In Praise of the Printed Page, Magazines

Because of the relatively cheap costs of printing and the ubiquity of decent editing software, there is now more or less a magazine for every interest however obscure, more than that, there is a plurality of magazines for obscure interests that have never been on offer before.

And I’m not talking about weird sexual stuff either.  Well, mainly not.  I’m talking about stuff like traction engines.  Now, I love traction engines, you love traction engines, everyone loves traction engines, except those stuck behind one on the road on the way to or from a steam rally, or somebody who wears loose clothing around one.  But until recently, there was only one traction engine magazine, and you had to get that mail order.  Essentially, people who built their own sex dungeons or had to get their hot tubs professionally sterilised after parties at their place were better catered for when it came to magazines covering their interests than the sort of people who enjoyed mechanised threshing in an outdoor setting.

No doubt there have been cases where a magazine has become magazines because of editorial disputes, and God knows that the world of hobbycraft can be a divisive one, one need only consider the Great Quilting Feud of ’06 and the Homebrew Wars of ’82 to ’87 to know that that’s true, but what the printing revolution has meant is that if somebody on the editorial board of doll collecting monthly does not like the direction that the publication is going in, with recent decisions not to exclusively cover dolls which are really creepy and are collected by adults that should be on some sort of watch list, then they can start up their own publication to cater for the creepy doll collector market.  Niche indeed.

G&P eulogises on a regular basis about fanzines, the privately produced publications of the 80s that were usually mail order and usually just one step up from a John Bull printing set or indeed a potato when it came to printing sophistication.  Now of course the internet allows lots of people with similar interests to get together and share hot tub cleaning tips and so on, but there’s nothing like a magazine to give a hobby legitimacy, and people love to read them.

I think a lot of it is fantasy.  I used to read ‘Canal and Riverboat’ because I like canal boats and can tolerate river boats.  Why not ‘Waterways World’?  Because that publication was a bit too racy for me.  I will never own a canal boat and indeed in reality have no real desire to own a canal boat.  But I like to read about them.  Which is bloody odd when you think about it, why would somebody who fantasises about owning a boat not buy ‘Superyacht Monthly’?  I stand about as much chance of ever owning a yacht with a helicopter landing pad on it as I do owning the sort of thing Rosie and Jim would live on.

I think that most magazines cater for the specialist mundane.  There are many magazines about modelling, not the top shelf kind, the scale kind.  There are magazines about all sorts of hobbies.  There are probably nearly as many magazines about knitting as there are about music.

And all of this while the internet offers endless free information about all sorts of hobbies.

Hobby magazines are supremely successful for a couple of reasons.  The first is that they address their congregation, they are produced for an enthusiastic and knowledgeable tribe who greatly enjoy learning obscure stuff about something they love.

The other reason is that a printed magazine about a subject lends that subject legitimacy.  This is the ultimate triumph of the printed word.  Anyone with the means can epublish, but getting something on a shelf requires talent and effort and is the result of hard work leading to success.

That’s why when browsing for magazines, I usually walk past the endless lifestyle mags all trying to look different and all looking the same, with a matte cover and understated font, and pick up something with a glossy front cover that has a colourful photograph of somebody looking truly ecstatic on a tractor.

In Praise of the Printed Page, Newspapers

Newspapers, it is reported on teevee, on the wireless and online, are in decline.

Newspapers have been in decline for years, in terms of quality there has been a shift from journalism to comment.  Newspapers had something of a reputation of never letting the facts get in the way of a story, but now it is a case of never letting any facts get in the way of an opinion.  Comment used to be serious writers writing about what they knew, then moved to essentially being blogs that somebody could be bothered to print out, and are now repackaged extended tweets.

There has also been a decline in quantity, declining budgets, declining circulation.  Most importantly of all, a decline in the size of the newspapers themselves.

Broadsheets used to have gravitas.  Sure, they didn’t always print the truth, and maybe the facts weren’t always right, and there may have been libels and damaging speculation, but the page was fifty inches wide and who can argue with a headline that is rendered in Time New Roman 400 point?  No matter what it says.

