Remember Anna Mikhailova? She was the student journalist who, while on work experience, outed the Girl With A One-Track Mind.

Such resourcefulness has stood the cub reporter in good stead.

The Collings and Herrin podcast is ace.

I’ve owned this book for years…

…but looking at it this morning, I’ve only now realised how Dredd found the courage to defeat the invading army of Sovs.

He was pissed.

This guy is almost entirely right in what he’s saying. It’s just that he’s got absolutely no right whatsoever to be saying it,

I can’t shift this new tune by Nick Cave:

Cave lives in Brighton. I can help thinking that he’s seen me out and about because he’s definitely stolen my moves for this video.

(Via Warren Ellis)

The Independent’s website has had a makeover. It’s all right, nowt flash, and certainly better than the previous monstrosity. And let’s hope it’s a bit more robust than the last one which was up and down like a bride’s nightie. (Yes, I know I’m one to talk but then I’m not a multi-million pound media outfit).

There’s just one thing. The Indy’s web designers, in their wisdom, have changed the structure of the site’s permalinks again (they did the same with the last revamp as well). This means that any previous deep-linking from blogs or other sites to articles on the Independent’s website no longer work. Idiots.

Oh, boo hoo…

The government has abandoned plans to impose a pre-9pm ban on junk food TV advertising when it unveils its new anti-obesity strategy tomorrow, safeguarding more than £200m a year in TV advertising revenue.

No doubt there will be those who are upset, though I’m not sure why. Anyone who thinks they can appeal to an advertising executive’s sense of morality clearly needs to see a doctor.

You’d have more joy asking it to levitate above Birmingham than expecting the advertising industry to set aside the entrenched hatred of humanity that allows it to be so successful. And as for expecting this government to raise our kids, well, it’s doing such a good job with everything else, isn’t it?

So, what’s the solution? I’m afraid most people aren’t going to like it. Don’t want your children watching adverts trying to sell them an early death? Then don’t let them watch the channels showing those ads.

This might come as a surprise to some but there are television channels out there that don’t show adverts. Apart from that one that shows the Fantastic Four cartoon and Captain Scarlet, the commercial channels aren’t really worth watching anyway, are they?

Take some personal responsibility (remember that?). The kids nagging for a mechanically recovered burger or a bucket of antibiotic-and-abscess chicken? Say no. Go on, try it. Advertising execs aren’t forcing you to watch the adverts or buy the slop. They’re just laughing themselves sick in swanky bars while you and your porcine brood are blaming everybody but yourselves.

‘Michael Barrymore is to return to the limelight playing Spike Milligan in a stage drama about the comedian’s life,’ according to the BBC.

What next? OJ Simpson as Nelson Mandela?

There’s no denying that the Beijing National Stadium is an impressive building. Gordon Brown certainly seemed to enjoy his press conference there over the weekend.

The thing is, I can’t say I’m taken with the colour of the stadium as it is. It’s a sort of dirty grey. How did they get it like that? Was it Beijing’s smog (that Gordon mentioned it in passing during his photo opportunity)? Maybe the builders mixed into the concrete the ashes of their colleagues who’ve been killed (that Gordon didn’t mention in passing during his photo opportunity) during construction?

I don’t know about you, but dead builders seem quite a high price to pay for a bit of running and jumping about. The Chinese regime obviously think it’s a price worth paying to help rehabilitate its international reputation.

I suppose Peter Hain is too old to start digging up sports pitches again?

I see Guido is using once again more tittle tattle of a sexual nature as a battering ram against the gates of the ‘mainstream media elite’.

All fair enough, I suppose, if you get a rise out of that kind of thing. You know, dragging a kid into your self-promotion.

Except. There are gatekeepers of the new media elite who are also reluctant to open up. People with long memories will remember, a while back, a group of bloggers attempting to ‘dish the dirt on their own’ thinking ‘it would be of huge interest to the public’.

Across blogs, in London and Brighton pubs, it has been common knowledge for years. This blogger is at the heart of the politico-media nexus that constitutes the new disintermediated class.

