THE NEW WAVE OF STREET POLITICIANS
So, applications to university are 9% down.
Shock-shock, horror-horror, shock-shock-horror (so sang Space in The Female of The Species).
The truth is there is no surprise. Irrespective of the cost, they feel that life studying in an institution might not lead to much. So they opt out.
The other truth is this might yet lead to something.
If dropouts can save America, (Gates, Jobs, Wales, Brin et co) then maybe opt-outs can save Britain and the rest of Europe.
Just for a minute think of an unruly, feral, failure-happy university of the street that channels its insurgent voice towards an underground Parliament. One without a Mr Speaker directing the traffic and salutations as strange as the Rt Honourable Gentleman.
Imagine, like music, it just took off and people warmed to it.
Imagine it’s led by women, young women, young black women, and they don’t play the feminist card. They just happen to be women, and young, and black, and critically, anticipatory. Yes, they have a hunch for what’s right, ahead of those who are still trying to fathom what’s wrong.
Wouldn’t that be nice to wake up to?
A smart young sisterhood for all of us. A counter-cultural movement to rewrite the rules of modern life so we start to get our house in order and our morals ironed out.
Yes, I’m in.
Are you?
DAVID FROST & ALAN DAVIES
Close your eyes and listen.
Only sight can tell them apart.
TERRY V SUAREZ IN ABUSE-OFF FOR CHARITY
It’s clocked up approximately twelve times the amount of coverage it had ever hoped for in its wildest nightmares. And still it remains mostly unsaid. The fear of saying the wrong thing and the threat of libel/slander that comes with it is what restricts this debate to its pedestrian pace and linear path.
Irrespective of the outcome of the Terry/Ferdinand case, the truth is it needs some absurdity thrown into the ring to free up the conservative tension.
Something as absurd as a new form of community service that does some good.
Something like this:
- An anything goes abuse-off in aid of charity (I’m thinking a 50:50 split between Amnesty for freedom of speech and Runnymeade Trust for racial equality)
- Every footballer gives a 1% donation of their week’s salary, agents give 2%, FIFA coughs up a token million as comeuppance for Sepp Blatter
- Sky/News International cover it and give over the broadcast rights and advertising revenue to aforesaid charities
- Any other substance/validity/absurdity you’d like to add yourself and pass it on
SUICIDE PUNDITS
If football has any connection with your life, you’ll be as saddened and baffled as anyone right now following the tragic news of Gary Speed’s suicide at the weekend. Thoughts go out to his family.
Radio 5 live, the voice of sport, chose to dedicate its phone-in to the subject this morning and the airwaves were a mixture of ordinary people alongside footballers, ex-players and managers, many of whom have had shared a sofa in recent years with Gary Speed to analyse the match of the day.
The shift from the superficiality of football to the depth and darkness of death, and the taking of one’s own life at that, is as vast a leap in tone and empathy as is humanly possible. I’d like to applaud those who stepped away from the game at the weekend, such as Jon Hartson and Craig Bellamy, as well as those who rang in this morning. You all spoke with brutal truth and without probably meaning to, delivered a programme that could teach politicians the lost art of sincerity.
To Nicky Campbell and all those involved, I salute you and hope you’ll join me in 90 seconds silence.
IS MONEY A TERMINAL ILLNESS?
It’s broken and there’s no point in mending it. Money has cancer. Incurable cancer of the most aggressive strain and no amount of research or intellectual investment will save money from eating itself. As a species, we’re standing around, scratching our heads and our arses, wondering whether to say something. It’s as if money is a relative, one of our own flesh & blood and we’re clamming up pretending it’s not really happening, that it’ll pass and get better.
Why are we in denial? Is money an addiction, irrespective of how much or little we have? We value money over oxygen. We treat money as a form of food that feeds us and sustains us more than food itself. Yet it has no nutritional content and no aerobic gift. We assume it is endless and in doing so we make it worthless. We let money corrupt our sense of judgement. It distorts our ability to measure, to weigh, and most crucially, to evolve.
Money is inanimate yet we have put it on a pedestal fit for the most intelligent creature ever to grace the earth. So how about we agree it is an animal? An animal that is the ultimate virus. A virus that’s killing our species off, as fast as we procreate.
If we phase money into extinction, it won’t be the answer, but it might just be the start of the end of the question.
UNIVERSITY FACTOR PRESENTED BY DERMOT O’ PAXMAN
Due to cuts, the following programmes have agreed to join editorial forces to entertain the nation.
University Challenge & The X Factor are now one and the same. Two teams of 4 young people will be asked questions and they must sing their answers in front of a live fresher’s audience. This new look talent quiz will be kept in check by a panel of academic-celebrity judges (compile your own here as it’s more fun than reading mine). If any contestant interrupts Mr Dermot O Paxman in mid question, he or she will lose 5 points and an item of clothing. The overall winner will be given their own 1 year residency post in the coalition as Minister of Youth Entertainment on a basic salary of expenses.
Also in the pipeline…
Grand Squats – Kevin ‘Swampy’ McCloud presents the greatest grungestorations of the last 12 months.
The Only Way is Belgravia – scripted reality drama within the struggling trust fund local community of SW3.
In The White Garden – a political puppet party aimed at pre-school, starring these long lost twins.
