That’s enough frigging Murdoch, let’s get back to reality. I finished repacking all the stuff in the attic! Or almost anyway. The boxes are upstairs, they’re just in the way of where I sleep. Which is not helpful, because I need sleep quite badly now. That’s probably why I’m having all these realisations. I finally realise the truth about snakes for example. Haven’t you? Snakes are land animals that evolved from fish… back into fish. Develop legs, climb out of water, lose legs again. Crazy. So from now on, I’m going to refer to all snakes as “landfish”. People will know what I mean.
Another thing. We have words for societies that are ruled by the rich, that are ruled by the best, by the mob, even a word for societies that are ruled by the worst. But there isn’t a word for rule by the most ruthless. How come?
And then I realised. There used to be, but all copies of that dictionary were burned and the lexicographers and their families shot.
This next story has the virtue of being true. A friend of mine came across the bizarre case of someone who was arrested for burning his own underwear. She wondered if that was arson.
Of course it is, I said. He set his arse on fire.
All right, I think I’m tired enough to sleep on the boxes now.
The end of an extraordinary day, says the TV man. Did anyone else think so? To me it seemed a let-down; predictable, unchallenging, frequently tedious.
What we were watching was, as reader jonolan put it, theatre. And not even good theatre, unless you count the intervention by the pieman – that at least was unpredictable. Otherwise its sole moment of flair was Assistant Commissioner John Yates’ surrealistic claim to be a postbox.
The prince came across more like a villain, and it was the king who vacillated. He wanted to apologise as profusely and humbly as possible – yet he wouldn’t accept the blame. Such inconsistency in a character strains credulity.
The best you can say for the production is that it was well rehearsed. The Murdochs delivered their lines effectively enough: News Corp is a highly ethical organisation, the News Of The World a completely inexplicable and isolated aberration. It was at least a daring conceit. And memorable – though mainly because they kept saying it at every opportunity.
Then in the last act a whole new theme was introduced. The News Of The World was revealed by Rebekah Brooks to be a crusading journal, focused only on protecting children and the rights of soldiers, a paragon of what newspapers should be. But the transformation hadn’t been justified by anything that had gone before, so it lacked conviction.
That’s what this show needs more of. Conviction. Preferably several.
Funny how it doesn’t seem to be in the news this morning, but last night all the websites of Murdoch’s UK newspapers were brought down. The Sun’s by LulzSec, the fun-loving hacker network – they switched it to a fake version that announced Rupert Murdoch’s death – the rest probably pulled by News International itself in a somewhat desperate effort to protect them.
I like the humorous anarchy of LulzSec and their ilk, but I fear an organisation as media-canny as News Corporation will be able to turn this to their own advantage. You want to make Rupert Murdoch look like a victim, you attack him with something even more feared and poorly-understood than himself. Interweb hackers, that can do all sorts of mysterious and dangerous things. Things that are – sharp intake of breath – bad for business. Bring down a Murdoch website, and you give him a chance to portray himself as a champion of free speech. Which would be ironic in any number of ways, not least because most of Murdoch’s websites were not free.
Meanwhile, rumours fly that Murdoch is about to be deposed as head of News Corporation.
Meanwhile, perhaps even as you’re reading this (video feed), Murdoch and other heads of News International will be giving evidence before an investigating committee of the UK parliament. They didn’t want to much.
Meanwhile, the next domino in the Metropolitan Police has fallen: Assistant commissioner John Yates, the UK’s leading terrorism officer.
Meanwhile, the whistleblower who originally broke the phone hacking story has been found dead. The police say it’s not suspicious, but… The police say it’s not suspicious.
So thanks for the lulz, LulzSec. But it looks like things are already way beyond that.
OK I’m going to do it. I’m going to talk about the Beckhams. Celebrity gossip. There, now is this a proper blog or what?
All right, they’ve had another baby and they’ve given it another odd name: Harper Seven. Not too bad compared to some maybe. What was their firstborn called again, Charlton Athletic? Something like that. But still pretty oddball. Why do celebrities do this all the time – do they hate their children?
