Oh God. Now the cold hard reality sinks in. Four more years of Steve Bell monkey cartoons, sneers about stupid Americans, the Independent, Simon Jenkins, Channel 4 news, the Guardian, talk about the equivalence between Islamic terrorism and Bush’s Christianity or Al Qaeda and the neo-cons…..
I’m so depressed I’m thinking of emigrating.
ce is central to his credibility. In the over two decades since Mubarak ascended to the Presidency, Egypt has been characterized by economic stagnation and a steady decay in freedom. The only defense for Mubarak’s regime is that it is preferable to the Islamists.
The line now taken by Egypt on the Sinai bombings – nothing to do with Al Qaeda, it’s down to the “desperation” of the Palestinians – keeps to the script:
Al-Qaeda played no part in bomb attacks that targeted Israeli tourists on the Sinai peninsula in October, Egypt’s interior minister has said.
Israeli officials had linked al-Qaeda to three blasts at Egyptian Red Sea resorts that killed at least 34 people.
Egypt’s Interior Minister Habib al-Adli has said the attacks were instead fuelled by a cycle of desperation and violence in the Palestinian areas. […]
Mr Adli said the attacks reflected “the current cycle of violence in the Palestinian territories and feelings of frustration and hopelessness resulting from it”.
Some wonderful old photographs of Korea 100 years ago. Robert Koehler of The Marmot’s Hole provides a listing in English.
On the same night as David Morley was beaten to death in a homophobic attack, Martin Stevens describes how he was the victim of another such attack only half a mile away. He fought back, only to have a bottle smashed over his head. Was he foolish?
I tend to think that if I can’t live in a public space without a modicum of respect then that does more violence to me than a bottle on the back of my head. Easily said now that I’ve walked out of A&E, but it’s true.
This is what the purveyors of sensible advice don’t take into account: the psychological cost of trying to buck your self-defence. “Don’t get involved, look straight ahead, pretend you didn’t hear, avoid their gaze.”
What’s the difference between big-city paranoia and abject cowardice? Is it possible to maintain your self-respect if you think like this?
Standing your ground, landing a few futile defensive punches — that will defend your self even if it doesn’t defend your body. The body repairs; self-respect is more fragile and infinitely more important. If the price of my self-respect was a gash in the back of my head, then I’m glad I paid it.
What’s the point of Armando Iannucci? He used to write columns for the Guardian – maybe he still does – and now he appears in the Times. These are meant to be humourous columns. They look like humourous columns, and they’re presented as humourous columns. Indeed the man’s got an enviable record of involvement with comedy shows like Alan Partridge. But he’s just not funny:
You’ve probably heard it’s an historic week for newspapers. The Times has gone compact, the Daily Mail is about to come out as a lozenge and, as from this weekend, the Sunday Mirror will be giving away a free Beckham girlfriend with every edition.
But, believe me, the US election has made this a genuinely historic week for the press. With the campaign out of the way, the debate over WMD has wound down; which means this is the last official week in which headline writers can use the phrase “Weapons of mass destruction” as a source of pad puns. You know the sort of thing: everything from bin Laden’s recent video to Jordan’s implants labelled “weapon of mass distraction”.Hardly a day has gone by over the past 18 months in which a newspaper hasn’t attempted a tortuous verbal contrivance based on the phrase, but now the curtain has got to come down. Expect, then, a last furious flurry of Weak Puns of Crass Desperation (d’you see what I did there?) with newspapers even making stories up just to fit their clever variation. I know for a fact The Guardian is planning to run a story about Kate Moss demanding metal bowls to cry into when she gives birth just so they can go with the headline “Weep-pans for Moss contractions”.
Meantime, a friend at The Independent assures me they are planning to take up the whole of their front page with a story about a fish-handed architect winning the contract to build the headquarters for a new government body that’s going to be in charge of regulating steam. All this just so they can run with “Web-hands of mist construction”. And finally, The Daily Telegraph were going to go for a story about someone disrupting Catholic church services by firing arrows into them, but abandoned it when their headline writers came up with “Weapons of mass destruction”.
Laugh? No, neither did I.
Black Triangle, on the other hand, shows that you can be funny about WMD.
es to capture and hand over the shah for trial. When signals came that Washington might actually consider doing so, other demands were advanced. The United States was asked to apologize to Muslim peoples everywhere and, in effect, change its foreign policy to please the ayatollah.
s are agreed upon it is that the Taipei regime is independent and sovereign. So Powell’s denial of this managed to raise hackles everywhere, much to the detriment of some important US plans….
But it was Powell’s subsequent remarks that left Taiwan in a state of shock. “We want to see both sides not take unilateral action that would prejudice an eventual outcome, a reunification that all parties are seeking,” Powell told CNN. […]
Currently the situation is that both the United States and Taiwan know that Powell goofed badly. The US wants to pass it off as a simple slip of the tongue. But Taiwan is well aware that China is likely to ignore a denial and make as much hay from Powell’s remark as it can. Indeed, on Wednesday Zhang Mingqing, spokesman for the Chinese government’s Taiwan Affairs Office, told a press conference, “Some people have said Powell made a slip of the tongue, but I don’t believe it.”
xture of literary criticism, philosophical and psychoanalytical reflection and vaguely Marxist politics. Nonethless, I regard these things as part of the same project. Roughly, this can be summed up in the words of Theodor Adorno: “To displace and estrange the present, to reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the messianic light.” And perhaps by the sadness in Brecht’s ‘As a way of living together, we merely invented capitalism.” If these quotes sound pretentious or portentous (in the pejorative sense) then go elsewhere.
Well Mark, it’s not so much the quotes themselves which sound pretentious…
Via Backword Dave, this is funny:
[I]f you can’t mimic niceness, you can mimic Liverpool, which was what John Peel did. Well, sort of. In fact, he was a public school boy, a Salopian. He could never have got through Shrewsbury intact sounding like the scouser he later became. His Merseyside accent, studiously acquired in Texas, was entirely phoney, even if the character speaking it wasn’t.
Wilfred Pickles’s accent was also contrived: when he began his career as a BBC newsreader during the war, he spoke Received Pronunciation burnished with just the lightest dusting of Yorkshire. It was only as his career headed for light entertainment that the accent became less Crystal Palace and infinitely more eeh ba gum lass, trouble at t’mill. Pickles went on to present patently risible programmes – but people still liked him, simply because he was patently a thoroughly decent man.
Similarly John Peel. Yet his palpable niceness was not in itself sufficient to explain his popularity. What gave him his enduring appeal was that he was England’s greatest anorak. England is a land of bird-watchers, of trainspotters, of aircraft-number jotters. Only that bizarre tradition of collecting meaningless things could elevate to national celebrity someone who dedicated his entire life, every breathing moment, to trawling through thousands of hours of anguished youthful vacuity, shouted and set to drums. Yet John Peel could do so with unfeigned relish, and hail much of the bilge he heard with awe and respect.
50 years after Tony Hancock’s first radio show, scriptwriters Ray Galton and Alan Simpson share some memories:
Simpson: “He went to see Pinter’s The Caretaker, and when he came back he said: ‘Christ, you’ve been writing this stuff for years’. ”