Radiohead

Technology is, on the whole, wonderful.  Take alarm clocks.  Once, an alarm clock was a clockwork thing with a couple of chimes and a hammer that, once a day, went off like a Haribo binging ADHD kid.

Then, advances in technology led to the alarm clock that buzzed, then beeped.

Then there was the apex of alarm clock technology, the Teasmaid.  The Teasmaid not only woke you up with a gentle buzz, but commenced boiling a little kettle at the same time, the idea being that you could have that all-important first cup of tea of the day without all the palaver of having to get out of bed.  This was liberation.  For those who sadly lacked butlers, it was a taste of what having staff was like, and for most, that tasted like PG Tips.

The next great leap sideways was the clock radio.  Instead of a bringggg, a buzz, a beep or a scalding jet of steam, you could be woken by a breakfast radio DJ, now probably safely locked up thanks to Yewtree, prattling nonsense in your ear.

Now, you can buy alarm clocks wake you by slowly increasing the level of light in the room whilst playing soothing sounds like the sea, or birdsong.  This is supposed to ease you into your day rather than provoke the natural reaction, which is to sit bolt upright screaming ‘what the fuck am I doing outdoors?’.

My alarm clock is set to Radio 4, because I like to go from peaceful sleep to enraged and in desperate need of tea as quickly as possible.

It is a habit that I am going to have to break, before I break the radio.  Radio 4 at breakfast time means the ‘Today’ programme and, frankly, I’ve reached the end of my tether with that particular show.  The presenters are so adversarial that my mental image of the studio is not some bland studio at Broadcasting House but a gladiatorial arena carpeted with blood soaked sand.

They really do seem to delight in getting their guests on, asking them a question, interrupting them, belittling them and then, just when the guest has managed to get into a full spluttering rage that promises entertainment, end the interview.  All of this before I’ve managed to wrestle myself out from under the duvet.

No more.  The internet has shown that there is a world wide web of listening choices out there.  Because that most modern of communication technologies, the internet, is revealing the true wonder and extent of that most traditional of communication technologies, radio.

Years ago, if you wanted to listen to radio from other countries, there were two ways of doing so.  You could set up a ham radio station in your shed and spend your spare time going up and down the dial, hoping that atmospheric conditions were such that a radio station in Minsk’s signal would bounce in your direction, or you could travel.

Not now.  I have an app that lets me listen to radio over the internet.  So far, so iPlayer.  But this app lets you browse by location.

Foreign radio is fucking brilliant!

By far my favourite is a Parisian station called Allouette.  Even the adverts are cool.  And DJs are so, so much more tolerable when you don’t understand a bloody word they’re saying.

But why stop there.  African radio is a hoot, as is South American.

And bloody hell, do the Americans love a bit of Christian radio.  In a way, it’s a no-brainer that Christians would have radio stations, it’s like being able to do missionary work without ever having to leave the trailer park.

And there’s so much of it.  I’ve decided.  My days of listening to grumpy old men interrupting one another are over.  No wonder the Today programme presenters are all so grumpy, they have to get up at four in the morning.  I’m going to start listening to radio from different time zones, so that when I’m getting up, I can listen to the mellow sounds of the ‘relax hour’ somewhere where it’s getting dark.  Alternatively, just listen to Radio 3, the most relaxed radio station on the planet at any hour.

