Showing posts with label U.K.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label U.K.. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

America answers the call


I was starting to think that Great Britain had locked up all the good political parties.

So imagine my delight to see that, in last night's New York gubernatorial debate, the only candidate who made any sense whatsoever was Jimmy McMillan of The Rent Is 2 Damn High Party.

Not only that, if you go to the party's website, you'll be greeted by the most danceable campaign theme song ever. A stone-cold jam.

From what little I could tell from the above video, The Rent Is 2 Damn High Party is the most entertaining thing to hit Western politics since this:


That's right, the rent is too
DAMN high. Especially on landless peasants.


See, I told you.

Thursday, September 09, 2010

F*** stuff


God bless the Landless Peasant Party.

And God save Angus X, wherever he might be after his unfortunate loss in the British national elections this spring.

An old friend was musing about the present doings of Land Is Power -- the party annual meeting is coming up Saturday at an Edinburgh cafe -- so I wandered over to the website of Angus X and the landless peasants . . . and found an amazing video.

No, really. That's it above --
The Story of Stuff. Please watch it.

WHEN I was watching this amazing presentation by Annie Leonard, I thought "This is pure Catholic social-justice kind of stuff here. I'll bet Glenn Beck hates it." And sure enough. . . .

Gosh, I feel so dumb now. The conservative ubercapitalists quickly reassured me by saying market efficiency and ongoing miniaturization will solve many of the problems of the sustainability and disposal of our abundant stuff.

Besides, we have a whole planet to be mined. We've barely scratched the surface. Why, if we mine deep enough -- through the earth's crust and well into the mantle, which we could do as technology advances -- we could have all the raw materials we need to make more and more stuff.

Deep extraction, that's the ticket. What could go wrong with that?

Like I said, The Story of Stuff is pretty standard Catholic social teaching. Don't believe me, look it up.

This little fact -- in addition to making Glenn Beck even crazier than usual -- also is likely to dismay one of the film's producers, the Tides Foundation, which believes we can best care for the poor and powerless of the world by helping them abort their poor and powerless offspring.

Sigh . . .
in a fallen world, nobody bats 1.000. Well, at least fetuses are biodegradable, right?

WE NOW return you to Angus X, who remains not safe for work . . . or the kids. But kind of spot on, nevertheless.

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Jolly good show, Rupe!


As we used to say in junior high school . . . DUHHHHHHRRRRRR!

Imagine . . . Rupert Murdoch locked up The Times website in a virtual Tower of London. His competitors didn't.

And, after he no doubt did all kinds of research to justify what he was hellbent upon doing anyway --
and after no doubt spending loads of money putting up the paywall -- what happened was what I could have told him would happen in exchange for a MacBook and a bottle of good bourbon.

THE READERS all went somewhere else, and The Times was quite effectively removed from the Internet conversation. But don't believe me, believe The Independent -- where you can read all about Rupert's Folly for free:
As the fugitive businessman Asil Nadir flew back to Britain from his North Cyprus bolt-hole last week, Sean O'Neill, the crime editor of The Times, scooped Fleet Street by being the only print journalist on the plane. Yet those searching Google for the latest on the breaking story that morning would have found no sign of O'Neill's exclusive – only follow-up stories by rival news organisations such as The Guardian and ITN.

Two months after Rupert Murdoch's decision to erect a subscription paywall around the websites of The Times and The Sunday Times, thus removing their content from search engines, the bold experiment is having a marked effect on the rest of British media. There are many who still wish the 79-year-old mogul well, hopeful that he is at the vanguard of a cultural shift that will save newspapers. Yet elsewhere there is dismay among analysts, advertisers, publicists and even some reporters on the papers.

Faced with a collapse in traffic to thetimes.co.uk, some advertisers have simply abandoned the site. Rob Lynam, head of press trading at the media agency MEC, whose clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Morrisons and Chanel, says, "We are just not advertising on it. If there's no traffic on there, there's no point in advertising on there." Lynam says he has been told by News International insiders that traffic to The Times site has fallen by 90 per cent since the introduction of charges. "That was the same forecast they were giving us prior to registration and the paywall going up, so whether it's a reflection on reality or not, I don't know."