The introduction of the tabloid newspaper heralded a new age, with the printed page becoming more accessible to the working man, who wanted to read the news in a way that spoke to him in his own language, about issues that mattered to him, and had a picture of a dolly bird with her top off.  Serious journalism still mattered in the tabloids, yes, there were pictures of topless women, but you got their name, age and learned that they enjoyed pottery in their spare time.  Gone now is such journalistic rigor with some hack just getting their ‘facts’ about Jane, 21 from Stevenage off Wikipedia.

From boardsheet to tabloid to mobile telephone screen, the news has gotten smaller.  Which is a shame, because issues like environmental problems, economic crisis and challenges to our security and democracy remain as big as ever.

There is, still, arguably, a place for newspapers in our culture.  That place is on line.

Kidding.  There is something about an actual physical newspaper that remains important.  What exactly that is, I’m not entirely sure, I think it has something to do with the crossword and other puzzles but I’m sure it must be important to all those who read the ‘Metro’, a newspaper that is given away for free at train stations and, on examination of the content, can be described as ‘overpriced’.

The Metro is owned by a rich proprietor.  This at least is a tradition that has endured in the newspaper industry when others have not.  If you are a normal human being with forthright views that you think others should know, you set up a blog that nobody reads.  If you have immense wealth and want to influence society, you either train your private army in an undersea volcano base, or buy a newspaper and exert subtle influence over first the editorial policy and then in turn over the population.  Remember, it’s not fake news if it’s your news, and if you are reporting what people want to know, where’s the harm, even if the news you print is not in total alignment with the facts?

The weekend though is when newspapers come into their own.  That’s when the majority of the newspaper can be given over to sections that are not already out of date by the time they are printed, like teevee listings.  It’s also the time when the review sections are published, and authors who had their last novel trashed by a reviewer can exact terrible revenge by describing the new work of their nemesis as ‘insipid’.  The same review can be recycled, not unlike the newspaper’s destiny, in the restaurant section where any restaurant in the whole of London can expect a dull rave review or a terribly witty crap one.  Places to eat outside London may be found in the supplement about rural gastropubs.

I gave up on reading the weekend newspaper some time ago, when it became like the opposite of a guided meditation.  The weekend is too short for fits of rage, except when reading the Telegraph, when it’s a perfectly normal, healthy reaction.

Showing results for 'Racist Arsehole'

Permanent petulant Li’ll Donnie has been sheeting* again.

This time, the subject of his ill-considered emission is Google, specifically how, when you search for news, a lot of the results are critical of the ‘policies’ of the subject doing the Googling.

If that is indeed the case, and it may well be for reasons so obvious they can be understood by moss then it is, at least on one level, surprising.

Surprising because over years the internet has moved from being the place where you could go for almost limitless knowledge, and limitless opinion, to the place that you go to for almost limitless knowledge, almost limitless ignorance, and a hell of a lot of opinions that align with your own.

No doubt it is the inevitable result of more and more stuff being put on the internet, so the chances of coming across a comforting endorsement of your own views, however niche those views might be and even if the allied opinion is expressed in the comments section of a teen’s instagrammed selfie, is moderately certain.  Alternatively, you could just go the media outlet or nutcase conspiracy website of your choice to have your vile (Daily Mail) or smug (Guardian) views endorsed.

Ah, for the days when the internet was the home of chatrooms and bulletin boards that were wee digital salons where great matters were discussed.  Yes, I am talking about the debate about who the greatest Star trek captain was+.  Again.

Apparently, when li’ll Donnie Googles presumably himself, he is confronted with negative news stories.

This is probably because it is difficult to be objective, and positive, about Li’ll Donnie.

It should come as no surprise to anyone but a tan-addled buffoon that the internet tends to be negative about authority figures.  And it does not matter who they are or what they have done (obvious honourable exception is Nelson Mandala).  Look at Aung San Suu Kyi, somebody who is not enjoying a whole lot of positive press at the moment, and she’s got a Nobel peace prize (details correct at time of publishing).  Even if you fade from politics and try and rehabilitate yourself, you are still fair game.  In 1997 Michael Portillo exited politics in a ‘where were you when Portillo went?’ teevee moment that was as shocking as it was hysterical.  Everyone viewing reached for their dictionary to look up if ‘hubris’ meant what they thought it meant.  Since then, he has made a series of steam-porn documentaries for the BBC where he affably wanders round Britain, guided by a guide book decades out of date.  Now he is mocked merely for his choice of attire, rather than repulsive views and making life difficult for millions when in power.