Still Fast

As has been previously documented, when I lived in a shared house it was far more ‘The Young Ones’ (at least in terms of squalor) than ‘This Life’ (although fair to say I did manage to have a relationship with one of my house mates, before she worked out that beneath the façade that I had erected (yuk yuk) to try and pass myself off as a fascinating adult was somebody with the emotional dept of an Arabian puddle – all I can say is thank fuck this happened during the years Doctor Who was off our screens, or she would have drawn her own, quite correct, conclusions from the number of sonic screwdriver replicas on display in my room and the relationship would have ended with the emotional equivalent of her blinking twice when asked if everything was alright, rather than in the pleasingly traditional manner of her finding somebody with more, i.e. any, muscle tone and dumping me like nuclear waste in a national park).  There was, however, a period where we had a mix of people in the house who shared the same interests; coming home and sitting quietly in front of the telly.
In retrospect, we should all have recognised that in terms of relationships, we were never going to do any better, formed a commune, bought i) the house and ii) an enormous telly and lived out the rest of our days wearing DVT stockings.
We didn’t.  I went on to convince somebody else that I was a fully functioning adult by not revealing the extent of my comic collection, hidden at my mother’s house, or indeed my mother, also hidden there, until it was too late. As for the rest, I think they are all essentially following the example set by the actors from ‘This Life’; you never hear from them but you sort of know they are doing well.
I think the secret to our all getting on well together (two blokes, two girls and one bloke who was never, ever, there) was that we never discussed anything personal, or if we did, we only did it drunk and so everything could be denied or diplomatically forgotten the next day.
So how did we communicate?  Not, I am pleased to say, through the traditional housemate method of increasingly aggressive post-it-notes left on bedroom doors, fridges, loo handles, plates stacked awaiting washing up and so on.  Rather, it would appear, through catch phrases.
This became apparent when I watched the two part ‘Fast Show’ special this week.
When it comes to comedy, reviving a show that has been off air is usually about as effective as passing electricity through a corpse and hoping for a reproduction of the original features, and about as funny as passing electricity through a corpse and having it reanimate and start throttling bunnies.  Not so here, this was hysterical.  In being so, it was in defiance of ‘Trotter’s Law’ - that a revived show is exactly as terrible as the original was beloved.
As the familiar characters and catchphrases rolled out, I recalled not sitting in front of the telly, but standing in the kitchen holding a packet of unlucky cod announcing ‘Tonight, I shall mostly be eating…fish fingers’.  I recall the watching the climax of a particularly bitter episode of University Challenge and, as the buzzer goes for the last question, my housemate piping up ‘Sorry, I’ve just come’.  And whenever any of us encountered another when wearing a dressing gown, one, the other, or both, would simply begin ‘Me?  The thirteenth Duke of Winbourne?  Here?’ and go on to describe something utterly filthy involving penguins.
The revival was spectacular, and funny.  And most important of all (J.J. Abrams please note) it did not take a cherished memory and Yewtree it.

Climbing the scaffold

Property prices being what they are, and inertia being what it is, many are choosing, instead of moving house to get more space, to go up, up, up and convert their loft, hitherto only used for the storage of Christmas decs, porn, and the desiccated corpses of deceased family members, into an extra room.  This means that houses all around the country have been sprouting cubes of shrouded scaffold wrapped around their roofs, turning them into giant Minecraft mushrooms.

Scaffolding is an interesting trade, you turn up, you erect a framework of metal, you wrap it in plastic sheeting then, after a couple of weeks, you rock up and unwrap the sheeting like a giant Christmas present – revealing a roof more or less exactly as it was before, but now sporting a dormer window.

Scaffolding is an all-weather profession and the scaffolders in the village at the moment are in their summer plumage – tee shirts and shorts.

It’s unusual for professionals not to be health and safety obsessed.  Your average builder is head-to-toe armoured like a medieval knight, from hard-hat to steel-capped rhinoceros-hide boots, with a high-vis jacket in the middle and, probably, Kevlar knickers.  The scaffolders’ sop to safety is that their shorts are cut-off denim jeans.  The only leather they sport is their tool-belt.

Possibly their swashbuckling attitude is party a result of their profession, they swarm up their framework with the confidence of animated monkeys and the assurance of a tall ship sailor going aloft for a spot of grog and buggery in the Crows Nest (the lookout point on the ship, not the popular homosexualist pick-up bar in Portsmouth).

The only people that exceed scaffolders’ disregard for health and safety measures are, well, the public.  Specifically, anyone that doesn’t work in the building trade but has a job to do that involves hiring equipment.  Very specifically, anyone who hires a chainsaw.

And I mean a Chainsaw.  Not one of those hedge-clipper things that are one step up from a male grooming product and run on electricity, no - a chainsaw, the sort that runs of petrol.  Leaded petrol, a machine that runs on dead prehistoric trees and the remains of dinosaurs and is wielded in popular culture by men wearing checked shirts, or masks made of teenagers unwise in their choice of vacation-spot.

When the hire company hire out a chainsaw you also get the safety kit, and a lecture even more frequently ignored than the ones given at the start of airplane flights.  The safety kit involves overalls, gloves, and a helmet with a mask (Perspex, not tanned teen).  All you need is a shield, lance and charger and you could joust the tree to death if you wished. 