NINE ELEVEN = TEN
Numbers continue to dominate this event but it’s a sum that still doesn’t add up. We are blinded and deafened by the mathematics of human life. Like any large scale disaster, be it natural or inflicted by man, we hear about it through the language of figures, of statistics, as reporters struggle to convey any genuine emotion such is the obsession with the amount of death as opposed to the depth of it. After it has lost its newsworthiness, we look to dates to allow us to re-mourn. Is all this really fair on those who lost their loved ones when the towers collapsed – to reprise the tragedy for the sake of a date? A deathdate at that. As sad as it is, these dead people would rather we toasted their birthday in memory if we’re to chose any significant date.
One final thought from my wonderful sister-in-law. She told me she’d read about a New York widow whose husband had died on 9/11 but not in 9/11. He had died the same day a few blocks away in a separate incident and the ambulance had got there too late to save him. So, forever he’ll be remembered for that one vowel of difference. ‘On’ 9/11, not ‘in’ 9/11.
THE (insert your name here) EFFECT
We’re all incredible.
Every single one of us.
8 and half a billion miracle workers, but all but a few of us aren’t quite sure what our magic powers are or how to use them.
We need role models if we’re going to be everyday role models to one another.
At Liverpool FC Kenny Dalglish has created The Dalglish Effect by convincing people of their talent and allowing them to play the way their instincts tell them.
Across Africa, women have created The Girl Effect by persuading people in wealthier nations to help fund their education in order for them to carve out careers in all kinds of industry and everso quietly change the course of history for their continent.
The You Effect is yet to be decided. This is the hard part – deciding what it is you were born to do, the path you really want to follow, the mark you truly hope to make. There are two ways to get there. One is keep your mouth shut and work your arse off until the signs of change appear stark enough for someone else to say “Hey, that’s The (your name) Effect”. The other method is to tell the world you’re gonna do or be something so extraordinary that it puts irreversible pressure on you to deliver and you actually achieve your most far flung dream.
Either way, it’ll end up on your tombstone. And if it does, make sure your inscription doesn’t take itself too seriously even if you end up saving the human race from our own doom. Try instead to bring a smile to those who visit you long after you’re gone.
Here’s one of my favourites:
Sacred
To The Memory
Of
John Talbot
Who at the Age of Eighteen
Had His Ass Shot Off
In a Honky-Tonk
November 1, 1936
This Mayonnaise Jar
With Wilted Flowers In It
Was Left Here Six Months Ago
By His Sister
Who Is In The Crazy Place Now
10 RIOT CURES
I should have posted this a few days ago, but like the Police I’m a bit slow off the mark. Not sure if you caught the Panorama guide to the troubles last night but it sparked a few resolutions in my head which i’d like to share with you now. In no particular order, here are a few ways of ensuring it doesn’t happen again in a hurry.
- Make looting part of the National Curriculum (then they’ll all fail)
- Sentence each one to an all-night romp with Theresa May
- Do away with welfare and get them to work in the city with one of their alleged enemies on a ‘bonuses only’ scheme
- Open shopping malls in prisons and give them all loyalty cards
- Appoint Darcus Howe as Met Police Commissioner
- Water pistols (as opposed to water cannons) filled with oestrogen-laden Thames water to tame their testosterone levels
- Policemen who tell jokes on the beat to lull the anarchists into hysterics
- Release all-over body acne gas
- Swagbag Top Trumps – tease out the gaming instinct to unveil the UK’s top ransacker
- Introduce The Bill of Rioter’s Rights with small indecipherable legal print that condemns them to some kind of exile in Lundy
As you can see, I’ve spent years refining this list. Please add to it and forward on to the powers that used to be.
TRUE PRICE OF EVERYTHING
The world economy has been found out. Just about every currency on planet earth is in freefall, which means what? On a simplistic level, it reveals the real value of every nation – not their debt, that’s a misnomer which I’ll come onto later when we’ve both had a lot to drink. It means we’ve all been conned for far too long. What something is ‘worth’ isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. ’Value’ on the other hand is the lifeblood of all living matter.
Value takes up a fair chunk of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. it’s the most distorted word in the English language, or any language for that matter. Value is not what someone is prepared to pay. It’s not just a monetary term. Value ain’t shallow, it’s deep. Unfathomably deep. If you took a cross-section of value it would cause colour-blindness. I’m not sure how, I’ve just got this feeling.
So, if we accept value is the most complex emotion known to mankind, we start to understand money is a waste by-product of value. The bile of value, if you like. Now, don’t get me wrong, bile has its uses. Bankers love bile. They trade in it and we reward them with it. We force-feed them with it, whereas footballers graze on it. When you think about it, money works in exactly the opposite direction to food, which makes banks our national sewage system and the IMF the biggest toilet attendant of all time.
As we’re charged more for everything we need to buy (fuel, food, water, etc) yet the currency we’re using to pay for everything is worth less by the day, then is anything actually changing at all? Maybe the rioting kids of the UK are the smartest creatures of all. Their actions demonstrate how little we’ve developed as a species, how we take as many steps back as forward in our lifetime. We might as well go sideways. Yes sideways, that’s it. A new way of growing, of thinking, of acting, of doing, of being. Let’s get on our bellies and look up to crabs. They have the answers. Stop boiling them. Start interrogating them. You can bet your bottom sea dollar they know why the universe exists.
And why nothing rhymes with purple.