A Brief History of Corporate Whining

Via Alas, a blog.

It’s funny ’cause it’s true.

In brief: yer all savages

I’m not one to defend the general British public (see forthcoming entry on culture when it, erm, forthcomes) but I feel that I should get my spake in, albeit briefly, about this.

BBC Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman has described the British public as “barbarians” who are too busy working to find time to appreciate art.

I’m not a huge fan of Paxman’s, it has to be said, for I find him more much more offensive and condescending than I do challenging and interesting, and the above strikes me as a typical statement of his.

Here are a few simple sums for you Mr. Paxman: earnings of £XX,000 per year, X children, £XXX,000 mortgage, and £XX,000 in car loans/ student loans/ credit card and other debts don’t leave many of us with whole lot of Xs to play around with. We work all the time, just to make our ends meet. And you wonder why we plebeians spend all of our time working and little of our time perusing art galleries? We’re flipping exhausted!

I would have thought it was f-ing obvious, even to a snob like you who makes considerably more Xs than the rest of us put together, and who doesn’t have to worry at all about where his next paycheck comes from or goes to.

Naughty little peers, they are

I’m only really posting this because it makes me laugh. Not because I care enormously about it one way or t’other.

Peers respond to cash allegations

Two of the Labour peers at the centre of claims they were ready to take cash to change legislation have responded to the allegations in the House of Lords.

If there was ever a reason to reconsider the effectiveness of the structure of Parliament in this country, then surely this is it. You don’t need a moral conscience when you’ve got vaguely royal blood, it seems.

On the way home this evening, I heard Radio 4 play a recording of Lord Taylor’s conversation with the Times in which he discussed a bribe, followed by Lord Taylor telling the House of Lords that he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong. The juxtaposition was priceless.

In his defence, he did sound a bit dottery. Well, when he was addressing the Lords anyway. Less so when he was talking cold hard cash. Frankly, I feel he was selling himself cheap for a grand. Apparently, he often gets offered £25,000 to pull a few strings. Marvellous!

Who wants to bet me 20p that the Lords in question get away with it? That’s how it rolls here, no?

If you don’t fancy that game, play this one instead. Get more metaphors into one paragraph than Lord Strathclyde does here. I don’t think it’s possible, myself.

“This House has been mired in a grim torrent of criticism about a culture of sleaze,” he told peers. “If these allegations are true those involved have shamed this House,” he said, adding there were no “grey areas in the paid advocacy rules”.

I love politics.

[Lazy blogging] McCain

From popbitch:

For anyone that didn’t know. John McCain was at the bottom of his military class at Annapolis, but still got to pilot a fighter plane due to his father’s connections. He is the son and the grandson of admirals. He finished 894 [out] of 899 in his graduating class. Despite crashing five aircraft, John McCain was never disciplined. And son-of-single-mother Obama is, of course, the privileged elitist.

Well of course. *rolls eyes*

Celebrity building spawnage

This has been on my mind ever since the newest celebrity babies (the Jolie-Pitt/ Pitt-Jolie twins) joined our sorry world. Children as accessories, then. I’m thinking of the adoptees from third-world countries, in the main.* I’m also thinking of the likes of the following (from popbitch of all places).

We thought in the West the days of child slavery were, thankfully, over. Yet for many of the children of celebrities, a life born into slavery even from the first weeks of life, beckons.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt waited barely three weeks before turning their twins into cash cows, putting them to work in front of the cameras for a multi-million pound fee. No matter that the fee was for a good cause, it was their children who had to earn it.

OK! magazine’s repost to Hello’s Brangelina exclusive this week was to bring out its big guns, in the shape of Jordan. Her daughter, Princess, got to celebrate her first birthday by helping her “uncle” Richard Desmond sell copies of his magazine. Jordan’s willingness to tell the world that her one-year old daughter never wears the same things twice and has a hundred pairs of shoes ensured OK! had as many column inches as Hello.

And in LA, the Beckhams’ continuing quest for even more fame saw David pick up an award at the Teen Choice Awards. And helping make sure he got the most coverage from the event, his three boys, in matching outfits (and haircuts just like their Dad, to ram the point home) also had to get up on stage and act up, like performing monkeys.

Surely as concerned, right-thinking citizens we should support the work of the anti-child slavery movement by shunning these harsh taskmasters?

Children there, building celebrity cred since 1998. And you all thought it was about shoes and handbags. Well it’s not. It’s about dressing your children up in finery that costs a small fortune, parading them in front of cameras looking cute and just that little bit precocious, and selling pictures of them to whoever bids the highest. It has a sort of pimping feel to it, frankly.

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* Imma gonna save them there little brown babies from sure peril for what would they do without us selfless and beautiful Americans! I don’t want an ugly one, mind. Or a fat one. Or one with eyes too far apart. Or one with too much hair. Or one with too little hair. Or one with strange eyes. Or one that’s too big. Or one that’s ugly. Have I mentioned that already?

Boy stabbed. Sister actress makes news.

Another stabbing in London. Yes.

But does it strike anyone else as strange that Ben Kinsella’s death has become more about his ex-Eastenders actress sister than him?