The trouble is that in the shop, they show you the chainsaw first. 

Now, from first seeing the chainsaw, a chaps attention span before he succumbs to images of himself plying a manly trade, honestly despoiling the environment through deforestation rather than the usual method of being too lazy to recycle, is about ninety seconds.  This is long enough to cover the basics – petrol goes in here, pull this cord here to start the saw, make sure it is pointed away from you.  It does not extend to cover the safety briefing.  While the shop guy does his best to explain the precautions and equipment required to ensure that, should the fellow ever want to take up a career as a juggler in the future, this remains an option, and the bloke’s wife is nodding along, our hero has moved on from fantasies of Sylvanian desolation and is wondering what sort of damage this surprisingly heavy bit of kit could do to, in ascending order of disturbing – fruit, a marrow, anything for the barbeque, that old shed he’s been meaning to knock down and that fucking cockerel his neighbour has acquired.

Of course, the most effective safety briefing for a hired chainsaw is the first time you fumble and it buries itself in the ground half an inch from your big toe.  A ten minute break to change into all the safety gear, and new trousers, and you’re ready for action.

Workplace of heroes

‘Netflix’ is astonishing.  Looking at the billboards across town advertising the US remake of ‘House of Cards’ you would think that Netflix is all about original (or nearly original) high-quality programming.  And it is, the US remake of ‘House of cards’ is so glossy that if it were a magazine, the ads would be so incredibly discreet that you would be left wondering if they were for mineral water of watches.  Of course, Netflix has no ads, just a monthly subscription charge.  And one of the selling points of ‘House of cards’ was that all episodes for a season were released on-line in one go.

Because original programming aside, Netfix is actually all about the binge watching.

How to describe Netflix?  Simple.  It’s like somebody driving a warehouse of box sets up to your front door.

It’s a binge bonanza and ideally suited to those with no real discipline (‘OK, just one more episode before bed’) and real patience (‘OK, apparently it only starts getting good half way through season two, but you have to watch the whole first season to really appreciate it’) and real time to indulge, or a real ability to ignore a very real need to do anything that involves going outside.

It also allows you to rediscover shows that you stopped watching because either they were on too late or you just missed them or because, at the time, you thought they were a bit shit.  Because thanks to the internet many a cancelled show has been reappraised and it turns out there wasn’t a problem with the show, but rather it was those jerks at the network who didn’t give it enough of a chance, or kept moving the timeslot and killed it off.  Also, since you’re paying for it anyway, you may as well give it a try, because the internet says I should like it and the internet is hardly ever wrong about cultural stuff.

The odd thing is, you’re more likely to dip back into something you stopped watching than you are to start watching something new.  It’s telly, it’s nostalgia, it’s instant, it’s more fun than jet-washing the patio, what more do you want?

It also let’s you determine consistent themes that appear across different shows.

A few years ago, there used to be a programme on teevee called ‘Reaper’.  It was about a seemingly ordinary bloke who worked at a huge DIY store called the ‘Work Bench’ but who turned out to be a bounty hunter for Satan, with responsibility not just for flogging automatic toilet roll dispensers or whatever, but also for dragging escaped souls back to Hell.

Then there was ‘Chuck’.  Chuck worked in an enormous electrical store called the ‘Buy More’.  Chuck wasn’t just a guy who could sell you a digital toilet roll dispenser or whatever, he was also the unwilling repository of ‘the intersect’, which sees all of the American government’s most secret secrets implanted in his head, yadda yadda yadda.

Obviously, there’s a format here.  If you want to cast an unlikely hero in an everyman occupation, it needs to be something that requires him to wear and apron and a name tag.  Buy not a hair net, as fry guy at maccydees was obviously an invitation to litigation, and so peon at huge store was the occupation of choice.

That much makes sense, as it would explain why there is never anybody around in the fucking timber section at my local DIYosausous to help you out when you need something cut to size, that size being short enough to fit lengthwise in your car so that you don’t have to transport a fencepost home vertically, which can result in your driving under some low electric cables and transforming your car into an enormous, impromptu, spontaneous dodgem, or under a bridge, transforming it into an impromptu convertible.