Former PM David Cameron is very much not rehabilitated.  Never mind gurning selfies from festivals, the bloke could post pictures of a UK wide tour of him in an ice-cream van dolling out free lollies to the kiddies, and the reaction would probably be that he is either a peado or, worse, is actively contributing to childhood obesity levels.

It’s doubtful, of course, that Li’ll Donnie even knows what an algorithm is or how one might be applied to sifting and sorting results for news searches.  It’s doubtful that he has an understanding that his action of putting children in cages, like the fucking Child Catcher, is likely to inspire at least mild criticism.  It’s doubtful that he understands anything that can’t be expressed on the front of a baseball hat.  He probably doesn’t know how to click past page one of Google results.

He certainly has yet to learn that you never, ever, Google your own name.  the best result is that you will find that there is somebody with your name who is more famous than you, obviously, and will probably be younger, richer and less tubby than you.  Worst case is that you, your actual self, are somewhere at the top of that first page, because that means that you have done something to attract the attention of a third party on the internet and, unless you are Nelson Mandela or James T. Kirk, the results are not going to be favourable.

* ‘Sheeting’ is a hybrid term that I’ve invented that I’m hoping will be, if not word of the year 2019, then at least accepted by some sort of urban dictionary with really, really low standards.  It’s a mash-up of ‘Shit’ and ‘Tweeting’ and describes the process of making an ignorant statement on Twitter.  In short, the digital equivalent of talking out of your arse.  For instance ‘I see Linaker’s been sheeting about a top four finish for Man U this season’.

+ Kirk.  Obvs.

The war on fake news

As usual about this time of year, I am sitting in a hotel room, thinking that this must be very much what it is like to be a foreign correspondent in general and a war correspondent in particular.  Except of course it’s not.  The hotel room is in central London and so unless I have undergone an unexpected and unnoticed transformation of nationality, I’m not a foreign correspondent.  Having said that, English does appear to be the minority language here in the hotel, a consequence of the continued popularity of London as a tourist destination, a weak pound making it even more popular and lots of worried Europeans getting in a visit while they can before a fucking huge fence goes up all round Britain, or something.  But as has been stated before on this blog, there is something about staying in a hotel room and having a laptop open on the desk that suggests something of the war correspondent.

Previously, I was in the happy position of exaggerating the foreignness of places when the most exotic thing about them was that they had not one but two Chinese take aways.  I was also in the happy position of inventing the ‘war’ element of the correspondent bit.  And actually, as anyone who has read this post this far will know, inventing the ‘correspondent’ element too.  Sadly, this is no longer true.

Of what war do I speak?  Certainly, the next few hundred or few thousand words could be about the war on terror, a war where the front line is on our streets, or actually on our high street.  Various nutters with pokey things have made right nuisances of themselves in 2017, but they don’t really deserve a mention here.  If you want one defining image of the war on terror, it’s that bloke fleeing from the attack at Borough market, still holding his pint.  When the little fuckers roll up in a tank, we might put our drinks down.  Until then, cheers!

Nor is it the war that is being fought over inappropriate touching, usually by celebrities, occasionally of people who wish to become celebrities.  This is not a war as such, merely a continuation of the battle of the sexes, which appears to have somewhat hotted up again.  The view from the G&P trenches (not, you will note, the view from the feminine equivalent, which I guess would be ‘Lady and Spectator’ or ‘Lady and Person Responsible For Cakes’ or something) is that that bastard Wienerstiener has ruined it for all of us.  Basically, if I call somebody ‘Love’ in the office, I’m fucked.  Not that I ever would.  I call everyone ‘chaps’.  ‘Chaps’ is a gender neutral form of address.  In all my tears of using it, I only ever had one person comment that one of those addressed was a woman, or a chappess.  The person complaining was not the lady in question, because she was a bloody good chap and would not do that sort of thing.  No, it was, I stringly suspect, the same person who complained when I brought doughnuts into the office for a treat that I had neglected to provide a fruit alternative.  FFS.

The war in question is the war on fake news, or as Fox News calls it, ‘news’.