The blogger who’s skeleton from his past the group attempted to ventilate ran for his lawyer and threatened them with legal action. When attending an interview to talk about the matter, the blogger took along his daddy[1] for moral support (the blogger is 40).

Can anyone remember that blogger’s name?

[1] Update: Or was it granddaddy?. Maybe Guido could clarify for us.

Also, this is from Guido’s ‘about me‘ blurb:

Any kind of reference to Guido’s family [...] is deleted without hesitation.

Couldn’t you just slap him?

Today marks the tenth anniversary of American blogger Matt Drudge breaking the story of the Monica Lewinsky affair. Things were never the same again. The world was rocked to its foundations by the astounding news that older men like getting their knobs sucked by younger women.

There were many crimes committed by the Clinton Whitehouse. However, I don’t think there are many sane people in the world who think Bill getting a nosh from an intern was one of them. Or at least one of the major ones. How the odd happy finish from Monica impeded the Clinton presidency before right-wing prurience attempted to derail it has never been adequately explained to me.

Still, we are where we are. In his paean to Drudge, Guido Fawkes somewhat prematurely hails his hero’s coup as the end ‘once and for all [of] the gate-keeper ability, if not the mentality, of the mainstream media elite’.

Guido’s love letter to his mentor is interesting in that it fails to offer a qualitative judgement of how things have changed. How much Drudge earns and where that income allows him to live seem to be the essential yardsticks rather than any explicit estimate of whether what he produces is any good. That people in large numbers are prepared to consume a product is not always the most reliable gauge of quality. It’s a thought that’s kept the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Bernard Matthews and Noel Edmonds warm for many a year.

It’s also interesting how little change has actually been brought about despite the breathless talk of a paradigm shift. Guido talks of an ‘mainstream media elite’ without seemingly being overtly aware that he and his role model have had to largely appropriate that elite’s methods to gain what they judge and measure as success. Is there any true innovation going on?

Guido exhorts would-be one-man newsmakers to ‘go get the story’ but beyond the phone calls he makes which (unwittingly or not) come across as the transcripts of a radio show prankster, it’s difficult to see what ‘getting’ of stories he actually does. Drudge’s big moment, let us not forget, was publishing a story that a mainstream magazine had baulked at. Guido, between rare forays into editorial, presents a diet largely consisting of mainstream scraps and off-cuts. Happy (for Guido) coincidence dictated that he also made his name by publishing a story of where another prominent politician (in this case John Prescott) was putting his penis. A story, like Drudge’s breakthrough, that the mainstream media elites had deemed unpublishable.

As such, you’d be forgiven for regarding both Guido and Drudge as mere conduits; alternative venues for other people’s legwork. There’s very little ‘making’ beyond the ability to string a sentence together. It’s repetition and reaction. It’s blogging.

Guido talks of his contact with and reliance on mainstream journalists but it seems to me more of a parasitic relationship rather than a symbiotic one. Like the unfortunate Monica, it sounds like he’s had to suck a lot of cock to gain his notoriety. The loyalty of the press can be rented but not bought. And like an exploited woman who talks of empowerment when really she’s just being used, I wonder if Guido is fooling anyone else but himself. Guido’s medium is the message - journalists are happy to report on his antics and caperings rather than highlight what he’s saying. You can see why the likes of the Guardian’s Michael White might snigger at him - the lone wannabe walking the high wire without a safety net.

I’d argue that all we’re seeing is the emergence of another albeit smaller elite - not the tearing down of some great edifice. Guido is nothing if not just another monied Westminster villager only with a maverick spin. He gives off the same air of the privileged insider privy to access and esoteric knowledge forbidden to the rest of us. But this new elite lacks the inherent quality control (sub-editing for instance) that make the ‘mainstream media elite’ even vaguely tolerable. It’s just as well that Guido gives his stuff away for free because you wonder how loyal his readership would be if he was charging for it.

Of course, Guido earns his money indirectly via advertising on his blog. He doesn’t or daren’t put a price or a value (financial or qualitative) on his product. It’s a new model, if only a cheap knock-off of the old model, down-sized and the corners cut. Despite copious evidence to the contrary, I sincerely wonder if Guido is truly happy about that. Like a self-taught painter trying to copy an old master, surely it’s a melancholy matter of pale imitation and disappointment.

