• HOLIDAY LIVE BLOG: Tips for Britannicus Vulgaris. If you inadvertently find yourself on a glass bottom boat touring one of the most beautifu #
• e Mediterranean, why not take a cheap paperback, MP3 player or mobile phone? After all, you are unlikely to see or hear anything to your adv #
• reaching the beach with the paid bar or the announcement that lunch is served. #
• HOLIDAY LIVE BLOG: And another thing. Why bother feeding your soul by snorkelling in the clear blue water with myriad darting silver fish #
• Why not, instead, cram your gaping piehole and pass out in the sun? #

• HOLIDAY LIVE BLOG: Ah, Corfu, land of contrasts. It’s fine cuisine and poor plumbing. It’s cheap, abundant beer and it’s cheap, abundant Bri #
• #iate your bunny hopping around the pool, trousers around ankles begging for that copy of yesterday’s Daily Mail.@ #

• HOLIDAY LIVE BLOG: Gatwick Airport - a wretched hive of scum and villainy. A three hour check in? Fudge you, Al Qaeda, you melonfarmers. #

• Whatever you do, DO NOT attempt to read Martin Amis in the Guardian whilst eating. It’s awful. #

Bit of a scandal in the baking industry right now. It’s been revealed that a few years ago a baker received a batch of flour that had been contaminated with caustic soda. He knew about the contamination but used the flour to bake bread anyway. The baker had to balance the risks with the ‘life-saving’ benefits for hungry people. He didn’t tell anybody about the contamination.

Anyway, there was a hell of a to-do - many of his customers died painful, lingering deaths.

There was a happy ending however. It was all hushed up, the baker wasn’t prosecuted but was allowed to retire and was later knighted for services to the baking industry. He had been working in good faith and made his decision based on the best available evidence at the time.

After all, there were precedents.

We all hate a nonce, don’t we? If we can’t burn him ourselves then we want him shanked in prison. The lowest of the low. Sub-human creatures worthy only of fists and spittle, yeah?

So, obviously, we can take a good guess at who voted Hermione Granger 98 in FHM’s 100 Sexiest Women**.

Can’t we?

* Holier than thou, dad-with-daughters post.
** I didn’t buy it. I read about it in the latest Empire Magazine. I bought the one with a stormtrooper on the front. I like stormtroopers.

That the Daily and Sunday Mail, the vomitus of British culture, destroy lives in the name of circulation and profit is a constant of our universe. It goes without saying that, in what they produce, these newspapers are analogous in the body politic as the anus is to the body human.

I have friends who’ve worked for these papers in the past but I rather think they likened the liaison to that with a Victorian three penny whore - cheap, functional and over as quickly as possible. In other words, an ugly lesson in life never to be repeated.

Anyway, enough of the metaphor stew. Even if you don’t care about partisan hackery being used to destroy an undeserving man’s career, Simon Walters’ pointless, vindictive, adolescently prurient and unlettered attack on Owen Barder today should outrage all those with a hankering for the issues of decency and freedom of speech. It’s not the first time words have failed Walters either, if stories are to be believed. A physical as well as a rhetorical thug.

Tim Worstall has the details and a worthy rebuttal to the latest foetid depredations of a newspaper not worthy of the name. I won’t duplicate the saga here - go and read it.

Tim rightly identifies this as an issue of freedom of speech. It will be interesting to see if other right-wing bloggers do the same or drop their libertarian credentials to make a partisan point. I wonder if they’ll be screaming as loud as they did over Inigo Wilson. Some of us will be watching.

I’ll just add a personal note. I first came across Owen a little while ago when I wrote a piece about the Department for International Development and its spending on consultants. In response, Owen handed me my arse, in the nicest and most courteous fashion.

The other Sharpener writers and I invited Owen to write for the blog on the strength of his excellent writing on his own blog (now, hopefully not for too long, gone). He accepted, expressing how flattered he was that he had been asked. It was only later, when we read Owen’s massively impressive CV that we realised it was us that should have been flattered.

One more thing. When I was collating The Blog Digest last year, I asked Owen if I could include two of his posts in the book. He politely refused. I was disappointed but he explained that he was returning from his sabbatical to rejoin the civil service. This is not someone unaware or unmindful of his responsibilities as a civil servant.

Unity (twice), Jim and Alex have more.

Update: Tim and Chris:

I’m sorry to see that the Cutty Sark is on fire, and even sorrier to see that the Mail on Sunday’s offices are not.

Update updated: Oh dear. It looks like the Mail, brave souls that they are have taken the comment facility away from their tawdry dreck. How very proper.

Update updated updated: Comments are now back but none of those posted by bloggers have appeared.

Lashings of bile, ill will and hopes for a lonely demise to the utter, abject knobheads who put the MASSIVE FUCKING PLOT SPOILER for 28 Weeks Later in today’s Guardian Guide. I hope all your children have really tiny dicks. Including the girls.

