Rampant Anomie

In response to:Compulsory DNA Testing Now!

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:07:51 +0200

Well said. I certainly admire Brosnan's chutzpah, and thought his performance was the bitter highlight of the whole saccharine enterprise. I'll take off-key sincerity over bland competence any day.

In response to:Compulsory DNA Testing Now!

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 12:20:03 +0200

However, he handled it with style and finesse. He even said he filmed some of it at the James Bond studio and was worried he would run into Daniel Craig while he had his bellbottoms on. He said it was great fun. He added sexiness to the role, even though he really couldn't sing. I thought the same thing about Antonio Banderas until I saw Evita

Miyaka@
Furniture Store

In response to:England Expects....

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:42:28 +0200

You make a good point. If a player has been subsidised by the British public, then we can certainly expect them to make the best use of our hard earned. What grates with me is the unnecessary and cynical pressure of expectation heaped on these players by the media and by extension their readers and viewers. I'm not sure I'd do my job very well if every day I read that I carried the hopes of millions - I think I'd just hide in a cupboard.

In response to:England Expects....

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:21:36 +0200

The premise is that Anne Keothavong has never wrapped herself in the flag. I hope that she is not one of those athletes who have been using facilities or grants paid from the taxpayers' hard earned cash to train rather than earn a living or in any other way used her nationality to get an advantage over any other players, gain publicity for their brand or in some other way to obtain additional advertising endorsement money. On the basis that those considerations would not apply to her, you are quite right. Very interesting post.

In response to:Compulsory DNA Testing Now!

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:07:19 +0200

Disaster! Have I made more money for this turkey?

Maybe Pierce Brosnan's raw, off-key heroism justifies a fraction of the rental price.

In response to:Compulsory DNA Testing Now!

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 09:51:50 +0200

:wave:

I havent seen this film yet but that clip has inspired me :yes:

Thank you :)

In response to:Compulsory DNA Testing Now!

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 13:32:33 +0200

Are you seriously suggesting that I've somehow misplaced my testicles because I've watched a film that doesn't involve shlock and slaughter? Will the fact that my other half recently watched the Bourne trilogy turn her into Fatima Whitbread?

I'm not for a minute suggesting that Mama Mia is worth watching, but I wasn't aware that my eyes could absorb oestrogen from an LCD TV. Aren't you mistaking insecurity for emasculation?

Even if I accepted your diagnosis, what would you prescribe? Get back down the mine, smoke tabs, drink pints and show her the back of my hand if she thinks about looking in the vague direction of another womanly woman's manly man? I think your argument may need some work.

In response to:Compulsory DNA Testing Now!

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 18:59:49 +0100

I can't believe you actually sat through this shit. What happened man, you used to have an edge? I'm still working on my blog about how modern life robs men of their masculinity. Thanks for amply demonstrating my point. I'm off to do something manly like re enacting the nude wrestling scene from Women in Love.

In response to:Can Anyone Explain This?

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 10:52:40 +0100

Great stuff, Flat Twin.

I suppose you could see the actions of mother and medics as victories for reason, and the archbishop's actions as the lunatic exception proving the general rule of reason. Yet my inner Eeyore would lugubriously suggest that the ongoing need for reason to fight its corner in the 21st century is terribly depressing. In fact, it's just what would happen.

While it is certainly true that excommunication is no longer capable of bringing governments to their knees, reactionary merchants of prejudice and superstition like the archbishop still occupy one of the world's most powerful seats of moral leadership.

Yet I reserve a certain affection for a much-missed cleric, whose moderate voice and worldly insights, had he been elevated from Craggy Island to the Holy See, would have made the world a better and far more entertaining place.

Down with this sort of thing (careful now).

In response to:Can Anyone Explain This?

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:55:27 +0100

Explain? No. Understand? Partly. Condone? Well, what do you think.....? I am, as you well know, as committed an atheist as the next, er, atheist, and hold some of my deepest distaste for those who would impose theocracy by the back door - the Catholic Church, the modern Islamic Church, the conservative Evangelical Right etc etc. However coming from the narrow point of view of the committed, traditionalist and most importantly, unthinking Catholic believer, this all makes perfect sense. A bitter, painful, dogmatic sense, but sense nonetheless. It must.

