On Saturday one could witness the flawless movement that helped Diversity win ‘Britain's Got Talent’ ahead of favourite Susan Boyle.
And if these examples are too low brow, or winners aren't your cup of tea, all week we have seen the GOP attack machine trying to assassinate the character of a Latina Supreme Court nominee that they feel threatened by, manufacturing doubts about how her ethnic background might not fit among the cogs driving their vision of the fatherland.
It seems at worst it can be a pretty astounding sight too.
Ruth Ducker always legally parks her Volkswagen Golf around the corner from her house, so it came as a shock when she discovered it had disappeared from its spot - and in its place was double yellow lines.
Her confusion deepened when Lambeth council claimed to have no knowledge of where her car was.
It took three weeks for the council to admit its contractors were behind the disappearance, and then add insult to injury by telling the 44-year-old graphic designer she owed more than £800 in fines.
- From the Daily Mail
Hate to sound like a broken record, but... who the hell is paying for this?? Kudos again, to another local council for constantly re-defining the meaning of value-for-money. Even when forgiving a lack of any advanced notification to residents that new parking restrictions were being enforced, a lack of notification that her car had been towed, and even the fact that she had been offered a laughable £100 compensation for " lost road tax, insurance and inconvenience", an extra £50 worth of salt was rubbed into the wound when Ducker continued to challenge the council.
There is a cross junction on the Slough trading estate that I pass through on my way back from work everyday. In fact, it is right next to a familiar blue-ish building that was home to the original Office. Approaching this junction on a 30mph street from either direction, the single lane splits as you approach. There is a left lane which carries you either straight ahead or turns left. The right lane is a turn-right-only. One fine day whilst waiting one or two cars away at a traffic light at the said junction, the lights eventually turn amber-red. As cars start slowly reving forward, the car in the right lane floors it and swerves left, cutting across and heads straight across the junction without indicating.
Not a single beep was heard. No horn. No rude gesture. No cursing. The traffic ambled onwards as if nothing had happened. My startled moment was quickly followed with frustration and anger. I refrained from using my own horn since I thought it rude to horn if the object of your road rage was not directly in front of you, but instead an innocent driver was before me. But my anger soon fell more heavily towards the driver in front of me who had let the evasive culprit get away with it all. And in retrospect, I should have horned the asshole in front of me for not horning at him. I left the junction now, already cruising at 30mph dissapointed in myself for not being able to do anything by this time. The time had passed, and the remaining journey ahead required my attention.
You see, when I noticed this repetion of history and began to suspect that some motorists preferred to use the empty right lane to overtake a dozen cars at a traffic light, it greatly annoyed me that no one would make their feelings heard. Either that or British motorists are easy push-overs. But it summarises a known British culture of never complaining for not wanting to appear rude or making a scene. This culture menifests unknown to the citizen who thinks he/she is doing him/herself a civilised favour, and ultimately puts the citizen in deeper quicksand that encourages an almost bully-ish behaviour from those who think they can get away with it.
And decades of this twisted mentality later, a council believes that £150 is a price worthy of a graphics designer's time, lost road tax, insurance and inconvenience. And for everything else, there is Mastercard.
NB: I must digress, so let's all make ourselves feel better about living in Britain. In other news, a Mongolian-raised British contortionist sets a new Guiness World Record by supporting her entire body weight with just her teeth (picture included)! Round of applause everyone. Well done.
Story #1:
A 3-year-old California girl accidentally shot and killed her two year old brother after finding a pistol under her parents' bed.
Police said the children's mother was in another part of the apartment when the shooting took place Wednesday, and their father was at work. The boy, who was shot with a .45-calibre semi-automatic handgun, was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
According to the US centres for disease control, American children 14 or younger are nine times more likely to die in a gun accident than children in Britain and 24 other industrialised nations combined. In 2006, at least 32 American children three years old or younger were killed with firearms, according to the agency.
And the NRA wonder why activists want to take their precious guns away after Columbine. Yes, your constitution allows you to bear arms. It's too bad it didn't stipulate that you had to have an IQ high enough to think twice about leaving a loaded gun lying in places accessible to children. A responsible arms bearer never points a weapon at a person, even when unloaded. They also never leave a bullet in the chamber during storage. There's no disimilarity to knife crime statistics; your chances of getting stabbed are higher when you carry a knife yourself. If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword, like they say. Too bad in this case, their toddler paid the price, and his sister will possibly live with that self-inflicted guilt the rest of her life.
Only in America.
Story #2 (news video available):
LENOIR, N.C. -- The Caldwell County Sheriff's Office and state agents are investigating after five people were shot, one fatally, Wednesday night.
The shooting began around 11 p.m. at two homes on Grandin Road near Blue Creek Road in an area called Kings Creek, north of Lenoir.
Officials say it started as an argument when one man’s dog killed his neighbor’s cat. The neighbor then shot the dog, prompting the dog’s owner to shoot his 50-year-old neighbor and the neighbor’s 8-year-old daughter. They are in fair and good condition, respectively.
If there was any headline in the British newspaper that I would pick out instinctively as being American, it would be "Dog kills cat. Cat owner kills dog. Dog owner shoots cat owner and 8-yr old daughter. Cops arrive and kill dog owner." OK, so I can't summarise news into catchy 5-word headlines like the BBC but still, only in America.
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An Oklahoma City pharmacist who shot and killed a 16-year-old would-be robber has been charged with first-degree murder.
Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater said Wednesday that 57-year-old Jerome Ersland was justified in shooting Antwun Parker once in the head on May 19. But Prater says Ersland went too far when he shot Parker five more times in the abdomen while Parker lay unconscious on the floor.
Ersland's attorney — Irven Box — says Ersland was protecting himself and two women inside the pharmacy.
Prater showed a security video in which two men burst into the pharmacy and one being shot. Ersland is seen chasing the second man outside before returning, walking past Parker to get a second gun then going back to Parker and opening fire.
Hmm, the headline at first seems like a morally justified albeit controversial killing; a pharmacist shooting some robbers to protect two female customers. The article does not report if the robbers were armed with guns. At least one of them was only 16 years old. Still, we can set aside doubt and sympathy, and assume these two men presented danger and intent to harm their lives, and still it makes my stomach churn when the fate of a kid already shot in the head is confirmed by 5 more 9mm rounds into the abdomen. The 5 bullets that pushed a man across a fine line between hero and zero is enough to push any debate around American gun culture to something that transcends gun control.
Michael Moore once tried to hunt down this answer in his documentary Bowling for Columbine. I believe the answer was, only in America.
Update (30 May 09): In other news, an European uses a swan (yes, a live swan) as a weapon.
An interesting element of certain languages, among them German, Turkish and our own English, is the allowance for compound nouns. We’re all aware that in English you can string some nouns together without modifying them to give more information about the nature, location or purpose of a the final noun. You know, spider monkey, fridge magnet, Ryanair customer complaints department. It makes for a more compact construction than, for example, the Romance languages like French or Spanish, where the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) translates back as the Organisation of the Treaty of the North Atlantic (um, OTAN). However, this construction is open to abuse, and the constraints of news headlines, where the optimal use of each word must be exploited, can twist good, respectable, hardworking words into some truly preposterous sentences. Take this example, from the BBC: ‘Dog fouling CCTV camera crackdown’ - five nouns shunted into a chaotic pile-up from which not even the most perpendicular minds in the English language could salvage anything; too nasty a crash for JG Ballard, too much junk for William Burroughs. Really, what on earth does it mean?
But the most conspicuous example of this abuse of the opportunities afforded by compound nouns , at least for me down the years (yes, seriously), has been the inadvertent fabrication by newspapers of a legion of inept supervillains, who, just like in the comics, either come to a sticky end or are arrested. The most recent example I noticed was when I was reading The Daily Expess(again, yes, seriously) and discovered that some fiend known as Crossbow Man had been taken off the streets. From the headline one could logically assume that this was his nom de guerre; it can’t be that much of a pain for headline writers to insert the word ‘with’ between ‘man’ and ‘crossbow’ to make it clear that the crossbow was the weapon of choice of a bog standard assailant rather than the Aristotelian essence of a veteran comic book nemesis. The same can be said of Sword Man, who should be easy to distinguish from a ‘swordsman’ or ‘man with sword’ by all but the laziest of headline writers, and so, must too be a bit special with a blade in his hands, and Hammer Man, who sounds like he should be lurking in wait for you behind floating platforms and lava pits at the end of his own Megaman level.
Some of these guys are too hot for Marvel or DC Comics to touch. Pure racist evil can be found in the ethnic hatred of ne’er do wells such as Swastika Attack Woman, Nazi Salute Man and the no-nonsense brigands styling themselves as the White Hate Death Threat Men. But fortunately other supervillains are unwilling to invoke genocide and tear the patchwork of mankind apart, and so occupy the other extreme, reaching outlandish levels of speciality and banality in their evil schemes. 50 Cent Onstage Necklace Theft Man, for example, must have had a pretty lame back-story, while the Soda Pop Theft Teen was never going to recruit loyal henchmen or acquire a hideout of her own with such a piddling little foray into the world of crime. Luckily for mankind, these two went down for their crimes with few problems. In fact, they both sound so lame that the regular police were probably able to handle them without summoning Batman, who is not to be confused with ‘man with bat’, or the risible Baseball Bat Man, so puny a criminal that the courts forced him back on the streets, no doubt to do some proper damage to our society.
More versatile baddies pose a greater threat and might require more than the police to halt their evil deeds. We are fortunate that Arson Man, not to be confused with Fire Man or a fireman, was undone by his voodoo obsession, thus joining his partner, Hijack Woman and his boy wonder sidekick, Theft Boy, in the slammer. The defiant Veil Row Woman might also take some pacifying before we see the back of her.
Unfortunately the most dangerous pyromaniac supervillain remains at large after all these years. When will they finally catch the Hell Fire Priest? As usual, it seems, the media is making our world seem even more terrifying than we ever had reason to imagine. And when the superheroes it provides are this lame, a bit of fear might be justified.
This picture makes me want to take up archery as a hobby. I wish I knew why.
So it’s a beautiful thing when a man whose hateful vision extended to disfiguring a whole continent is rewarded with the eternal recognition that fleeting visits to garden parties cannot guarantee. Westminster City Council has granted planning permission to cast the likeness of war criminal, state terrorist and crucifier of Central America, Ronald Reagan, in bronze, possibly because wooden spoons make for rather rickety statues. It will be erected on Grosvenor Square outside an American Embassy that, the last time I heard, was moving location anyway. Maybe the nearby Canadian embassy will have some use for it. The council has even been prepared to waive established rules that normally delay such memorials until ten years has elapsed since the death of the selected hagiographical study so that his pal Margaret Thatcher can turn up for its unveiling. On that day irony will scream almost as loud as those in the torture chambers of the Saudis and Baathists he had for allies, as the statue of the man behind Star Wars is planted opposite one of Dwight D. Eisenhower, best known for leaving office with warnings about the military industrial complex.