He warns that newspaper organisations have less muscle in internet advertising campaigns than they do in print. "Online, we have far more options than just newspaper websites – it's not a huge loss to anyone really. If we are considering using some newspaper websites, The Times is just not in consideration."
THE TROUBLE with newspaper dinosaurs today is that advertisers aren't nearly as stupid as they are. DUHHHHHHRRRRRR, indeed.


P.S.: Thinking on this a little more, I believe there's only one way you'll make paid online "newspaper" content work. It needs to be iPad friendly; it needs to be a rich, flashy multimedia experience . . . and once you've bought it, you need to be able to keep it on your hard drive, or whatever. Just like you can keep a dead-tree edition of the paper.

As they say -- or at least used to say -- in the housing market: Why rent when you can own?

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Gitchi gitchi ya ya Gaga


One of Britain's top hitmakers thinks, anymore, that pop music is one giant miss.

And that Gaga is no lady.

And that you'd be mortified to listen to any of what he calls "soft pornography" with your mum in the room.

Mike Stock, with co-writing or co-producing credits on 16 No. 1 records in the U.K., is mad as hell . . . and he's taking his anger to the pages of the
Daily Mail:
The man who helped launch the career of Kylie Minogue yesterday condemned modern pop culture for 'sexualising' youngsters.

Mike Stock, one third of the legendary pop factory Stock, Aitken and Waterman, said: 'The music industry has gone too far. It's not about me being old fashioned. It's about keeping values that are important in the modern world.

'These days you can't watch modern stars - like Britney Spears or Lady Gaga - with a two-year-old.

Ninety-nine per cent of the charts is R 'n' B and 99 per cent of that is soft pornography.'

He continued: 'Kids are being forced to grow up too young. Look at the videos. I wouldn't necessarily want my young kids to watch them.

'I would certainly be embarrassed to sit there with my mum.'

Mr Stock, 58, pictured below, was behind the rise of Miss Minogue in the late 1980s when she stormed the charts with I Should Be So Lucky.

In the accompanying video, she wore a simple black cocktail dress. The lyrics were similarly innocent.

In contrast, 24-year-old Lady Gaga, who burst on to the scene two years ago, has regularly used crude metaphors in her lyrics as well as posing in revealing outfits.

Mr Stock believes that today's children are being 'sexualised' as a result of images put out by the pop industry of stars such as Lady Gaga.

He said: 'Mothers of young children are worried because you can't control the TV remote control.

'Before children even step into school, they have all these images - the pop videos and computer games like Grand Theft Auto - confronting them and the parents can't control it. Talking to mothers' groups, they were saying that even they have lost faith in brands like Disney.
THE PROOF in Stock's pop-tart pudding, however, just might be found in the comments on the story on the Mail's website:

"I'm a 17 year old girl and completely agree with this article. I don't watch these music videos, but other kids in my school do. With them having that image of what's 'cool' they make fun of everyone else who isn't like that. I'm part of the 'popular' group at school, but I'm still constantly made fun of because I don't have sex and I don't dress sexy," says Christina from Ohio.

But there's another big criticism of the whole pop-sleaze phenomenon no one has mentioned yet.
It's boring.

It's stupid.

It's mindless.

And all in all, music built almost exclusively upon a foundation of disinterested, mechanical intercourse barely rises to the time-honored romanticizing of lust. Actually, this masterpiece of tediousness by Lady Gaga sounds more like a junkie's ode to the monkey on his back:
I'm on a mission
and it involves some heavy touching, yeah
You've indicated you're interest
I'm educated in sex, yes
and now I want it bad, want it bad
A lovegame, a lovegame

Hold me and love me
just want touch you for a minute
Maybe three seconds is enough
For my heart to quit it

Let's have some fun, this beat is sick
I wanna take a ride on your disco stick
Don't think too much, just bust that kick
I wanna take a ride on your disco stick
AND THEN the big finale:
Let's play a lovegame
Play a lovegame
Do you want love
Or you want fame
Are you in the game (Don't think too much just bust that kick)
Dons the lovegame (I wanna take a ride on your disco stick)

Huh!
OK, not a junkie's ode. Make it a crack whore's instead.

Huh! indeed.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

The Ministry of Silly Passports


Great Britain won't let Iroquois lacrosse players into the country because, to Her Majesty's government, their papers aren't in order.