If you’re planning to go and see the film and don’t want to go with a MASSIVE FUCKING PLOT SPOILER lodged in your brain, do not, I repeat DO NOT, read the Guardian Guide today.

Thanks for nothing you only-in-the-job-because-of-daddy dicks.

A fitting monument to the monumental idiocy and endemic hatred of humanity of the Blair years has been found:

Britain’s most expensive state school is being built without a playground because those running it believe that pupils should be treated like company employees and do not need unstructured play time.

The crap spewing from the mouths of those responsible makes you wonder if their colons have gone into reverse: ‘Pupils won’t need to let off steam because they will not be bored’ and ‘[Pupils] will be able to hydrate during the learning experience’.

Needless to say, this joy-killing drone factory is a flagship academy. It’s replacing three other local schools. The pupils will still have a choice though. They can decide whether not to play football, not to play British Bulldogs or not to play Chain Tig (my personal favourite - by the end of the game the kid on the end is moving at near supersonic speed). All very important in this age of children being groomed for their optimal position in the economy.

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what soulless drudgery you can do for your country.

John Reid, tosser:

‘If you will permit me to use one of my favourite quotes - in a sense not to answer your question - I think the Owl of Minerva will spread its wings only with the coming of dusk.’

Why doesn’t he just punch people and tell them to fuck off like we all know he wants to? Or would that show marginally less contempt?

Please say no.

What’s this Facebook all about then?* I only signed up because I’m vain, someone was linking to here from inside it and I couldn’t find out who it was without joining myself.

I now find I have two friends there. The estimable island-traversing Nick Barlow and rolly-smoking posho J. Clive Matthews (he’s very sweet really). Two blokes I know and like in the real world and who I could probably have pint with at almost any time if only I could be arsed dragging my sorry carcass off the settee.

Nick kindly informs me that Facebook is MySpace for grown ups. Which, no offence to Nick, fills me with that free-floating end-of-days ennui that’s doing the rounds these days. Not panic as such, just a resigned sinking-feeling that it largely really is all over for us, culturally at least.

Are our egos so damaged in the swirling mass of eschatological turds that is modern life that we fluff them with online lists of ‘friends’? Christ, at least with MySpace you run the risk of stumbling over a decent tune or two.

Facebook, however and unless I’m missing something pretty fundamental, is culturally devoid of such rare treats. It merely serves the same purpose as a pen and paper and the nagging suspicion that you’re not as popular as you think or would like to be. Dammit, you’re going to make a list to prove it ain’t so. It’s a pissing contest against yourself. Grow up.

*If someone says it’s a ‘networking’ tool, they are banned from this blog forever and I will hunt them down and bludgeon them to death with a table leg. Networking, as I’ve said before, is the hateful and misanthropic practice of pretending to like someone you don’t in order to extract from them something you want.

…Poons is hunting fascists. Just who are Navigor?

• So, Daleks have crossbred with humans, ok? They no longer have death rays and bullet-proof suits, no? Blunt instruments are in order, yeah? #

What would you think if I told you the police had accused 5,000 British citizens of a really unpleasant, despicable crime, the sort of thing where just being questioned is the kind of news that could destroy your family, career, and psyche, that some 39 of them had committed suicide as a result, but quite possibly every man-jack of them was innocent?

read the rest

‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is the seven signs of ageing,’ said Andie MacDowell.

(more…)

For Immediate Release

Recent challenges arising in the UK’s criminal justice system have prompted the Home Office to pilot a programme of community custody schemes across the country. We at Civic Comeuppance Ltd are proud to announce that we will be providing a major part of this new wave of outsourcing penal services to the private sector.

Unveiled this week, Our AdoptaCon™ scheme is inviting low income families to give up their spare rooms to the Correctional Candidates that government reformatory facilities and police station broom cupboards are currently unable to accommodate.

These new Community Warders will receive generous benefits packages, a big jangly bunch of keys and a blind eye turned to any excess of exuberance. AdoptaCon™ will issue buckets, tatty pornography and snout to all Correctional Candidates. To ensure the smooth running of the scheme, Home Office officials will not be overseeing its procedures.

Following on from the AdoptaCon™ programme will be the AdoptaNonce™ scheme. No longer will communities live in fear of the untraceable sex beasts in our midst - they will be under lock, key, and constant surveillance in our very own homes.

Powers to administer physical admonishments to these sexually differentiated Candidates will be given to Community Warders under the terms of their contracts. Specially trained AdoptaNonce™ operatives, equipped with sharpened spoons will visit once a day during ablution periods.

In the event of problems the latest panic button technology will summon the nearest neighbourhood vigilante team who are equipped with the requisite placards and incendiary devices and are on standby 24 hours a day.

