night Bank of England governor Mervyn King gave a speech of the profoundest bleeding obvious, when he opined that, since the country had given the clearest possible signal to certain organisations in the financial sector that they were too important to be allowed to fail, it followed as night follows Mandelson that these organisations must be reorganised so that their unique and insupportable status be removed. In case you don't follow his or my reasoning, let's posit a bank called, say, TSBarclays. Let's say that it consists of a standard commercial banking arm - you know, the kind of thing where you pay your wages/salary in, which you later take out to buy stuff like, oh, I don't know, electricity, food, the little fripperies of life. Let's say that this part of the bank can also be prevailed upon to lend you the odd few grand for a new car or, if you're a company, the odd few tens of grand to continue the overdraft.

Let's posit that TSBarclay also has an investment banking arm, where men in silly shirts and suits that cost my monthly salary trade Credit Default Swaps, Credit Derivatives and other Toxic Assets. No-one outside half a dozen ex-Cambridge University or MIT PhDs understands what they are, or how they work, but since our men in suits are just barrow boys they'll trade anyfink, and they do, and then pay themselves quite staggering amounts of our money for being such diamond geezers. Until, of course, the wheels come off, since this is a gigantic Ponzi Scheme, or Pyramid Scheme, or some other Scheme beginning with P but which amounts to A selling B something that has no intrinsic value.

In any properly ordered world, such an organisation would be permitted to exist only as long as it remained solvent; upon the cessation whereof the employees and anyone stupid enough to have invested in it directly would immediately learn the error of their ways. Unfortunately we live in a world governed (if indeed it is governed in any real sense) by Gordon Brown, Alistair "Who The Fuck Is This Guy?" Darling, and Mandy Antoinette.

So nothing will change. The banks will continue, as they are today, to pretend that they're solvent (so they should be - they've been given enough of our childrens' money) and that because they've done such a ripping job in the few short weeks since they last brought the global economy to its knees, they should be allowed to share out the odd few billion surplus they have lying around. And if anyone tries to stop them - well, there goes that seat at the board, the box at The Royal Opera House, the Royal Enclosure, Glyndebourne....

*****

Nick Griffin is on BBC1's Question Time ~~tonight~~ tomorrow night (Thursday - thanks PhilipH), to the eternal shame of the BBC. I am entirely unconvinced by the argument that they're a proper political party - of course they're not, since they only allow white non-Jews to be members. Griffin seems to be determined to hole his ship below the waterline before he even gets onto the panel, with his fatuous remarks about Generals Sir Richard Dannatt and Sir Mike Jackson who had complained at the BNP's co-opting military symbols. Not only has the BBC soiled itself by permitting this odious wretch to give his racist filth the cloak of respectability, it has entirely failed to line up any genuine heavyweights to counter-punch. Instead of a ready wit and brilliant debater like, say, William Hague or Boris Johnson they put up Bonnie Bloody Greer who can hardly hold her own in the teddybear pit that is Newsnight Review and Jack Broken Straw. Feeble.

First the bad news, and then the good news

2009-10-12T09:04:00.006+01:00

I'm getting rather exercised about pensions. You may care to recall that under the stewardship of the (allegedly) best Chancellor of the 20th century (yes, someone in The Independent really wrote that. Presumably with a straight face) not only did Gordon Brown sell off our gold reserves (at about a quarter of what they would be worth today) for no good reason that I can see - maybe he needed the space for more shelving - he also stole money from personal pensions to the tune of about £100 billion. You might wonder what happened to the money. Me too.

That's not the thrust of my exercise, though. Labour and Conservative (and, for all I know, the Lib Dems though they seem to be missing a leader) are jostling each other like tramps over a nit comb over raising the age at which men and women will be entitled to a state pension. At present the Tories are preening themselves at their daring in proposing that the age for men will rise from 65 to 66 by 2016, whereas for women it will rise from 60 to 65 by 2020.

I. Just. Don't. Get. It. For starters, why do women (who statistically live longer than men) get their pension earlier? Is it some dotty chivalry? If so it sucks. What I really want to know is, why not raise the age for both men and women to 66 now? Today? Let anyone currently entitled to and claiming the pension carry on, but for all others make them wait an extra one (or six) years. Why not? Seriously, I really want to know.

*****

The X Factor live show segment is back. Opinion is divided in Rot Towers about whether the audition process is the preferable part (I say it is) or whether the live shows rule (Mrs Rot. She's wrong, obviously). This year the standard is a lot higher, I think, and there are half a dozen who could win. Miss Frank, who have one stand-out singer and a couple of passables, are the great hope for the groups (the twins from The Midwich Cuckoos cannot last, I think). Stacey is delightfully bonkers in a Victoria Wood meets Catherine Tate sort of way, with her fruity Dagenham accent, but has a decent singing voice too. Olly Murs is a favourite of some denizens chez Rot, as is Danyl (who was subject to a truly egregious comment from Dannnniiiii, later imperfectly retracted and blogged about here by the incomporable Sordel) and Jamie "The 'Fro" Archer. My money at the moment is on Lucie Jones. She can sing, looks lovely and has a nice manner. But here's why I'm right about the audition process being better than the live shows.

Makeovers.

Never mind that the majority of these singers will have honed their pipes in karaoke bars up and down the land, they do come to the party with some vestige of themselves. Until the mentors get their soul-less, tin-eyed claws into them. Look what Louis did to Kandy Rain - reeling under the tabloid's expose of their sordid past - that's right - he made them look more like prostitutes than they already did. Simon upped the sleaze quotient by maintaining that he still thought they were great (Simon, try listening with your ears instead of the other thing) at which Cheryl pulled the most fabulous moue. And the same goes for the others - restyled to within an inch of their lives. Ok, I'll grant you that they improved Rachel's god-awful birdshit highlights, and the twins look extra crazeeee with their superglued quiffs. But Stacey in jeans and a Marilyn Monroe t-shirt? Give me strength.

*****

Apparently Tracey Emin is threatening to leave Britain for France in protest at the top rate of tax (David Mitchell is extremely funny and scathing about it here). Can anyone think of a better reason to pay more tax? Toodles Tray - don't let the sound of hollow laughter as we contemplate again your masterworks "Tiny Bronze Bird On A Fucking Enormous Pole" and "A Poorly Embroidered List of A Thousand Drunk Desperate Men" put you off.