London is, of course, the home of the BBC, a corporation with correspondents both foreign and domestic, both war and peace.  The BBC is funded not, as you might imagine, by flogging episodes of ‘Top Gear’ to China and a TARDISload of ‘Doctor Who’ merchandise, but through the license fee, which everyone is happy to pay even if the BBC only ever broadcast ‘Blue Planet II’.  That alone would be worth it and you won’t find anyone that will contradict that because nobody wants to look like an idiot in public.  Recent voting patters demonstrate that people are happy to be idiots in the privacy of a booth, but in public, unwise social media posts aside, it’s a different matter.

Because everyone pays their license fee, two mind-sets simultaneously evolve.  They can be held by the same person at the same time.  The first is that evey license fee payer feels that they have the right to criticise any aspect of the BBC.  The second is that when anyone who does not pay a license fee tries to criticise the BBC, they defend it like Horatio defends a bridge.

Case in point.  The BBC loves to cover extreme weather events by sending presenters with usually immaculate hair and make up to report live from the scene.  This usually involves wellies but it’s not unusual to see a BBC presenter in a North Face parka, screaming into a microphone held to their lips, trying to make themselves heard over the screaming wind that is driving the rain into their face.  So essentially you have a BBC reporter doing their bit from where was until yesterday a busy high street, but is now the Little Puddling Water Recreation Centre.

Then you have one of those masochistic BBC programmes where the viewer gets to make their point, usually that a presenter has been too rude, or too Tory, or too Leftie, or too female, or too black.  And the complaint in question, that the BBC reporter was giving advertising to a particular brand of anorak.

Now, the benefit of this sort of attitude is that there is no other broadcaster of news, in the world, with such rigorous oversight.

Which is why fake news does not happen on the BBC.

Admittedly, some of the correspondents and editors can give an opinion on something that is about as palatable as a Bush Tucker Trial, but that’s part of the fun and it all balances out.

The problem now is that the BBC is reporting on certain individuals, naming no names, who lie, and because the BBC has a duty to report, those lies get broadcast.  It’s like retweeting fake news.

And that’s the soft end.  The hard end is the truly terrifying boiler rooms in malign states that are pumping out fake news clickbait.

By the way, I can assure you that G&P is not written in a vast warehouse just outside of Minsk.  If it was, it would be so much more better writtener.

Every screen is the front line in the war on fake news.  And right now, I’m not sure who is winning.  Certainly, fake news has gained considerable ground.  It used to be that fake news was confined to the playground and the pub.  Not any more.  Thanks to malicious minds taking the innocent internet, that used to be used for such lofty pursuits as porn and bickering about Star Trek, and using it to drip poison into the ear of Joe Public, fake news is a Key Opinion Influencer.

Maybe though things will change.  Fake news is getting easier to identify.  Everyone should have the fake news equivalent of one of those aircraft spotter posters showing the silhouette of enemy aeroplanes, except that they would show the signature shapes of fake news, such as ‘anything that you really want to believe is true, probably isn’t’, or a picture of a fox.

And those that peddle fake news need to be identified too.  It’s a pity that the entire established media hate Facebook because they fear it so, and also a pity that facebook does appear to be a home for fake news.  But so what, who cares?  The Internet is the wild fucking west, there are no rules.  And really, what sort of person believes something they read on Facebook.  Unless it’s about kittles.

Trusted sources, that’s what it’s all about.  Like the BBC.  Never knowingly fake.

Finally, a note on the hotel.  It’s in the centre of London which is a big area I admit, as any area connected to the tube might make that claim, but this really is, there are more busses and cabs than cars.  The hotel is discreet but posh, and judging by the fluffyness of the towels is luxurious.  My room is on the first floor, meaning that the window, with views of a typically cosmopolitan London street, is a few fee above the windows of the top deck of the busses that stop outside at the lights.  Nobody has waved yet.  The bar looks like the sort of place a foreign correspondent might frequent in that it sells cocktails, which is hard liquor mixed with more hard liquor or, if you’re a lady, some fruit.  There was also what appeared to be a fashion shoot going on.  Rude to stare.

Brexiteers would loath this place.  It’s full of foreigners, coming over here, boosting our economy.  And that’s just the staff.

