All of us should be heartened by the news that Tom Kelly, Tony Blair’s former official spokesman, has been awarded the Order of the Bath.

It was Kelly’s job to read aloud to journalists from pieces of paper handed to him by government spin doctors and to occasionally slip the metaphorical stiletto between the ribs of potential political threats. It was Kelly who memorably described Dr David Kelly as ‘a Walter Mitty‘ type. Kelly (Tom) found it in his heart to apologise for the remark after Kelly (David, Dr) was dead.

That such modest talents should be enough to earn a medal for chivalry (the temptation to use quotation marks around that last word was almost too much to resist) is a rallying call to the rest of us toiling away in obscurity.

The enobling of Kelly (Tom) demonstrates that fame and fortune are within the grasp of anyone with the reading skills of a seven year-old and the ability to administer a put down to people whose abilities dwarf your own. Tom Kelly was, in a final analysis, a blogger attaining greatness.

Fly my pretties, 2008 is ours for the taking.

Jesus wept:

A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot - because players couldn’t understand it.

The Cool Cash game - launched on Monday - was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.

To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.

But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some. Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.

The immediate response is to laugh when the true response is to ask: how can this be right? How is this allowed? Of late I’m trying to be nice, I’m trying not to be negative, I’m trying to make suggestions. But, I’m sorry, two generations of education ministers should be dragged out this very night and horsewhipped.

It’s the 21st century. We’ve got huge brains and opposable thumbs. We’ve barely begun to explore our potential as a race. We should be on Pluto by now. But no: we’re stuck on this rock, the gears jammed in reverse. I’ll say it again: we’re on the cusp of a new Dark Age.

(Heads up from Eugenides)

Update: A fair point from Jamie:

[U]nless you think it’s the job of education to train stupid people to know just enough to make stupid bets, then the fault isn’t really with the education system. The scandal here is that the state promotes the exploitation of stupidity by licensing a lottery system in the first place.

As we all know, the Little Britain pound is big money. Buy British. British Jobs for British Workers. No element of our lives is immune to an attempted appeal to knee-jerk nationalism. You’ll never go broker appealing to Billy Britain.

Take the Southern Electric representative who just knocked on our door trying to get us to switch our power supply to his company. To say he wasn’t going to take no for an answer was an understatement. When he finally saw he wasn’t getting anywhere, he asked which supplier we were with. Upon being told we were with Scottish Power he replied:

You know they’re Spanish owned now, don’t you?

(Because light bulbs glow that little bit brighter with good old British electricity, don’t you know. Because you don’t want your money lining the pockets of avaricious Spanish businessmen when it could be lining the pockets of avaricious British ones.)

And with his appeal to our patriotism also falling on stony ground, he was gone. I wonder if appealing to British nationalism is in the training manual.

Last night, as I cracked open my eighth can of lager and shoved the final piece of pizza into my gaping maw, I turned to my partner and said, ‘you know, I think I might be sleep-walking into an obesity crisis‘. Sleep-walking. We sleep-walk into all kinds of things these days - a surveillance society, environmental catastrophe, financial meltdown. It’s terrifying the things we get up to when we’re asleep. Pass me a Red Bull.

In this instance, it’s not my fault I’m a fat drunk; it’s my genetics. It’s not my fault I’m tired and apathetic; it’s society’s for giving me a cushy job and big pies. It’s not my fault I’m a lazy schlub unwilling to get off the couch; my body’s designed for harder times - it’s the latent caveman in me.

I like crisps. Walker’s salt and vinegar to be precise. Very nice in an egg mayonnaise sarnie. Not too often, mind, just the odd bag now and again. Or rather I did, because now they’re shit. Because parents couldn’t stop themselves pushing bag after bag after bag of those cholestrol time-bombs into their swelling offspring, Walkers had to change their crisps by reducing the saturated fat content by 70 per cent. And now they’re shit. Because a swathe of British parents couldn’t stop themselves from abusing their children, my crisps taste like shit.