The Power of the (De-)Press(-ed)

2009-09-30T08:47:00.013+01:00

I was watching Newsnight last night when the momentous news broke - The Sun was no longer backing Labour, and instead had switched its allegiance to the Conservatives. Moments later Jeremy Paxman popped up with the odious sixth-form swot Ed Milliband, who was trying gamely to persuade us that he didn't really mind that much, and that in any case it was the voters who decided elections, not newspapers. Turns out that Milliband Minor may not be as green as he's cabbage-looking.

It's taken as Holy Writ that It's The Sun Wot Won It, referring to the unexpected victory of John Major in 1992 which received wisdom alleges to have happened as a result of another headline in The Sun. Well, I don't buy it - neither The Sun nor this piece of revisionist balderdash. The Sun - or, more properly, the Murdoch family - supports whichever side is most likely to win. In 1992 it was a close call, but since Neil Kinnock actually espoused some left-wing policies, it couldn't throw its weight behind him. When Kinnock spectacularly failed to get elected, The Sun rather cleverly persuaded us (well, not me, but some rather gullible fools - the sort who rather readily believe that there's no entry in the OED for the word "gullible") that it (The Sun) had played a major part in the result. Of course, the cause and effect are the wrong way round - The Sun backs the winning party because it's going to win, and not the party wins because The Sun backs it. This morning, on The Today Programme, the Political Editor of The Sun (which must be surely the cushiest job in Wapping - you could write any old shit and none of the readers would be able to tell, never mind be interested enough to care) declared with a breathtaking disregard for the facts, that their readers come first, second and third, whereas what he should have said was that the readers come a very distant fourth behind Rupert, James, and the rest of the Murdoch clan. Neither should it be overlooked that the majority of The Sun's readership don't vote, and that those who do probably vote for UKIP or the BNP. Not that Murdoch would care if either of these parties won - the tit quotient in The Sun would remain the same, and sales would therefore remain high.

What actually happened in 1997 was that Murdoch père et fils recognised that Blair, Mandy Antoinette et al. were somewhat to the right of John Major, and so they decided that The Sun should become the paper of change. Not, obviously, a change to the degree of attention they were paid by those lickspittles in power nor to the ease of access for the Murdoch Family to those seats of power - oh no - just a change in the faces on the government benches. By the by, all this talk of "right wingers" reminds me of one of the funnier of the week's stories, starring - yes, you've guessed it - Mandy Antoinette himself. Lord Mandelson criticised "extreme rightwing figures" for spreading rumours about Gordon's alleged intake of pharmaceuticals. One of The Guardian's CiF commenters put it best:

Extreme right wingers? Meaning Cabinet Ministers? Bankers? Warmongers? The insane brigade trying to privatise the post office & keep the railways out of public hands , those who are in charge of PFI. People who crawl on to the yachts of plutocrats for a summer holiday. Those who promote religious schools.

These are the people who come to mind when extreme right wingers are
mentioned. I think Lord Mandelson knows where they live.

Of course he knows where they live - he certainly knows where their yachts are moored. If you're not convinced by my protestations of his awfulness, witness his craven scuttling after the Tories as he offers to work under a future Conservative administration - there really are no words to describe what an utter shite he is. As The Daily Mash put it,

A friend of the business secretary said: "Peter has to have a title because
without one he quickly reverts to being a long, perfectly manicured streak of
absolutely fuck all."

*****

The new exhibition of Aztec art is all over the media at the moment, with otherwise sane people such as Philip Hensher arguing that the exhibition is flawed because it doesn't come with a post-Enlightenment critique of Aztec blood sacrifices. What I want to know is - when did Montezuma become Moctezuma? And why? I'll tell you this for free - I'm no more going to refer to the old bastard as Moctezuma than I am planning to change from a lifetime of calling Boadicea by her original name, nor calling Madras "Chennai" nor pronouncing Veni, vidi vici as Whiny, weedy weeky. We don't refer to Paris as Paree, nor Munich as München, so why all the crap about Beijing, Mumbai and the rest. When a poster asked the same question about Moctezuma on a blog, a smug tosspot piped up that "Moctezuma" was his proper name, just as "Boudicca" was hers. Yeah? So sue me. Thought so. Not so easy when you've been dead a few centuries. Plus, I'd be willing to bet that both of them ~~was~~ were illiterate.

*****

The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed a music-player widget at the top. Only one song loaded so far - a very hissy and poorly recorded demo from the 1980s. More coming soon.

Lies, a liar and a parade of useless

2009-09-15T09:16:00.007+01:00

Last night's episode of BBC1's Would I Lie To You? ~~starred~~ ~~featured~~ accommodated that Diumvirate of Dire, Janet Stree-Pawta and Davina McCall. So, where's an arsonist or a loony with an Uzi when you need one?

*****

Lord Bloody Mandelson is all over the airwaves again, making it very difficult for me to avoid him unless I actually have the TV remote in my hand. Mandy is one of those people (like Pawta and McCall - vide supra) who has a truly visceral effect on me - I simply cannot stomach the wee shite, either to look at or to listen to. Mind you, yesterday morning he was very satisfactorily squirming on the end of James Naughtie's fishing pole, with Nick Robinson administering the coup de grace. Sadly it won't stop the ennobled turd from springing up again, Phoenix-like, from the swamp (and don't get me started on Phoenix). I can only reiterate my bafflement at his continued position at High Table - he displays (publicly, at least) none of what one might think were the necessary attributes for high office - charm, intellect, wit or beauty, and yet when Gordon Brown's arse was truly in the sling who does he send for? Mandy must either know where some serious bodies are buried, or have pictures of someone doing something truly illegal to someone or something else. Do you see Mandy Antoinette as saviour of the New Labour experiment? Surely only if your idea of saving it is to kill it first and then save ( in the sense of 'preserve') it in formaldehyde. Pour encourager les autres?

*****

Forget everything I ever said about Julie Bloody Burchill or Zoe Bloody Williams - they have been roundly usurped by Tanya Bloody Gold. In today's The Guardian she lays into the Queen Mother - Gold is never one to pick a difficult target if she can find an easy one instead. Her spiteful and ignorant article was occasioned by the publication of a new biography of the Queen Mother - presumably Gold wanted to provide a counterblast to the fawning hagiography that she obviously hasn't read.