No funny. At all.

The coverage of the tragic school shooting in Conneticut, combined with the ongoing coverage of the suicide of the mother and nurse who was the victim of a ‘prank’ call by two tossers who ‘worked’ for an Australian radio station, makes watching the news or reading a paper a fairly depressing activity at the moment.  Essentially, if Angela Merkel pops up and you think ‘thank Christ!’, you know things are grim.

What’s striking about the tossers who made the ‘prank’ call is just how mind-boggingly insensitive they truly are.  When they gave a press conference, their first public appearance following their actions that had led to a woman taking her own life, they talked of how ‘shattered’ they felt.

Let’s be quite clear here, nobody cares how you feel.  Nobody.  After you have driven a woman to her death, you do not go on national telly and talk about how it has affected you.  You go on telly, and you say ‘I am sorry’.  You say that and only that and you keep on saying that until the camera crew have packed up their lights and gear and shit and have left the room, left the building.

Following the death of Jacintha Saldanha (charmingly described as ‘Kate nurse’ in the media) the tossers who made the ‘prank’ call had to take down their Twitter accounts.  This is probably because being self-absorbed media wankers (question, does working for a radio station in Australia qualify as being a job in the media?) check their Twitter accounts before they take their morning dump, although sitting on the loo is probably a great place to discover that everyone in the world wants to kill you.

There have been a few protestations that the level of abuse heaped upon the tossers was out of proportion, but I’m not so sure.  First of all, it’s not like anyone has actually seriously made any sort of death threat against them, knowing the internet community, it’s more likely that people have been tweeting that the pair should meet an unpleasant fate in an unlikely fashion, like being gored to death by goats, or struck by a hot air balloon making an emergency landing.  Essentially, a non-specific remark that the planet would be better off without you.

Certainly, the world would have been a better place if they had not made that call.  I have to admit that I have never appreciated practical jokes or hoax calls.  Maybe somebody can explain to me the humour in ‘phoning up a hospital to get confidential medical details about somebody and then broadcasting it.  I can’t see the humour but can see that in terms of filling air time this is a lot more economical than paying a writer to sacrifice an entire summer and develop a coffee dependency in order to come up with six half hour radio shows that only receive a luke-warm reception and will never make the jump to television.

Contrasting the tossers with the television footage of Jacintha Saldanha’s daughter giving a statement to the press about how much she will miss her mother was quite revealing.  Composed and dignified, it demonstrated the gulf between those who have something to say that’s worthwhile listening to, and those who want to talk about themselves, without having anything interesting to say.

Without wishing to add to the sum burden of human misery in the world, and without wishing to make a judgement about somebody based upon reading a few words and seeing a few seconds of television, it’s pretty clear that even if the tossers are not terrible people (and I suspect they are, sometimes you don’t need much information about somebody’s actions to make a judgement about them, like if you knew somebody spend their evenings peeing on choirboys and that’s all you knew about them…what more do you need) they are at least terrible broadcasters.

I know this because at a time when dee jays and radio presenters in England were being arrested as sex offenders and more accusations about peados on the radio came out, these were the two people that the internet (for which read: The World) decided to hate.  Says it all.

Read, and hear, all about it

Now that we have a bit of distance from the ‘phone hacking scandal, it’s clear to see that the whole bloody disgraceful affair is even worse than anyone thought. The thing was like one of those news shots of a natural disaster, such as a flood, you start out focusing on one bloke on the roof of his house and pull back to eventually reveal that shitty water stretches from horizon to horizon. Such a toxic lake has engulfed News International.

Back when the News Of The World phone hacking scandal engulfed people in film and television, the public took the suffering of glamorous people with a pinch of salt or stardust. The second, and I mean the second, it transpired they had hacked the ‘phone of Milly Dowler, you could almost sense a mood of national disgust. Like a mass tequila burp.

The players in the pantomime, NI execs, lined up to be castigated. What was interesting is that while the Murdochs and Rebecca Brooks-Wade have power, money and influence, nobody seems to envy them, and this is not just because they are now about as popular as meningitis, but rather because despite working in, despite actually being, the media, they lack glamour. More than that, they have reverse glamour. They are successful in the same way that Sauron was successful in Lord of the Rings. Undoubtedly powerful, but not someone you’d admire, and prone to torturing hobbits. And RBW looks like Lady Macbeth. A dragged-up Lady Macbeth from an all-tranny production, but Lady Macbeth all the same.

