A Weekly Rhetoric

Look! It's One Of Those WOMAN Things!

2008-09-07T15:29:17+02:00

Watching the Republican Party Convention this past week, and the attendant hoopla which went along with it, I have to question the judgment of some of the American political watchers. Firstly, how can someone who was so unpopular, so behind in the opinion polls, and so overlooked like John McCain, suddenly now be running neck-and-neck with Barrack Obama? Is it really because he announced his running-mate as Sarah Palin? Can a move so blatantly cynical as appointing a women as a potential Vice-President be swallowed so wholeheartedly by all-and-sundry?

I mean, really.

Not just any woman though, a card-carrying nutcase to boot. Do we really want someone like that who, frankly, is one stray bullet away from being leader of the free world? If she were any more right-wing, she'd have pictures of her paraded around on the sides of tanks (courtesy of The Bugle).

The scariest thing is that people seem to be buying it.

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The Future Of Communication Cannot Be Cat-Shaped

2008-04-27T04:34:12+02:00

OK, being someone who has a fair amount of experience on the internet, there are some phenomena which I simply do not understand. Namely, the LOLCats and Icanhascheezeburger sites. If you've never seen these, well, what they are, are Cat pictures with poorly worded, badly spelled captions with terrible grammar. I ask you, rhetorically, what is the point of these?

Now, don't get me wrong, I understand the feelings of cat lovers, and can understand their obsessions with their pets. I grant them that, but the pictures, and captions? Presumably the perpetrators of these images may very well not even be cat owners. Well, I don't get it. With the advent of social networking sites now, my Facebook has been inundated by these pointless images, does this mean people are communicating like this now? Will all future communication be in this form? Should we look forward to a government press release in the form of a LOLcat with it's finger on the red button, stating "We r @ War!"?

With the works of William Shakespeare now being released rewritten into txtspeak (so the "kids" can understand them), it's a fair assumption that good English and grammar are not particularly high on peoples priorities....

....and that's just wrong.

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What Is A Winner?

2008-03-22T12:13:26+01:00

As a sports fan, this is a question I find myself asking a lot. Here in the UK, I believe the waters couldn't be any murkier as far as peoples attitudes towards decent sporting competition is concerned. Here's why:

Part of the Great British psyche is to reward the heroic losers, and woe betide any team or sportsman who actually achieves in his, her or their field, as they're all doomed. Take Lewis Hamilton, for example, on his way to being the first ever rookie to win the Formula One World Championship, crushed under the weight of national expectation, and he bottled it. Not to mention his team being punished for the Forumla 1 Spying Row with Ferrari. Take Tim Henman, always crushed under the weight of expectation when he played at Wimbledon, and therefore never won (famously losing to Goran Ivanisevic after a rain-delay, who went on to win the championship - you can't argue with destiny....). When England were in the World Cup in 2006, the weight of expectation was that we only should turn-up and the other 31 teams shouldn't bother. Cue England going out in a penalty shoot-out to Portugal after a string of sub-standard performances, mainly because, I feel, the national attitude spilling over onto the players.

Primarily, my sport is football (or soccer, if you're American), and with the English Premier League being stale and restricted to the same four teams battling out for the top four places, it's become a procession. Surely this is getting boring for Liverpool, Man Utd, Chelsea and Arsenal fans too? These are the four "best" teams in the UK, among the "best" in Europe, if not the world (and by "best" I mean "richest"). So my rhetoric is, if you're effectively buying the level of competativeness, then where's the sport in that? One of the reasons I like American Sport is that it's built towards parity, the worst teams get the first draft picks at the beginning of a new season, and therefore are given a fighting chance to put right their wrongs of the previous season (yes, i'm ware of the irony of drug cheats too). There are salary-caps in place (save for some "star" players), and this is something which football needs urgently. If only to temper the attitude of the players, who frankly are cacooned enough from reality as to have no clue how to function outside of the busom of their agents.