Chairman of Civic Comeuppance Ltd, the recently ennobled Lord Hyde Malone, explaining the new schemes says ‘Designed to be arresting, this “experiential” approach increases reform and rehabilitation’s relevance within consumer’s lives.’

Commenting on the new initiatives, Home Secretary John Reid said, ‘My staff and I spent an entire Friday afternoon drawing up this policy. This is the opportunity for members of the community to stop moaning and take action.’

…

Notes to editors:

1. The Community Warders will be blogging their experiences at intheshowers.blogspot.com

2. A new BBC TV series about the ups and downs of life as a Community Warder, presented by Fiona Bruce and Nick Knowles, will air in the Spring.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing.)

One more reason to spit on the Murdoch press.

(Nicholas Hellen)

(via Blairwatch)

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During the Israel-Hezbollah war, Israel was accused by Human Rights Watch and numerous local and international media outlets of attacking two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances in Qana on July 23, 2006. Following these accusations, some websites claimed that the attack on the ambulances ‘never happened’ and was a Hezbollah-orchestrated ‘hoax,’ a charge picked up by conservative commentators such as Oliver North. These claims attracted renewed attention when the Australian foreign minister stated that ‘it is beyond serious dispute that this episode has all the makings of a hoax.’

In response, Human Rights Watch researchers carried out a more in-depth investigation of the Qana ambulance attacks. Our investigation involved detailed interviews with four of the six ambulance staff and the three wounded people in the ambulance, on-site visits to the Tibnine and Tyre Red Cross offices from which the ambulances originated to review their records and meet with supervisors, an examination of the ambulances that were struck, an on-site visit to the Qana site where the attack took place, and interviews with others such as international officials with the International Committee of the Red Cross who were involved in responding to the attack on the night it happened.

On the basis of this investigation, we conclude that the attack on the ambulances was not a hoax: Israeli forces attacked two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances that night in Qana, almost certainly with missiles fired from an Israeli drone flying overhead. The physical and testimonial evidence collected by Human Rights Watch disproves the allegations of a ‘hoax,’ made by persons who never visited Lebanon and had no opportunity to assess the evidence first-hand. Those claiming a hoax relied on faulty conjectures based on a limited number of photographs of one of the ambulances.

more here

This can’t be said enough when ‘embattled’ Christians/Jews/Muslims/A N Other Faith start banging on about how their religion is under threat/attack/a cloud: Isn’t your God supposed to be, like, omnipotent. If he’s as all powerful as you claim he is, won’t he be able to shrug off a few people calling Christmas ‘Winterval’ (if such persons exist)?

You know, if he’s the one true God and all that.

If you’re so sure of your facts, why worry? (’the facts are always more interesting,’ as religious rent-a-gob Ann Atkins said on Radio 4 this morning.)

Facts. If being a good Christian (in the current instance of ‘Christmas Under Attack’ faux-hysteria) is about being honest and truthful, why try to further your agenda via lies and right-wing demagoguery?

Or is this more about one’s personal vanity rather than God’s delicate sensibilities? ‘Oh, look at me ostentatiously defending my faith. Aren’t I a good Christian? Watch me spend money I haven’t got on crap I don’t need in order to honour the baby Jesus’. If that’s the case, somebody needs to go back to Sunday School.

And what the hell was Jack Straw, thinking about:

If I may speak on [the angel] Gabriel’s behalf, I’m very clear on his view for 2006. Put the tinsel in the office.

You know, I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find tinsel mentioned anywhere in Nativity story. This guy used to be Foreign Secretary and now he’s claiming to speak on behalf of an angel. Did he ask Gabriel’s advice on the eve of the Iraq war, do you think? Let’s hope not because it would put the whole notion of divine omniscience into question. That’d shake your faith rather more than a bout of fictional political correctness gone mad, wouldn’t it?

What is wrong with this country?

(The always excellent Oliver Burkeman has yet more. The poor sod deserves a medal.)

Update: Jeff Randall, on the other hand, is hysterical. And I don’t mean synonymous with ‘hilarious’. Don’t forget, he got paid for what looks like an article inspired by urban myths he found on Google. Had he been a blogger he’d probably now be considering retirement after the deluge of abuse that he would have doubtlessly received (and indeed does receive, of a fashion, in the comments under his piece - the comments agreeing with him are another matter and yet further evidence of how squalid white middle-class people are when they try to fool themselves that they are oppressed).

“We’re not going to have a war, we’re going to have the appearance of a war,” says the cynical spin doctor in David Mamet’s screenplay for the 1997 movie Wag The Dog, about an imaginary conflict created to whip up support for an ailing president. But he might equally have been talking about the 2006 war on Christmas - a war that tells us much about the growing politicisation and sense of entitlement among religious groups in Britain, but which turns out to have been almost entirely invented.

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