Gold's take on the QM? Well, she was rude about the servants, didn't like Wallis Simpson, may have ignored nieces with alleged learning difficulties and probably harboured quasi-racist thoughts. The whole tone of Gold's presumably paid-for article (a mixture of spite, anecdote, opinion and gossip) can be found in this paragraph:

There is a passage in Vickers's biography that actually manages to make me feel sorry for Princess Margaret. He relates how she wanted to marry the divorced courtier Peter Townsend, who had comforted her after her father's death. When Margaret realised she would have to give up her royal status to marry a divorcee, she backed out. But she spent one final weekend with Townsend. When Margaret returned to Clarence House, Vickers writes, "Queen Elizabeth was due to keep an evening engagement at the University of London. The Queen Mother set off for this, unaware or unconcerned that her daughter would be having dinner alone on a tray."

That is just child abuse, plain and simple. Isn't it? I mean leaving her daughter, a grown woman, to have dinner alone on a tray with only three hundred flunkeys in attendance, not to mention the entire Who's Who at the end of a telephone to keep her company. What a bitch. The QM wasn't very nice either.

Sadly Tanya Gold isn't the only running joke at The Guardian. Julie Bloody Burchill might have done the decent thing and buggered off, and Zoe Williams seems to be confining herself to commenting on the output of Radio 4 and can therefore safely be ignored. Julie Bindel is still around, still hating men but not really giving me sleepless nights. However, there's still Jess Cartner-Morley, the full ghastliness of whose moronic output can be safely inferred from her "ickle lickle me wiv pigeon-toes cos I is so cute" picture here. Her weekly column How To Wear Clothes really is an object lesson in why newspapers are totally doomed. There's the ineffably weedy and drivellous Tim Dowling. There's Hadley Freeman, who used to be just about bearable as a fashion Agony Aunt (Dear Hadley, Is it ever okay to wear pink leggings with a purple ra-ra skirt?) but who has been promoted way above her pay grade to be some sort of opinion-for-hire on all sorts of matters, some of which even matter. If it weren't for the wonderful Marina Hyde I'd completely give up logging onto The Guardian's free website.

I've got a little list. Actually, it's quite a big one

2009-09-03T13:04:00.016+01:00

Below is a list of the top 100 things that annoy you (no, not you, that person who sat behind you on the train, tutting and sighing) as discovered by Lactofree’s Annual Intolerance Survey. Incidentally, aren't you delighted that you live in a country where such an annual survey is carried out? I know I am.

1. Chavs
Filthy scum, wearing hats and not liking Beethoven.

2. People driving close behind you
I know it's legal to drive at 45mph in the middle lane of the motorway, but is it wise?

3. People who smell
Worse than people who stink? The old ones are the best.

4. People who eat with their mouth open
Not as bad as people who make egregious grammatical mistakes.

5. Rude shop assistants
Yeah, sack 'em all. That'll make shopping a better experience.

6. Foreign call centres
You mean all those ones in Scotland?

7. Stepping in dog poo
It's not that I mind so much, it's taking off your shoes before you've noticed.

8. People who cough and do not cover their mouths
and then offer to make you a cup of tea.

9. Slow internet connections
It's a bummer, isn't it. You're watching Debbie Does Dallas and the screen freezes at just the wrong moment.

10. Poor customer service
I wouldn't know, I don't know any poor customers.

11. Dog owners that don’t clean up after their dog
Send them your shoes - that'll teach them.

12. Noisy Eaters
This would be cured if they closed their mouths.

13. Cold-callers
I never get cold callers. Maybe I should turn off the patio heater outside my front door.

14. Door-to-door salesman
Just pretend to be mad. In your case, it's probably not much of an act.

15. Stubbing your toe
This is number 15 on the list?

16. Bullying
Yeah, I hate bullying too. It gets so boring when the victim has been crying for mercy for more than about ten minutes.

17. Computer crashing losing work you’ve spent three hours doing
So you don't back up your work, or you do it less frequently than every three hours? You deserve to lose your work.

18. People who talk loudly on their mobile phones
Except me, because obviously my conversation actually matters.

19. Spam email
Or just Spam, since no-one who actually eats Spam has an internet connection, much less an e-mail address.

20. The nation’s obsession with Z-list celebrities
Can we agree which ones are the Z-list, and which ones the Y-list? Obviously Katie Price, Peter Andre and Lord Mandelson are Z-list, but I need help with Y, never mind the giddy heights of X or even W.

21. Leaving a tissue in a pocket and putting it in a washing machine
Don't wash your pockets. Works for me.

22. Driving slow in the fast lane
Repeat after me - There's. No. Such. Thing. As. The. Fast. Lane. Oh, and slow is an adjective, not an adverb.

23. Adverts in between programmes
Depends on the programme - anything that interrupts Sarah Beeny is a gift from God.

24. Toilets you have to pay for
Better than dangling prepositions.

25. The nation’s obsession with the Katie & Peter split saga
See number 20.

26. People reading over your shoulder
That includes you - get your own interweb.

27. People that park in disabled bays when they’re not disabled
They're slightly better than people who presume to judge a person's disability by the lack of a wheelchair.

28. Brownnosers
I rather doubt the existence of such a word.

29. People who complain about their weight yet make no effort to exercise or eat properly
I think people who complain about their weight are eating properly - it seems slightly unlikely that they've managed to get so fat by spilling much, or failing to convey fork to mouth.

30. People jumping the queue at the bar
Where do you drink? I can't say I've ever been to a bar where there was anything that might reasonably be called a "queue" - there's just a series of disorderly scrums forming around vague nodal points roughly adjacent to the various waitrons. In any case I think you mean people who are more charismatic than you, and who are not overlooked every time a new serving opportunity occurs.

31. Junk mail
Go on, admit it, that's the only sort of mail you get. Well, along with the final reminders.

32. Tailgaters
Isn't this the same as Point 2. Couldn't the person who compiled this survey read?

33. Big Brother
Is this the list for 2001? You know what's worse than BB? People lazily appropriating tropes from Nineteen Eighty Four and Brave New World in a doomed attempt to illustrate political correctness gone mad, or ZaNuLiaBore's deviancy.

34. Muggers
Muggers are less annoying than a stubbed toe? Jeez.

35. MPs’ expenses
Rad man. Like, totally zeitgeist.

36. Stepping in chewing gum
Ok, you got me there.

37. Pricey train fares
Anyone who voted for this has a droning petulance allied to a painfully engorged sense of entitlement.