The most, and oddly also the least, relevant issue for me is one of the importance of the excommunications. For excommunication to be of any value, as either threat or punishment, it has to matter to the receiver. There is no Damoclean fear present in the prospect of being turfed out of a club you aren't fussed about in the first place. Given the events both leading up to and following this sorry debacle - the presence of a stepfather (widow? divorced?), the willingness on the part of the mother and medical staff, thankfully, to go through with the abortion in the face of the almost certain opprobrium to come - did it actually matter to the Doctor? To the medical staff? Even to the mother?

If it mattered anything like as much as the Church and Bishop desperately wish it did, this story would never have made it out of Brazil, possibly not even Recife. Are we not simply seeing an out of touch old man, powerless and otherwise ignored through all of this, flexing what little muscle he feels he has left? After all, there was nothing else the Bishop could do to assert his importance and position - he couldn't care for the child beforehand, he could make no beneficial physical intervention to resolve the situation and was clearly unwilling to offer support and succour to those most in need afterwards. The deed was done. All of the hubris, the fire and brimstone threats, the fundamental tenets of his bedrock faith, came to naught.

There are of course bigger issues here. The notions of imposed religious values, the separation of Church and State, the institutional misogyny of the Catholic Church you raised earlier.

But the real story is one of a victory, albeit a bitter and wholly unnecessary one, for simple humanity and common sense over fear, ignorance and manipulation.

In response to:Can Anyone Explain This?

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:26:56 +0100

Tom,

That's a clear and compelling view. I suppose the devil's in the logic rather than the detail. All manner of bizarre and appalling acts can be justified if people are enmeshed in compelling schemes of logic.

I have some sympathy for the principle of preserving life at its most defenceless. Where the religious right really trouble me is in their insistence that life has a non-negotiable, absolute value; in practice, this means a nine-year old's life should be sacrificed for an accident of fertility and the terminally ill should endure a private hell before they pass into oblivion.

And yet this respect for life manages to be wildly inconsistent; it doesn't seem to extend to victims of sectarian murder and colossal numbers of AIDS victims. As you suggest, the fact that these principles are explicable is disturbing.

In response to:Can Anyone Explain This?

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:35:14 +0100

I'm an atheist too, but I have no trouble understanding this decision, even though I totally dislike and disagree with it. They see a foetus as a person, made in the image of god, and therefore one of the worst things that can be done is to take that life. Rape doesn't take a life so is a lesser crime. If she had died in childbirth, that would have been god's will. It's all perfectly logical and consistent, it just stinks.

Tom.

In response to:Children Of The Revolution

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:35:12 +0100

He's already found me. He made me choose between banana and nuts. I fear for papaya. I'll be at Hampstead Heath, the usual spot, 1230 zulu time. Keep passing open windows.

In response to:Children Of The Revolution

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 22:06:00 +0100

You’ve compromised the operation. ‘P’ knows. Watch for the monkey faced man. You need to come in. T.

In response to:Children Of The Revolution

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:03:50 +0100

Celery is way more dangerous to mankind than explosives.

In response to:Movie Review - Shoot 'Em Up

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 22:07:13 +0100

Fair comment. But, having said that, 'Shoot 'em up' did have Monica Belluci serving ice cream in a tight pink smock. Worth the price of the DVD alone. Wanktastic.

In response to:Movie Review - 'Wanted'

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:18:15 +0100

Confusedbyzeitgeist, thanks for taking the time to make me feel even worse than I already did about subjecting discerning people to reeking cinematic tripe. Rest assured, with my credibiliy as a seeker-out of quality cinema now imperilled, my choices will from now on be far more painstaking. After all, and in my own humble defence, when Empire gives this dog four stars, who can you trust?

http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/review.asp?FID=133072

In response to:Movie Review - 'Wanted'

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 14:59:09 +0100

Thanks for the review of this movie GSmudger. Alas it was too late for myself and the wife...we were the victims of a vicious deception having been told this movie was a 'watcher'. Worst still the 'promoter' brought it into our house to watch with us. About 26mins 25sec in, a suggestion was made to 'switch this rubbish off' but we were too polite to allow this. I did fall asleep after the 30th head exploded only to awake with it still on. Normally I laugh at this low grade movie...this one was so bad that I didn't even snigger.