You know, I quite like my nanny state. Who doesn’t like free cash and having stuff done for them? Why modify your own stupidity when you can carry on before with an easy conscience that someone else is looking after your children’s welfare? As if the stupid, bovine, corpulent parasites that seem to constitute the majority of middle England these days didn’t have enough excuses to continue their mewling, rapacious, whipped cream flecked self-destruction disguised as you’ve never had so good stack it high sell it cheap all you can eat good times.

Telling fat and lazy Britons that they’re fat and lazy because they’re no longer chasing gazelles out on the savannah has to one of the most stupid things I ever heard. It’s as facile as the bit about blokes loving a barbecue because deep down they miss being hunter-gatherers and sitting around a fire in a cave. Can everybody please grow up?

I’m fat and lazy because I eat and drink too much and exercise too little. A child could grasp it - between gobfuls of cake, obviously. It’s a simple case of inputs and outputs. You put in more energy than you burn off and you get fat. Try tweaking the levels of one or the other to get them to match. Bringing our great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great uncles Ig and Ug into it just syphons off a bit more personal responsibility from a population that could do with a big heavy spoonful of the stuff. And then being hit round the head with the big heavy spoon.

Unless, with all this talk of our ancestors’ genetics, the plan to get us all fit and healthy is to release the inhabitants of Chester Zoo and give us each a spear. You can sign me up for that.

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?

Well, it pays to think ahead in the current climate:

The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales have attended the dedication of the new national Armed Forces Memorial.

…

There is room for 15,000 more names to be carved on the Portland stone walls of the memorial, at the National Memorial Arboretum.

(Via Ed Rooksby.)

Dear Sky News

Thank you for your press release hawking your hilarious political Top Trumps. It has been filed away in the usual place. I was gratified that you obviously took the time to look around my blog before including me in your mass unsolicited mail-out.

You missed this however. Oh, and the political ethos of this blog that would suggest, even to a particularly slow child, that I would rather place my generative organ in a bacon slicer than help shift product for Rupert Murdoch.

On the up side, however, I must praise you for elevating British politics to the level of a card game and boiling down the defining characteristics of our leaders to their looks and charisma. Democracy is safe in your hands.

Love

Justin

Former New York mayor and US Republican presidential ‘hopeful’ Rudy Giuliani’s been in town and dissing the NHS.

Speaking at an event at a London hotel, he said: “Healthcare right now in America - and I think it has been true of your experience of socialised medicine in England - is not only very expensive, it’s increasingly less effective.

“I had prostate cancer seven years. My chance of survival in the US is 82%; my chance of survival if I was here in England is below 50%.

I think he probably ‘misspoke‘. What he, of course, meant was:

A prominent politician’s chance of survival in the US is 82%…

I’d be interested to see, to pluck an example at random, the survival rates of black men from New Orleans having no medical insurance. It’s a question of who you are, I would say.

A bit like having a dodgy ticker over here. One imagines that if Gordon Brown were to wake up this morning with a prostate gland the size of a grapefruit, his chance of survival would be considerably greater than 50%.

Garry Bushell, 21st Century Boy:

‘I think there are a lot of things to put right in this country before you go around preaching the gospel of perversion,’ he said.

Yes, like tying up bottom-feeding old never-weres in a sack and dropping them in the Thames, for starters.

Homophobia, as we all know, is largely based on a misplaced narcissistic rape anxiety. But what’s Bushell’s excuse? Surely even he can see that no self-respecting gay man would look at him twice? Is it the nagging horror that he might enjoy it, perhaps?

(via Larry)

One of the advantages of living in a modern society, as opposed to say, Athens in 500 BC, is our flexible approach to refuse collection.

Brighton City Council, for instance, have taken to the not unreasonable policy that, should your wheelie-bin be full, any excess refuse bags placed beside the wheelie-bin will be ignored by the refuse collector and left to rot. (And yes, I do sort through my garbage like a starving racoon to separate out the glass, plastic and paper).

That is why, at 3.15 AM this morning, I was woken by the sound of not one, not two, not three, not four, but FIVE urban foxes having a violent and protracted Mexican stand-off over the (double-bagged) chicken carcass I put out yesterday. A truly unique sight, I hope you’d agree.