Ranking evil is often a fatuous task, but the respective legacies that these two will leave on the world makes for a most one-sided comparison. Nick Griffin’s henchmen pass their time smashing windows, recreating '300' by wrestling Asians in car parks and daubing BNP slogans on the inside of toilet cubicles. A few corpulent BNPers literally fill seats on local councils but the party is small fry and its crimes small scale. The police can deal with them. As for Reagan, well he may not have been a beer-gutted street brawling xenophobe with an aura of piss and scotch eggs, but he was in much greater need of a spell in jail. Pick a lousy government outside the Soviet bloc on any continent and he was ready to support and fund their evils. Pinochet’s Chile, Mobotu’s ‘Zaire’, Saddam’s Iraq, Ceausescu’s Romania, Suharto’s Indonesia, the list is long. He also sought to undermine democracy if he didn’t like it, exposing Nicaraguans to a decade long terrorist insurgency until its revolutionary government’s social programmes caved in and a frightened population voted them out of power. As Libyan civilians found out, he was quite prepared to drop his own bombs too. And while Reagan was no BNP racist, his refusal to give up continued support of South Africa’s Apartheid government stank more than all the shit BNP activists have ever posted through the letterboxes of designated ethnic undesirables combined.
This guy was not a particularly great friend of Britain, only its wrecking ball Prime Minister. He backed the Argentine junta until they farted in the jacuzzi with their Falklands invasion. Only then was he forced to choose between prized allies, picking Thatcher’s Britain despite his prized ideologue, Jeane Kirkpatrick, recommending that they stay close to the mutilators and abductors in Buenos Aires. He even managed to ruffle his relationship with Thatcher by needlessly invading Grenada, a member of the Commonwealth. Never mind, Steve Summers, the chairman of Westminster City Council's planning applications subcommittee, believes that "Regardless of politics, nobody can dispute that President Reagan was a true ally of this country”, a defence that anyone in bed with the mafia might cleave to, but nobody in search of genuine justice.
While BNP members have beaten people black and blue, Reagan’s legacy is blood red. If you want a statue of Reagan because he contributed to the USSR buckling then you may as well stick an icon of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, perhaps brandishing a Stinger missile, outside the embassy. British soldiers are being dispatched to clean up and die for both men’s mess. Still, once it’s built we can re-enact the Cold War and tear the damn thing down.
Reagan and Suharto, who proved that you could get away with anything if you were anti-Communist
So Eurovision turned out OK in the end. Graham Norton did a fine job, although Norway won with a devastatingly rotten song. So bad I refuse to post a link to it, not that that will save Europe from its sickly embrace. That shot of saccharin and the unexpected glitz of this particular edition of the contest stand in sharp contrast with the daily drudge of work. And sometimes it can be a most repetitive drudge.
Lord spare me from these infernal spreadsheets. Just look at all these numbers. These soporific lines and lines of digits. They mean nothing to me, even less to you. They are ugly and there is nothing fun about them at all. Staring at this impenetrable wall of statistics only serves to amplify my hyperactivity and artistic urges. Could there be a way to harness them for a higher purpose (i.e. a cheap diversion)?
It looks a lot more hypnotic on my monitor. But it's still something, no? And just as we have sulphur and magma bubbling under our feet, hiding behind the beauty of our world, here we have sterile numbers holding these images in place, doing the hard work in an analogy that is certainly not at all contrived.
There’s a potential business plan here - an online Persian rug generator. Or I can take my designs to the masses, or get my local church retiled. It won’t cost much to print these off and blu tac them to those cold stone walls, and might attract some new converts if Muslims think they’re walking into an Iznik-tiled mosque.
The heart beats in a cage, and creativity in the workplace is vital. 7.7s and 3.2s and -0.1s may have begun to haunt me in my dreams, but those wretched numbers shall never enslave me, not so long as I can find ways to keep my five year old's brain occupied. Still, in the world of tiling I am a rank amateur. Here are some examples of how it looks when it's done properly:
Assuming I can steel myself for Norton’s barrage of double-entendres, I will be interested in one aspect of his commentary in particular, and that is how he copes with the fact that this is a song contest heavily skewed by factors other than the music. There is a slight political dimension to this contest, in much the same way that there is slight gangster dimension to The Godfather films. Politics and national rivalries are shamelessly plastered all over it. Norton can choose to accept this reality with a knowing laugh, or choke on it with awkward bouts of hysteria and a swell of patronising lectures. In recent years Wogan had increasingly tended towards the latter, coming across as a bitter old man before throwing in the towel when his fixation with how the people of Eastern Europe chose to use their phone votes gave him one dark night of the soul too many. Wogan’s contention, shared with many viewers and the British press, was that Western Europe would never again win the competition since Eastern European nations had closed ranks and formed some kind of cartel, voting for each other along friendly neighbour lines and depriving the minority Western nations from finishing in the higher reaches of the rankings. This seemed to become a hot topic a few years after 1994, when the contest expanded greatly to accommodate new members, once penned behine the Berlin Wall in the Eastern bloc or part of the USSR, eager to compete alongside their Western European neighbours. While some of us chose to see this as an opportunity for some fun cultures bringing their own novel eccentricities to proceedings, others interpreted it as a modern Red Peril, with one schoolmasterly Lib Dem MP getting so worked up that Eastern European nations weren't sitting at separate desks that he tabled a motion condemning the contest for, paradoxically, harming friendly ties between European nations. Others, including Wogan, called for the UK and maybe some of its Western friends like France and Germany to pull out of the competition until nations like Bosnia and Estonia learned how to use their freedom constructively.
