Flipping channels the other night, desperately trying to find something less likely to rape my IQ than, well, pretty much everything that every network has ever shat into its nightly schedules ever, I stumbled on to “Are You Having a Laugh? Comedy and Christianity”, an offering from BBC1 in which the self-righteous former MP, epic dance failure, and massive bag of conservative catholic judgement and masturbatory nightmare-fuel Ann Widdecombe was using her loud, barely-contained witch’s cackle to whine about how Jesus and his billion-strong gang of sycophantic stalkers have become something of a target for comedy in the modern era, and that this simply won’t do. Apparently the one-time candidate for Tory party leadership, frequently referred to by the people of Britain as “Doris Karloff” (presumably because she has the looks and substantially atrophied thought-processes of a recently exhumed corpse), sees the widespread mockery of people’s most cherished beliefs (well, hers at least) as being yet another example of the continuing persecution of christians, in wilful ignorance, it seems, of the fact that, actually, nothing is “sacred”. Read more “Sacred Cow”
Over the last day or so I’ve been engaged in a scientific argument (of sorts) on Twitter with a user by the name of @Adam4004. While I would love to make the infuriating futility of the false equivocations, straw-man arguments, and dishonest logic of his claims the basis of this week’s post, it will have to wait for another time. As is so often the case there will always be certain other events occurring in the world that prompt those of us with a predilection for passionate ranting to jettison our current plans and instead focus on the hot potato that has suddenly landed in our laps. This week, that potato is the idea of offence; I don’t mean the wooden thing that separates your garden from next door, that’s a fence – I mean the idea of causing offence, or of being offended, and what prompted me to talk about it this week was the fact that, yet again, Jeremy Clarkson has said something amazingly fucking stupid. Read more “Sittin’ on offence”
One of the bizarre things I’ve discovered about getting older, at least for me, is not that I find myself worrying about nature’s great, big, ticking, death-shaped clock of impending mortality cessation; nor is it that I’m concerned with checking off the list of things one is supposed to be in possession of at this point (wife, kids, mortgage, dog, massive sense of futile despair at one’s interminable existence etc.) – it’s more that I’ve come to feel like I’ve sort of always been this “age”, as if my personality were a suit that was at least 14 sizes too large and was just waiting for me to grow in to it. The suit might have had one or two minor alterations over the years, nothing drastic, but it otherwise remains pretty much exactly the same as when I first got it. As your tastes, opinions, and beliefs begin to coalesce in your twenties and thirties, you develop a far clearer understanding of who you are, what kind of suit you’re wearing, and what radio station you should be listening to. Read more “Radio 4 Radicals”