Now, I love foxes. There are loads of them round here (clearly). Amazing animals. I spent a very pleasant hour watching the five little pranksters foxy-boxing, howling at the tops of their little lungs and generally trying to tear each other to bits.

But when you knock on the window and all five brazenly stare up and don’t move, their minds clearly fixed on the prize, you have to wonder how far we - and specifically the abject Brighton City Council - have progressed since the Cretans invented the landfill site in 3000 BC.

And that’s why I’m knackered and feel like I want to thrash a council representative this morning.

(See also Seagulls. This year’s incessantly squawking and rutting contingent seem to have finally buggered off from the roof. Looks like we’re going to have to give the seven-year old the ‘where do babies come from’ chat before they come back as I suspect my ‘oh, she’s just giving him a piggy back’ excuse is wearing thin.)

Rhys Jones was in ‘the wrong place at the wrong time’ say Merseyside police.

Now forgive this crusty old liberal, I’m not an expert on police procedure after all, but surely it was the twat with the gun who was differentially positioned and temporally challenged?

Good to see David Cameron’s now customary fat-headed response to the issues of the day (in this case the Learco Chindamo affair) getting both barrels.

It’s just a shame that New Labour, still never knowlingly outflanked on the Right by anyone, weighed in with their own fatuous response. Jack Straw leapt aboard the bandwagon so nimbly you wonder if he missed his calling as an Olympic hurdler.

The thing is, with re-offending rates amongst Britain’s ex-prisoners astronomical, a more humane and thoughtful government (of whatever political stripe) would have taken the opposite tack.

By any measurement, Learco Chindamo is one of the success stories of the modern prison system. A violent murderer who entered prison 12 years ago ‘unable to read or spell his address when he started his sentence’, he has expressed remorse for his crime, gained GCSEs in maths, English and art and is described by the deputy governor of Ford prison as ‘a changed person who would prove himself worthy of trust’. Chindamo should be held up as an exemplar of what can happen when prison works as it should.

But no, the retributive flavour of the mix isn’t strong enough. We need a dash more. A ravening, spittle-flecked media, interested in nothing more than shifting product, yank on the politicians’ chains to get them to do the heavy lifting. Which they duly do for fear of slipping a few votes in the super-marginal constituencies. Why don’t we just do away with Parliament and have all decisions of importance made by a board consisting solely of newspaper proprietors? By which I mean, they make those decisions already but let’s have some transparency and stop insulting everyone’s intelligence, shall we?

The Home Office’s case against Chindamo seems to be that, ‘while it was unlikely that Chindamo would reoffend’, his very existence as a free man poses a risk to public safety as a third party might be tempted to have a pop at him. Using that logic, why aren’t all of Britain’s nonces under lock and key to protect them from fire bombs and poorly spelled placards? Why aren’t Chris Moyles, Alastair Campbell and Rebekah Wade in the pen?

It’s Chindamo’s ‘notoriety’ that marks him. But who stoked that notoriety, Chindamo himself? He seems to want to keep his head down, atone and reform. How about the likes of the hacks who chased him earlier this year when he was on day release? Or headline-starved MPs and their echo-chamber hangers-on?

In the middle sits Mrs Lawrence, yet another victim of the drive for newspaper sales and political populism. Neither of the parties pulling her this way and that give two shits about her grief or her dead husband. She’s not so much attempting to ride the raddled tiger as trying to fight off two at once while they attempt to have their filthy way with her. And they won’t phone in the morning.

Update: This is very good.

And so, to Devil’s Dyke yestereve to witness The Perseids, the annual meteor shower created by the Earth passing through the tail of the comet, Swift-Tuttle.

The shower’s unalloyed cosmic joy and beauty was somewhat tempered by the accompanying shower of idiots on the ground. There was the berk who thought it a sensible idea to set up his motorised telescope using a torch that blazed with the power of a thousand suns. He took an age and then it turned out the telescope’s batteries were flat. Then there was the stupid guitar-toting hippy who nearly trampled us because he was walking across the ground with his eyes shut.