The swirling paranoia over the honesty of these Eastern Europeans culminated in the results of last year’s competition, a lazy journalist's wet dream where Russia won with votes from, among others, Latvia, Lithuania and the Ukraine, despite their song being so underwhelming that it would have sent a sloth into a coma. We were told repeatedly that it was obvious all along that Russia would win because of all those ex-Warsaw Pact states floating about with votes to give and eyes only for their former prison warden. Absent from this modern Cold War story was the fact that this was Russia's first ever win and the song was sung by an established Russian star.
Voting for non-musical reasons, including bloc voting, does go on, but its effect on the final result is exaggerated and its critics are often guilty of hypocrisy and geo-political illiteracy in hyping up its importance, often squeezing countries that weren’t aware that they were best friends, at least not until a bunch of lazy Western pundits informed them, into contrived special relationships because it serves their obsession. Believe it or not, there could well be cultural and even musical reasons powering these seemingly unworthy winners to victory and this should always be the first aspect to examine when diagnosis on why the UK entry lost begins. With some lessons on what not to do from his predecessor, here are some reasons why Graham Norton shouldn’t even get started on these tedious accusations of bloc voting determining who wins, and should just stick to the knob jokes.
"Twelve points will go to Spain."
Terry Wogan on Andorra, 2007. Seconds before they gave twelve points to the Ukraine.
1. The outcome of bloc voting is only predictable in hindsight. Let’s do a roll-call of the impostor winners: Estonia 2001, Latvia 2002, Ukraine 2004, Serbia 2007, Russia 2008. What do these countries all have in common? They’re all Eastern European. What don’t they have in common? THEY’RE ALL F**KING DIFFERENT FROM EACH OTHER.
Russia was always going to win because of all its Warsaw Pact accomplices, we were told. After they won it that is. Beforehand we were inundated with news that some Eastern block nation would win but not who, perhaps because journalists weren’t invited to the 20+ meeting of these perfidious nations beforehand. Maybe if those who see only rigid predictability successfully named the impostor due to prevail before the contest began, or if the same nation was repeatedly exploiting the benefits of its neighbours’ charity then we could take their objections a bit more seriously.
The longevity of the bloc-voting theory is enhanced due to the good insurance it provides to those making the accusations. Think - if Serbian voters, for example, give 12 points to Bosnia, Montenegro, Croatia, Albania, Slovenia, Macedonia or even Hungary then it falls into the confines of the theory and is predictable. Proponents of the theory can't lose. For all the self-satisfied cries of I told you so, Russia actually won it for the first time last year, becoming the fourteenth different winner in as many years. The favourite, not only to win this year but also become the first country to win twice under the expanded format? Norway.
"Close enough - along the old Balkans."
Terry Wogan on Greece and Armenia, 2007
2. Bloc voting often ignores geographical and cultural realities. Who forms these blocs? Sure, Greece and Cyprus are in bed together, and Andorra is virtually guaranteed to help out either France or Spain, provided that the Ukraine doesn’t require its services. There are the Nordic countries too. But from over here in Western Europe anything East of the Reichstag is portrayed as a homogenous, confusing blob from Poland to Albania to Estonia to Azerbaijan, with geography collapsing into some seeminly endless kind of fuzzy black hole full of countries that Western commentators (wilfully) fail to place. Where's Armenia on the map? Does Tajikistan compete? What about Slavaturkistan, is that a real country? I think we all know who they'd vote for... Shoving Eastern, Central and, to be strictly honest, non-European nations into this nebulous mass reduces Western Europe to a third of the competitors, which suddenly makes the high number of winners outside their number seem less disproportionate.
Slotting countries into presumptuous blocs seems easy at first, but if we think for 00.1 of a second then things get complicated. Who is Finland closer to, Scandinavia or the Baltic nations? Poland could just as easily vote for Germany as for Russia. It neighbours both of them, and has been given a thorough going over by both their armies. Romania has little in common with its neighbours; does it form part of a bloc? Those same twits that casually proclaimed how obvious it was that the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would all vote for the Slavs of Russia are overlooking the fact that these three didn’t give full marks to each other, as one would expect in a bloc vote. Eastern Europe is absolutely not one bloc, but at most, sereval smaller ones with between two to six members at most in each. This leads to the more taxing question of why these blocs don’t cancel each other out.
3. Diasporic voting, a more obvious flaw in the system, is overlooked. There is obviously a distinction between reflexively voting for your neighbour and voting for your own nation from abroad, where it’s nice and legal but arguably more unethical. Last year Romania didn’t benefit at all from votes from the Slavic countries in its neighbourhood and actually got its highest score from fellow Romantic nation Spain. Russia gets consistently high marks from Israel due to the Russian community there. So to win, Britain doesn’t need friends abroad, it actually needs to shift citizens abroad. I propose we start with the convicts, then progress through the celebrities, Z-list backwards.