Almost every sport is rife with excessive gamesmanship and cheating, which is so far beyond the spirit of sporting competition as to defy comprehension. When Paula Radcliffe pulled out of the Athens Olympic marathon, she described it as "A bereavement", it's a foot-race Honey, not a death! Stop taking it too seriously.

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Northern Rocks & Little Earthquakes

2008-03-03T05:20:46+01:00

In the week that a large proportion of the British population were miraculous survivors of the strongest earthquake to hit these shores in 30 years, and by "survive", I mean most of them slept through it. I felt it necessary to write a blog on the colossal overreaction there was to both this story, and the collapse of Northern Rock Building Society.

There has been a worrying trend in recent years, and I use the word "worrying" entirely deliberately, for the people in news broadcasting to insert something relatively banal, and blow it up to be something incredibly worrying. Firstly, let me point out that the collapse of Northern Rock is not in itself a banal story, but the collapse itself was not the story on which they were reporting at the beginning of the day. The story they were reporting on was the fact that Northern Rock had been refused an emergency loan by the Bank Of England. As we were watching that morning I said the following sentence (and this is no word of a lie): "You watch, later today there'll be people queuing out of the door to take their money out".

And that's exactly what happened.

Put simply, widespread panic. Which I believe was largely unwarranted, because media reports on a story exacerbated the problem and brought about the collapse of the bank.

Fast-forward to this week, when at 1am, my house shook to the first earthquake I've ever experienced on these shores (I've experienced a tremor on the Island of Crete in 2003). Obviously we in the UK are not used to such things, but sheesh, the sum total of the casualties from the UK-wide "natural disaster", was one guy who suffered a broken pelvis. Spare a thought for the people who've suffered real earthquakes and lost family members, property and possesions. I mean, really.

It's time we all got a grip. Once upon a time we were furnished with the Great British Stiff Upper Lip (tm) and we never succumbed to such frivolity. This is what we need to get back to, less panic, more pragmatic, it's what made Britain great.

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How To Cure A Junkie Rock Star...

2008-02-23T04:12:01+01:00

The world has all but gone to hell, and it's all the media's fault. No more hellish than the treatment of "troubled" artists such as Amy Winehouse and Pete Docherty. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of either but I'm very aware of their status in the UK, but one of the main reasons why they are where they are is not purely on talent alone, but on sensationalist reporting of their off-stage antics. In the case of Amy Winehouse, I'll freely admit that she's clearly talented, but for me, the sensationalism turns me off. That and the black frightwig. I think that people truck far too much with gossip (a future blog will no doubt be critical of warmth generating fish & chip wrapper, "Heat") and there is a lot of information in this world that we do not have any right to know. I frankly could not care less if a rock/pop star is injecting themselves with heroin or drinking themselves into oblivion, fuck them, if they die it leaves a space for my bands. Joking aside, I know I'm in a minority, because Pete and Amy's lives are pretty-much public domain. Surely that's wrong, isn't it?

Now, here's the thing. Would they lead such licentious lives in the public eye if nobody reported on them? There is certainly a school of thought which says all publicity is good publicity. Well, maybe it's not as simple as that, but I'm willing to bet that Joe Newspapereditor would be pretty pissed if one or both had cleaned up their act. I mean what's newsworthy about that, eh? Well, nothing. This is the one of the many reasons that the world is going to hell, we love this stuff! However, my campaign to have not only these people left alone, but Britney Spears and anyone else whose lives have hit the skids, because if they are left to work their shit out, then that is a faster track to being clean and sober, than it is if they're in the papers everyday.

So to sum up, these people are ill, and they're not going to get well unless aspects of their personal lives are left to be just that. Personal. What is the world coming to when all we care about are the antics of a few unimportant celebrities? We should stop it, stop it now.

If newspapers cared more about the people they were reporting on, they could actually make a concerted effort to help these people out. Surely a motivation for Amy, Pete, and Britney to clean up their acts would be, if they were ignored UNTIL they got themselves sorted out? That is the motivation that these people need. "We won't write about you or your product unless you get yourself sorted out"...

...it's a thought.

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