(This is the latest instalment in my protracted quest to give The Blog Digest away for slightly less than you can now buy it for from an Amazon affiliate. Or at least to give the jokes I sweated over for the chapter intros another run out)

Blood, Sweat and Beers – Work and Play

Life, as a great man* once said, is the name of the game, and I want to play the game with you. Did you know that in an average lifetime we spend around 25 years asleep and six months on the loo? We also spend about 20 years at work and 10 years eating. That only leaves around 15 years for the pleasures of drinking to excess, smoking, le cinéma de Bruce Willis and vigilante campaigns against paedophiles.

Let’s face it, work is a hateful activity. Anybody who says they enjoy their job is a teetotal sociopath with a threadbare social life. This chapter consists of a vicious critique of the bitter ennui that is working for a living. It’s tempered by a vibrant celebration of those priceless jewels of hope, joy and wonder snatched from the claws of the beast known as work-commute-sleep-work, along with other meditations on the human condition.

* Bruce Forsyth

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You can now get The Blog Digest for a penny. Ask them for a discount.

You can get The Blog Digest on Amazon for two or three pence. I get ten percent.

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.

Another piece from me over at Liberal Conspiracy on how, despite the government calling for more political engagement with the public, they’re not exactly making it easy for us.

(Comments off here - please chip in over there if you feel like it.)

My first post for Liberal Conspiracy is up.

(I’ve turned the comments off on this post so I don’t get two parallel discussions.)

The Blog Digest 2007: You And Me Against The World - Activism

It’s true to say that while blogging has proved the ideal inducement to people sitting on their arses, it’s also provided many incentives for people to get up off them as well. If you’ve got a cause, blogging is the perfect medium for rallying others to it.

Coupled with other online tools (Pledgebank.com, where people pledge to perform a certain action, and WriteToThem.com, which allows you to email your MP), blogging has become a real force, if not exactly for holding Authority to account, then at least for going a long way to informing it of what it is its true bosses (that is, us) are thinking and want.

Here, amongst other articles calling for awareness of important issues, we see how a cause, a blog and a little bit of good old-fashioned pluck, can bring about real results.

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I’ve got a piece about the Alisher Usmanov affair up at Index on Censorship.

The Blog Digest 2007: Confusing Power With Greatness – Politics

Those readers who aren’t fans of drama, democracy, or tales of dirty deeds done dirt cheap, should skip to the next chapter. Whoever says politics is boring deserves a wet slap, this year more than ever. To try to chronicle everything that has gone on in British politics this year would fill this volume and beyond. And being a political blogger myself, I was very tempted to try.

We’ve had the resignation of Charles Kennedy as Liberal Democrat leader and the election of Ming Campbell as his less than sparkling successor; Tessa Jowell’s moody mortgages; David Blunkett resigning (again); John Prescott visiting a billionaire businessman’s ranch to talk about cowboys but not casinos (Prescott’s sexual shenanigans are dealt with elsewhere in this book); the passing of the Identity Card legislation (I think it’s safe to say that there isn’t a single British blogger who’s in favour of that); the Tories’ ascendancy in the opinion polls despite their lack of policies; and continuing speculation about when Tony Blair might retire to the US lecture circuit. And more…

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The Blog Digest 2007: We’ve Had A Bit Of A Falling Out – War

From the smallest playground spat to intercontinental nuclear exchanges, fighting in all its ugly forms is regarded by all right-thinking people as A Very Bad Thing. Unfortunately, these days, right-thinking people aren’t allowed within 500 yards of the apparatus of power and this is where it’s got us. The last one to come close was probably Mahatma Ghandi, and look what happened to him. Somebody shot him.

Conflict is a subject with many contradictions. Glass someone in the pub and you’re a common thug; push the button on half a million* Iraqis and you’re a statesman. As the soldier says in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life: ‘I killed 15 of those buggers. Now, at home they’d hang me; here they’ll give me a fucking medal, sir.’

Here, some of Blogland’s foremost thinkers attempt to traverse the moral minefield that is Fighting Each Other, whether it be in Iraq, on the home front of the War Against Terror in London, or raking over the coals of World War II.

* At the last estimate, according to research published in The Lancet.

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The Blog Digest 2007: The Honourable Member – Sex

The beast with two backs. The mattress mambo. Touching the Void. Posting Yul Brynner first class. Where would the British be without euphemisms for the sexual act? In possession of a much more mature attitude towards sex, no doubt, but having fewer laughs along the way.