No, naturally they want to give their kids the best start in life, and in a PR-obsessed world they believe that this includes a memorable name. But it is a high-risk strategy. If fame eludes them, it will get tiresome when everybody they meet ever remembers hearing about their birth. Can it, with names like that? Look at the Geldof-Yates children: Four of them have ridiculous names, but only one of them is even mildly notorious. Fifi Trixibelle meanwhile is still going to be called Fifi Trixibelle, even if she goes into stockbroking.
What’s so good about being rich and famous anyway? Simple; being rich. That’s quite good. Being famous means wherever you go, people attempt to crowd in on you. It’s the downside. So being famous but not rich is the worst of all possible worlds. I just hope that Victoria and David are prepared to support little Harper Seven for her whole life.
Brace yourself for more irritating, hyperactive adverts on TV, more men with laptops and weighing scales in shopping malls, and more burglaries. Gold has reached a new record price of over $1600 per ounce. This means that, for the first time ever, gold is now actually worth its weight in gold.
But I shouldn’t get surreal, the reality is ridiculous enough. Buying gold is the global economy’s answer to popping valium and praying. Whenever the markets don’t know what’s going to happen or what to do next, they run to the yellow metal. There is no clear reason why, it just has this talismanic ring to it. Weight. Historical value. Shininess.
Also of course, it’s an actual thing. All those brave traders out there, wildly speculating all day on derivatives and futures and other fanciful ways to bet on how other people will make bets on how you will bet suddenly realise that all they own are pieces of paper written in the conditional mood, and succumb to an urge to possess something that you can actually hold and touch and hug. Or at least, a piece of paper that says you possess something you can hold and touch and hug.
This superstition-based value is highly dysfunctional. The problem with the flight to gold is that there is not enough room in gold. You’ve heard that factoid about how much there is in the entire world? Enough to fill just two Olympic swimming pools. It depends of course on how deep those pools are, but this is roughly right. There are something like 155,000 tonnes of gold lying around. Assuming that ounce price is for troy ounces, the normal ISO (International Silly Old) unit, and that comes to about eight trillion dollars ($8 000 000 000 000).
That’s hardly the current account deficit of a small South American republic these days. With the Euro in dire straits, there is clearly a lot more money needing somewhere to hide than that, and all the gold in the world is not a big enough hiding place.
Unless, of course, its price goes up even further and even faster.
You can almost hear the new wars starting in Africa, as it becomes lucrative once more to arm some children and turn over a neighbouring country. (Arms manufacture is always a good secondary bet when gold goes up.) Oh and if you have any gold fillings, now would be a good time to cash them in. Before someone else does, with a brick.
Hiya. If you haven’t dropped in to I.Doubt.It over the weekend, it was a busy one. Thanks to everyone who made Saturday a record day for visitors. Here’s the best of what the rest of you missed:
Latest in the ongoing series of articles aimed at helping you pick the best fruit in the smartphone jungle. Today I look at Google’s Android and ask if it is a better alternative to Apple’s iPhone.
The agency charged with keeping us safe from the likes of the News Of The World’s “phone hacking” has a suggestion to prevent the same thing happening here. Unfortunately, it’s wrong.
Despite ever more excruciating cuts into Ireland’s budget, no matter how much we reduce health and social spending, the US-based agencies continue to revise our credit rating down. Could there be a hidden agenda?
Disgraced Murdoch minion Rebekah Brooks admitted her papers got celebrity news from police informers – or so George Michael claimed on Twitter. I edit his tweets together to make his allegations clear.
Before she was fired herself, when Rebekah Brooks made the entire staff of the News Of The World redundant, she told them that when the full story comes out in a year from now they would see she had no choice. I think I know what the terrible secret is.
Some email scamming attempts are so idiotic, you wonder who is ever taken in by them. And then a rather sad vision appears, of the Internet as a place where even a scammer who is no mental marvel can succeed, because they find victims who are well into needs-spoons-explained territory. You want to go out and find the dumb people who are taking advantage of the even-dumber, and mete out terrible if partially mitigated punishment.