In response to:Movie Review - 'Wanted'

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 13:08:42 +0100

A pleasure. I felt it was in the public interest to broadcast the awfulness of this one-legged donkey.

In response to:Movie Review - 'Wanted'

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 13:00:16 +0100

Go, don't hold back. Tell us what you really think. :)

Thanks for the warning.

In response to:Inaction Man

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 22:58:39 +0200

My first Action Man was ‘Sandy’, a sailor from HMS Ark Royal, bought from John Britton’s toyshop on Shambles Street, Barnsley. Ratings hat, blue tunic with the square sailor’s collar, bellbottoms. Black rubber boots. He had a ginger number 1 and a matching beard. I always imagined him speaking with a Scottish accent. Losing an arm off the coast of North Africa during an exchange with a heavy cruiser from the Kriegsmarine. But our heroes always let us down. Thanks to Churchill I realize now that Sandy most likely reeked of Lamb’s Navy Rum and partook in unhygienic practises – afloat and ashore.

In response to:Aimless Rant About Soccerball and George Lucas

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:53:26 +0200

By contrast, I have never loved football and got punched once or thrice at primary school for refusing to play, which turned indifference into full-blown loathing. I did experience a brief thaw in my teens; driven by a pitiful urge to fit in, I would make ill-informed conversation about 10-4-6 attacking wings, Peter Beardsley's goalkeeping record and the future of the premium league.
In ornery near-middle age, I can now give my prejudices full rein. Can I be the only one who's noticed that the most vocally critical fans, the mudheads who spend the full 110 minutes screaming potty-mouthed advice at professional athletes, are typically fat fools with nary an athletic bone in their blubbery bodies? Come to think of it, does anything better accentuate the moob and beergut twinset than this year's sweat-tech, high performance soccerball top?
Does my lack of experience of team games render me incapable of understanding the tortuous homo-erotic and homophobic minefield of the changing room? When, as a gym user, I've been unlucky enough to share facilities with five-a-side players, I've been amazed at how the random homophobic humour is punctuated by towel flicking, ass-grabbing, ball squeezing and similar kinds of foreplay. Am I simply not man enough to understand that gay-bashing and cupping your team-mate's testicles go together?
I don't understand the tribalism of it either. Take Chelsea fans, for example. What is it about that squad of multi-national, millionaire professional athletes that colossal numbers of ordinarily unathletic and poorly paid residents of anywhere but Chelsea identify with? If you put the Chelsea Pensioners on the pitch, I'd find it a lot easier to understand. As with any other team of foreign millionaires, it's not so much location, location, location as roubles, dollars, sterling.
I suppose it makes sense that our age of globalised markets and a shrinking world might make people want to rediscover their roots and find a sense of place. But stretching a stripy t-shirt over your beergut to rant at overpaid egomaniacs and then fight someone almost identical to you but for their differently coloured stripes just means you've taken your place in the rollcall of the overmighty cretinocracy.
Time for a little lie down.

In response to:Aimless Rant About Soccerball and George Lucas

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:45:13 +0200

I used to love football at school. Jumpers for goalposts, chopping the legs off some kid from a rival form in sickeningly brutal tackle, one man Wembley, curving pass to the tall lad whose hormones had woken up early and made us all look like dwarves. But that was playing. From one bell to the other we’d be kicking each other up in the air, crafty shimmies, dropping the shoulder, artful feints, going past three, sneaky elbows, catching the trailing leg of some fucker who thought he was Zico streaking down the wing. That said, sexy game though Ruud Gullitt may think it, football is not porn. Watching it does not encourage me to take part myself. And my days of trap, dribble, shoot! are gone.