This year’s rash of political sex scandals (is that the appropriate collective noun?) heaped yet more ridicule on politics and politicians. The avid interest and disapproval aimed at those affairs by the media and the public showed us to be simultaneously – and paradoxically – both prudish and prurient.

Sex still sells big. It’s to be wondered how much envy plays a part in the voyeuristic intrusions we make into other people’s sex lives; is it that we would quite like to be doing those kind of things with our own John Thomases and Lady Janes?

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A pressie arrives in the email from the lovely Matt Buck - his cartoon that introduces the chapter on Sex in The Blog Digest.

DO NOT click here.

The Blog Digest 2007: Politics For Pretty People – Culture and Media

‘In the future,’ Andy Warhol famously said, ‘everyone will be famous for 15 minutes’. As it turns out, Warhol, the dear old over-rated charlatan, was of course wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. His 15 minutes was an average figure. The world is seething with infuriating nonentities and spectacular mediocrities who have enjoyed simply hours of unearned fame while far greater talents freeze to death on the streets of Britain every day having had not even a nanosecond of recognition. Add all those times together and divide by the number of people and you get 15 minutes. QED*.

Fortunately, The Blog Digest is seeking to redress this imbalance by featuring in this chapter only articles of culture and refinement. Big Brother and its sub-human denizens, for instance, are afforded the space and respect they deserve (that is, hardly any). Celebrity pin-cushion and alleged popstar Pete Doherty also features but only as the untalented berk he is rightly regarded as being. So pull up a chaise longue, uncork the laudanum and wallow in the best, and a little of the worst, that British culture had to offer this year.

* This theory will be proved if it takes you longer than 15 minutes to read this book.

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I never did thank all the people who bought The Blog Digest 2007. So, thank you all. I thought about having a party at some point and inviting everyone who did buy it. I know a nice little telephone box near me where we could meet. I’ll provide the bar and buffet - a couple of cans and a bag of Cheesy Wotsits should do it.

Anyway. To show the 99.999999999999999999999999 percent of people who haven’t seen the book just what great things were contained within, I thought I’d post the links to all the blog posts it collects. (If for no other reasons than I sweated blood over the ‘jokes’ in the chapter introductions and was quite pleased with one or two of them, and I’m a good little recycler.)

You can then print off the the posts, staple them together and make your own personalised Blog Digest. It’s a shame I can’t link to the excellent cartoons that Matt Buck did for the book, introducing each chapter. The one of John Prescott shagging an enormous pork pie should be in the National Gallery.

First up, coming shortly, Chapter 1: Politics for Pretty People - Culture & Media.

Hello you. I’m Justin McKeating and I’ve been fortunate enough to be writing for The Friday Thing for nearly a year. You may remember me from such conceits as the geriatric Indiana Jones or that bit about Tony Blair dreaming about being buggered by his many victims.

If I could plead your indulgence, I’d like to say a few words to mark the passing of a dear friend. I hope many of you are as upset as I am as the sun sets on TFT. For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.

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So, The Friday Thing won’t be here anymore to hold your hand through the minefield of modern life. And let’s face it, 21st Century Britain is rapidly coming to resemble one of Hieronymus Bosch’s more stomach-churning paintings.

So, in a last gift to help you through the coming months, we take a final look in the TFT crystal ball before we sell it at a car boot sale on Sunday morning. Here’s what we would have been writing about if TFT bosses hadn’t decided they’d rather spend the money on hookers and gin.

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My beloved The Friday Thing was put to sleep today. It is no more. It’s proved impossible to run in any viable manner and so the decision was made to close it.

This makes me inordinately sad and not just because I’ve been one of its writers for the last year. I feel genuinely bereft. I was a devoted reader from almost the beginning and will miss very much its freewheeling wit, cynicism and imagination.

If you’ve never read it I suggest you get across there and have a swim in the archives. I defy anyone not to get something out of TFT’s five years of consistent brilliance.

Self-referential and out of context as they may be, I’m reproducing my final TFT pieces on Chicken Yoghurt to complete the set and to prove that ‘I did that’. (You can read the rest of the stuff I wrote for it here.)

I’m very proud to have been asked to write for TFT. It’s been a personal highpoint for me and I think I’ll go along way before I feel the same pleasure and satisfaction again. I worked hard at trying to match the quality of the writing that had made me such a fan of it. I hope I came close on the odd occasion.

It’s melodramatic, I know, but a bit more fun went out of the world today. Cheer me up, somebody?

Well, it’s half time in the Iraq vs the Rest Of The World football match. For those just joining us you’ve missed some amazing action in the last four years, and although the score remains unclear at this stage both sides still have all to play for.