So far, so sustainable.  What doesn’t ring true is that in both cases, insanely hot, but also charming, women work with our heroes.  In the Reaper’s case, in the store and in Chuck’s case, at the sausage shack next door, in the same retail park.

Now, I am the last person to make personal comments about the sort of people who work at B&Q/Homebase/Retail Park ‘Restaurants’, but if pressed, I’d remark that in terms of looks I think you’re less likely to think ‘hottie’ and more likely to think ‘somewhere, there’s a bridge unattended with goats just skipping on over it’.

‘Reaper’ actually makes quite a decent fist of locating their extraordinary Joe in such a mundane location and to be honest, the lovable misfits goofing around in the store is a lot more enjoyable than the segments when he is forced to do battle with budget CGI effects.  ‘Chuck’ is more of a straightforward spy thriller but you get the sense that the fan base for both of these shows were the sort of men who have a job involving a name badge.  No doubt knowledge of this demographic emerging had something to do with no season three onwards being available for either series.

Village Life - the Charter Fair

Wooly decorations adorning the village on Charter Market day.

Many years ago, so long ago in fact that it was before the world was in black and white, possibly as far back as when the world was woodcut-coloured (predominantly black and white, but with the occasional full page of dazzling colour, with a giant letter somewhere in the landscape), some bloke with probably a beard and almost certainly a crown granted the village it's charter.
A charter for a village back in Ye Olde Days was a very big thing, as it was all about status.  The village went from being a collection of shacks at a muddy crossroads with a tavern where weary travellers could be waylaid and their bodies conveniently disposed of in the parsnip fields, to being a collection of shacks at a muddy crossroads with a tavern and a town hall, where decisions like taxing travellers could be taken, meaning you got to take money off them on a regular basis.  It didn't matter that the tavern had a hygiene rating of no stars, this was an age when everything had a hygiene rating of no stars.
Having a charter meant status, the ability to legally burn witches and, depending which way the ecclesiastical breeze was blowing, Catholics or Protestants and, most important of all, having something over on those bastards from the next 'village' along, which was just a collection of shacks at a muddy cross roads with a tavern.  Ha, losers.
Village rivalry a few hundred years ago was settled with the occasional pitched battle (well, 'battle' may be exaggerating things slightly, as it probably consisted of a couple of dozen peasants with assorted clubs).  Then it became all about who had the most peasants left standing after the plague hit town, then who had the biggest church, and so on.  There was a brief return to basics when, in the heyday of football hooliganism, things were settled once again by a battle, this time on the pitch.  In these much more civilised times, rivalries are settled by where beats where in the regional heat of 'Britain in Bloom', which is not to say that local pride does not occasionally result in action being taken in the dead of night with step-ladders and weed-killer resulting in mysterious blight in the neighbouring village's hanging baskets.
Local pride is very much alive and well in the village.  This was clearly exhibited a few years ago when the Post Office, in a misguided move, decided to give the village the same postal address as the nearest town.  The villagers sprang into action; sod 'Save our hospital', this was 'Save our house values'.  The villagers fought long and hard and eventually decided simply to ignore the Post Office, who subsequently also decided to ignore their own advice.  Honour was satisfied.
The crowning glory though was a couple of years ago when a Little Waitrose opened in the village.  Forget having the biggest church, and forget that the village already had an independent butcher, green grocers and bakery, this meant free coffee.  Yes, you heard, free coffee.
So villagers are proud of their village, and fiercely protective of it, including being protective of the charter that gives it it's status.
One of the requirements of the charter is that the village should have an annual charter market.  Back in the middle ages this would no doubt have been quite special, featuring tradesmen selling ribbons, hog roasts and possibly even a witch burning.  Today, it's still a big deal, and rather special in that as well as tradesmen, local people can have their own stalls, in their own front gardens.  It's like a cross between the biggest yard sale ever and the reaction to the council advising that for one day only they will come and pick up all the old crap you've been meaning to take to the dump for years.  Attics and garages are plundered and hugely optimistic price tags are attached to one-step-from-landfill items.
If nothing else, it provides a valuable insight into the mentality of your neighbours, especially the ones that think there's a market for VHS tapes, even one marked 'Derek & Anthea's Sex Tape', and included by mistake.

