An epiphany

I think I may have worked out why the Taliban are fighting us in Afghanistan.

They’ve cottoned on to the fact that we’re trying to install a democratic government in their country.

You know, just like ours.

Agassi….My toupé cost me the French Open

Screw the crystal meth stories. This is the real dirt….

“Every morning I would get up and find another piece of my identity on the pillow, in the wash basin, down the plughole. I asked myself: you want to wear a toupee? On the tennis court? I answered myself; what else could I do?”

Did I just write a blog post about tennis?

Sorry. Won’t happen again. Shoot me if you like.

Forget, forget the 5th of November

Interesting article here from Boris, written with his usual flair….

It is precisely now, when the public mood is so bitter towards bankers, so hostile to profit, so seemingly brassed off with the very idea of wealth creation that we should remember how ghastly, grim and unworkable was the alternative – state-controlled socialism. It was a moral disaster, a system that extolled equality but entrenched the privileges of an unelected elite who luxuriated in their dachas and their Zil limos, roaring down their reserved lanes and splashing the people with contemptuous sludge.

And then there’s this passage….

Without the Fall of the Wall, Nelson Mandela would never have walked to freedom. How much the greatest political event it was in my lifetime, and how much the best.

….which serves to remind me of a conversation I had a few weeks back with a Johannesburg businessman, who highlighted just how inextricably linked the end of communism was to the collapse of apartheid. Once the cold war ended, he told me, the Americans were no longer concerned with proxy wars in sub-saharan Africa and said to the Jaapies, “Listen, you blokes, you’re embarrassing even us now. We can’t support this, or you, any longer.”

And hey presto! A miraculous tsunami of moral enlightenment (or perhaps simple pragmatism) swept through white South Africa.

Sadly, however, as we enter the era of the post-democratic Europe, yet again we seem to be ignoring the lessons that history has to offer us.

Stephen Fry saves the internet again

A disaster of epoch-making proportions was narrowly avoided yesterday when, for twelve agonising, nail biting hours, the world waited, digits crossed, gaze fixed intently at its computer screens, to see whether or not @stephenfry, the man widely acknowledged to be in charge of the internet, would make good his admonition that he would be leaving social networking site, Twitter, never to return.

This near tragedy came about in the early hours of yesterday morning when hitherto Twitter also-ran and complete unknown, @brumplum, had the downright gall to refer to Fry’s tweets as “boring”. Naturally Fry wasn’t about to take this lying down and returned serve with interest….

To which, sense of fun and japery going into overdrive, our friend The Plum responded….

Only to discover that Fry wasn’t in on the joke….

As is only right and proper when the honour of a National Treasure™ is impugned, the world wide web went into a ferment, and the sense of outrage and moral panic had reached fever pitch by the time Fry’s QI sidekick, the part time actor and full time Dagenham enforcer, @alandavies1, arrived on the scene and waded in with this flailing combination of haymakers….

Followed by….

And finally, the following call for all good Essex men and true to take up arms in defence of our hero….

And so it continued, for hour after hour, with enraged Twits landing body blow after body blow on The Plum, while the object of all this opprobrium and his small but loyal band of followers manned the barricades to prevent his Twitter account from being overrun and laid waste utterly.

But no word from Fry. Would the internet ever be the same again? Would he return, right hand raised, doe eyed, beatific smile illuminating his features, to pronounce benediction on a rapturous, welcoming throng, or would he be lost forever, a memory, a rumour, a smudge on a forgotten page of history?

Finally, early this morning, as dawn’s fingertips began slowly to draw back the black velvet curtain of night, our long, uncertain vigil was at an end….

And suddenly as if the yesterday’s brouhaha had never happened, love was all around….

Now I think I speak for the vast majority of right thinking people when I say that this kind of thing cannot, under any circumstances, be permitted to happen again. We simply cannot afford to run the risk of Stephen Fry deleting his Twitter account and the internet collapsing into chaos and anarchy. Therefore, with this in mind, I have devised a plan, a series of options that should allow us to sleep easy in our beds….

1. All personal insults, jibes and brickbats must henceforth be presented to a Mockery Panel, made up of admired and respected Twits, such as @rustyrockets, @CHRISDJMOYLES, @MayorOfLondon or @jenxstudios, and scrutinised for quality, grammar, and diversity consciousness. Any that don’t pass muster must be deleted and the user’s account suspended until he, or she, can prove to the panel’s satisfaction that he, or she, has mastered the subjunctive as prescribed in Fowler’s Modern English Usage.
2. All prospective Twitter account holders must be subjected to psychological profiling, involving online Rorschach Tests, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and Neuro Linguistic Programming, and graded on a score of one to ten. Any user scoring below one will be banished from the internet until the Apocalypse.
3. The word, “boring”, must be substituted by the following sequence of characters from the Greek alphabet: βορίνγ
4. There must be full implementation of the harshest, most unforgiving Darwinian principles, with unregulated, all in, free-for-all mockery, lampooning, ridicule and sending up, and may the best man, or woman, win.

Call me callous and obdurate but I’m inclined to go with option 4.

Alan Davies has been unavailable for comment, on Twitter at least, for the last 16 hours.

Never let it be said that He’s Spartacus shies away from tackling the serious issues in life head on.

I invested in a new rug yesterday. I regret to report, however, that I got it home and discovered it is just wrong on every conceivable level. It would, I have decided, suit the apartment of a homosexual drug dealer.

Ah well, I shall just have to heave a sigh of resignation and return to the interior design drawing board.

Coincidentally, the chap who lives across the landing from me actually is a real life, walking, talking, gay drug dealer. Very nice man, despite the fact that he appears to believe shirts are an unnecessary encumbrance, who takes tremendous care of his dogs. People like that are the very bedrock of the community.

I’m considering selling him the rug, although I find myself on the horns of a dilemma in this regard….

Do I just offer it to him without further comment or do I suggest that it is the perfect adornment to any gay drug dealer’s home?

Notes on my fridge #5

Here’s 500 custom designed, special edition, perfumed post-its I got for you down at WH Smith. Please feel free to jot down your theories on domestic hygiene, and share your feelings about my personal habits.

Then go post them on some other poor fucker’s fridge.

The Lizard King speaks out against extremists

Slimy bastard

I see Ken the reptile’s on his high horse in The Grauniad this morning, condemning the BBC for giving a platform to the racist homophobe fascist, Nick Griffin. Would that be the same Ken Livingstone who was quite happy to give a platform to the murderous IRA, the racist homophobe fascist Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the anti-Semite would be dictator, Hugo Chávez?

It’s not all bad news though. The UK electoral system, for parliamentary elections at least, is stacked against the BNP. Only an imbecile, the Lib Dems, or a shameless, unprincipled and desperate Labour party, would change it.

Oh, hang on a minute….

Balloon Boy…. Lock up those cruel parents and throw away the key

They do deserve to be charged. They should recieve a fine and be ordered to do several hundred hours of community service.

For naming a child, “Falcon”.

Well, I suppose it could have been worse. They might have called him Fiesta

For saddling an innocent child for life with the name, “Falcon”.

Well, I suppose it could have been worse. He might have been christened Fiesta.

Or Edsel.

Or Granada.

Or even Focus.

Now, if they’d had the class to give him a proper name, like Scorpio….

Notes on my fridge #4

I have replaced the butter with a dish of mud.

Although some of you morons may consider mud an inferior product, there is actually a far greater demand for mud worldwide, as demonstrated by the fact that mud can be found in 175 countries.

Butter is no more than an elitist, bourgeois achronism.

Notes on my fridge #3

Thomson called.

Could have been Thompson.