The Mirror: EastEnders star Brooke Kinsella in emotional tribute to murdered brother

BBC: Sister’s tribute to ‘true angel’

The Sun: Stabbing grief of EastEnders star Brooke

The Telegraph: Ben Kinsella, brother of EastEnders actress Brooke Kinsella, is murdered

Sky: Actress Pays Tribute To ‘True Angel’

Daily Mail: EastEnders star’s tribute to murdered brother as she begs for end to knife epidemic

Guardian: Brother of actor is 12th teenage stab victim

The Times: Actress Brooke Kinsella’s brother is London’s latest knife victim

I’m not really sure what that’s about, but it makes me feel very cynical and uneasy. When I walked past the newstand in Tesco this morning, I saw her face five or six times. I saw his once.

Lifetime committment

I’m going to complain about Facebook’s treatment of relationships again.

Not only did I find out through three notices on Facebook yesterday that a friend reconciled with her boyfriend over the weekend, but today I was greeted with this ludicrousness:

Ross and Linda (*) are married. Ross and Linda made a lifetime commitment to one another, and let everyone on Facebook know.

A lifetime commitment to each other? Says Facebook. Because Facebook knows them both very well. What Facebook didn’t mention is that is Ross and Linda actually ‘made a lifetime commitment’ to one another three years ago, have since had a child and are thinking of buying a new house together in the coming months. But they ‘let everyone on Facebook know’ did they? Well thank you, Facebook, for reporting this joyous news. What else do you know about Ross and Linda that they let everyone on Facebook know?

You’re a fvcking website, Facebook. Don’t pretend to know people. Don’t tell their friends about ‘lifetime commitments’ in that generic, presumptuous and obnoxious tone you seem to have recently adopted. I’m fast becoming convinced that you really are being operated by the American Right. Let’s hope Ross and Linda never break up, huh? What then will I be greeted with?

Ross and Linda (*) are now divorced. Ross and Linda turned their back on their lifetime commitment to one another, and let everyone on Facebook know. They will burn in hell now, just as they deserve.

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(*) Names removed to protect the innocent.

Tom Cruise indoctrination video

The Tom Cruise indoctrination video that Scientologists don’t want you to see.

It’s nearly ten minutes long and about three of his sentences make an actual point. The rest is just rambling about what he knows…

My oh my!

My questions to you, Tom:

You know what  exactly?

And what is this it you keep talking about?

Watch it before it disappears again!

Moments of madness

Radio 4 recently reported an interesting story about new Internet billing software which disables your machine by issuing so many pop-up reminders about your outstanding payments that your computer becomes unusable. It’s currently being tried by the developers, MBS, and is used mostly on, unsurprisingly, porn sites. From what I can gather – I don’t remember all the details – it asks you to check a box indicating that you would like a free trial period on the site, but in doing so, you agree to the terms and conditions that you will receive the pop-ups. Of course, that clause is on page 20 of the terms and conditions which no one ever reads anyway. And these pop-ups aren’t those we were all too familiar with in the pre-Firefox days, either; they’re the type, apparently, that you can’t close and that are so memory intensive, your computer can’t function. Until you agree to pay, that is. My thoughts on this are predictable – that such things really should be more closely regulated – but they are not the point of this post.

The point is this: one lady interviewed by Radio 4 was complaining about this software because it had disabled her husband’s computer. She and he were obviously very upset by what had happened, but I was both embarrassed and amused by the way she told her story. Her husband had had a five minute moment of madness, apparently, when he decided that he would like to seek out some pictures of ‘nude women’ on the internet. He went to this site in what really must have been a moment of madness (she repeated), and checked the text box agreeing to the terms and conditions. She just doesn’t know what he was thinking! (I do!) He was plagued by pop-ups and eventually had to come clean to both his wife and his employer (he was using his work computer). Bless!

Now seriously! In what world does Mrs. Moment of Madness think that this is the first time that Mr. Moment of Madness has looked at porn. It’s not! It’s the first time he’s been ‘caught’ by you, but it is not the first time he’s accessed porn. I would stake my life, and yours, on this. It was so obvious from her voice that she absolutely wanted to believe what she was saying, and that she wanted the listener to believe it too, but her doubt was evident. She’s hurt, angry and probably a little humiliated at what she’s discovered, and I’m sure that she wants to believe her husband was possessed by something shocking at the time, but we all know that’s not true. I feel bad for her, but she’s not fooling anyone, including herself.

The moral of the tale: Middle England ain’t ready for porn. And it certainly ain’t ready for an MBS billing system. (Oh, and always read the terms and conditions!)

I do hope that Mr. and Mrs. Moment of Madness get through this, but I dare say he’s in the spare room for now. Possibly along with his laptop.

Mass hysterica and our culture of fear

My friend writes in another friend’s livejournal today:

None of us are safe you know. I’ve been to two school fetes this weekend and I wasn’t searched at either of them. If that isn’t just asking for trouble I don’t know what is…

I reply:

You are joking?! If I’m not stopped and frisked at least three times on the way home from work today, I’m going to phone the FBI!*

I can’t help but think that there’s a terrible lot of fussing going on about nothing here, and I’m not saying that just because I’m a Child of the Troubles. For starters, I would be a lot more convinced of the validity of the Critical Terror Threat if the cars in London had been loaded with Semtex, for example. I can’t see how gas (particularly that amount) could have blown up half the city; and I’m pretty sure the handful of nails found at the scene couldn’t have done too much damage either. Of course, I could be wrong.

In any case, I think that everyone should just calm down, and save their energy for when Al Queda really threaten to strike. Because byjaysus, you can be sure that they will.

That’s all I have to say on the matter. Thank you.

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* To which my friend replies:

We were talking about national security, not your sexual deviances…

Yes, but that’s a whole other matter entirely!