Interestingly, living in Madrid I found none of the expats I knew were sufficiently motivated to vote for the UK’s drab entry, although diaspora voting is as accessible an option for Brits as anyone else. The massive German community in Spain could also have helped their nation (and equally hysterical media) from abroad but chose not to. If these nations can’t rely on their troops abroad, why should they fuss about their neighbours not giving them votes?
Anyway, how much this flaw really tilts the vote is unclear. To make a serious impact on the result a diaspora is going to have to invest a concentrated and widespread effort that is not easy to achieve. Certainly heavily mixed nations like those in the Balkans have an advantage here.
And assuming that a minority can amass significant numbers, is this an unethical strategy? It would be interesting to see those who answer ‘no’ are equally frustrated at the fact that friends and relatives of X Factor contestants can jam the switchboards of that strictly musical event, and part of me feels that if expats are willing to piss away so much money on texts and phone calls then so be it. If the Eurovision Song Contest is going to be puritanically just about the songs, then each household should get just one vote. If it's going to be just about a bit of fun and charming stupidity then keep it as it is; it's the moaning critics that need to change.
"[Since 2003] Turkey really aimed high, hoping to come away again with a first place prize, and sending a stream of famous singers to do so."
Zaman newspaper, 2009
4. Some countries outside these blocs regularly do well. Regular high-flyer Turkey may have Azerbaijan, and, at a pinch, its diaspora in Germany to depend on. But it is certainly not part of any bloc, and so needs to produce sufficiently appealing output to sway voters. A country with even fewer friends in Europe is Israel, who won in 1998 and has finished high on several other occasions.
"Ukraine want to be absolutely sure that the electricity and oil flows through."
Terry Wogan, 2008, after Ukraine gave 12 to Russia
5. It engenders cack-handed analysis. If Ukrainians want to be absolutely sure the electricity and oil comes through they could always accept who Putin dictates their leaders should be and stop edging towards NATO, rather than pacifying him in the rather less significant arena provided by a tacky singing competition. Weird remarks about Russia cutting off everyone’s gas if they don’t fall into line, made by potentially unhinged commentators who unsettle me because I don’t know whether or not they’re joking, are hardly going to impress anyone living in the real world, and given that the option of Ukraine or Estonia making an anti-Kremlin protest vote was just as plausible as a political manoeuvre it seems strange that they only mention this narrative of Eastern Europeans in their scripted role of energy hostages.
Whinging critics wishing to foist a geo-political subtext onto the competition shouldn’t pussyfoot around - they should do it properly. A focus on bloc voting bypasses far more interesting stories that Eurasian politics throws up. For example, this year it would be heartening to see some focus on the Israeli entry, a joint Arab and Jewish effort by two people who have put themselves in the firing line from their respective constituencies but believe that maintenance of dialogue between them is paramount for peace to grow. My suspicion is that this will go right over the heads of too many commentators, just as the 2007 competition results concerning Armenia and Turkey. This pair have no diplomatic relations and share a closed border due to their continued battle over the Turkish government’s denial of the Armenian genocide and Armenia’s bloody territorial war with Turkey’s best friend, Azerbaijan. Yet in 2007 Armenia got the full 12 points from Turkey, which should merit at least a raised eyebrow, if not a small fanfare. Well, to be fair, it got some analysis, provided by the David Icke Division of the European wing of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Such as this comment from the BBC message board:
"Turkey voting for Armenia had EVERYTHING to do with politics!...it was to make Armenia hush hush about the genocide."
Yeah, because nothing ends years of historic pain and pursuit for justice like fobbing a nation off in a campy music competition. But from such trenchant analysis one can develop the Eurovision formula of importance for the politically tone deaf:
Peaceful coexistance => Genocide => Eurovision votes
If an overlooked genocide went beneath the radar, the victor that year, Serbia, could have provided a nice redemption story from the state it was in a decade earlier. Instead our writers saw little beyond the free 50 points it was apparently guaranteed from the neighbours its army had spent all that time ravaging and ethnically cleansing.
Interestingly, now and then some bright spark floats the idea that Britain should enter four songs, under the guises of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Inevitably this is then shot down with the retort that the latter three all hate England and therefore wouldn’t vote for it. No doubt because England has never been as lovingly attentive as Russia has with its neighbours.
"You have to say that this is no longer a music contest"
Terry Wogan, 2008
6. Double standards for double Ds. There exists a quaint idea that Eurovision is a singing competition between competing songs and that is all that should matter. This would be incredible, as it would make this contest a musically pure haven from the weekly music charts, where publicity stunts, music videos and stage-managed interviews make or break artists. But if this is the case, perhaps someone can help me edge around the hypocrisy I keep running up against when acts fronted by nubile supermodel types rake in the points. Lest we forget, this lot were the early leaders last year:
Under the strictures of the 'music only' movement, votes for ironic entries must also be discouraged. Either we all have fun properly with suitable guidelines or we will all have to sit down and read the UK's Big Book of Proper Songs cover to cover before we can resume.
"Britain's votes plummeted with the invasion of Iraq and have stayed in the basement with the occupation."