At work I’m surrounded by canteen pundits. Each with their own loyalty to some local ‘firm’. The Tarn, the Blades, the Owls, Donny Whites, the Mighty Millers, Dirty Leeds. But the thing is, I sense that these men were shit at the game when they were at school. Always picked last, ‘toe bunging’ passes at oblique angles, screaming foul when they got scythed down by a sliding tackle. But now, thanks to Sky+ and parroting the words of Alan Hansen, they’re all experts. I think Tommo needs to use a squarer back four. He’s playing Matty too wide, the lad’s natural game is on the instep, the long ball is a blind alley when it comes to youth development… Every burst of Sky Sports 1 with Vicky Gomersall (phwoar!) is like a testosterone shot in the arse. England internationals dissected and discussed like the battle plan of the Somme; the resemblance is there, I’ll give ‘em that. Chest slapping masculinity. I know about football, I’m one of the lads, OK so I secretly fancy Joe Cole but I’m still a bloke’s bloke… Bollocks. You’re just an annoying fucker. Now switch the telly over and let’s have some Murder She Wrote.

In response to:That's Entertainment

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:58:59 +0200

Hell's teeth, guinnessorig, you have been skulking in some grim places. Yet all that darkness you've been quaffing has helped you vomit forth some shining gobbets of truth.
In my own dealings with the plucky, umpteenth generation underclass, I've arrived at a very similar epiphany. As a sensitive and callow agent of what we nostalgically label law and order, I used to feel a pang of confused compassion for the Kyle demographic. How awful must it be to sink into squalor, to have your wit and aspirations stubbed out by moral decay, drug abuse and cultural idiocy?
Then I realised I'd missed a deeper and darker truth: those who truly belong to the Kyle demographic and sink-estate kleptocracies don't see themselves through my pastel-tinted, bourgeois prism. My version of normality is not theirs. Poverty of expectation is more than just a sociological cliche for them for low expectations are easily satisfied. The culture of entitlement without obligation is embraced with a self-righteous passion that took my naive breath away. They are the truly free, liberated from such tedious nonsense as responsible parenting, contraception, turning up for work, paying taxes, not taking other people's property and refraining from punching a stranger because they dare to have DNA.
Look what else these cockachumpies have done: They've got me thinking of myself as bourgeois, when I could credibly argue that I'm an educated and thinking member of the working classes.
I should distance myself from any comment that makes me sound like a Daily Mail reader. I don't think there's a great, liberal conspiracy to undermine everything that is best and brightest about blah blah blah blah blah. But permissiveness is a problem, and I'm not talking about Soho hump hump bars and gentlemen's literature buried in the woods. I'm talking about the notion that any viewpoint is valid and permissible if it is shouted with enough phlegm in a street argot, and that judgement and moral censure are oppressive of my rights, innit, or racist against animals or sumfink.

In response to:That's Entertainment

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:07:05 +0200

I caught a glimpse of 'The Jeremy Kyle Show' this morning. It’s like peeling back a bandage to look at a festering boil. Or checking inside your handkerchief after a good nasal clear out. Morbid fascination. But it’s too easy to view Kyle’s programme as a freak show. Come see the Siamese twins, be astounded at the bearded lady, laugh yourself sick at the toothless amphetamine addict clapping their diseased gums over an ex-boyfriend’s lie detector results... The huge difference between Victorian ‘freaks’ and the shambling participants on Kyle’s show is that the latter aren’t suffering. They’re triumphant. The teenage Dad who has made his girlfriend’s mother pregnant. The absentee Mum who wants to be reunited with the family she deserted in 1991 for the bass guitarist in a Stranglers tribute band. The thirteen year-old twenty stone anorexic who wants a ‘babby’. You might look at them with an air of superiority. Financial. Moral. Intellectual. But they themselves are all victorious. Happy as pigs in shit. Don’t kid yourself - they wouldn’t want to be you. You’re not as cool as them. As free. They embody the spirit of freedom. The genius of unshackled individuality. And the air time is theirs.

The mirror is broken. The reflections fractured.