But all you can do is make fun of them. Here then, straight from my personal in-box, are some Stupid Scammers:
“I have been diagnosed with esophageal cancer. It has defiled all forms of medical treatment”
That is some mean disease.
Subject line: “Your Email Please.”
I could have sworn I gave it to you.
A file attachment named “Please kindly open this file attachment”.
I admit, I was tempted by the Alice in Wonderland approach. But is was an odd file type so I couldn’t.
More inches in your pants, less steps to success.
Leg-extension spam, I hate it.
We produce the cheapest and the best watches
Best, cheap, and watch. Choose two.
Add Bahcelors, Masetrs or Dcotorate Dergees to your resume
You think that’s just to get around spam filters, but I ended up with a degree from TIM.
Dear Friend, I’ve teamed up with Citizens United, Newt Gingrich, Ann Coulter, Fred Barnes and a bunch of other good people to do a film entitled Battle for America.
I don’t know you anymore.
By having a beautiful luxury designer replica watch, your girlfriend will be surely inclined towards you at once. All of a sudden, natural feelings of love, peace, comfort, romance, and sex will be restored again between you and your girlfriend for long time
You seem to be confusing my girlfriend with some sort of hooker.
“i am far from attributing any part of mr. bingley’s conduct to design,” said elizabeth; “but conclude will be the case, you send me full powers to act in your name throughout the whole of this
The classic “Jane Austen hustle”.
This is my new address. Here you may email me about what food I am going to have later that day. I can also give you updates on senior staff meetings and let you know what is getting in the way of my sleep routine. Thank you for cleaning out my poohouse today – I am very grateful to have clean gravel. Yowl, Mrs S
I’m really not sure if this is a scam at all, or just an email I got by mistake. From a cat with a job.
When was the last time you were abel to discover a High Profile Hollywood production company on the ground floor?
One day it might be as big as Univresal or Wanrer.
Are you currently paying too much on your monthly payments?
No actually. Quite the opposite problem.
Please, I urge you to make this transaction confidentiality within your mind for security purposes.
Everyone's got something to hide except me and this monkey.
Perhaps I should have saved this until Monday. “Your Monday Monkey” really has a ring to it. But then I’d sort of be committing to coming up with a picture of myself holding a monkey every Monday, and that could get pretty expensive.
Yes! That’s me! Holding a monkey! I’m on the left. Guess I should say, that’s me at the age of ten. Yeah I had blond hair once. OK yeah, I had hair once. First it turned brown, then it curled up, then it started to fall off. The autumn of my life happened in my teens.
Ah, but I was beautiful then. *Sigh*
That is, I think I was ten. I really don’t remember this photo being taken. Well I kind of do. I remember the event. When I look at the expression on my face, I think I remember being too excited and too self-conscious and too worried about doing what I was told and smiling right to really make the most of the fact that a small primate had its furry arms around my neck. I remember it being over too soon. I just don’t remember where it happened. Or why. Why!?
I actually think someone just came to our school with a camera and a monkey and offered to take pictures. It was a simpler world then. With more monkeys.
One of the sweet things about the blogging software I use here is that it searches the WordPress community and offers you links to other posts on the subject you’re (apparently) writing about. I used to reject those auto-links out of hand, but I’m feeling a little more communautaire these days and try to stick a couple in.
Damn it, could none of us think of an interesting title?
And for no apparent reason better than that it mentions the same city, a site pushing a restaurant voucher deal in Galway links to one of my recent posts.
The one called “Who Deserves To Die?” Can’t see that selling a lot of two-course meals for two with glass of wine or beer each.
This reminds me, I entirely forgot to mention that I’ve opened a link section here now – or “Blogroll” as WordPress likes to call it for some misguided reason. Here I link to some blogs I occasionally read myself. It should be over to the right there somewhere. So if you have a blog you think I might like, why not send me a link?