38. People who walk painfully slowly on the street
Has it even occurred to you that they might walk painfully slowly because walking is painful? Welcome to the Christian Brotherhood.

39. Noisy neighbours
Not me - I've got superb taste in music.

40. People who sniff and don’t use a tissue
What use is a tissue if you sniff? All you get is a nostril full of paper.

41. Sweating
Hands up who voted for this. Not you Bender, nor you Marvin.

42. Binge drinking culture
Hint - it's not compulsory.

43. Feeling bloated
Stop the binge drinking - it'll soon go away.

44. The recession
The recession is "annoying"? Annoying like, say, cancer?

45. Delays at the airport
Why don't you go by train? Oh, I forgot, pricey tickets.

46. Automated phone systems
I know. You're in the middle of a really good rant, shouting and swearing about your overdue library book, and the chirpy little voice interrupts asking you which extension you want. Bastards.

47. Smoking
I found hypnosis helpful. That, and a really big gun.

48. Road rage
Fucking shitting tarmac.

49. People that have their mobile turned off when you really need to get in contact with them
You don't think they knew you were going to call, do you? Riiight.

50. Running out of toilet roll
Just use your CV.

51. Coverage of Michael Jackson’s death
I know - poor old Farrah Fawcett. I felt the same when Aldous Huxley died.

52. Reality TV
Get rid of reality. Or your TV. Either works for me.

53. Flies
Button or zip?

54. Finding a flat tyre
Yeah, I know, I found one today on a van parked next to me at Tesco. It really pissed me off.

55. Parking costs
Why not do what I do, and drive round in ever-increasing circles until you find a free space. Ok, so you've wasted £20 in petrol, and you're three hours late for your hairdresser/proctologist, but at least you've saved 45p on the parking. A bit like this.

56. Bossiness
Shut up. Now. This minute.

57. Rubbish opening times to doctors, dentists
I can't believe how selfish they are, not staying open so that you can get your hurty tooth seen at four in the morning.

58. When your washing machine breaks down
It's about this time that I'm starting to think that someone, somewhere, needs to get a life.

59. Politicians
Yeah, but have you considered the alternative?

60. Paper cuts
Sure, they can be a bitch, but not like a Stanley knife or a machete.

61. Buses not arriving on time
What are these "buses" of which you speak?

62. Singers who mime
Madonna singing live is better than Madonna miming - how?

63. People who can’t park properly
Yeah, considering how much they're paying, you'd think they'd be able to do it properly. Though I've always found that stopping the engine and vacating the car more or less constitutes the entire operation.

64. Over packaged kids toys
Do you mean toys for over-packaged kids? Do you see what I did there? No? O well.

65. Diarrhoea
Yours, or other people's?

66. Constipation
Great juxtaposition with 65 - positively costive even.

67. Text message speak
Yeh txt msg spk lol rofl. How do you do "yawn" and "fuck off" in txt spk?

68. Bad hair days
Worse than being bald? Be careful what you wish for.

69. Getting something in your eye
That would be my finger, if you don't stop whining you little baby.

70. The hot water running out when you’re running a bath
A cold bath's going to kill you? I suppose it would if I were there to hold your head under.

71. People who drive in the middle lane of motorways
What, ever? How else do I get to the "Fast Lane" (vide infra) where I fully intend to drive slowly.

72. People who mumble
YeahIknowwhatyoumeanyoucan'tunderstandawordtheysaynothatit'sworthbotheringanyway

73. Slow traffic lights
I think they knew you were there, and did it deliberately. You'd better write to your MP or something.

74. Cashiers giving you your change on top of a receipt
What the fuck? Honestly, I don't know how this crept in.

75. Cramp
I'm sitting here wondering who these swathes of people are who suffer from cramp? I get it about once a year, when I point my toes (damn ballet lessons) but it's not the 75th most annoying thing ever.

76. Reading about Brad Pitt/Jennifer Aniston saga
Well, stop reading about it you ... oh fuck it, you're so stupid that you get annoyed by a leisure activity (unless you're a proof-reader for Heat magazine)...

77. Unpredictable weather
As opposed to predictable weather? Which happens where, exactly? Mercury?

78. Cars blocking pedestrian crossings
If I had a hammer...

79. Adult acne
Yours or other people's?

80. People who are not polite in emails

Dear Turdface

Thanks for your message about the meeting. I have no intention of attending.

Fuck you very much,

Rotwatcher.

81. Yo-yo dieting celebs
First I thought this was a reference to The Wire, yo, where the people all call each other "yo". Then I realised it was something else entirely and completely lost interest.

82. Trying to find the end of the sticking tape or toilet roll
Life really does suck for you, doesn't it.

83. Pimped up cars
Yeah, they make your "J" reg Morris Maestro look a bit, well, lame-o.

84. Traffic wardens
People who don't like traffic wardens are like people who don't like speed cameras - idiots.

85. Losing your passport
That's what you told the police, of course. You neglected to mention the Somali people-trafficker who offered you the use of his sister in exchange for Her Majesty's document.

86. Running out of petrol
It's interesting how many of these are about cars or driving. I wonder how different it would be if we all rode bicycles. Plus, Jeremy Clarkson would be out of a job - sounds like win-win to me.

87. Burning your toast
Guess what - I don't give a monkeys, as long as you don't burn mine.

88. Sunburn
You know that big yellow shiny thing that arrives in the East and goes away in the West nearly every day except in the summer? Well, stay away from it.

89. iPhone obsessives
What's an iPhone? Nah, just joking. I'm playing with mine right now. The Apps are way cool.

90. Celebrity fitness DVDs
Just how stupid do you have to be to think that Davina McCall could have anything to teach you about fitness? She can't appear on television without looking like a five year-old in a Nativity Play.

91. People addicted to watching soaps
Have you seen that latest Dove? Beats Imperial Leather into a cocked hat.

92. Breaking a nail
Screw you. Geddit? O, never mind.

93. Bankers
Diddums get the bailiffs round?

94. PDA (public displays of affection)
Kissing in public - eww. Bring back the good old days when we all crapped in the gutter - so much more edifying.

95. Under performance
I must have missed the memo - can you run this one by me again?

96. Someone altering your seat height at work
Ok, it was me. Sorry. Still, the rest of the office thought it was hilarious.

97. People who don’t remove their shoes in the house
Especially if they've just trod in some dog poo (see point 7)

98. Children at weddings
First you get married, then you have the children. Oh, you meant other people's children. Yeah, they're toast.