DJ Paul Gambaccini, 2007
"It is the politically correct countries that get all the votes" Terry Wogan, 2003
7. It is yet another excuse to nurture a British victim complex. Wogan always seemed to career wildly from dismissing the competition as camp nonsense to treating it as a mirror to the stark reality of an unforgiving dog eat dog world, and appeared deadly serious when he claimed that Britain would never again win because nobody in Europe likes us. In yet another attempt to cast attention away from the sheer awfulness of everything Britain has submitted after Katrina and the Waves in 1997, some silly berks claim British military ventures abroad were the root of the problem. Would that it were so. If the price Britain has to pay to get its clutches on the Holy Grail, centre of the universe, genocide-defying accolade that success in Eurovision provides is to keep the foreign invasions to a minimum then I’m all for it. Wogan himself seems to think that the rest of Europe hates Britain because, unlike, say Serbia or Russia, it has attacked nearly everyone on the continent. So either these European victims had a gargantuan bout of collective amnesia in 1997, or I have missed out on a lot of fighting on the continent in the last 12 years. At least the UK always left its voting partner Ireland alone...
"The only way the UK will ever gain any respectability is if we get a major British star – Robbie Williams, Take That, God knows there are enough of them – to represent us, and then people will have to vote for us."
Terry Wogan, gets it right, 2008. World fails to notice due to flying pig sightings
8. Picking a decent act helps. Submitting the odd decent song certainly would be more use than wallowing in self-pity or recoiling in disbelief at any implication that Eastern Europeans might not like the recent British entries, great as they were to people with a diet of consisting only of cheese and who use Q-tips lined with tin for their ears. These people can designate political voting as the culprit if they want when someone not even considered good enough to win the X-Factor bombs in the contest, but they aren’t any use for building a winning strategy. My suspicion is that they'd just insist we send Susan Boyle next year. A better template is Finland’s win in 2006. They got the highest score of any nation in the competition’s history by rocking out, which qualifies as originality of the highest order in a contest held practically at gunpoint by awful synth pop. Longtime fans have also remarked on how consistently high-scoring Turkey have generally thrown themselves into the competition wholeheartedly, picking songs that they think the rest of Europe will enjoy rather than dumping any old crap onto Europe’s plate with the sour look and “like it or lump it” attitude of a disillusioned school canteen worker. Russia's song was sung by regional megastar Dima Bilan, well-known throughout Eastern Europe and with massive record sales that probably didn’t come about through orchestrated bloc-purchasing and blackmail. If this song sucked, it wasn’t for lack of trying, given that Timbaland, who knows the way to reach the top of the charts, also produced that song. Maybe if the UK worked with him they could perfect the art. God helps those who help themselves, and in 2007 when there was speculation that Morrissey was going to perform the UK entry, we instead packed this shower off to Helsinki on a wing and a prayer:
"[T]he former Eastern Bloc countries are not sufficiently versed in the ways of democracy to realise they are supposed to be voting for a song, not a next-door neighbour.",
Terry Wogan 2008
9. It’s an excuse for cheap bigotry. Strangely, although friendly countries exchanging votes is a European-wide phenomenon, it is only the untrained puppies responsible for East European bloc voting that raises any alarm. Expeditions to educate the natives there have not yet had the desired effect, but then again, when thinking for oneself has adverse side effects such as borderline racism then maybe it is better to stay shackled under regional thought slavery. "Goodnight western Europe", moaned Wogan at the climax of his last competition, shortly before drawing his iron curtains and storming off to a comfy bed in the retirement home. Later he bemoaned that “East of the Danube they won’t be voting for a black singer any day soon” when Britain’s black singer made little headway in 2007. On either side of that particular river, he should have added. People who decided to over indulge in the spirit of recent UK Eurovision entries and take up being losers as a fulltime occupation surpassed him, writing hate mongering filth such as this.
Britain and Ireland swapping votes is just fine by the way. We should do more of that.
"Less than a third of the total votes for the winning entry were ones which seemed to have been influenced by block voting" Eurovision statistician and fan, Derek Gatherer, 2007
10. Its effects are exaggerated. Serbia won with considerable Eastern support in 2007. Yet if the votes from those naïve upstarts in Eastern Europe were removed and only the West permitted to vote, the winner would have been…Serbia. It also got 12 marks from Switzerland, Austria and Finland. That’s an interesting bloc – countries with overlooked skiing facilities. Russia did benefit from the votes of a bunch of nearby states (that hate it’s current government and every one it ever had) last year, but someone needs to explain why they have never benefited like this before 2008. The idea that this insipid, dreary piss-dribble music might be popular in the East might be worth exploring, especially when it’s sung by a famous act that has invested significant effort into its performance. What is certain is that to amass winning scores of 200+, a country will have to appeal to others outside its bloc/ sphere of influence/ frightened empire.
“Anyone would think you wanted Ireland to lose the next Eurosong contest […] maybe because it was costing too much to stage”.
Father Dick Byrne, 1996
11. Our annual ration of sour grapes might taste a bit sweeter if we think about the responsibilities that success entails. Britain has the 2012 Olympics. It also has a financial crisis. We really want to host Eurovision too? Wogan should be willing Balkan nations to victory so that they all go under. Iceland might want to consider taking a hit this year too.
"Do we stand by quality or do we join in this rather tasteless lottery that Eurovision has become?" Phil Coulter, writer of Puppet on a String, 2008
12. It defies those with a functioning memory. From nostalgic types comes the accusation that bloc voting makes a mockery of the competition. Really? Maybe Estonia or Serbia haven’t yet reached the level of sophistication required to submit appallingly unprepared acts or songs about planes with blowjob jokes, but then again, they are too busy winning the damn thing to aspire to this just yet. I suspect that if I were to commandeer a time machine and request that it took me back to the years when Cyprus didn't vote for Greece it would reply 'does not compute'. And if I ordered it to travel back to the age when Eurovision was respectable and all about the music, it would shake frantically and blow up in my face.