'Chatsworth House'

Ah, the internet.  It has given people such an opportunity to express themselves, and not just through posting porny selfies or demonstrating their mad skillz creating cute costumes for their cats then posting pictures of pets dressed as former Communist party leaders and captioning them ‘Chairman Meow’. 
Occasionally though one finds a fine example of that dry English wit that typifies the nation in the most unexpected of places, and just has to be celebrated.
I have recently taken possession of a fish pond.  No problem, I know what to do with fish ponds, you fill them in and plant barbeques on them.  However, a quick consultation with the Internets reveals that this is ‘likely to cause distress’ to the resident fish.
Putting fish up for adoption is also trickier than it first appears.  The traditional way of disposing of fish, by setting up a bent funfair stall that requires the average punter to spend roughly the cost of a Koi before winning a fish in a bag, is now frowned upon.  One solution is to give the fish to pet stores for ‘rehoming’, although when you read on you discover that they can end up being rehomed in the digestive tracts of other pet shop residents, which I sure as hell hope means other pets rather than Crazy Phil behind the counter.
Accordingly, I have to take care of them before I work out what to do with them. 
Step one, food.  No problem, the local hardware store sells what appears to be vastly overpriced confetti that the fish seem to enjoy.
Step two, oxygenating the pond.  Did you know that fish need oxygen?  Strange, given their choice of environment.  But as it would appear the fish are not going to make a great evolutionary leap any time soon, the oxygen has to be introduced to the water.  This is done by splashing the surface of water surface.  Thankfully, the English weather has managed to do this on a grand scale recently by the simple means of rainfall by the budketload.  The Internets also recommends a wee fountain.  (That is, a small fountain rather than one styled along the lines of Brussels’s most famous spurty splashing feature).
Ever the optimist, I reckon a solar powered one is the best interim fix and hop on B&Q’s web site to see if they sell them.  They do, so check the comments section.
And there it is.  A five star review in every sense that explains the product is, essentially, a little fountain that spurts a three inch jet when the sun is out.  However, it’s the opening sentence that steals the show, encapsulating in five words the aprirational essence of the back garden water feature, the mentality of the gardener and the self-effacing humour that typifies the English condition. 
The review begins…’It’s not exactly Chatsworth House’.
Genius.

Eurovision 2014

Every year so fresh, every year a new and exciting opportunity to hear ‘bingly-bingly bong’ expressed in a variety of languages.  Every year more opportunity than last year to hear a new language as, things in Europe being what they are, formally happy countries are becoming new, bloody miserable, countries with their own currency, national costume (the flared pantaloon) and language (just like last year’s national language, but with a lot more gargling at the back of the throat).

In a changing world, it’s quite lovely that there are some constants.

Such as the many stock components to Eurovision, without which, it wouldn’t be Eurovision. 

There is the host venue for instance.  It used to be that the competition would be hosted in a prestigious established national musical venue, but that’s before all those Eastern European countries that are intolerant of gays started winning, and so now the venue is likely to be a former industrial site, like a cement factory, abattoir, or prostitute training school, so all the homosexualists the event attracts are already outside the city walls by sunset anyway and nobody has to fret about their goat being fucked by anybody outside the family.  Whatever the venue, some neon and dry ice and it looks exactly like where they film the ‘X Factor’, which I think is a suburb of Hell.

There are the hosts.  Anyone from a foreign country who can speak English reasonably well has either become a banker in London, married a footballer, become an action hero in Hollywood or is working hard on their second Michelin star by doing interesting things with goats.  That’s why the people left hosting the programme sound like their day job is dubbing porn, and look like the only job they could get in porn is dubbing.

There are the acts. 

There are four types. 

The first is, essentially, ethnic Euro.  This is ooompah to a disco beat and it’s only half way through ‘Ein Jolt’ (‘My Goat’) that you realise that this not irony, but a representation of the cultural output of a country that, by the twisted rules of broadcasting, considers itself to be ‘European’. 

The second is the type that has a pleasingly bingly-bongy tune, a bloke singing, and either backing singers or dancers that make the males in the home audience go very quiet. 

The third is the trier.  Typically a ballad, this will normally be a woman in a floaty dress, normally in a lot of dry ice, occasionally with a bloke on a stool in the background strumming a guitar or, if they followed the last act, himself.