99. Hot weather when you’re not on holiday
This has many facets to it. Do you mean that your workplace gets too hot? No, I thought not. You're a fucking dog in the manger who can't bear the thought that someone else might be on holiday and enjoying themselves while you're answering phones in a call centre in Scotland. Don't worry, everyone hates you.

100. Sports commentary
Which one? Your TV does have an OFF button, you know.

Ranksy

2009-09-01T15:57:00.009+01:00

Last week we went to the Banksy exhibition in Bristol. Luckily for you it's finished, which means that my recommendation not to bother is not moot.

Earlier this year we went to the Crimes of Passion - Street Art exhibition at Bristol's Royal West of England Academy. I have a reflex hostility to "street art" - graffiti - because so much of it is crap. We're invited by the cultural relativists to view "street art" as qualitatively equivalent to any other art - the same desperate crapola that seeks to hoist Bob Dylan onto the same plinth as Keats. Well, in my capacity of Watcher of Rot I can tell you that I, for one, am not buying it.

However, the RWA exhibition was a bit of an eye-opener. Instead of the vacuity and dearth of ideas that you find at an average YBA show (or ShitArt, as it used to be known), here were plenty of challenging, well-constructed works of art. Not all of them, for sure, though there were very few out-and-out duds. Some of the pieces were essentially graphics - nothing wrong with that; as someone who used to take his calligraphy pretty seriously, I like well-made letters. Overall, the exhibition was superb - beautifully laid out and altogether impressive.

Sadly, Banksy's wasn't. The queue was very, very long - about five times up and down University Road and the Museum staff monitoring the queue told us that we didn't have much chance of getting in. After queuing for over two hours we finally made it, about ten minutes before they closed the doors. And about fifteen minutes before the staff started shutting down the museum.

He's clearly a clever fellow, that Banksy, but there was less there than met the eye. It's all nicely done, particularly the installations, and in places it seems quite subversive, but in the end I came away thinking it was actually mostly trite, shallow and rather obvious. I'm glad I went, in the same way that I'm glad I've seen the DVD of Mamma Mia, but only in order to be able to avoid making the same mistake again. The Daily Mash seems to agree with me.

Interestingly, as I write, Bristol City Council is giving the city's inhabitants a say in whether street art should be retained or removed. Brian Sewell has given us the predictable soundbites - Banksy should have been put down at birth ... The public doesn't know good from bad. One has to conclude, in an era which has lauded Sam Taylor-Wood, Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst as artists of the first water, that neither do the critics. Though to be fair to the old vowel-strangler, I don't think he's much time for the conceptualist con-artists either.

*****

Have you heard of James Murdoch? No, me neither, at least until he popped up on the Rotdar having delivered this year's MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Festival. James is a scion of father Rupert, and works in some unnamed capacity in the hideous News International media empire. It's worth reading his lecture, if only to reflect that having all the money in the world doesn't stop you being a petulant, whiny little dick.

His argument is that the BBC is too big, and is therefore stifling other news outlets. He seems to be trying to persuade us that the BBC is some sort of propaganda arm of government or the State - and that its size and power means that other news outlets are stifled at birth because they cannot compete.

He attempts to dress his specious waffle in a scientific coat, leveraging Creationism vs Darwinism (Creationism being, of course, the current model where the rules are prescribed, Darwinism being his preferred free market). It is, of course, the most transparent nonsense. Basically he's crying because the genius of the BBC and its visionary news website means that no-one will ever pay for on-line news from one of his outlets. And if you're not paying for it, you're at a disadvantage. Or something - I still can't quite get my head round his argument that having free access to news content is egregiously unfair to the poor.

All the major newspapers (as well as the minor ones and the Daily Mail) have web sites where you can browse the "paper" free. Some of them hide bits of the physical counterpart - the crossword on The Guardian, for example, is only available on a subscription basis. For some time now I've been aware of rumblings that The Times' on-line paper was planning to charge for access to its content.

I visit the big four (The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and, rather more infrequently, The Daily Torygraph) every day. Would I pay to go there? Well, I might be prepared to pay a very small amount to visit The Gruandina, likewise The Independent. You might be able to pay me to visit The Torygraph more often than I do. But The Times? Nah. It's rubbish. It's a rubbish paper, and it's an even worse website. Poorly laid out, utterly crap search engine, lousy writers. Need I go on? Mick Hume? Daniel Wanklestein? A A Gill? I don't think so.

Murdoch's spitting feathers at the unfairness of it all. "Why", he bleats like a balked baby, "can't I have a proper market where I can charge punters for access to The Times?" Aw, diddums. But there is something you could do, and it's something that the BBC cannot. Advertise. That's right, James, you could do a modicum of background research and learn that the pay-as-you-load model works best with advertising, not with charging. So then we get to the nub of the problem. Who would want to pay to advertise on The Times' website?

In a quote that has appeared all over the media regarding his lecture Murdoch says The scale and scope of its current activities and future ambitions is chilling. When I first read this I thought he was referring to the scale and scope of News International/Sky, and thought what an admirable degree of self-knowledge he was demonstrating. But when I realised it was the BBC, I just laughed. No-one except media moguls with sub-standard media empires thinks the BBC is chilling - most people in possession of their right minds think the BBC is one of the greatest jewels in the country's treasure chest. Quite why Mandy Antoinette hasn't tried to flog it to David Geffen I've absolutely no idea.

A good walk spoiled

2009-08-24T16:51:00.009+01:00

Is golf a sport?

The question is moot, because golf is set to be included in the Olympic Games in 2016. I've actually tried golf a few times and I can tell you that it's not as easy as it looks, and it doesn't look that easy to start with. Nor, if you look at Tiger Woods or Nick Faldo or Greg Norman or Ernie Els, can you reasonably rejoin that it's a game for muffin-tops (yeah, I know, Craig Stadler, John Daly, whatevs). The last time I seriously tried to play golf I lost about twenty balls and my temper on one hole alone. Mrs Rot thought it was hilarious.

It so happens that my favourite running route takes me through a golf course on Cleeve Hill. I noticed a week or so ago that a number of golfers appeared to be pushing their golf trolleys. Now you know, and I know, that it's easier to pull a piece of string than to push it, and the same goes (so I thought) for a golf trolley, particularly on a golf course set on a hill with some fairly steep slopes.

