Little Donnie

In the last G&P post there was a thinly (ironic) veiled pop at the sort of people (fat people) who are targeted by those wishing to push New Year diets.  This is because overweight people are easy targets, both for those who would exploit them to make them purchase stuff, or for arseholes like me who mock human weakness.
However, anyone who picks up one of those diet plans has something special.
Self awareness.
Now self awareness is a precious and arguably increasingly rare character trait.  If you have been in a train carriage with somebody that either does not realise that their telephone contains the same technology that allows a whisper on stage to go to the back of the auditorium and so they do not have to conduct their conversation at a volume more suited to bellowing out of the carriage window in the hope their mate will hear them, or does not care that he is sharing his test results with a carriage of commuters slowly edging away from him, then you will know that self awareness, like doffing your hat, is a vanishing art.  I blame social media.  And arseholes.
Speaking of which, L’ill Donnie.
Self awareness appears to be as remote from L’ill Donnie as, well, let’s be blunt about this, gentlemanly behaviour.
There, I’ve said it.
What. A. Guy.
One, occasionally, wonders how the…and here I struggle, he’s clearly no gentleman, he’s not a chap, nor is he a fellow, he is certainly not a bloke.  I think that we shall describe him as a ‘guy’.
We don’t say his name, lest we summon him.
Also ‘that steak of shit that a fox leaves when it has had a bad chicken dinner from the bins’ may be accurate, but is rather lengthy.
OK, so, one wonders how L’ill Donnie got elected.  Surely there can’t be that many racist, sexist, stupid arseholes in the US?  I’ve been there, and the people are lovely.
That said, I was pretty amazed that England voted to Brexit.
I genuinely thought that the only reason you would vote to Brexit is that you had been to an agricultural fair on polling day, and a Shire Horse had shied at a Punch and Judy show, as we all might, happening possibly near a toddler, you had sought to restrain the horse, it kicks you.  Concussed, you fell into a replica threshing machine, more concussion, then you wandered into a polling booth and mark the wrong box.
Now, that might excuse the actions of a couple of thousand ‘Leave’ voters, but really, what were the others thinking?  ‘I can make some money out of this’ will do, if you know you can, but for the rest, really?
L’ill Donnie though, is truly repulsive.  The guy (let’s stick with guy) appears to communicate by social media, Twatter, specifically.  And this is quite appropriate really, because the guy is a troll, and when I say troll I don’t mean the goat loving creatures that dwell beneath bridges, I don’t even mean the lurkers who use the internet to try and intimidate others, I mean the plastic toys that were popular in the seventies and eighties and had crazy hair.
This guy appears to have no self awareness, or wish to improve.
Don is of course the title of a criminal academic at Oxford University who is exposed as a vile and beastly type by Inspector Morse.
Don is also, according to my viewings of ‘The Godfather’, the head of a crime family.  This, I think, is probably the most appropriate analogy.
However, there are noble Dons.  Quixote.  Here was a fellow who was quite delusional and thought himself a defender of the people, but was just tilting at windmills. L’ill Donnie is nothing like the noble Quixote.  Quixote managed to hold onto his loyal staff, and in his heart was a good man.
Don Amott.  King of caravans.  Growing up in the Midlands one had the privilege, if one watched commercial television, of witnessing the magnificence of the adverts for Don Amott.
The most magnificent jingle of all time.  Including that time they hung that peado Morris-man outside the Hop Pole in Droitwich.

Que the music...and the inevitable pop-up radio station

It used to be that if you wanted to set up your own radio station, far from the corrosive influence of The Man, so that you could play the records that you wanted to play, you needed a ship floating in international waters and a bloody big transmitter mast.  This got you beyond the reach of broadcast licensing (and, some might say, the reach of any law enforcement agencies that might want to take a close look at the activities of the crew of ‘The Singing Nonce’).  Obviously, when the BBC was looking to crew its, appropriately as we now know, youth orientated radio, it took DJs from the pirate stations, a sort of reverse press-ganging.

Radio 1 torpedoed Caroline and others, and the next shift in pirate radio was when even commercial radio refused to play endless twelve inch acid house mixes.  Pirate stations popped up, playing music and telling people what fields they may want to gather in that weekend to either dance in, or make crop circles in, or both.  This still required you to tune in to the crackly end of the dial.

Then came the podcast and the true meaning of pirate radio was revealed.  It certainly wasn’t to allow you to listen to music that nobody else was listening to, that had been happening for years thanks to C30, C60 and C90 (Go!) cassette tapes circulated in schools, you know, the things that were supposed to kill the music industry instead of, as they actually did, generate interest in bands and allow people to share there enthusiams.

This, and the fanzine, was analogue social media.