Kyle’s guests celebrate their lives on our TV screens. The ‘underclass’ have nothing to be ashamed of. And with Kyle’s collusion they justify seedy standards of living by the very act of their stories being featured on television, being discussed and debated. In the same way that the health service does stitching up their assault injuries, providing them with their free medication, the police recording their crimes. And slowly we – the tax-paying, thinking majority – slowly we too accept the aberrations as normal. As acceptable. The fact is we have outlawed morals. And there are few taboos left. Any attempt to restrain, condemn or curb the activities of anyone doing almost anything is met with liberal disdain. Mary Whitehouse has lost. She’s been gunned down by AK-toting homies on 'Grand Theft Auto', her protests drowned out by the orgasmic screams of some glossy cheerleader getting a set of knuckles shoved up her vagina on fistfiesta.com. Because whether it is violence in video games or the glut of accessible pornography on the internet, or some knuckle dragging troglodyte from the local tower block shouting the odds about the benefits of taking his son to a brothel (today’s theme), our acceptance of behaviour and standards of expectation are invidious. Sedimentary. Layer by layer. OK, so not every child who plays 'Bitch Slapping Homos' on the PS3 will go out and murder random shoppers in the mall, but perhaps he’ll not think twice about giving someone a kicking on a Friday night in the pub. In the same way not everyone who watches internet pornography will jizz on their girlfriend’s face. But you’ve thought about it, haven’t you…?

In response to:Fear & Limp Disdain in Las Vegas, part 3

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:51:04 +0200

Damn, you could tell I was wearing my vibrating pants....

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article107421.ece

R

In response to:Fear and Limp Disdain in Las Vegas, part 1

Sun, 11 May 2008 22:18:30 +0200

The secret alien plot twist is the easiest in the world. There's no logical trap that can't be escaped by giving the hero bizarre and impossible powers. Come to think of it, I use a similar mechanism to persuade myself to use public transport. I allow myself to believe wholeheartedly that if anything kicks off, I can vapourise ne'er do wells with my gamma vision and teleport unwitting pensioners out of the path of flying beer bottles.
When did I tell Lally the plot line?
Have you solved the mystery of the errant briefs yet?

In response to:Fear and Limp Disdain in Las Vegas, part 1

Sun, 11 May 2008 21:23:57 +0200

Smudger,

I'm amazed you lowered yourself to using public transport, bearing in mind your levels of paranoia. I would have thought someone who thinks a drink in the local village pub is too risky, would have assessed a bus or coach trip as being about as dangerous as sticking one's face in a fan. Imagine if some drunken anti-social elements had got onboard. The trip to the states could have been over before it even started. I look forward to the rest of your travelogue. Hope the novel is going well. SL has filled me in on the plot line, so I'm busy plagiarising it. I'm having a bit of trouble getting the plot twist in though where the main character turns out to be an alien.

In response to:Turning A Blind Ear

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:48:36 +0200

You're right. The Liberals are to blame, sitting in their headquarters in New York controlling the purse strings of international finance and forcing us to accept a humiliating peace settlement when we could have fought on against the imperialists! Fear not, kamerad, our day will come again.
Sorry, I'm being facetious, but I do thing you're being very hard on Joe Grimond and David Steele.

In response to:Turning A Blind Ear

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:35:27 +0200

On a similar vein, I've just seen a report on the news where a doctor for some libertarian group was claiming that people should be free to become clinically obese if they so wished.

What a wonderful society the liberals are creating for us!

It takes a truly perverse mind to champion someone's right to slowly kill themself, in the same way as it is deemed acceptable for parents to willfully bring a damaged child into the world, when it was in their power to avoid saddling said child with a disability from birth.

The current western obsession with rights, divorced from any notion of responsibilty is truly the cancer at the heart of our society. It will eventually destroy us. We are all responsible for this sickening state of affairs. The wave of apathy which has engulfed our populace, means the libertarian tsunami can roar on unapposed.

Aldous Huxley may have written of "soma holidays" where the workers were subdued and controlled by pharmaceuticals, but he could not in his wildest imaginings have pictured the corrosive effects of reality TV, in stiffling public debate.

We get the society we deserve.