Turns out that they're not standard golf trolleys, but electric ones. There's a wee button arrangement on the handle and a car battery on the base, and this got me thinking. What kind of sick, addle-pated dingbat would tip up at a golf course to play a "sport", only to remove at least 90% of the "sporting" element by electrifying the carriage of their clubs? Sure, if you're neither hale nor hearty - by all means enjoy your round using an engine to cart your clubs about, but most of the people I saw were younger than me. So I ask again, what kind of mindset would you need to see a round of golf as being enhanced by the sheer energy- and materials-profligacy of attaching an electric engine to your golf cart?

*****

We have just finished the final season of The West Wing on DVD, having been unable to watch it owing to Sky's penchant for cherry-picking the good stuff. In the end it became like an addiction - there we would be, bleary-eyed and dying for bed, only to look at one another and agree to Just One More Episode. Received opinion has it that the show plummeted in quality when Aaron Sorkin left, but actually I enjoyed Series 5 the most. But that's me - always full of surprises.

*****

O God it's that time of year again, season of mists and crappy karaoke. Yes, folks, The X Factor is back, and you know what? I'm not sure I'm strong enough.

Three series ago a genuine singing sensation was discovered - Leona Lewis. If you disagree with this then we're going to have to fall out. I would concede that most of her output isn't exactly my cup of tcha, but she totally nailed Snore Patrol's "Run", and her audition version of "Summertime" is an unalloyed joy.

Since then (and, if we're being truthful, before then as well) an awful lot of sonic dreck has been paraded for our entertainment. Personally, I like the initial auditions best, whereas Mrs Rot prefers boot camp and beyond. It goes without saying that the judges (including Saint Simon Cowell) are lamentably tin-eared and entirely uninterested in anything that smacks of originality, invention or talent (hence Alexandra "The Foghorn" Burke winning last year).

This year some bozo (ok, Simon Cowell) thought it would be a good idea to liven up the initial auditions by holding them in front of a live audience. Big. Mistake. Big. Huge. What was once a bite-sized opportunity for terror has become a gargantuan feast of the screaming ab-dabs. Allegedly the audience aren't permitted to boo, but that's not the point. There's something about seeing and, more to the point, hearing the terminally misguided "sing" in front of four judges, a bouncer and a few TV cameras that isn't the same when the audience is numbered in the thousands.

I suppose I'll be watching, though I do take some consolation from the news that if the current series of Big Brootha is to be the last, surely The X Factor cannot be far behind. Please don't trouble to remind me that enforcement of the law requiring me to watch The X Factor is honoured more in the breach than the observance - you're missing the point.

*****

I'm still working on getting my music archive on-line - but I'm not working very hard, hence the delay. In the meantime I apologise not one whit for presenting this extremely unusual video. In it my favourite pianist, the prodigiously gifted Valentina Lisitsa, plays the first movement of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, but sans orchestra. I'm not sure that the piano is of the highest quality but for me it was a delicious treat. I know the Rachmaninov concerti very well, yet have never heard the piano part solo (though I did find my brain supplying the accompaniment unbidden)

Meagre justice

2009-08-20T09:59:00.009+01:00

The recent lack of new Rot is not a reflection of a world-wide dearth of the stuff. "Lord" Mandelson has been "governing" us for a while, so I expect the ink will by now be dry on the sale contract of the outstanding pieces of our national infrastructure not previously in the hands of venal crooks, thieves and PFI PPPs. An election is underway in Afghanistan to attempt to persuade the public there to vote again for our puppet Hamid Karzai whose impeccable democratic credentials include enacting a law to allow men to starve or rape their wives if said wives refuse said men sexual gratification.

Elsewhere today the Scottish government appears to be preparing to release the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds. He has, we are told, terminal cancer (though we were also told that Ronnie Biggs was at death's door just before his release).

The reaction to the proposed release has been interesting, though hardly surprising. Most of the people who died at Lockerbie were American, and their surviving relatives have been pretty vocal in declaring that the release would be a travesty, and that he should rot in hell. I daresay I might think the same if I were in their shoes. However, not all the relatives agree; the most high-profile on the British side is Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in Pan Am flight 103, who believes that the evidence that convicted al-Megrahi was flimsy, contrived and unsafe.

His opinion is backed up to a certain extent by the then Scottish Lord Advocate, Peter Fraser, (Baron Fraser of Carmyllie), who said in 2005 that the Maltese man Tony Gauci (who identified Al-Megrahi) was an unreliable witness:

"Gauci was not quite the full shilling. I think even his family would say [that he] was an apple short of a picnic. He was quite a tricky guy. I don't think he was deliberately lying, but if you asked him the same question three times he would just get irritated and refuse to answer. You do have to worry. He's a slightly simple chap, are you putting words into his mouth, even if you don't intend to."

There's more. Vincent Cannistraro of the CIA headed the Locherbie investigation. He had helped orchestrate the brutal and murderous Contras movement against the Sandanista government, He helped arm both Osama bin Laden and the Mujahadeen as part of the covert dirty war in Afghanistan in the 1980s; and, most tellingly, was head of the anti-Libya propaganda department in Ronald Reagan's White House. Jim Swire, and many others who have investigated the case, have long suspected that it was the CIA who planted the supposed bomb fragment (that helped convict Al-Megrahi) in Calder Forest near Lockerbie in order to implicate Libya, and given Cannistraro's history that seems a reasonable hypothesis.

Finally, there are questions about how the bomb got onto the plane. At the original trial it was asserted that Malta was the only place where the bomb could have been placed on the aircraft, but after the trial it emerged that there had been a break-in to the secure area at Heathrow that day, though no-one has ever been found or identified who was involved. Jim Swire is on record as stating that if this had been known at the trial it would have been impossible to convict al-Megrahi.

Whatever. I have absolutely no business commenting on this matter, as I only know what I read in the papers and elsewhere. It does seem, on the face of it, that an appeal should be heard but al-Megrahi dropped that as part of an alleged deal to allow him to be released on compassionate grounds.

The case throws into sharp relief the disparity between the US and British governments regarding the administration of justice on both sides of the Atlantic. Hillary Clinton has been extremely forthright in condemning the idea of releasing al-Megrahi, while a group of American senators including Edward Kennedy and John Kerry have signed a letter to the Scottish Justice Secretarty Kenny MacAskill requesting that there be no change in al-Megrahi's sentence.