Eyebrows were raised early in the game over the sacking of Iraqi manager Saddam Hussein while play was ongoing. In amazing scenes, the team saw a succession of managers come and go as the match failed to go in Iraq’s favour. Garner, Bremer and Allawi were all found wanting and dismissed. Current manager Nouri al-Maliki reluctantly took up the reigns and has expressed his intention to leave the job after the game.

Our experts in the studio expressed surprise at the Rest Of The World team only fielding eight players, the thinking clearly being that an understrength side would easily beat an apparently demoralised Iraqi eleven. A big mistake which saw several own goals scored early doors. The mix of the away team is also strange. European talent is clearly lacking and the underperforming British players look certain to be substituted in the second half. Some players have also complained that their kit isn’t up to scratch with cheap boots, missing shin pads and no team physio for those players taking knocks.

Questions have also been asked about the refereeing of the match with both sides ignoring reffing decisions. Match referee Annan was controversially replaced just before half time by Ban Ki-Moon who has so far failed to stamp his authority on the game.

The Iraqi’s substitutions during the first half have seen an influx of foreign talent using some dubious tactics. The strategy by some of the Iraqi players of involving the crowd was unorthodox but worked in turning the fans against the Rest Of The World team. Offers from the Rest Of The World coaching squad to train some of the Iraqi players has been met with some scepticism. It’s widely doubted that the money is available for the grooming of new talent and whether inexperienced players will be able to make an impact.

Late in the half, Rest Of The World brought on several more attacking players in an attempt to put the game beyond the Iraqis’ reach. The home team’s attacking players responded by largely melting away but their defence is still looking pretty solid.

News just coming in says the chairman of the Rest Of The World, dissatisfied with his team’s performance, might declare them the winner at some point in the second half and take his ball home.

And with the whistle being blown for the second half, it’s back to our commentators to tell us how the game’s going - Tony and
George.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing. Go and subscribe, it’s really good.)

‘And I saw when the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the Four Beasts saying, “come and see”.’

Revelation 6:1

It’s said the great civilizations of the past didn’t disappear overnight in sudden cataclysms. Instead, they slowly and sadly declined over long years. The Roman Empire, for instance, slipped away through an embrace of decadence and lead piping in its plumbing. A lethargic and slowly lead-poisoned empire was - eventually - too tonto to survive.

And so, like standing in the calm eye of a hurricane, when standing at the centre of a slow-motion apocalypse it can be difficult to tell that anything is wrong. But the signs that we’re doomed can be seen by those who choose to look.

The first seal heralding our own slow demise was opened this week when the media went into febrile paroxysms over the significance of David Cameron’s changing hairstyle. What was the meaning behind Cameron’s switch from a parting on the right to a parting on the left? Articles that didn’t quote ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ by The Who were as rare as non-piss poor journalism.

Confirming eschatologists’ fears, the total length of column inches devoted to Cameron’s new hair was *exactly* 666 miles. Miles and miles given over to whether the shift of parting was symbolic of Cameron’s political journey. Only mere inches, however, recorded that within days Cameron had changed again to a far more symbolically apposite spiv’s greasy quiff.

Let’s be emphatic about this. David Cameron wants to be the next Prime Minister - one of the world’s most powerful men - and current opinion polls show him having a good chance. Yet the media have so little to say about him that they went to town on his haircut.

He was also given a free ride over his House of Commons speech responding to the Budget. What it lacked in anything meaningful it made up for in endless flaccid jokes about Stalin and Michael Foot, a man anybody born after 1980 has never heard of. Listening was like trying to eat a spare rib with no meat on it but smeared thick with lemon curd. Or as Lib Dem leader Ming Campell cattily put it afterwards, ‘Once again, I am struggling to match the intellectual rigour of the previous speech’.

In the Book of Revelation, when the first seal is opened, a man appears on a white horse. There has been much speculation through the ages as to the man’s identity. Is it Jesus? Is it the Antichrist? More worryingly, we have no idea whatsoever how he wears his hair.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing. Go and subscribe, it’s really good.)

‘Come in and sit down, Mr Britain,’ the doctor said sympathetically. ‘What can I do for you today?’

‘Well…’ Mr Britain began and proceeded to list his ailments.

It’s true what they say, the doctor thought as he listened, getting old is a cruel and miserable business. He had many elderly patients, but whenever one of them sadly admonished him with ‘don’t ever get old, doctor’, it would never fail to chill his heart by another degree of disquiet.