What the podcast does is allow a radio show to be produced without any of that tedious music to prevent the presenter stoking their ego by talking about their favourite subject for thirty minutes.  Podcasts are now like the magazine shelves of WH Smiths, there is a podcast for every hobby and pastime, no matter how obscure.  There are probably podcasts about how to knit presentational jackets for wine bottles.  If there isn’t there bloody well should be.

And that should have been it for the pirate radio station.  Killed off by being legalised and available everywhere.

However.

Small, temporary stations are starting to become something of a vogue once again.  In the village every Easter, the local Christians run a radio station for a couple of weeks, and jolly good fun it is too.  Who gives a flying frick what the traffic is like over some bridge many miles away, I want an update on what the queue is like a) at the crossroads and b) at the check-out at Threshers, both of which are visible from the front of the café the Christians broadcast from.

But, say the hipsters, how can we make this even cooler?  I know, let’s appropriate the idea, put the word ‘pop-up’ in front of it, and pass off the idea as our own.

Hence, festivals now come with their own pop-up radio stations.  Nothing new there, but the twist is that these ones are being run by national broadcasters.  For instance, Radio 2 and their recent ‘Eurovision’ pop-up.

Don’t get me wrong, I think pop-ups are a great idea.  Pop-ups make things more fun, ‘book’ and ‘penis’ are just two of the tings that can be improved by having the words ‘pop-up’ in front of them.  But radio station?

Having said that, there’s a great deal of charm in something that is only in existence for a short time and is dedicated to one particular subject, and if it’s the only way we get to hear what is, essentially, the Eurovision B side, then it’s probably of some cultural significance.  Probably.

But is it as good as being slipped a cassette in the playground, or as thrilling as happening upon a new tune emerging from crackly static at the top of the dial?

#‎R.I.P.

Rik Mayall is dead, and I can’t quite believe it.  How could somebody with that amount of energy, somewhere between a dynamo and a typhoon, expire at so young an age.  If he had lived out his life and wound down naturally, he would probably have lived to be 472, but to go so young is wrong.  Of course, there was the whole quad bike accident, but still.

He was, I think it’s fair to say, formative.  It’s normal playground behaviour to discuss last nights telly the morning after, I think the episode of ‘The Young Ones’ where they go on University Challenge is actually still being discussed among those who saw it when broadcast.  Certainly, whenever I happen to turn on the telly and UC is on, my first thought is ‘Achtung!’.  More than that though…Lord Flasheart, in Blackadder II and Blackadder goes Forth.  ‘Always treat your kite, like you treat your woman’.  In my experience, if you heed that advice you won’t go far wrong.

Reaction to Mayall’s death has proved something of a litmus test for reaction to celebrity mortality.  In short, Twitter.

There are various expressions of public grief

The most affecting are those public memorials, garage fourcourt bouquets of flowers gaffa taped to a lamppost at the site of another roadside tragedy.  If you want to spare yourself some grief you can pretend that they are actually a traffic calming measure put at busy junctions by the council.  If you like.  In America, they’ve even got a word for them, ‘descanso’.

Away from the roadside, there’s the equally affecting doorstep memorial.  Usually set against a backdrop of fluttering scene of crime ‘Police stop’ tape and a single bobby standing watch.  Simple messages and stuffed animals tell you all you need to know about that.  Want to know more?  Read the novel ‘Fullalove’.

Moving into social media, Facebook has proved a popular site to post messages and share photographs of the departed.  It’s fitting that Facebook should serve some purpose in mourning the dead, as it’s often the source of images for the news media breaking tragic news of the passing of somebody who isn’t a celebrity and so is not the subject of thousands of stock photographs.  That’s why a newsreader with a serious face and a low voice occasionally breaks the news of the unfortunate death of an individual in front of a background showing the only picture available to the news media of that individual, usually grinning like a loon and giving a cheery thumbs up or, quite possibly, a pixillated hand gesture.

Then there’s Twitter.

If a news item starts ‘Tributes have today been paid to…’ get ready for some quotes that are no longer than 140 characters and which may read how much somebody will be missed, or how important they were, but really mean that the person sending the tweet couldn’t even be arsed to send an e mail.

Always looks for lengthy, sincere and long statement.  That is the celebrity with the good agent who has taken the time and trouble to craft something genuine for their client and it is a lot, lot better than tweeting a tribute which can say anything you like, but only ever means ‘Read of the tragic passing of X while on the loo reading Twitter.  Immediately tweeted in response, as am feckless media whore’.

It’s a measure of Mr Mayall’s standing that his tributes were substantial.  Mind you, comedians all do like to bloody talk, don’t they.

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.