Contrast this with our craven government's meek acceptance of the USA's extradition demand - sorry request - for the extradition of Gary McKinnon for alleged hacking activities. If this is allowed to go through, he will face up to 60 years, when it appears that all he was after was information about UFOs. Our Home Secretary (who is it these days? Alan someone-or-other) agrees with the previous one (Jacqui Pornfilm) that there are no grounds to challenge the extradition, presumably on the grounds that what America wants, America gets. Didn't happen with Pinochet, of course, who was bundled off back to Chile despite Spain's request for extradition, on the grounds of Pinochet's illness. Presumably the age-related illness of a filthy murdering tyrant trumps Asberger's Syndrome.

McKinnon's extradition occasioned a ripe exchange of letters in The Grundina, with Lord West, the Home Office minister claiming, when examining extradition UK to US versus US to UK, that
It comes down to a difference between suspicion and belief, which are broadly comparable, realistically as close as two different legal systems are likely to get, and in both cases the standard governing issue of domestic warrants.

Menzies Campbell put this nonsense to the sword when he replied,

If, as [Lord West] says, it all comes down to the difference between "suspicion" and "belief", he cannot legitimately claim that these are "broadly comparable". They are not.

"Suspicion" is defined in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as "apprehension of guilt or fault on slight grounds or without clear evidence", while "belief" is defined as "acceptance of a proposition, statement, or fact, as true, on the ground of authority or evidence".

Or, to put it another way, a jury would be entitled to convict if it believed someone to be guilty but not if all it had was suspicion.

The present attorney general, Baroness Scotland, when a minister in the Home Office, told the House of Lords on 16 December 2003: "By contrast, when we make extradition requests to the United States we shall need to submit sufficient evidence to establish 'probable cause'. That is a lower test than prima facie but a higher threshold than we ask of the United States, and I make no secret of that."

This frank statement made clear that the standards required in both countries under the extradition treaty were different. They are, and they should not be if the treaty was truly reciprocal.

Would the so called "special relationship" be irretrievably ruptured if both countries applied the same standard and gave their citizens equal protection under the law? I doubt it.

So there you have it. Game, set and match to Campbell. Won't make a jot of difference, sadly. We have been America's poodle more or less since they took their own country off us in the War of Independence, and that's not going to change anytime soon. I do sometimes wonder at the willingness of our elected masters to accept the mantle of Presidential Puppet, but then I'm not privy to the briefings that they receive when they take office. Maybe the American spooks know where the bodies are buried, though they'd have to be some pretty important bodies to keep sway over successive Tory and Labour governments. Either that, or our kidult politicians just like being close to the action.

Luckily the Scottish justice minister isn't quite so in thrall to our trans-Atlantic overlords, as I've just heard that al-Megrahi has been released. I've just looked at this page and if even half of it is true, it looks like the deal to allow him to be released would come as a big relief for spooks and government ministers, both retired and serving, everywhere.

Two twerps

2009-07-14T09:45:00.011+01:00

It's been rather quiet on the Rotten front lately. The usual suspects - Mandy Antoinette, A A Gill, Clarkson et al. have been keeping their heads down, which means I in turn have nothing to aim at. Okay, there was the Michael Jackson circus about which I have a somewhat apocryphal anecdote ¹ but honestly the whole thing was so tragic and yet so risible that further comment was superfluous - it was its own commentary.

So I've been looking for something else to blog about. You don't want to hear about my life - far too dull, and in any case the good bits have been snaffled by Country Lite (which has itself been woefully silent of late). However, just when I was about to pull on my walking boots and make my way into the Slough of Despond Ben Bradshaw pops up in The Guardian trying to make political capital out of the BBC.

I don't know much about our Ben, except he'd be played in the film by a young Christopher Ravenscroft. To save you the bother of reading the article and then doing some mind-shredding background research, I can tell you that he's getting all heavy on Mark Thompson and Sir Michael Lyons because they are refusing to share out the licence fee among other broadcasters.

Where to start? It's always difficult with world-class fuckwittery to ascertain the original jumping-off point of the seriously stupid. First, why would the BBC voluntarily agree to give the money they receive from the licence fee to, for example, ITV? Without a reciprocal arrangement about advertising revenue, say? Would turkeys, in the unlikely event of being given the suffrage, vote for Christmas/Thanksgiving? Second,

"[There] are plenty of people within the BBC that do not feel it is a well-led organisation and that is almost for me the most worrying thing," Bradshaw told the Financial Times.

I venture to suggest that such people are proportionately and numerically far fewer than those who think that the UK is not a well-led organisation. So stop worrying about a few dissenters in the BBC, and start worrying about the thirty fathoms of shite you're standing in.

Third, he suggests that there's widespread support for the idea of "top-slicing" which will mean that "around £130m of licence payers' money will go towards ITV regional news programmes". I ask you this, and I ask you to respond honestly. Would you really be sad if you were never able to see another ITV regional news programme? Surely almost any programme on the BBC (and I include those presented by George Lamb) is worth more than any ITV regional news show, with its slap-covered presenters, its lame-o links and its utter lack of content.

The problem with the BBC is historic, and dates back to John Birt and his soul-lite clone takeover. What's required is to retro-strip the Producer's Choice/phony market crap out of the organisation, sack about three million pointless suits, and give all the money to the people who actually make programmes. You know, those people who would in any reasonable world be called "The Talent" (whereas of course in topsy-turvy land "The Talent" means Paris Hilton). That way the best show on terrestrial television won't be a re-run of a show made by HBO (The Wire, in case you were wondering).

And no sooner does Ben Bradshaw oblige me with some copy but I see that the latest expert on the media is Matthew Robson, a 15 year-old "intern" at Morgan Stanley, whose premier bon mot is that "Twitter is not for teens". Leaving aside the rather vexed question of who exactly Twitter is for, the argument put forward in support of this is that "teens" would rather waste their phone credit texting than tweeting. Which is all very well if your only means of tweeting is by text. But later this same sage told us that teens don't read newspapers because they "cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarised on the Internet or on TV" So these teens have access to the Internet, eh? So why don't they tweet from the Internet on Twitter.com? Eh? Eh? Answer that, clever clogs.

