End of the Silly Season...?

There've been a few stories in the press this week that have made me tut.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE....MOVE ON....

What a load of crap this is with England's Rugby World Cup Squad. "Jonno", the coach, summed up the tabloid feeding frenzy perfectly: "Rugby players go out for a beer after the match - shocker!" Bears shit in the woods etc. I can understand why the red-tops joined in, though. Features of the "story" were: English professional sportsmen got pissed abroad / Boisterousness and play-fighting / Husband of royal totty with face in another woman's cleavage / Dwarf-Tossing.

Dwarf-tossing? In New Zealand? Hobbit-tossing I could understand now that Peter Jackson's movies have finished and left the dimuntive hairy-footed shire-dwellers out of work for a while so they need to make a few quid, possibly by being tossed.

Bunch of Tossers?

I think phone-hacking is reprehensible but...wouldn't it be fun to hear Mike Tindall's call to Zara after the details broke? Actually, no. It wouldn't. It's much more fun to imagine our own versions. I'd cheerfully introduce Madame Guillotine for the royals and toffs of this benighted nation but I've a suspicion that Mrs Tindall is probably cut from a different cloth and might not deserve the short, humiliating trip in the tumbril. I really hope she laughed her tits off and then lovingly kicked her husband in the nuts for being such a twat. I mean, if he's no oil-pianting and has managed to snag the delicious Zara...make up your own headline.

But it all sounded like a pretty good night out. There's no story here, provided, of course, that our drunken, fighting, cleavage- slurping, dwarf-tossing heroes go on to unceremoniously dump Roumania and Scotland in the same manner they have just despatched Georgia. All will be forgiven until we lose to someone and then it'll be "blame it on the boozie" all over again.

THE WHACKY WORLD OF PUBLISHING...

Until this week, I had nothing whatsoever against Polly Courtney, because I'd never heard of her. She's a novelist, by the way. Oh, and she used to be an Investment Banker and then gave it up (after only two years) to write novels about...er...Investment Banking and women in "The City". Her best-seller, Golden Handcuffs, I have not read. Neither have I read any of her other works, which include a novel called Poles Apart that - and I'm guessing here - might be about wives left behind in Poland while their husbands work in Germany and the UK. OK, probably not. If I want a good story about "The City" or investment banking then I can read the FT or Peston's blog and go, "Christ! Did that really happen - rogue trader dumps $2bn?" People making shit up about invetsment banking can never be more entertaining than the inconvenient truths of the real thing.

Anyway, that's not the point here with Ms Courtney. She self-published her first book (well done) and then she got a three-book-deal with Harper Collins! Brilliant! Respect! Now, apparently, she has told Harper Collins to stick the deal up their arses because, in her opinion, they are giving her literary outpourings a spin that smacks of "chick lit", based on their suggested cover design of her latest tome..."It's a Man's World". 

Courtney's New Book:
Unfairly Judged by its
Cover?

Just a minute here, Polly. You have a THREE BOOK DEAL with a MAJOR PUBLISHER and you're going back to self-publishing because you don't like the "chick-lit" appeal of the covers?  These are the covers and the publishing power that will make your books fly off the shelves and make you loads of money? Per-leeeeeze, Polly. There are writers out here (like me, admittedly) that would rip out their own spleens for a deal like that. And don't pretend that you're the next Proust. These are novels which, according to the industry stats, have a major market with....you guessed it...women!

I have little doubt that Ms Courtney will find an alternate, sympathetic publisher who will provide a cover for her books that she will find acceptable, not least as a result of this current flannel that might just make the covers of her books more interesting than the contents. I'll go and read one now so I can have the opportunity to eat my words after I've digested hers....

SHAME ON YOU...GRAUNIAD

I love the Guardian (and by that, I don't mean the disastrous turkey of a movie with Kevin Costner...I mean the lovely, lefty, liberal newspaper). I love to read Simon Jenkins's pieces. I love to get cross with Polly Toynbee, George Monbiot, Mehdi Hasan and John Harris. The SamCam pieces can deliciously funny, as are the contributions from Woolaston, Crace, Freeman, Hyde and so many others, although I tend to turn the page when I see Deborah Orr's byline. And Charlie Brooker is a blast (most of the time).

But the Grauniad lets itself down occasionally. In Guardian Weekend this week, we are subjected to a "feature" called "Who Makes Kate?" Let's all marvel at the lovely clothes that our future queen wears, shall we? Oooh, let's look at her in jeans, pretty dresses, hats and then turn the page for a graphic on what she likes, who influences her and a gratuitous pic of Diana, just in case we forgot who the Daily Express wants us to think she's supposed to emulate. On the other hand, no, let's not.