Eurovision...
...has never...
...been about...
...respectability...
...or, for that matter,
just ability.
"This is a farce. I'm sorry . . . someone's got to stop this. The EBU's got to take this in hand"
Terry Wogan, 2004, after Cyprus voted for Ukraine, Serbia and Greece (who went on to finish first, second and third respectively)
Still, those shrill cries have already made some headway in weathering away common sense, because this year we have a dubious combination of telephone voting and a national jury imposed to regulate the fun and administer it in quantities deemed acceptable by the Western sphere, despite the fact that the votes of an entire population are harder to control than those of a panel, and the potential for panels to be so pressurised not to vote for their neighbours that they might actually vote for inferior songs from outside their region just to avoid these tiresome allegations. The real issue of expats voting will not be dealt with because there is no logical solution other than to accept that every nation has this option.
Deserving of consideration is the theory that maybe in this contest to find Europe’s most popular song… people in Eastern Europe are choosing Europe’s most popular song. Maybe it is not that the contest has not changed so much as that Europe itself has. Eastern Europe has regions of shared culture and language that gives any song alluding to them a significant advantage. It’s no coincidence that Russia’s and Serbia’s winning entries were in languages that their neighbours understood, while songs with traditioanl regional melodies were very possibly enough to compel Armenians and Turks to vote across political boundaries and enjoy each other’s music. Cries of bloc voting from the UK, itself in as peripheral a position in Europe as Turkey, Cyprus or Russia, drown out any attempt to understand that there might be, along with political ties, musical reasons for why people vote the way they do. These moronic keyboard driven dirges seem to go down well in these parts, and protests from us that this isn’t real music are as futile as those of a metal fan listeningh to the UK Top 40. The UK’s only route apart from forsaking its own musical identity and churning out these horrible songs itself is to think outside the box and release something different, with ab it of class and heart, and stop whining that it has been turfed out of its own contest.
The idea that the big four of France, Germany, Spain and the UK pull out in protest deserves little consideration. No one would notice. France may have had one of the coolest songs last year, but generally the presence of these four hardly lifts the quality or enjoyment of the competition. And if Eastern Europeans are happy to shell out so much to keep their nations high in the rankings then I’m sure they’ll be only too happy to continue funding it themselves. It would just be a bitter, unnecessary gesture.
I was in Helsinki in May 2006, on the night that Lordi won for Finland. The city errupted, like Finland had won the world cup. An act that was well put together, tried something different and genuinely charmed a diverse range of audiences showed that if everything clicks into place, it doesn’t matter what country your entry is from. So, if and when the UK’s latest reality TV selected effort tanks, I hope Norton will have some more interesting reasons to explain its failure than mere prejudice, and will choose not to dole out the blame on the unworthy two thirds of the continent. Bloc or no bloc, if there’s one thing all Eastern Europeans have in common it’s a hatred of being told who to vote for by outsiders.
Is The Scum exploiting Michael Sophocles?
Remember Michael Sophocles from The Apprentice last year? That whiny man-shaped vessel of unfiltered git? That self-important windbag who, in the exact reverse of one of those puffer fish, would deflate from his usual cocksure self and cower sickeningly in front of would-be predators until they left him alone? That fecal-tongued, incompetent halfwit whose business acumen basically consisted of an ability to beg and grovel where other men with even a shred of dignity would take a bullet? Yeah, you do.
Most people had a field day with this sorry sample of instant karma in action, as he limped along the course of the competition, crashing into every obstacle and dragging down those with him. There’s always one contestant that manages to achieve the seemingly unachievable and give the world of business a worse name than even it deserves. Therefore even the papers that idolise Suralan Sugar were thoroughly disgusted with this Sideshow Bob character, and subjected him to the ridicule he deserved each time his misguided behaviour caused him additional setbacks.
The Scum had as much fun as anyone in adding insult to the self-inflicted injury of ‘Slimy’ Michael Sophocles, the 'horribly greasy spooner', in stories such as this one, which would have made ths skin of the residents of a morgue crawl. In the face of such insult there comes a time for redemption, there comes a time to prove the doubters wrong, there comes a time to strike out and…
…accept pay cheques from the very same paper that had such a leading role in degrading him. Hmm, it appears that Michael Sophocles really will plunge new depths for cash. He has been hired, albeit as an Apprentice critic, and each week we get his verdict on a bunch of contestants, who, while liberally peppered with useless individuals, still would have no space to waste among them on a male escort who doesn’t even know what religion he is. The semi-literate assessments are written with a clanging, virtually deafening deficit of irony that must have had copy editors sniggering behind his back. The assessments also have the charmless tendency resort to blugeoning, witless personal cruelty as a first resort (ahem). Here are some samples from a precious blink and you miss it artefact of our civilization, that guarantee that from this day forth I shall be reading The Scum for a whole minute every week.
Michael Sophocles on Yasmina Siadaten: "This lady needs to seriously look into buying some Clearasil. A small contribution to a dismal team performance saved her bacon.” (A timely lecture on personal appearance from Michael Sophocles here. Despite warning that irony would be absent here, even I remain flabbergasted at how it flees the room whenever this desperate jellyfish squelches his way in. Buy yourself a mirror, boy).