Finally there’s the novelty act.  Trampolines can be a feature of this, as can national costume (anywhere East of Paris and national costume is all the same, pantaloons and a hat).  This is the winning act.

There is the definition of ‘European’.  Hello, is that the Kremlin?  Yes, well, according to Eurovision you are part of Europe, and hence part of a larger whole, ruled from Britain (with some help from Germany), so start behaving like a proper European, that is, don’t invade countries, but do by all means buy as much of their goat’s cheese as possible.

There is the Eurovision viewer.  There are two types.  The sort that watch the entire show, possibly making a party of it, either by having an actual party with friends in costume and so on, or by adopting the much more sensible measure of sitting there with a telly, a wine box and a smart ‘phone and txting their thoughts to their friends, all the while occasionally flicking up the channels to that ‘Morse’ they can’t recall if they have seen or not.  Then they get a bit intense and bitter when the voting starts and the camera shows the various camps backstage and the British entry starts the evening bubbly and ends blubbing.

Or the politician.  Miss the acts, sit down in front of the telly for the voting, and probably get a greater understanding European politics than you will from any number of newspaper pundits.

And of course, next year, the possibility of a Scottish entry, with bagpipes.  So, Eurovision 2016 from Leith?

Didn't they do 'whiter shade of pale'?

What, the actual, fuck.
Occasionally Twitter makes up for the fact that it is essentially a social media site dedicated to allowing people who rely on others for validation to broadcast their every thought without reason (‘just snorted cereal thru my nose, LOL’).  The story of the kidnap of 200 schoolgirls had made a footnote in the mainstream media but had been a constant presence on Twitter since the atrocity was first reported, my favourite comment being ‘If this had happened anywhere else, the entire country would be in lockdown’.
It’s true.  Can you imagine what would happen if 200 schoolgirls were kidnapped here?  Every single adult would get up, get their coat, grab a torch and, as the mood took them, a shotgun or cricket bat, and get out there, probably only to meet every single police officer in the country going door to door with dogs and tasers.
However, mainstream media doesn’t much go for foreign reporting.  It’s expensive and in countries like Nigeria it’s hard to establish facts to a deadline or find enough informed speculation to fill a cycle of rolling news.  This is especially the case where there are no westerners involved.  Far better to hope the French correspondent from AP sobers up in time to file some copy and, with that and Wikipedia and a bloke from some East Anglian poly specialising in ‘African studies’, get a solid two minutes for the ten o’clock bulletin.
All that changed when a video from an arsehole in a bobble hat turned up.
Back to the bobble hat in a moment but first a public service announcement:  If you are the sort of utter detestable arsehole who believes that children shouldn’t be educated, then you of course have the right to keep that belief to yourself and never, ever do anything about it, you despicable turd.  If you manage to hook up with some like minded people, no doubt when you were cruising for porn on the internet and accessed a chat-room ‘for research’, that’s when the problems start.  Things usually come to a head when you find yourself in a Toyota dealership haggling for a fleet of Land Cruisers.
And what the fuck is it with arseholes and Land Cruisers?  Now, I like pick-up trucks. The best example I saw was in Aspen where a guy pulled into a gas station and there was one inch of snow and two over-excited dogs in the back.
All good pick-up trucks should be well-loved and come with dogs in the back.  Land Cruisers, it would appear, come with arseholes in military fatigues, and fucking flip-flops, hanging out the back all holding AK47s and looking for trouble.  Rednecks who murder hikers at the weekend are worried that Land Cruisers are giving pick-up owners a bad reputation.
Back to the bobble hat. (Obviously, there was a sigh of relief round the boardroom table when the BBC found out that a tosser in novelty knitware appearing on telly was not yet another disgraced former teevee presenter).
Some kidnapping arsehole has recorded a video where he claims responsibility for kidnapping children and announcing that he is going to sell them.  Lovely.  Putting aside the obvious monstrous evil and the desire for that video to end with a whistling sound before it cuts to black and then to another angle of the same scene, this one from above, in different shades of green with a fucking crosshairs in the middle and a top-down view of a bobble hat getting bigger and bigger, did anyone else think the guy was odd?
I don’t know much about doing a piece to camera but I do know that, ever since the craze for ‘Chatroulette’ passed, you don’t repeatedly touch yourself while talking to your audience.  The guy starts by, no other way to put this, plucking at his trousers and then pulling on the bobble of his bobble hat.
Usually when you see such behaviour, it’s being exhibited by a toddler and is rectified by a percussive slap around the legs from the kid’s mother.  One rather wishes that somebody was there to sort out bobble-guy, with a cricket bat, dipped in shit, on fire.
Now, I am not one to judge the mental state of the sort of arsehole who kidnaps children, but I would say that any adult who plucks their bobble hat repeatedly is, accordingly Wikipedia, a FUCKING NUTTER.
In the meantime, the whole world is united in praying for the safe return of the children and the continuation of education of our children in the hope of a better tomorrow.  In the meantime, maybe the mainstream media had better start looking over its shoulder, because hashtags have started to replace headlines.