(Cross-posted at Liberal Conspiracy.)

Is anyone else finding it almost impossible to drag themselves away from those videos of Tom Cruise?

I only turned away when a thought struck me: maybe this is The Cruiser’s plan. While the rest of us are all staring wide-eyed at his pronouncements and chewing our knuckles, Scientology is on the march.

Oh, and get well soon to Larry. Hopefully real help will be along soon.

Torchwood, fool me once, shame on you - fool me twice, won’t get fooled again.

If you want a perfect example of the triumph of the (lack of) spirit at the heart of British politics, look no further than John Harris’ interview with culture secretary James Purnell in today’s Guardian.

When he talks, the requisite New Labour tics are present and correct - a fondness for such wonkish adjectives as “strategic” and “systematic”, and a habit of responding to difficult enquiries by making up his own rather banal questions and briefly interviewing himself (eg, “Is it better? Yes. Is it perfect? No.”)

…

Purnell won’t be drawn on specific examples

…

He talks about “engagement with communities”

That Harris is a Labour Party supporter makes the interview all the more unsettling. Purnell is another one of those smooth, featureless New Labour drones, like the Miliband brothers, Andy Burnham and Jim Murphy, who, terrifyingly, are hailed as the future of politics in this country. As the New Statesman’s Martin Bright put it with, for some unfathomable reason, complete calm: ‘One way or another we will have Adrian Mole as Prime Minister’.

Painfully on message, chary of the tough question, indoctrinated with that lifeless, soulless use of language devoid of passion, personality or the power into inspire, I’m yet to be convinced that these people aren’t being grown in vats somewhere. Which culture was the culture secretary grown from?

Purnell’s pre-Parliament bio is the all too predictable boilerplate we’ve come to expect of these up and coming young spud guns:

While still a student he worked in the summer holidays as a researcher to Tony Blair from 1989 to 1992. After graduating he worked as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research before moving to the BBC to become Head of Corporate Planning. In 1997 Purnell returned to work as a special advisor for the now Prime Minister Tony Blair until 2001. He also served as a board member of the Young Vic theatre.

Purnell was selected for the seat of Stalybridge and Hyde in 2001.

To wit: well connected, special adviser, parachuted into a safe seat, ya-da, ya-da, ya-da.

His master plan for the arts in Britain is…

…to usher in a new era in which the logic underlying public subsidy moves from “measurement to judgment”, and the pursuit of targets (as seen in a long-standing focus on the arts appealing to certain social categories) is superseded by a new emphasis on “excellence”

Which is all very well, in theory, but you have to ask, as you do with all these New Labour initiatives that promise tomorrow’s boysenberry conserve (nothing so common as mere jam for the new Jerusalem): what constitutes ‘excellence’ and who gets to decide?

We are besieged, and have been these long years, by the mediocrity of thought, poverty of ambition and dunderheadedness of deed of this government. Along with decisions and recommendations being made by committees of placemen and the top-down legislation being passed by rubber stamp, the precedents for a new golden age aren’t good. To say the least.

Purnell is looking forward to a ‘new renaissance’ which is extremely worrying when you consider that most of what passes for art in this country right now is almost entirely untouched by any renaissance values whatsoever. New Labour once charged itself with assembling the acme of British culture and look what we ended up with. Toiling under this regime, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo would be starving artists working in call centres to scrape by.

(See also Jamie and Philip.)

I Am Legend: Take spare pants.

…to bad rubbish Ike Turner. Boo hoo, rock ‘n’ roll pioneer. Boo hoo, Rocket 88.

You know what? To borrow from Jamie Kenny, writing about another wife-beating arsehole, it meant nothing from the moment Ike first raised his hand to his wife.

Why do famous wife-beaters always get a ‘but’? Sure he hit his missus but did you see him play guitar? Sure he hit his missus but did you see him kick a ball? Sure he hit his missus but…

Tell you what, try this: spend ten minutes talking to someone who’s worked in a women’s refuge and see if these arseholes are still your heroes afterwards.