The whole Morgan Stanley report is all over the press and can someone please tell me why? Why a report so platitudinous, second-hand, obvious-even-to-Daily-Telegraph-readers should be taken up as if Moses had gone up for a second bite of the cherry of Divine wisdom? So Matthew found that teens don't want to pay for on-line content (which is what has caused such a flurry of excitement, prompting Edward Hill-Wood, executive director of Morgan Stanley's European media team to call it "one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen". He went on, "We've had dozens and dozens of fund managers, and several CEOs, e-mailing and calling all day." He said the note had generated five or six times more responses than the team's usual research.") Well, hold the middle page.

You know what this proves? That you can work for Morgan Stanley, be paid more in a day than your or I earn in a month, and still be a clodhopping chump who knows fuck-all about anything. The joke (or at least it would be if it were a) funny and b) not tragic) is that these tossers justify their Brogdignagian pay on the grounds that, if offered less, they would take their skills elsewhere. I think we are all now horribly aware of the extent of these skills (three words: poker, our, money) so I fully expect to read soon that the average wage of the Morgan Stanley wonk is fourpence ha'penny a quarter and all the mead you can drink.

¹ Many years ago (1983 or thereabouts) when I was a recording musician I found myself in one of those luxurious studios in the country - one which doubles as an eminent producer's rural bolt-hole. Don't worry - I'll stop showing off in a minute. Anyway, I was chatting to one of the engineers and he told me this story. It seems that The Producer and The Producer's Wife had been in LA where they had been invited to a party. Michael Jackson was also at the party and The Producer's Wife, feeling rather frisky (no doubt fuelled by champagne and powder) took it upon herself to seduce Mr Jackson and somehow managed to manoeuvre him into a bedroom. When she put her hand down his trousers she found that he was entirely sans sac. The story went that at some point just prior to puberty the Mafia bought a share in Michael Jackson's contract and, mindful of Aled Jones (forgive the anachrony), insisted that he MJ be castrated in order to preserve his voice and their investment. It all made sense to me at the time - not only his little boy voice in a man's body, but also his rather less than black children and his frankly bizarre lifestyle. But then, unlike most right-thinking people, I simply LOVE a good conspiracy theory.

Last night I watched the highlights of the fifth day of the test match (having been lucky enough to have been at Lord's for Friday and Saturday - what a treat). At the end of the coverage 5ive did one of those highlights montage films with a thumping backing track. I was sufficiently intrigued to track down (geddit?) the music and it turns out to be Florence and the Machine, today nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. Here's the piece itself, but with a rather different flavour of image.

Where's the tumbril?

2009-06-25T08:27:00.015+01:00

I don't know how to break this to you, dear reader, but Rotwatcher isn't exactly a horny-handed son of toil. Although now in his gloaming years, his youth was one of gilded excess. Not for him the drab mossy concrete of the local secondary modern; instead it was the drab mossy granite of Malvern College. Very much towards the middle of the 2nd division of public schools, Malvern College in the 1970s dutifully turned the sons (not daughters - boys only, I'm afraid) of solicitors, middle-ranked army officers and not frightfully successful businessmen into solicitors, middle-ranked army officers and - yes, you've guessed the rest.

I didn't last the full five at this drab establishment. It was truly fucking grim - bullying was rife, the food was unspeakable, we slept in iron-framed beds in serried ranks in unheated dormitories and almost everyone was a snob with absolutely nothing to be snobbish about. I was - ahem - expelled, and was sent to what was (and probably still is) called a "crammer" - that is, a school whose sole purpose is to "cram" knowledge into the heads of privileged dunderheads who have blown it at their public schools.

I tell you all this because one of my contemporaries at this crammer was one Charles James Spencer-Churchill, Marquess of Blandford, late of Harrow, the depth of whose academic achievement was quite depressingly shallow. Still, if you're heir to one of the greatest stately homes in England and a staggeringly large fortune, the odd 'A' level seems very small beer.

I have the odd anecdote about our Jamie that I'll keep for another day. He was always pleasant enough to me - bought me many more drinks in the pub than I bought him, though now that I come to think of it he'd probably never met anyone from the lower classes before who wasn't actually waiting on him or cleaning one of the family's ten thousand lavatories, so doubtless I interested him in an anthropological sense. Not that he would have known what "anthropological" meant. Neither was he the only aristocrat at the establishment - there was a fair sprinkling of Hons, as well as some sort of mittel-European Prince (of Luxembourg or Ruritania or somewhere) - fabulously rich and stunningly mean.

Blandford and I went our separate ways after failing our 'A' Levels and I've only once seen him since, at Membury Services on the M4 where he was haranguing the staff. For a while in the last century he was quite the feature of the gossip columns due to his prodigious cocaine habit, and his father disowning him (in case you're worried about him, he will inherit the title but not the property, which is entailed to his son the Earl of Sunderland).

Recently he popped up again on BBC1's Famous, Rich and Homeless which took five celebrities and, well, made them homeless. Actually they took five rather interesting slebs for once - Rosie Boycott (always good value), Annabel Croft (ex-tennis player and presenter of Treasure Hunt), Hardeep Singh Kohli, Bruce Jones (Les Battersby from Coronation Street) and the aforementioned peer.

Jamie proved that inheriting the name Churchill had not automatically equipped him with any bulldog spirit. While Rosie, Hardeep and the others endured the cold wet pavements and doorways, Blandford sneaked into a five-star hotel where he spent two nights. He claimed that the first was spent rough in the car park, but as his sleeping bag was found unused this simply didn't wash. The second he spent in a room with the producers' permission, as he'd threatened to walk off the show otherwise, but he promised in return that he'd honestly sleep on the street the next night, honest guv. However, when John Bird approached him the following evening Blandford gave it to him with both barrels. "It doesn't matter where I'm going. I'm finished with this. I'm not going to make a fool of myself in the street punching you in the fucking mush, but I tell you, if I ever see you again, you will get it!" And off he went, back to one of his five residences, presumably utterly unchanged by his experience or lack of it, leaving the four of them to complete the task.

It's unlikely, in any event, that he would have brought much to the table. The years, and a large intake of Class As have done nothing to improve what was essentially a miasmic void where a personality should have been.

And what of the other slebs on Famous, Rich and Homeless? Well, needless to say they're not homeless at the moment. They all "went on a journey" (my new favourite hate-phrase) and doubtless returned cleansed yet enriched by the experience. What would really be interesting would be programmes made six months later - where are they now? (on their journeys, assuming they haven't reached the terminus) Sadly, of all the reality shows it seems that Big Brother is the only one where the corpses refuse to die.