Top Clarkson

Jeremy Clarkson is in trouble again.  The teevee presenter is no stranger to controversy, fronting a show about motor cars and appearing to hold views as dated as his wardrobe, he has in the past offended hand-knitted environmentalists by brutalising shrubs and so on, offended lorry-drivers by implying that their profession is synonymous with murdering prostitutes and offending, well, just about everyone really, by having Christmas lunch with David Cameron and Rebekka Brooks.
There is no doubting his success and his popularity.  ‘Top Gear’, a show that used to be about reviewing hatchbacks but has morphed into event television that sees portly middle aged men taking on car-themed races across countries and feature-length adventures on other continents strewn with spontaneous hilarious incidents based on the lads hapless lack of understanding of their environment, and which is the BBC’s biggest export.  That’s right, it’s not ‘Newsnight’ that gets flogged around the world, it’s ‘Top Gear’.
Clarkson is also a successful author.  Which is not to say that he writes surprisingly touching novels about life in a home for single mums in turn-of-the-Century Macclesfield under the pen name Delores Whitter, but rather his ‘newspaper’ columns are collected into paperbacks, launched onto the market in time for Christmas, and sell in the sort of numbers that make Martin Amis start each writing day looking in the mirror mumbling ‘must…be…funnier’ for five minutes before wandering out to the pool of his house in LA and dictating the next chapter of his new novel about life in London.
If you are a successful cash cow, you are allowed license.  Especially if the controversy gets you publicity and only annoys a minority that would never watch you show, or buy your books, or DVDs, anyway.
However, if you are successful enough for long enough you will end up pissing people off and one day there will come a point where you’ve pissed enough people off to turn an incident into a media event.
Footage was released of Clarkson apparently n-bombing.
The way this was covered in the media was telling.  Normally, the BBC crucify their own presenters when they screw up but for once, the Corporation was balanced.  I suspect this was not so much out of deference for the presenter of a flagship programme, but rather because so many former BBC presenters are currently behind bars, awaiting sentencing or under investigation that unless the next show you are likely to appear in is the prison panto, it’s hardly headline stuff.
Over at Sky news however, it was a different story.  Sky managed to demonstrate just how much they hated and envied the BBC in general and Top Gear in particular by presenting the story using a ‘lap times’ board similar to the one used in Top Gear, but with Clarkson’s gaffes rated instead of lap times from various cars the viewers will never be able to afford.  I’m not sure if television programmes can actually stalk one another, but I would not be at all surprised if the Sky presenter in question has a mock up of the Top Gear studio in her attic and gets her friends round to play at presenting a successful telly show.
Sky so obviously wanted Clarkson humiliated and off the BBC that you could taste it.  That way, when they give him his own show (any format you want Jeremy) in six months, they can do so at half the value of his so-enormous-you-can-see-it-from-space BBC salary.
What was interesting was Clarkson’s column in the Sun.  He actually is a funny writer, even under, or maybe because of, pressure.  He also revealed that the BBC have a list of ‘forbidden’ words that it’s probably best not to blurt out on air.  Apparently the ‘n’ word is fourth on the list, making one wonder what the hell the top three are, and whether or not anyone will ever manage to get all ten into The Afternoon Play on Radio 4.
The secret of Top Gear’s success by the way?  They review a £150k supercar and conclude that it’s shit, meaning the viewer can turn off safe in the knowledge that they made the right choice with their Astra.