Fuck the lot of them.

For the people most threatened by the revolting masses talking back are those paid to opine from the tops of the mountain: the old school, mainstream media commentators and opinion journalists. If there are people out there who will do what you do, for free, for the sheer pleasure of it, and who are quite capable of dissecting and critiquing your piece, and who, in doing so, prove themselves equally impassioned, equally well-informed, then that is a threat. Mediocrity will suffer. Too damn bad.

read the rest

Take one stupid but still quite scary Doctor Who villain, and make it even stupider and less scary. Killer steak and kidney puddings, anybody?

I’ve been showing the kids some Tom and Jerry cartoons. I watched them with my dad when I was a kid and even though they’re hyper violent, they never had any adverse effects on me. Apart from the time I killed that cat by dropping an anvil on it, obviously.

Anyway, YouTube has loads and loads of Tom and Jerry cartoons. While I was searching out my favourite ones, I found this. It’s an Iranian ’scholar’ explaining how Tom and Jerry are part of the the Jewish conspiracy.

It’s a convincing argument, I’m sure you’ll agree. I knew there was something about that bloody mouse.

Anyway, here’s one of my (and my dad’s) very favourite T & J cartoons. It’s the one where Jerry drinks the blood of Christian children at his Bar Mitzvah.

It’s all over, isn’t it?

‘America’s Next Top Model 8′: Week Four: Crime Scene Victims

Sarah
Pushed Downstairs by a Model

Nigel: The look on your face is just extraordinary. Very beautiful and dead. (later) I think Sarah is the classic example of someone who isn’t typically pretty, but translates amazingly well on film.

Guest Judge Photographer Mike Rosenthal: I think you just put a little bit too much thought in the pose. I thought with the facial expressions, you did a great job.

Why no ‘Beaten to death with a huge porcelain phallus by a Model‘? The poverty of imagination on display is only too wearyingly familiar. Someone with real balls would have recreated the murder of Sharon Tate. If you hate women - or yourself for that matter - that much, put some bloody effort in. Misogyny as a creative driver is so 1970s.

The most shocking part about this is that the image aren’t really that shocking. Most models look dead inside anyway; that glassy stare looks out from a million magazine. What are the pictures trying to say? Anyone trying to make a real point would have hung their model from a hook in a meatlocker. Or given us ‘Anorexia-induced liver failure by a model‘.

As it is, the whole exercise is a moral vacuum, exquisite in its amoral vapidity; pointless. The pictures don’t fuel any sense of outrage but merely top up the resignation to the fact that the human race is slouching towards a tyranny of the mediocre and not giving much of a toss along on the way.

I give us ten years at the outside. By then we’ll be so emotionally stunted we’ll be eating our own young and rutting in the street like animals. Those of us escaping this psychic cataclysm will be regarded as latter-day Travis Bickles. We won’t be the lucky ones.

(Link via Rochenko)

The mighty Keith Olbermann and the mighty George Carlin, together at last:

God, I love him: William Shatner - ‘It Was A Very Good Year‘.

Courtesy of the mighty Cover Freak.

And so the natural supporters of traditional BBC values look glumly on, too battered by 30 years of Murdochian assaults on excellence (”elitism”) in the sacred cause of mass-market mediocrity (”accessibility”) to do more than whinge, as I am doing today, as the last truly great entity in British life is denuded and devalued, its wrists cut and its lifeblood ready to begin slowly seeping away.

read the rest

Exciting times for Star Trek fans. The prequel, showing the first adventures of a fresh from Starfleet Academy Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty and the rest, has been cast. Our very own Simon Pegg gets to be Scotty.

It’s sure to be a tense, roller-coaster of a movie with plenty of jeopardy and an ending that I’m sure nobody will be able to guess. Anyone care to bet which of them won’t survive the battle against the villain, Nero?

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart interviewed on the US C-Span channel. It’s from 2004 but has only just arrived on YouTube. Still worth a look if you’ve got an hour to burn:

Parts two, three, four, five, six and seven.