Ad Criticism

Watching the new series of Peep Show. Here are some random thoughts that occurred during the ad break.

Does that bloke do all the ad voiceovers, or just anything to do with telecommunications?

Attention CGI'd-to-look-sort-of-plasticine new fathers: this is how it works in a maternity ward - if you don't tell the nurse, she will just keep giving you more babies.

Davidoff isn't going to be the person people want him to be any more. He's going to interfere with children.

Everyone involved in Skoda needs to die.

McDonald's food is not xmas themed and everyone involved in this pathetic attempt to persuade us that it is should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

The day is starting well.

Have you noticed that people start their Christmas shopping earlier every year? Who did Mr Justice Mann get this for, I wonder? If it's for me, he shouldn't have. All I got him was one of those Terry's Chocolate Orange bars last year. Now I'm going to have to get him something nice. Tickets to Les Mis, perhaps?

I always knew this day would come, and wondered how it would be, yet now that it has I feel strangely ... serene*

The inevitable is happening, apparently, and one of the few women politicians that can make Thatcher seem vaguely human - or at least remind you that in the good old days evil villains used to be vaguely intelligent - might try the presidential run that everyone has been expecting from her.

The only question is whether this is to be (a) welcomed, because she's so patently unelectable and the Republican machine is divided so might not be willing to pull the same scams they did for the last fucknuckle; or (b) feared on the grounds that enough people might be pissed off with Obama not to vote and enough people are downright insane enough to go to a voting booth and pull a lever marked 'Palin'?**

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* Yes, you have heard this before.

**Yes the allusion to a gallows was in there - obviously in this case a self-operated one.

NEWS!

(imagine it being shouted by a drunken Johnny Vegas for full effect. Yes, I've been watching Attention Scum! too much recently)

Since people neither I nor anyone who reads this blog will ever meet* are getting married, completely understandably nothing else appears to be happening today.

But just in case you were under the delusion that EVENTS can still happen even when the NEW MARIE DIANA is GOING TO UNDERGO AN ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEDURE before the Earth has next rolled around to its current position in its orbit of a ball of flaming hydrogen 1.4 million kilometres across and 150 million kilometres away, here are some illusory gobbets of THINGS.

• Despite compensation being offered to the Gitmo detainees, Shaker Aamer has been held without charge for more than 9 years now. Cage Prisoners will be holding a rally about his case in London on 11th December.
• Sussex University is under occupation by students calling for no rise in tuition fees.
• Cameron has stopped paying his photograher from general taxation.
• Viktor Bout, arms dealer and scumbag extraordinaire, has been extradited to face trial in New York.
• Francis Maude is ConDemNation's Mephistopheles (and a mysterious organisation run from a private house near Stratford on Avon has direct access to the whips' office). OK, I was a little slow on that one.
• The President of the European Council thinks Ireland could destroy Europe. Go, you priest-infested backwater you! Honestly I have no idea whether this is a serious possibility or pointless hyperbole. My instinct is the latter, but who knows? We all remember the damage Father Dougal Maguire could cause with a poorly placed comment, and I assume the republic is basically just like a sitcom about priests.
• There's probably loads more STUFF too. But I can't process more than however many news stories this was in a single day or it all goes out of my ... thing. You know, with the hair and the eyes. Inside that.
• Yeah, that.
  

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*Although to be strictly honest, I did used to work for his dad. He is the one who's dad is Charles, right? He's not the other one? I get confused.

I'd forgotten this. But it's brilliant.

A few years ago, there began the most important translation of a sacred text that has happened since the National Council of Churches' Division of Christian Education first had tea, cake and an agenda.

Now pretty much complete it stands as a testament to human wisdom folly foldom. As a sample, here's John 3:16, the verse that rednecks love to wave around the ring at wrestling matches.*

NRSV:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

Ceilincat sez:
So liek teh Ceiling Kitteh lieks teh ppl lots and he sez 'Oh hai I givez u me only kitteh and ifs u beleeves him u wont evr diez no moar, kthxbai!'

I think you know which is the most readable, enlightening, and above all true to the spirit of the message.

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*Why? No one knows.

It's fine, you can thank me later.

Just realised, after a friend updated their FB status to 'We turned London into Paris' that basically, the success of yesterday's demo in London was down to me.

Without my incendiary blog post, on the prestigious, edgy internet no less, who would have had the cojones to drag a sofa out of Millbank and into the street? That's right, no one.

You're welcome.

No, no money required. Just a post on the supreme soviet will do nicely.

When in doubt, blame the victim.

A classic right-wing move when one of their policies turns out to be very bad for people is to blame the victims of that policy. There are probably a gazillion examples but when I saw IDS's nauseating plans, the first one that leapt to mind was Norman Tebbit’s ‘on yer bike’ attitude at a time when Thatcher’s policies had just cut 2 million jobs from the economy.
It is an exact replication of the same calculated idiocy (by which I mean that if you look at it for a moment you can see how stupid it is, and assume that the ministers responsible are cretins rather than what is actually the case: they are committing deliberate acts of evil in public), whereby employment secretaries conveniently forget that we don’t live in an industrial democracy, and most people don’t have much choice about work, and assume that the reason there is so much unemployment must be because there are so many unemployed. Therefore, goes the ‘thinking’, if you make life hard enough for people who have 'chosen' to be unemployed, this will incentivise them to find the work that 2.5 million of their comrades also seem to be a bit too lazy to find.

Actually, a more accurate title might be: When in doubt, don't just blame the victims. Beat them up a bit more. 'Hey you, you haven't got a job! That makes you basically a criminal, yeah? Here's a bin bag and a rubber glove. Off you go.'

I think what sickens me most is that it’s not even new. I’m assuming that when drawing up the policies, one of the remaining civil servants/photographers were sent round to get some clippings from a 1981 copy of the Times.

It's Happening, Reg! Somthing's Actually Happening!

Today was awesome for anyone who likes to see proper angry protest in a progressive cause. Aaron Porter might think those who smashed windows were "despicable", but as someone who's been on one too many protests where you see too many of the usual faces, a demo like this says something that 'peaceful' (let yourself get kettled by the cops and don't say so much as a bad word about it) protests don't quite so well: we're really angry. I think people in power tend to get more sleepless nights about angry protest than peaceful protest.

Always good to see a bit of people power and a progressive cause taking control of the streets, anyway. And if you wanted a demo without dickheads you might as well wish for a police force full of paragons of virtue. Just accept that people REALLY don't like Condem policies, guys.

Not that it needs stating, but just for the record: I don't think violence is to be welcomed, but if you're pushing through policies that hurt people, people can't always be relied on to wait for deliverence from a Mediator. Besides, as a revolutionary I tend to think that only the co-ordinated power of the working class can overthrow the class system itself and bring an end to the conflict inherent in class societies - and I don't expect the bourgeoisie to give up easily.

Not that I was on a demo, mind. I work for a living, me.