What was fascinating was that when news broke that David Cameron had had dinner at Christmas with RBW and Jeremy Clarkson, the response was not ‘how fabulous’ but rather ‘that’s the winning entry in the ‘name the dinner party from hell’ competition’.

In a desperate effort to deflect attention away from the phone-hacking scum at News International, News International have mounted a spirited ‘they’re all at it defense’ in the apparent belief that guilt is somehow diminished if shared. They want to see any enquiry widened to take in all the media (i.e. their competition too).

Will this include local press? Do they want to see the editor of the Titchwell Gazette giving evidence? That should be a hoot, perhaps that will allow the profession to restore some confidence and pride in the profession by explaining the art of gathering confidential information by propping up the bar at the Sheep Worrier's Arms like a traditional journo.

In the news

That’s it, it’s time to roll up the internet. I don’t care what you’ve used it for, updating your status on Facebook to tell everyone you’ve left your wife to get together with your school squeeze that you contacted through Friends Reunited (remember that?), selling second hand tat, buying yet more tat, tweeting, twittering, twatting and looking at porn, porn, porn. Doesn’t matter, nothing will ever be as good as this story:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12161449

That’s right, a drunk Russian circus. This story has everything, clowns, dangerous animals, ‘mythical beasts' and all of it soaked in alcohol and sadness. And not just any sadness, Russian sadness. Their plays are famously dour but, by God, it takes misery to new heights to have a sad circus. It’s like Ray Bradbury had collaborated on a story with Charles Bukowski. The bit about the family walking through a blizzard, a BLIZZARD, to see the circus only to find that it had been shut down by the police before it could be burned down by the folk who had seen the first, and only, show is enough to make a gargoyle weep. Instead, it was just the children blubbing.

Crying kiddies aside, this is a great idea. I mean, normally at any sort of show you expect the audience to have had a drink, but the performers as well? Genius! Everyone knows that the only way a normal person can tolerate theatre and especially musicals is to bolt gin both beforehand and during the interval. Who can doubt that the RSC would not put in even greater performances if the actors were hammered too, and can you imagine the reviews ‘Patrick Stewart was the greatest pissed Polonius ever to throw up on the stage of the Swan’?

And why draw the line at theatre? Formula 1 is just blokes in cars going round and round while the teams argue about diffusers, which I thought was something that you fitted to a hairdryer. Any sport that the teams look to settle in court is not to be respected but, what if every time a driver pitted, he had to down a vodka shot? Obviously Red Bull would dominate yet again but it would be good to see the drivers knocking the stuff back instead of just advertising it.

I actually went to the circus once. I dimly recall a lady in spangly tights and a sense of tremendous enjoyment but what I remember most clearly was the sheer amount of snacking I got through – a hot dog smothered in sauce and onion, popcorn and God alone knows what else. I probably didn’t need fed again for a week. Certainly the circus comes every year to the village, no doubt to give children the opportunity to run away somewhere for a life of mucking out the clown caravan and nursing a crush on the trapeze girl.

Word up

In a telly programme he did some time ago the TV critic (he writes about television, he doesn't wear dresses. Actually he might do, but I've never seen it. Anyway...) Charlie Brooker was explaining that he had seen a programme so terrible it had moved beyond the dictionary's ability to describe it, and suggested that two words be combined to try and imply the level of awfulness. With his usual scatological style he described it as 'shittifying'.

This notion, of mashing up who words with negative meaning to somehow create a word describing negativity squared, appeals greatly. This week I was asked to describe how something had gone and, to be honest: 'shitastrophic' was the only thing that fitted the bill.

This tickled colleagues so much that I have heard somebody use the term ‘shitastrophy’ to describe a recent incident, unfortunately I think it might have been in reference to something I had done.

The expansion of the lexicon is not restricted to negative things; certainly one of my favourite terms is ‘geekgasm’; used to describe a successful shopping trip to a comics or gaming shop, or a particularly excellent episode of Doctor Who. In fact you can prefix ‘gasm’ with just about anything to describe a rushing gushing feeling of joy at experiencing something rather lovely ‘bookgasm’, ‘foodgasm’, ‘decentpintgasm, although the last one might be stretching it.