Blimey!


AFTER ALL, reports The New York Times you can't be too careful, in this age of global terrorism, over whom you let into your country.
For a few hours on Wednesday, the Iroquois national lacrosse team thought its passport brouhaha had been resolved, thanks to a one-time waiver from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton clearing the way for it to travel to the world championships in England using tribal documents instead of United States passports.

But later in the day, the British government was said to have refused to grant visas to the team, even with Mrs. Clinton’s waiver, a potentially decisive setback for the team.

“We are deeply disappointed, and urge our friends and supporters to reach out to the British government to seek reconsideration,” Chief Oren Lyons of the Onondaga Nation, one of the six nations that make up the Iroquois Confederacy, said in a statement.

The team’s travel plans were first thrown awry last week when the British consulate asked for a written assurance from the United States government that the team would be allowed to re-enter the country using its tribal documents — an assurance that federal officials would not provide.

They changed their stance on Wednesday when Mrs. Clinton authorized the special waiver. The State Department provided the Iroquois team with letters providing assurance of their re-entry, said P. J. Crowley, the department’s spokesman.

Mr. Crowley told reporters in Washington that it would be up to the British government to decide whether to issue visas to the players based on those letters. But the Iroquois team described that decision as more of a formality, with the biggest hurdle — coming to an agreement with the State Department — having been cleared.

That turned out not to be the case. The British Consulate decided that the letters from the State Department were not sufficient because ultimately they were not passports, according to a United States government official informed of the decision.

“At this point there’s not a lot we can do,” Percy Abrams, the team’s executive director, said in a telephone interview. “We were given a set of demands, and then we met those demands — and then they were switched. That’s the way we feel.”

The U.K. Border Agency said in a statement that the British government would welcome the Iroquois team, but only if their players “present a document that we recognize as valid to enable us to complete our immigration and other checks.” The statement did not discuss the letters issued by the State Department, and a spokeswoman declined to elaborate. Until Wednesday morning, when Mrs. Clinton authorized the waiver, State Department officials had noted that federal law does not allow a tribal document to be used in lieu of a United States passport for international travel. (Security is one reason: The Iroquois passports are partly handwritten and do not include any of the security features that make United States passports resistant to counterfeiting.)
AND ONCE AGAIN, the Iroquois are reminded that with friends like the English, who needs enemies?

Perhaps the "people of the long house" would have had a lot more success getting to that English lacrosse tournament if they all had converted to Islam and gone around calling for death to all Jews, gays, etc., and so on. Maybe they might have even cultivated ties with al Qaida and urged their fans to blow up s*** all over Blighty.

Or maybe they just could have said they were Arab dissidents trying to get the hell out of the Great Satan after a vacay gone bad -- that they were longing for a friendlier, more self-hating spot for a little R and R.

Maybe then the Brits would have rolled out the red carpet for the Iroquois lacrosse players.

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Dear Britain, I think you have a problem


Big protest against BP today in New Orleans. Among the sights there was this, as captured by The Times-Picayune.

Mr. Cameron, I think your UK-headquartered oil company may have presented you with a bit of a sticky wicket, public-relationswise.

Trust me, as BP continues to make the Gulf into a massive dead zone and wipe out entire cultures, you will find this display of outrage is only the "tip of the spear," so to speak.

Saturday, May 08, 2010

Kill the Man, cuz we wuz robbed!


Even in the patently whack, one can find kernels of truth. Welcome to the world of Angus X and the Landless Peasant Party.

As I've said before, if American tea partiers weren't such crypto-racist, whiny tossers, they'd be forming a U.S. branch of this.

After all, can you really totally hate an entertaining Scottish eccentric who blatantly steals from Patrick Henry and makes it his own right under the nose of the British monarchy?

Friday, May 07, 2010

If tea partiers had bollocks


See the bloke behind Gordon Brown at last night's vote count in the British prime minister's Scottish constituency?

Yeah, that one. The one with the upraised fist. Right on. Can you dig it?

That is Deek Jackson of the Landless Peasant Party. And he -- along with the Jesus Christ guy and the Monster Raving Loony Party -- is why British politics is far and away more entertaining than the colonial brand of democratic futility.