I assume that this excremental feature only appears because of the current and wholly ridiculous "Fashion Weeks" that give the opportunity to newspapers and broadcasters to show images and video clips of anorexic coat-hangers so that Victoria Beckham can make more money than her husband and turn "Harper Seven" into a brand rather than a daughter. And in the same magazine, we have at least thirty pictures of "ordinary mums" picking their kids up on the school run. By ordinary, the Guardian means Elle McPherson, Claudia Schiffer, Gwyneth Paltrow, Victoria Beckham (again) and some yank in sunglasses I've never heard of called Sarah Jessica Parker. (Why is it that Americans have such long names and more than their fair share of teeth?) School run? School photo-op, more like, sponsored by Dolce & Gabbana.

Primark's "Suit & Tie" Models arrive
for  London Fashion Week

But three hurrahs for "City Mayor of the Century", Boris Johnson, who turned up for the launch of London Fashion Week dressed in what he described as "a suit", appropriately dishevelled and without having taken advantage of a comb or a professional tie-knotter, as usual. I don't know what it is about Johnson. He should just be a bit of an upper-middle class, Old Etonian areshole but there's something that makes him more worthy than that, somehow. What could it be? Ah! I know. Intelligence - not common in politicians. That's what threw me.

Note to "Guardian Weekend" editor: Re-title article "Who Makes Kate?" to "Who Actually Gives a Shit?"


BOUNDARIES AND DEMOCRACY

More "Shock Horror!!!!"

It seems that the proposed constituency boundary changes will disadvantage Labour. Patrick Wintour suggests that "...as many as 10 million voters, predominantly poor, young or black, and more likely to vote Labour, could fall off the electoral register under government plans..." as he commented on the reports from the Electoral Commission's psephologists' "warning". Psephologists? (Psephology is the study of elections and the statistical analysis thereof - source "psephos", which is the Greek for pebble, which their ancient versions used to cast as ballots. Why do we have to have classical references to describe stuff? No matter.)

Greek "Ballot Paper" and Psephos

The point that Wintour and others are trying to make is that if/when these boundary changes are brought in, some people (those whose constituencies are changed) will have to re-register to vote, something that we citizens of the UK are not required to do by law, by the way. The panic seems to be that where boundary changes occur in the "leafy shires" that traditionally might be Conservative enclaves, the population might well seek to re-register seeing as they wish to perform their civic duty to keep Dave and Giddy in power, whereas those that are compromised elsewhere in traditionally Labour areas might not be arsed to bother.

That'll be the same people that can't be arsed to vote anyway, then?

The unlikely-named Labour man, Tristram (Hunt), said that "...this is designed to wipe the poor and the young off the political map...". Well fucking well do something about it, then, Tristram. The man from Ipsos Mori, Roger Mortimore, said, "...it is a very dramatic change and I am opposed to it...it is most likely to disadvantage Labour...". Hang on, there Roger, aren't you supposed to be a pollster? You can, quite legitimately, suggest that the changes might "disadvantage Labour" but by saying that you  are "opposed to it" might make anyone other than Labour choose to look elsewhere for their pollsters? Er...OK, maybe they do already. My mistake.

"WITNESS" WAS NOTHING LIKE THIS...

Two Amish Men Discuss Beards

It wasn't what you would call a "seminal" motion picture, but the Harrison Ford / Kelly McGillis movie vehicle "Witness" was entertaining and maybe gave some of us a romantic perspective on the Amish people of the MidWest of the United States. Their need for "plainness" which requires them to forego anything that involves bright colours and makes the chaps wear curious chin beards, are uppermost in my own memories of the film, along with their eschewing of all things involving the internal combustion engine. Oh, and McGillis naked from the waste up having an Amish "bath" while Ford looks on through a gap in a door like some pervy nonce.

This refusal to join the 20th century (let alone the 21st) has landed a lot of the Amish guys from Kentucky in trouble and some of them in jail. The local authorities in that state required the Amish to put high-visibility stickers on the back of their horse-drawn carriages and the weirdy-beardies refused because the stickers were too colourful. So the police banged them up. Still, at least the prison service were thoughtful enough not to force these "criminals" to wear the day-glo orange jump suits while inside the nick, giving them some drab ones instead. The whole point of the luminous orange sticker things is to make your vehicle more noticeable. Surely, even in Kentucky where these things might be more commonplace, I think that some hugely-bearded men in broad-rimmed hats clip-clopping along in a nineteenth century horse-drawn buggy in the highway with a queue of traffic and piles of manure in its wake...is the sort of thing most people would notice?

SILLY SEASON CONTINUEs...

It's Political Party Conference Season! (Yawn...)

Nick Clegg will be able to reprise and paraphrase one of his predecessor's most famous conference declarations:

"Go back to your constituencies and prepare to be removed from government..."

What a chump.