I am expecting to see more mashed up words appearing in the media. The first place you will see them is in weather forecasts. This is because weather forecast presenters have that sort of psudo-science aura that allows them to use terms that sound made up, but are actually true, like ‘occluded’. Having shot their bolt and exhausting the thesaurus so early in the year trying to find frightening words to describe snow, they are going to have to invent new climate terms.

Until new terms to describe things we should be afraid of or outraged by are coined, newscasters will have to rely on using the existing vocabulary, but delivering them in increasingly emotive terms. Fox news is leading the field in this, rightly concluding that their viewers do not want to see a rational, measured explanation of what’s happening in the world delivered at a reasonable volume but instead want to watch the sort of rant that’s a combination of a toddler throwing a tantrum, an evangelical preacher and a maniac with tin foil wrapped round his head standing on the street corner screaming abuse at cats.

One of our terrorists is missing

During the festival period the eyes of the World were on Scotland. This was not just because a lot of bagpipes going off at once tends to get attention, but also because Scotland decided to release the Lybian bloke who was imprisoned for blowing up the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie. This was an exercise of mercy and, some would say, the proper action of a mature nation.

Barely had the debate in Scotland about whether the release was the right or wrong thing to do started when the first foreign criticism of the action rolled in from America. The rights and wrongs of the exercise of mercy were forgotten as a million hairy arsed Scotsmen gave a collective ‘whit noo?’ when their country – THEIR COUNTRY – was criticised by a person from a nation where democracy is still in the pimply stage and who thinks that the proper way to treat criminals is either execute them or build a naked pyramid of them and take photographs, like torture Tetris.

Scotland is granite. It’s wild heather and mountainsides. It’s men built like giants who risk their life at sea to feed their families, it’s wee stunted men down mean closes in Glasgow tenements. It’s aspiration and desperation and beauty and terrible terrible deeds.

It does not take criticism well. Actually it doesn’t take criticism at all.

And to be fair, while well-fed folk in England and America were having a pop at Scotland (what this had to do with England I have no idea, that Pan Am clipper was blown up over Lockerbie, not Chipping Fucking Norton) actual criticism from real live Americans, of which there were many in Edinburgh, was not forthcoming. Could this be a case of the meedja stirring the pot? Surely not.

Given that people go all radicalised Moslem in clink, I reckon that after a few years in a Scottish prison Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi has become a radicalised Scotsman. Now known as Alex ‘Wee Al’ MacGrahied, he has been turned on to the true path of the fish supper, a wee dram and ‘The Sunday Post’ every weekend. One can just imagine his homecoming, with various Arab bigwigs rolling out the red carpet from the tent, only to be greeted with a cry of ‘Jings, helpmaobawb! Away ye big jessies, whit are ye wearing dresses fer? An see this sheep’s heid? It’s naw even deep fried. Nameachrist whit’s gain own?’
‘We welcome you on your return from prison with a banquet and, er, a platter of dates. And some goat’s milk’.
‘Are you taking the pish? I’m fer a pie supper, a pint of heavy, a rare tear across the flaire wi’ that lassie owe’r there and then aff ta the pub to see the Harts Hibs game.’
‘Alcohol is forbibben.’
‘Right Achmed, turn this fookin’ ‘plane round RIGHT NOW, I’m aff haim.’

The Americans are threatening a boycott of Scottish products. So that’s MacDonald’s fucked.

Finally, it occurs that although rentagobs have been foaming at the mouth on telly about this, on the streets of Edinburgh, where just about every nation is represented, nobody seems to be criticising anyone. They are too busy buying united in a single thought…how the hell did the Lybians get hold of all those Saltire flags? I mean, I know that in Lybia they probably sell stars and stripe and union flags as fast as they can burn them, but the Saltire? The three being waved about at the airport were probably the only ones in the country. The tat shop owners of Edinburgh were probably kicking themselves at not anticipating the order add air-freighting a few dozen out there ahead of Wee Al’s ‘plane landing. And some shortbread too, naturally.