Hard time, no Hard Times

Pickled predators and bisected bovines do not impress me, nor do unmade tents or embroidered beds.  I am not a fan of the YBAs who are, if not yet quite OAPBAs, certainly now MORBAs.
Nor am I a fan of VYBAs, a group who, denied conventional gallery space, appear to exhibit their work on the partitions of open plan office veal crates, countless fridge doors and occasionally framed on the wall in the home of indulgent to the point of misguided middle class parents.
Apparently the best selling reproduction of an artwork (that's 'postcard' for those of you not fluent in bollocks), unjustly unseating that poster of that bird playing tennis scratching her arse, is that one of the butler and the dancing couple on the beach.  But I'm not so sure.  Based on personal observation the most popular artwork in the homes of, certainly couples aged twenty five to forty, is a dun-coloured splodge of paint radiating a few spidery lines with the word 'Dady' crudely crayoned in the corner.
Denied a traditional commercial foothold in the art world, it's surprising that VYBAs appear to be responsible for such a large amount of the output of the greeting card sector.  Possibly this is because it is considered charming, and socially acceptable, for a child to labour over a piece of folded A4 with some paint and glitter, the result bringing a tear to the eye of many an affected relative, possibly encouraged by their third breakfast birthday sherry of the morning.  A cynic might remark that if the little sod hadn't spunked their pocket money on Haribo, they might have been able to spring for a decent, shop bought card, possibly featuring a beloved syndicated cartoon cat or a vintage photograph with a humorous caption.
What's undeniable is that the are occasions when a hand-made card featuring splodges, glitter and ill-spelled words of affection are of incalculable value (maybe that's why the work of VYBAs does not appear in galleries, the owners find it hard to calculate their commission of affection), most importantly when a parent is separated from their child.  A child can't write you a two-thousand word letter with news from home like your mother, or send you racy poleroids of themselves in their scanties like your partner, but when it comes to communicating love across distance, a little bit of glitter of a bit of folded coloured card goes a long way to letting you know you're being thought of on your birthday when you are far from home, or worse, far from a Greggs.
Which is why the Government's policy of preventing prisoners receiving home-made cards would appear to be actual, calculated, wickedness.
Prisoners are possibly the one group in this country that the Government can penalise even more freely than public sector workers, who at least have a union to speak for them.  The latest announcement from the Home Office (once described by Armando Iannucci as 'twinned with Mordor', a joke far too good not to repeat here and often) is that prisoners may no longer receive books as presents from the outside world.  Apparently they have to work in the salt mines or whatever to earn the cash to buy such 'luxuries' (good to see the policies of the Department for Education, which has long considered books in state schools luxuries, spreading, like a shitty tide).  Que outraged Bleats on Blather from outraged authors, and not just the ones popular in prison like Jeff Archer, condemning this, Bleats which also revealed that this policy extends to packages containing underwear and, wait for it, home-made birthday cards.
In a masterclass of evasiveness, twisting like a sweating peado in a vigilant's head-lock, the prisons minister, when interviewed on BBC Radio 4s Toady programme, managed to not answer any questions about withholding literature, banning pants and penalising small children squarely.  In this, it's fair to say, he was ably assisted by the presenter who missed the most obvious question, the question the listening nation was shouting in a collective cloud of teadrops, toast crumbs and marmite fumes, which was 'what the actual fuck?'.
Apparently, the news from the Home Office is that searching packages going into prisons takes resource.  Yes, yes it does.  But that's why you have people in prisons who aren't prisoners.
I don't, thank goodness, know much about prisons.  But I do know that you have to check stuff.  Cakes, they have to be X-rayed to ensure that there are no files in them.  Outgoing laundry trucks have to be searched or, if time is precious, randomly stabbed with a pitchfork.  Vaulting horses have to be looked under in exercise yards.  You even have to check the attic from time to time for evidence of glider.
All these are sensible measures, but banning children's cards to their parent is just cruel.  What the fuck is the danger, are they afraid the con is going to sniff the glue securing the glitter?
The underwear thing is ridiculous too.  Unless the state is going to provide fresh undies for everyone.  One Bleat from a woman was making the point that if you stop gifts of underwear, you have to rely on the state for scanties.  Municipal pants sound about as grim as it gets, but not as grim as having to rely on municipal bras.  As we have seen, anyone relying on this administration for support of any kind if fucked.
The book ban is even more sinister than it is ignorant, and that's going some.  Apparently inmates can buy 'approved' books from a 'catalogue'.
I am so appalled by the idea I can barely type.
But...
What the fuck!  Who is choosing what people can and cannot read?  Possibly the only fucking benefit to society of incarcerating somebody other than getting wrong-un's off the streets and seeing justice done is to have somebody come out of prison a better person than they went in, and I don't see a restricted reading list helping that?  And what's in the catalogue?  Government approved books.  Is this fucking North Korea?
I'm no fan of this government, but this really is the lowest sort of unjustifiable, petty, vindictive and short-sighted unmitigated bollocks.