Just look at old Mr Britain, for example. He was a small, still dapper man, despite the air of a slight threadbareness about him. He’d been a prize fighter in his day, punching above his weight, and there was hardly anywhere in the world he hadn’t visited. He’d done it all. But now the trophies were long dusty and the memories sepia.

‘…and then there’s sex, doctor,’ said the old man.

‘I’m sorry?’ said the doctor, startled from his thoughts.

‘You know,’ said Mr Britain, without a hint of embarrassment. ‘Fucking.’

Here we go again, the doctor thought. The only way to deal with Mr Britain when he was in this mood was to be as equally brazen.

‘Fucking,’ replied the doctor, evenly. ‘We’ve been through this before, haven’t we, Mr Britain. You might have given that German woman a good seeing to but that was a long time ago now, wasn’t it?’

‘Well, yes…’ said the old man, his voice trailing off. He knew what was coming next.

‘The only other woman I can recall you expressing an interest in fucking was that Russian lady and the last time you mentioned her was in about 1989. And then it was all about some bizarre threesome with your American friend. I seem to recall the poor Russian woman had some kind of breakdown. Fell to pieces, you could say.’

‘But this Trident you have me on,’ said Britain, ‘it’s helped my performance up until now but I’m not sure it’s working any more. Haven’t you got anything else?’

‘Well, there is a new version in development. Mr Britain. But to be frank with you, if I were to prescribe it to you, who do you have to fuck with? And please don’t say those Middle Eastern ladies you say you’ve been chasing all over the place.’

‘Well, you never know when you might meet somebody,’ Mr Britain said hopefully.

‘I’m very sorry, Mr Britain.’ said the doctor, ‘Don’t you think your Casanova days are behind you? And you have other conditions that require more urgent treatment. What about your violent mood swings and your terrible diet?’

Mr Britain clenched his fists and closed his eyes.

Elsewhere, the sun was setting.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing. Go and subscribe, it’s really good.)

Again, on the big issues it is necessary to quote Bill Hicks and for that we make no apology. Speaking about the first Gulf War in 1992, Hicks said, ‘I was in the unenviable position of being for the war, but against the troops’.

Yes, Iraq needed to be freed from Saddam. It’s just that expecting Tony and George to make a decent fist of it was like asking Jonathan King to run a youth outreach programme. They’re all the wrong men for the job.

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Couple of reviews of The Blog Digest from February. One from Brighton’s Rocks magazine, and one from the Times Literary Supplement penned by our very own J. Clive Matthews.

It was reported on Wednesday that Gordon Brown had root canal work done without anaesthetic last week so he could give a speech afterwards - about citizenship training for immigrants - without a frozen mouth.

Keen a few months ago to parade his emotional pain over his baby daughter’s death in his bid for popularity, Gordon’s now keen to show us how much physical pain he’s willing to endure in order to make us like him.

‘Mr Brown did not flinch or grimace at any stage,’ said Mervyn Druian, the cosmetic dentist who did the drilling and who, according to his website, can help you create ‘your perfect smile’. No mention if he takes NHS patients though. Doubtless the famously financially prudent Chancellor of the Exchequer got a good deal.

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This week saw the screening of BBC3’s ‘Kill It, Cook It, Eat It‘. Over three nights an invited audience - and the viewer - witnessed the slaughter, butchery and cooking of a cow, a sheep and a pig at a real abattoir. The audience were then able to taste the meat of the animal they had just seen dispatched.

It was graphic stuff. Stuck pigs really do bleed like stuck pigs. The programmes allowed people to ‘reconnect with the source of the meat they eat’ as the earnest host, food journalist Richard Johnson, put it. That we should try to eat meat that has been humanely reared and slaughtered seems to have been the only, rather obvious, point that came out of the spectacle. A happy animal tastes better than an unhappy one and we feel better about eating it.

While the well-fed British masses agonise over their steaks, chops and fillets, in another faraway abattoir, a slaughter of a different order goes on largely unobserved. Here’s a transcript of the forthcoming ‘Kill It, Cook It, Eat It’ Iraq special.

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It was announced this week that filming of the new Indiana Jones movie will start in June. In preparation, 64 year-old Harrison Ford is spending three hours a day in the gym and eating a high protein diet. The poor bastard.

Sean Connery (76), in retirement since hating every minute of making ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ (he should have tried watching it), has said he will reprise his role as Indy’s father, Henry, if the script’s any good. It couldn’t be worse than the turd that dotted the full stop of his career as it currently stands, surely?

In an exclusive, here’s a glimpse of that finished script.

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