There’s an old cliche which states that the arrival time of a certain kind of road-based, public transport vehicle has little to do with traffic flow, mechanical problems, and the ever-unpredictable human element all conspiring to exert a negative impact upon the published timetable (and, inevitably, your opinion of the eternal optimist who formulated it). Apparently it is, instead, more like blog post ideas, in that there’ll be extended periods of bugger all followed by a flurry of activity; this time, however, the driver of one such bus forced their way to the front of the idea queue and insisted I ride with them first. This tortured analogy (it’ll all make sense in the end, I promise) is my way of saying that, for the first time ever, this is an “on-demand rant” (making me a bit like BBC iPlayer – “making the unbearable vaguely tolerable”); yes, my fellow Blunt-murderer Aerynne has asked me to say a few loud words about the whole Suzanne Moore-Julie Burchill transphobia, journalists and social media thing, and I’m only too happy to oblige. So, cue the animated circle of interminable buffering! Read more “Less is Moore”
Despite being totally with it, up-to-the-minute, and “down wiv’ da kids” – the kind of guy people always come to for “the word on the street” when either Huggy Bear or the Highways Agency road-painting crew are unavailable – I didn’t become fully aware of the whole “Kony 2012” video phenomenon until I saw Charlie Brooker’s segment covering it on “10 O’Clock Live” on Wednesday night. As a dedicated denizen of Twitter (follow me now, you bastards!) I’d naturally heard of the video, knew what it was about, and was vaguely aware of Invisible Children, the organisation responsible for producing it, but I hadn’t looked any further into the details. As the segment unfolded, Invisible Children, and its co-founder Jason Russell, were starting to come across rather scarily like the kind of sinister, child-recruiting religious cult they were condemning Joseph Kony for running, only with fewer guns and more dance numbers. Raves and I wondered to each other how long it would be before clean-cut, god-humping, goody-two shoes Russell would be caught either huffing poppers while getting felched by a gay prostitute, or perhaps running around the street in his underwear with his cock out, wanking at passing traffic? “About 12 hours” was the answer, apparently. Read more “Stupid Cult”
I don’t know about you, but when I heard the news this week that the twin bills SOPA (Screwing Over Proper Artists) and PIPA (Positively Invading People’s Anuses) had suffered a humiliating defeat/climbdown when pretty much the entire world told the entertainment industry to go fuck itself and stop trying to ruin the internet, I breathed a huge sigh of relief, wiped the self-satisfied “Ha ha, we did it!” grin off my face, and then started to wonder just what kind of monstrous form the bills will take on once Hollywood and the record companies had re-grouped and returned to begin the next leg of their “Stealing Freedom Tour 1996 – 2047”. For reasons I can only imagine have something to do with my brain feeling particularly charitable (knowing that I had a blog post to write and no ideas), these thoughts began colliding with ones about the nature of religion versus science and how, as it is with content producers versus the internet, the battle is about nothing more than destroying the competition in order to protect an obsolete business model. Read more “New Model No. 15”
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”
Before you get the wrong idea about me, I’m not planning to use this post as a forum for expressing some kind of deep and abiding physical attraction towards christianity’s premier long-haired hippy prophet. Although the messiah is, according to some, a very naughty boy (and, under normal circumstances, I would be inclined to question therefore whether I should get to know him better), neither the more plausibly accurate, “Osama Bin Laden in his student days” image of Jesus, nor the white, WASP-ish, lightly-bearded pretty-boy that most christians falsely imagine him to look like, could ever be really described as being “my type”. No, this week’s post was inspired by a casual tweet from @Rati0nality that got me thinking about religion and popular culture; specifically, I was given cause to consider the idea, accepted almost universally as true, that “christian music is shit”. Read more “Rock me, sexy Jesus”