BELOW, enjoy a not-work-or-family-friendly advert for the Landless Peasant Party, featuring Mr. Jackson, whom we'll refer to as Angus X. This is what the tea partiers would be on this side of the Atlantic . . . if only they had . . . er, bollocks.


AND HERE is Scotland's No. 1 peasant, Angus X, on the campaign trail.



AYE, 'tis a bonnie thing to have a candidate tell a voter he thinks he's daft. Almost as good as when the BBC's Jeremy Paxman gets a hold of a politician who unwisely tries to "spin" him.

Thursday, May 06, 2010

Bad night for Jesus in the UK


David Cameron may be hard pressed to win an outright majority for the Conservatives in the United Kingdom, but he had amazingly little trouble dispatching the King of King and the Lord of Lords in his Witney, Oxfordshire, constituency.

No wonder no one thinks it will go well for the British after the politicking is done and the attempts at governing begin.

Another disappointment was the poor showing of the Monster Raving Loony Party, though I believe it did come in ahead of the Almighty.


ALL IN ALL, you have to admit there is far greater entertainment value in British elections than in ours. Then again, I'm just geeky that way -- as you can see here.

A most pleasant surprise in the BBC coverage of the UK national balloting is the emergence of veteran Beeb presenter David Dimbleby as the most entertaining damn thing on network television since Dan Rather spun his last Election Night simile and mangled his last metaphor.

Dimbleby -- who has a refreshing lack of patience for any kind of television, or political, foolishness -- even came up with a Ratherism fine enough to warm a colonist's heart: "But behind the scenes, you know they're fighting like cats in a sack."

And then there was this question from someone on the BBC team to a Labour minister:
"It's 20 past 3 in the morning, couldn't we please just have a straight answer?"

Hear! Hear!


Monday, November 30, 2009

Touché . . . and good night


File this under: "I'm not dead yet!"

Nice ad that, for a change, out-Apples Apple. Now, all Rupert Murdoch needs to do is figure out how to make the "must-have handheld accessory of 2009" self-updating so it's no longer full of day-old news.

OH . . . and make it display audio-visual content, link to stories in all the other "handheld accessories," and somehow interest young folk in a "handheld accessory" that doesn't have an "i" in front of its name.

All for free.

(Crickets.)

Alrighty, mates! Let's get cracking on the next advert in the campaign, wot?

Monday, November 16, 2009

When radio mattered


Once upon a time, radio mattered.

Once upon a time, popular-music radio mattered so much, "pirate" Top-40 stations off the English coast scared a government and provoked a massive official backlash.


Once upon a time, "pirate" disc jockeys were bigger stars than the musicians they put onto the airwaves -- and the youth of a nation fought to keep them on "free radio."


AND ONCE HER MAJESTY'S government -- in 1967 -- finally succeeded in pulling the plug, the staid facade of the British Broadcasting Corp., cracked under the weight of demands that it program for the people, not at the people. Later that year, BBC Radio 1 was born.

Top-40 BBC Radio 1.


Many of Radio 1's original DJs were hired off the pirate ships. Because the pirate ships mattered . . . and because radio mattered.

Across the pond and across four decades, things have changed mightily.
Because radio no longer matters.

At all.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Meanwhile on the isle. . . .


While English and Welsh "freshers" were out getting pissed last week, Rifleman Craig Wood, 18, was otherwise occupied after a short stint in Afghanistan.

The jihadists may have a point


When a country has its knickers in such a twist as Britain -- literally -- that's when sharia starts to look not half bad by comparison.

By the time it's a common thing for college students and other "drunken yobs," as the Daily Mail put it, to shuffle down city streets with their drawers around their feet -- at least when they're not pissing on war memorials -- you're either musing about sharia (or something close enough), or you're looking for a good monastery to hide out in as the Dark Ages descend and civilization disappears.

I MEAN, for God's sake:

The image of a drunk student urinating on a war memorial has provoked a furious backlash from relatives who had laid wreaths of poppies in tribute to their loved ones.

John Ievers, the grandson of a World War I soldier who died in 1917, branded student Philip Laing, 19, a 'drunken idiot' for desecrating the memorial in Baker's Pool, Sheffield.

The 49-year-old software sales consultant said: 'I am annoyed - he's a drunken idiot.

'He should be made to clean the streets of Sheffield or do some kind of community service.'

