| Your essential Tuesday reading |
[Oct. 18th, 2011|04:43 pm] |
Steve Rotheram raises seven kinds of hell in the House of Commons with an extraordinary speech on the Hillsborough disaster:
I am proud to be a Liverpudlian. In the 22 years for which the families have fought their dignified campaign, I and the rest of Britain have watched as my great city has come together on this issue. Out of the darkness of the Hillsborough tragedy, an eternal flame of unity has emerged and means that Liverpool is now synonymous with a unique kind of solidarity. Whether red or blue, we are Scousers all.
To those who attempt to perpetrate the myth that it was the fault of the fans, I say that I will never tire of reminding them that the ordinary fans were the real heroes on the day, not the villains. They reacted while those in authority froze.
My granddad used to regale me with vivid accounts of the two world wars that he fought in, and while he never glorified in war itself he would explain to us children his sense of loss for fallen comrades, nearly half a century later. I did not really understand that when I was growing up, but I do now. It does not matter how long it takes, we will never stop fighting for justice for the 96.
and
Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance:
2. “Fortune” is a word for having a lot of money and for having a lot of luck, but that does not mean the word has two definitions. |
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| Fruits of labour |
[Mar. 22nd, 2011|05:26 pm] |
No idea* how this took SIX MONTHS for the few hours' actual work it took to go from spur-of-the-moment Sunday afternoon purchase to final sealing and labelling, but here:
Who's coming round for a drink?
[label courtesy of the peerless ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) maga_dogg]
*An obvious lie; I have every idea. Lazy-bastardry. |
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| If you're gonna go out, go out in style |
[Mar. 5th, 2011|01:09 am] |
I suspect you see a perfect circle. I see a downward spiral. I see a cascade of shit pirouetting from your penthouse office, caking each layer of management, splattering all in between.
..
You may have heard the phrase, "The flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas." Well, try this: "The lies of a newspaper in London can get a bloke's head caved in down an alley in Bradford."
From this resignation letter, an instant classic of the genre. |
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| Revolution delayed due to snow on the barricades |
[Dec. 27th, 2010|10:59 pm] |
So there's been this big row going on while I was away from the interwebs over Christmas (happy Christmas, everyone!) over the student protests and whether they're self-organising and the old left (whatever that is) should just curl up and die quietly. I have nothing insightful to say on the matter but I did like this bit of wisdom:
It is a minor sociological irony that those movements which think of themselves most readily as counter-cultural are least likely to be significantly counter-cultural. It is, in the conditions of late capitalism, far more counter-cultural to demand a quiet life with a steady income than to have every accessible fold of skin pierced whilst listening to professedly alternative music.
Certainly "a quiet life with a steady income" looks about as unobtainable to me and half my generation as a full-blown socialist paradise with stuffing and sprouts and all the trimmings. |
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| Jealousy |
[Jul. 21st, 2010|12:27 pm] |
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The day I get to pen a news story which begins "A gay man, who took a huge dose of LSD and injured his roommate by hitting him over the head with a 12-inch glass penis after setting his house on fire while nude...", I can retire from journalism in the knowledge I'll never write a better intro par. |
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| A half-arsed prediction |
[May. 7th, 2010|10:00 pm] |
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since every other pundit got it spectacularly wrong already and I'm unlikely to be any wronger: Clegg realises his own party won't wear a coalition with the Tories, so he, Cable and Huhne will defect to Cameron's mob along with just enough of the other Orange Book lunatics to provide a majority. They may succeed in getting ID cards dropped but electoral reform will not happen, and the fallout will send the Lib Dems back into the oblivion they've mostly enjoyed since the foundation of the Labour Party. And everyone will have learned a valuable lesson about ruthlessly ambitious upper-class careerists pretending to be progressive. |
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| America: world leaders in socialism |
[Apr. 28th, 2010|12:38 am] |
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At least, I can't recall Britain having any nationalised theme parks. The appalling Dreamland Margate got an ineffectual government bailout, if I remember aright, but as ever the proud red ranks of the American proletariat show us Limey pinkos the way. |
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| Riddley Walker |
[Apr. 27th, 2010|11:03 pm] |
"The "straight passage" is a crucial moment, I believe. For those missing pieces here and there, it grounds the Eusa story in something concrete, and though we've known it all along, quite plainly puts forward the severity of the gap between our world and theirs. This moment both pulled me closer to Riddley's world in terms of pathos, and firmly planted me outside of that world. Without the magic of Riddley's language, the passage seemed almost naked to me, sad in its matter-of-factness. Oh, I thought, I'm one of them, and so far away."
Passages like this make the manifold idiocies of the Onion AV Club's discussion series on Riddley Walker much easier to bear. (No, fans have not come up with some inventive notions of where the book's places *might* go in modern England, you fool, those *are* the damn places, as Hoban makes entirely sodding clear). Still, there's enough insight to make the series worth keeping an eye on, and the idiocies have damn near stirred me into action on a long-threatened plan to scribble down some thoughts in this yere LJ... |
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