April 25th 2004 - May 2nd 2004
Sunday Hamstrung
Saturday Gov ho
Friday Didn't we?
Thursday Time to go
Wednesday Gypsies, thieves
Tuesday There's posh
Monday Signs
Sunday 2nd May 2004
So, is Brad Pitt "hung like a hamster"?
Saturday 1st May 2004
Trevor Phillips, the Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) has lambasted deputy chief constable Clive Wolfendale for beginning a speech to the North Wales Black Police Association with a rap.
Crass? Yup. Insulting? Hardly - it's actually quite good:
No one loves the coppers 'cos we're rotten to the core
Cross between the devil and a government whore.
Friday 30th April 2004
Famously, Ron Atkinson got caught out referring to Chelsea defender Marcel Desailly as 'what is known in some schools as a fucking lazy, thick nigger'.
Anyone still inclined to believe that this indicates a desire to get down with his homies (rather than, say, sheer ignorant stupidity) should read the article in last Sunday's Observer:
'You know what, if somebody had said what I said about Desailly to one of my players, I would have got 'em by the throat and chinned 'em.'
Then Atkinson asks me: 'Look, I've seen a black guy with the word nigga, or something like that, on his number plate? What's that?'
I explain that some young black people have, in an attempt to lessen the effectiveness of the word, used the term nigger, or nigga, as they spell it, as a term of endearment. I also tell him that most African Caribbeans see such people as misguided imbeciles.
Some gay people call themselves queer, I say, it's the same principle. Atkinson looks confused.
'But we always used to call gays queer, didn't we, you mean you can't...'
Once again he trails of, this time with incredulity.
Thursday 29th April 2004
Anyone who's ever stood, tapping their feet impatiently, behind an old-age-pensioner in a queue, watching them count out the exact amount required, coin by carefully-examined coin, will surely feel a certain sneaking sympathy with the reported mission of nurse Barbara Salisbury, who is accused of murdering four elderly patients in her care in order to free up their hospital beds.
Courtesy of the trial coverage, here are three things to say the next time you feel similarly trapped:
A: "Why prolong the inevitable?"
B: "Give in, it's time to go."
C: "With any luck your lungs will fill with fluid and you will die."
Wednesday 28th April 2004
Obituary watch
Thom Gunn ('Poet whose elegant and rigorous verse could combine traditional metres and rhymes with bikers, homosexuals and junkies' - mmm, nice company.)
"At about this time, Gunn, then 25, met Christopher Isherwood, who was 50 at the time and took the young poet under his wing.
"As a tenured academic in America he was nervous of confessing his homosexuality, and he envied the confidence and freedom with which his friend Robert Duncan could write about it. He would refer to it teasingly or with innuendo until the 1970s.
"Thom Gunn is survived by Mike Kitay, and a cat, Rose."
Tuesday 27th April 2004
So you're a sub-editor working for The Star and you have to come up with a headline to cover the latest episode in the (on-and-on-and-on) saga of David Beckham's marriage, a brief story alleging that Victoria Beckham's mother hired a private detective:
Posh mum has dick
Really, you have to admire that.
Monday 26th April 2004
First signs of summer
The street outside Comptons crammed with a crowd of chatty queens flirting and cruising on a Saturday afternoon? Check.
The grassy knoll beyond the Royal Vauxhall Tavern instantly squatted on a Sunday afternoon by a flock of roosting reprobates, many of them more than a little the worse for wear, at least one of them wearing something shockingly unsuitable (yes, I mean you, the young twerp in the yellow jumpsuit)? Check.
Lifting the lid on saucepans full of food that you enjoyed only yesterday to find they've turned overnight into foul-smelling evil-intentioned mud? Check.
Eyes, nose and throat suddenly clogged with unspeakable fluids as the trees lasciviously unfurl their rude bits into the breeze? Check and - snnnnnifff - double-check.
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