Michael Sophocles on Mona Lewis: "A great win for the project manager does not excuse her for having the most irritating voice I have heard since witnessing foxes mating.” (You watch foxes mating? Why? Do you keep a logbook of woodland creatures' reproductive habits? The Sun doesn’t even need to pay journalists to pry into this twisted man’s personal life anymore - he just admitted that he watches nocturnal animals mating).
Michael Sophocles on Philip Taylor: "An arrogant pillock who had one eye on the prize and the other on Ms Walsh. Needs to realise that he ain’t God’s gift to women.” (Given that Michael Sophocles stated quite clearly at the start of last year’s show that he was comfortable being arrogant and given that only the most throbbingly erectile of pillocks would chose the paper that derided him with such malice to next spring up, that assessment might be a thinly veiled compliment to the admittedly awful Philip Taylor).
Michael Sophocles on Lorraine Tighe: "This lady was lucky to stay alive this week. Needs to start winning friends and influencing people to survive.” (You can’t blame the boy for drawing on the ravages of personal experience for his column, although a lecture from an individual whose conspicuous lack of influence probably prevented him reaching stratospheric levels of unpopularity is of dubious value. His fellow contestants thought he was a tit as well).
Does this boy not see that he is building his own gallows while The Scum looks on with the same glee that Simon Cowell gets from transient X Factor contestants? Part of me hopes that this absolute trainwreck of a column makes it to the end of the series, and that the flimsy puppet on a stick that is Michael Sophocles doesn’t get savaged beyond repair until someone is about to get hired. Then The Scum should just cut his strings and let him fall flat on his face again. A hate-nourished, jizz-swilling sow of a rag will never quite match the nauseating qualities of those willing to crawl on all fours through the mud and prostitute their self respect to get at its milk. And in case you were wondering, pigs aren’t kosher either Sophocles, you serial milk-gargling pillock. I suppose I shouldn’t insult him too much, lest our punishment craving subject come crawling to this pit of shame for a job.
The message from British voters is always the same: Vote for us or this contest is anti-Western and meaningless. So let's get the honesty in early: This song is a vortex of dross and if it sucked any harder then Europeans, Eastern and Western, would have to nail all their furniture to the floor. More on the myth of bloc voting later this week.
OWOSSO, Mich. (AP) - A mid-Michigan woman says she was denied entry into Canada because she is on welfare.
Rose Kelley of Owosso says she has filed a discrimination complaint with the Canada Border Services Agency over its refusal to let her and her two children cross the border via the Blue Water Bridge connecting Port Huron with Sarnia, Ontario.
The 25-year-old Kelley tells The Argus-Press of Owosso that she planned to visit friends and relatives when she arrived at the border May 1. She says she was told to furnish evidence of citizenship, financial support and other documentation, but was denied entry again on May 3.
Kelley says she was told she didn't make enough money and people on welfare shouldn't take vacations.
- via WLNS.com
Face mask or not, it's all right to take a deep breath and calm down a bit about swine flu. Despite the hyperventilating media reports of recent weeks odds are pretty good you're not going to be felled by the nasty but generally non-fatal H1N1 virus. This may come as a shock to, say, Egypt, which ordered all of its pigs slaughtered in a misguided attempt to stop the spread of the flu (which, reports indicate, is not transmitted from pig to person).
Infections are falling in Mexico, the country hardest-hit by the flu bug, and the World Health Organization said the virus has not yet created a sustained outbreak in Europe. Though new cases are popping up around the globe each day, it appears that a widespread global pandemic isn't forthcoming. Just like SARS and the avian flu before it, H1N1 probably will cause more damage through anxiety than actual infection.
- Continue at TIME (Top 10 Panics!)
We're all gonna DIE!! Whaaa?Dee dee dee deeee. Dee dee dee deeee. Get out of my head!!
With all of Gordon Brown's problems it's heartening to see that his predecessor, the one with that grin and the illegal war under his belt, isn't missed much. Presenting himself to a Guardian audience to champion the benefits of neoliberalism in developing world countries like Sierra Leone was, to put it mildly, provocative on Mr Blair's part. So it's no surprise that this article soon had its comments section closed by exhausted moderators due to the rash of anti-Blair invectives from irate readers. Below are some of my favourites. Notice the conspicuous absence of references to economics and post-war development.
"Look what the cat dragged in." MarkKearney
"You may or may not be right about Sierra Leone but I just cant belive you" thatsonlyyouropinion
"Anyone remember that bit in Juraasic [sic] Park when they lower the cow into the forest full of Velociraptors at feeding time? This article is that cow." 13thDukeofWybourne
"The sight of Tony "rent a cause for $1m" Blair does not fill me with hope." jackoba
"This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted." Virtually everyone else
It's worth mentioning that a few comments engaged with the scrambled logic of Blair's article and highlighted the effects that neoliberal policies, enforced by international financial institutions like the IMF, had in exacerbating conflict in Sierra Leone by crippling public services and enraging its excluded youth. The British government went along with these policies in its usual slackjawed, complacent, presumptuous manner, so it is no surprise to see him recommending them again here.
By most accounts Blair gets a good reception these days in Sierra Leone due to the role of British troops in routing a violent rebel insurgency that plauged the country throughout the 1990s, a fruitful outcome to a heavily improvised mission that had initially been a rescue operation for foreign nationals, not a humanitarian intervention. Pity that the saint-like glow that success with guns gave him in Africa didn't wear off quicker, though. We all could have been spared another dose of his dubious kindness.
Thanks Tony. Now fuck off
Neither a pack of lies nor a strict moderator can help little Timmy here.
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