Lying on our backs, as the majestic arc of the Milky Way wheeled above us and the shooting stars leapt through the sky like tigers defying the laws of gravity, the soundtrack to the spectacle was provided by the man some way off to our left who complained incessantly. His stiff neck, the evening’s temperature and the fact that he was only getting a mere one meteor a minute as opposed to, presumably, an aaargh-my-eyes Day of the Triffids style spectacular.

When we got back to the car we found that, in the darkness, we’d laid the blanket on top of a massive dog egg. Never before had I longed so hard for the heat death of the universe.

A load of old lazy, cheating, drawn out toss. A massive confidence trick played on the reader. Bollocks, it is*.

*Why? Those not bothered about spoilers should highlight the text below.

[Thanks to the convoluted mother's-love plus Harry/Voldemort-blood-transfusion plot contortion, Harry has effectively been immortal since the end of Book Four.

See? A total bloody con. People have gone to prison for less. Rowling should give the sodding money back.]

The other day, I wrote a ‘joke’ that, at the end of the new Harry Potter book, Hogwarts is closed after a poor OFSTED report only to be reopened as a City Academy specialising in training call centre workers. Whoops, a bit of satire there.

Of course, it’s rubbish, isn’t it? An absurd extrapolation of the notion that schools now only exist to produce economically-optimised drones. Bollocks, in other words.

But then…

A secondary school which has opened an on-site call centre where pupils can practise selling mobile phone contracts and answering customer complaints has been criticised for lowering children’s expectations.

Christ. I feel sick.

I’m trapped in a giddying Moebius band of conflicting emotions. It’s a relief to find that there are people on the planet who have a lower expectation of our species than I do. That my sociopathy is not total. But then I’m horrorstruck that people actually exist who loathe and despise humanity (children in this particular case) to such an extent. But, hang on, why should I give a shit? People are arseholes. And round and round.

The pinnacle of creation? You can bugger off. The only worthwhile contribution opposable thumbs have made to the planet is the opportunities they afford for self-abuse.

If we have the fifth largest economy in the world, why was there a torrent of human shit and filth cascading down my street during the storm this morning?

‘I’d rather be a little shit than a big cunt.’ - Matthew Parris responds to Alastair Campbell’s labelling of him.

Poor diddums.

At least, that’s the implication smuggled inside this weaselling piece of wriggling from the former first lady.

Asked whether her speeches would enjoy the same interest were she not married to Mr Blair the lawyer replied: “I really don’t want to answer that question, actually. I don’t know what it’s got to do with anything. There’s no way I exploited my position.”

Er, ok. If you say so, nice lady.

Denial. It’s a river in Africa, as ever.

Proof that any cock-up the public sector can perform the private sector can do as well.

Barclays bought out the Woolwich who, until this week, we banked with. No choice in the matter, our accounts were transferred this week to professional bastards, Barclays, and the Woolwich accounts deleted.

To add injury to insult, our Woolwich cards were cancelled before the new Barclays ones were sent out. Genius. The new cards haven’t arrived and now there’s a postal strike. Excellent. Looks like it’s going to be a quiet weekend.

Plus, the Barclay’s website is so piss-poor we can’t even see when our direct debits are going out and so have no idea if we have enough money in the bank to cover them. The drone in the call centre said they might refund any charges incurred ‘as a courtesy’. Cheers.

My partner has just spent two hours in the local branch and has got no further forward. Thanks for nothing you rapacious bastards. I hope the chairman chokes on his foie gras.

Anybody recommend a decent bank? I use the term ‘decent’ to mean ‘efficient’ or at least ‘usable’. I’m not so naive as to expect decency from the banking establishment.

‘And here we all are, at the dogs‘.

The number of people killed in road accidents fell, by 1 per cent from 3,201 in 2005 to 3,172 in 2006. 31,845 people were killed or seriously injured in 2006, 1 per cent fewer than in 2005. There were 258,404 road casualties in Great Britain in 2006, 5 per cent less than in 2005.

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