Mr Ievers placed the tribute - a solitary wooden cross with poppy decoration - to his grandfather on the memorial on Remembrance Day last November. Edwin Ievers was 32 when he was killed in France in October 1917.

The youth was one of 2,000 university students taking part in an organised seven-hour pub crawl in Sheffield, during which many familiar scenes of debauchery were seen.

Half-naked women collapsed on the street while young men ran among passing traffic.

But by far the worst moment came when Laing, a sports technology student at Sheffield Hallam University, staggered to the World War I memorial and urinated on it. Other revellers seemed oblivious, but the incident was reported to security staff who washed down the memorial with water.

'He should be made to clean the memorial at the very least,' Mr Ievers added. 'He must have been paralytic.

'I don't think he should be flogged in the streets or anything but there should be some reparation.

'But this sort of thing goes on all the time in Sheffield with freshers week
[Freshmen week -- R21]. They had to take the fountain out because someone was killed. They would do a pyjama jump but too many of them came down with hypothermia.'

ACTUALLY, after looking at that picture, I think flogging in the streets might not be such a bad idea. Flog one, teach 1,000?

What I see in these pictures -- and in stories such as this and this -- is a culture at the end of its
days of wine and roses. A culture living for its distractions, because distractions are the only reasons it has anymore.

The distractions, meantime, are having the last laugh.

Getting "stewed" in your own juices not only is a bitch, it's also fraught with irony.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Fat, drunk and dentally-challenged . . .

. . . is no way for a country to go through life.

Who knew that the Brits' famed stiff upper lip got that way from trying to make it to the 'loo before blowing chunks?


FROM THE DAILY MAIL in London, we get this depressing account of the Big Night in the U.K.:
Binge-drinking revellers fuelled a chaotic start to 2008 as over-stretched ambulance workers battled to cope with emergency calls flooding in at a peak of one every eight seconds.

In the capital alone the London Ambulance Service had to deal with its highest number of emergency calls since the Millennium - the majority related to excess alcohol.

As midnight came and went there was mayhem as scores of drunken partygoers around the country tumbled into the streets, some wearing little more than their underwear.

Fights erupted and a string of dishevelled young men and women collapsed on benches and in doorways, too inebriated to remember or care that the night was supposed to be a celebration.

There to mop up the mess were thousands of emergency workers drafted in to provide cover on the busiest night of the year.

In the first four hours of 2008, London Ambulance Service (LAS) dealt with an astonishing 1,825 calls alone, peaking at over 500 calls an hour between 2am and 4am. The volume of 999 calls was up 17 per cent on last year' and four times worse than a normal night.

Meanwhile in the West Midlands the ambulance service fielded 1,400 calls in just five hours - a rate of one every 12 seconds. It was mirrored by the North East Ambulance Service which received 1,860 calls between 11pm and 5am.

Last night the astonishing number of calls to deal with booze-fuelled illness of injury prompted accusations that lives of those in real emergencies were being put at risk and demands for partygoers to wake up the costs of binge-drinking.

LAS spokeswoman Gemma Gidley said: "These calls put the Service under increased pressure to manage demand when we have to ensure we respond quickly to other patients with potentially life-threatening emergencies.

"People need to think about the real consequences of drinking so much that they require treatment."

In the south, the South Central Ambulance Service dealt with three times more incidents that normal.

OR, IN THE WORDS of that English prophet, Johnny Rotten:
God save the queen,
The fascist regime,
They made you a moron,
Potential H-bomb.

God save the queen,
She ain't no human being.
There is no future,
In England's dreaming.

Don't be told what you want,
Don't be told what you need,
There's no future no future,
No future for you!

God save the queen,
We mean it man
We love our queen
God saves.

God save the queen,
'Cos tourists are money
Our figure's head
Is not what she seems.

Oh God save history
God save your mad parade
Oh lord god have mercy
All claims are paid

When there's no future
How can there be sin?
We're the flowers in the dustbin,
We're the poison in your human machine,
We're the future; your future.

God save the queen
We mean it man
We love our queen
God saves.

God save the queen
We mean it man
And there is no future
In England's dreaming.

No future no future
No future for you
No future no future
No future for me.

No future no future
No future for you
No future no future
No future for you
No future no future for you.