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.
FORCE QUIT (# 74,885)
Yesterday I had the great pleasure of working with a bunch of feral-thinking students at UCF, an art school in Cornwall, UK.
I set them 7 exercises in 7 hours, the first of which was to write a leaving note to their tutor (may I take this moment to applaud them all for writing with their enteric nervous system – the brain in the gut).
This mass exit made me imagine the consequences of the teachers strike over pensions on 30-11-11. What if they resigned instead? What if every teacher in the land and their public sector comrades chose to quit their jobs as the greatest statement of solidarity since Gandhi led the Salt March. If you’re one of the 3 million possible candidates who could bring this slow motion economic genocide to a head, don’t think twice.
Trust your gut, it can’t lie.
WORLD’S BIGGEST SIP
He drank from a new bottle of water without drawing breath.
He only knew when he’d finished once it had turned inside out.
BLATTER FIRED – 1,000,000,000 SIGN E-PETITION
PETITION FOR A NEW FIFA PRESIDENT WITHIN 24 HOURS
THURSDAY 17TH 2011
I, the undercommented,
second the motion to remove Joseph Blatter from his role as president of Fifa,
before 21:30 on 18-11-11
by order of the rights of the human race.
________________________
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH’S DENTURES
You read right. I didn’t mistype adventures. I meant dentures. And I meant the one man exempt from criticism, Sir David Attenborough.
It’s not his programme-making I take issue with. It’s his voice. Yes, it’s the slowest voice on British television and it’s getting ever slower, which most argue gives his words even more gravitas.
But something’s wrong. His teeth don’t fit. Seriously, listen right now.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00zj1q5/Frozen_Planet_To_the_Ends_of_the_Earth/
As you do, listen very closely to every ‘S’. His dentures whistle. There’s so much air soaring through with every ‘S’ he could give Burl Ives a run for his money on Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.
Am I being voicist in saying he needs to pipe up or nip out to Harley Street and get his wobbling plate adjusted? Or is it my right as a licence fee payer, to have a pedantic whinge about double-standards? By this I mean, they can boot out intelligent female newscasters whose middle-aged faces just aren’t cutting it with the public anymore, yet they let an 83 year old national treasure drool down a mic for a primetime hour a week.
There is another way of listening to him. Imagine he’s chewing on a dingo carcass in between in each line and yes, we’ll all forgive him.
THE FT – UPDATED MOTTO IN KEEPING WITH AUSTERITY MEASURES (# 74,886)
We lie in Financial Times
We die in Financial Times
THE ITALIAN CIVIL WAR 2012-2014
By the skin of his teeth, he’s safe for now. But now will be yesterday by tomorrow. By February Italy will be torn in two, or possibly three.
Berlusconi will have been ousted illegally and held hostage by students in Milan at an unknown address. There will be many thousands of casualties during the 33 month war, with constant defections from side to side to side, mimicking the ‘flexible Italian’ reputation of WWII.
Peace will emerge out of the ruins, and a technocracy will govern the newly formed North Italy, while South Italy will be unofficially given over the Sicilian mafia.
THE FUTURE PRESIDENT OF EUROPICA
The year is 2031. The date is 3 November. The continents of Europe and America are one supercontinent. One man is in charge. His name is Ned.
Like Brazilian footballers, he is known only by a single name, such is his status on the world stage. He wears an N just as he did as a boy. It was only on his 7th birthday that his mum realised he was destined for greatness, which was pretty handy, because she was pretty disillusioned with the world at the time. But this was about to change. Her day would come and she too would win the Nobel prize, the first ever mother and son duo to do so. The entire future of the world hinged on a single event on this day, the day he would be 7. All that happened was he heard a song sung to him. That song went something like this:
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday mr president Ned
Happy birthday to you
This, they say, was the turning point in the future of man. Whatever Ned said, the bigwigs did. They acted on his every word and somehow, by the most wonderful stroke of luck or skill, he fixed a very poorly planet. He married his childhood sweetheart and they adopted 203 orphans, one for every nation recognised by FIFA – his first official presidency that he took on to fill his Saturday mornings at the age of 9.
There was a Ned statue in every capital city on earth, sculpted in play doh by his mum.
HOW TO SAVE GREECE & OTHER SIMPLE IDEAS BY JILL
A friend who is drastically undervalued at the Guardian newspaper kicked my arse today with a text. By the way, if you’re reading Mr Rusbridger, don’t lose her – she’s a rare one, albeit a rare one from a small village on the outskirts of Middlesborough where they still give her stick about her hairdo.
Anyway, who says fancy hair gives you great ideas – apart from Malcolm Gladwell, and Einstein. Not Jill. She may not have the giant twiglets of Rebekah Brooks but she does think with the gravitas of a feral barnet (even though her actual bob is, as her friend puts it, skinny). Enough of the salon talk, here are her observations for a better world on this glorious day, November 1st 2011.
- If Greece is so skint, why don’t we hold the Olympics there every 4 years?
- Why doesn’t St Pauls open its doors to the protestors and show what being Christian is all about?
- Is a payrise that’s 2.5% less than inflation really a paydip?
- Why are the homeless of London being shuffled off the streets so it doesn’t look bad at 2012?
- Should we build a Thames Falls as mighty as Niagra to attract tourists who aren’t into sport?
- Should we abandon the GWB (Gross Well Being) matrix of the coalition in favour of the GDO (Grossly Done Over) as a true barometer of the British mood?
This is the sort of thinking that could save the skin of any rag in town, not to mention a few Euro nations. Al, do the right thing and give her Tim Dowling’s stage.
LAST OF KIN
At certain points in your life, death is a possibility.
At times like these you’ll be asked to name your next of kin. You may be asked to write it down, an act which can turn slander into libel if you’re not their next of kin.
So why next of?
Why not last of?
There might be something in this. Imagine the more distant the relation you nominate, the more remote the possibility of your death. This is not as contrived as you might think as murdered people are usually known by their murderer.
But less seriously, it’s not about you – it’s about them. It clears their name when you peg it. Administratively, it’s an alibi.
Next time you’re asked to name someone, use the name of the person asking and see if the paperwork disappears.