July 15th - July 21st 2002
Sunday Ginger
Saturday Barged
Friday You
Thursday Thorped
Wednesday Ron ron
Tuesday Jaded
Monday Fatboy
Sunday 21st July 2002
Nearly
Just on the off-chance that there are some Big Brother fans out there who are unfamiliar with cockney rhyming slang (long odds, I know, but maybe aliens monitor the show for signs of intelligent life, or something), please be aware that there is slightly more to the soubriquet Ginger Whinger than initially meets the eye: ginger, ginger beer, queer.
Which is not to say I want the klutz to play for our team. Quite the contrary, mary.
Saturday 20th July 2002
"The deeper the canal, the faster the barge."
It's something I overheard on the tube yesterday from amongst a crowd of engineering students talking about tunnelling; I have no idea if it's true but I think I'm going to practise raising an ironic eyebrow and dropping it into conversations...
Friday 19th July 2002
Hardly
As much as I respect Tom, I'm afraid I can't agree with him when calls the Guardian's search for The Best British Weblog ''a bloody stupid idea' even if I do find it a little tacky.
Tom appears to think such a competition will result in everybody who enters suddenly starting to suck up to the Gaurdian in their blogs. (I say appears to think, because I can't believe he truly holds the blogging community in the contempt that such a statement would imply.)
True, as many have pointed out, this adds yet another level of paranoid suspicion to the manner in which we will read the relevant blogs in the coming weeks (as if we didn't have enough to worry about trying to fill in all the Ker-CHING. Dot dot dot entries out there) but - hey - that might be fun.
The theory that the competition is designed merely as a PR exercise might hold more water if the Guadian had an image problem that this competition was patently designed to redress. But, speaking for myself, I see little if any criticism of the paper on blogs that I read. The Sun, yes; the Guabian, no.
Tom's wider point, that the Guardain is the enemy (or part of the enemy), I find slightly more credible. But I think we've still got a long way to go before blogs offer even the remotest threat to the national news media.
(Try this test: find five things you read on a blog this week that weren't mentioned in the news and then find five things you heard on the news that weren't mentioned in a blog. Which could you live without?)
The fact that I work - part-time - for the web version of a big national paper may be influencing my views here. But it also allows me to state, with concrete certainty, that the people who work for the e-press hold very different views from the powers that be in their dead-tree parent media. The Goardian's competition comes, I think, from their electronic media people; it's a bit of a stretch to dismiss it as an act of, what would be the word... recuperation.
Tom is also uneasy about the idea of inviting people to compete in their self-exposure (I'm surely not the first person to have thought of Big Brother in this context). But is self-exposure truly such a fundamental part of running a blog these days?
For all sorts of reasons, blogs are certainly a more direct mode of self-expression than, say, a resumé or a newspaper column. Franker even than most stand-up comedy routines.
But to judge by the blogs I read, the most common source of angst appears to be job prospects and failing to pick people up in bars.
Sure, there are a handful of wet-pillow blogs out there - but this is not an open contest: you have to apply to be judged by the Guardiam's judges, just as you have to choose to air your dilemmas in public in the first place.
Tom is investing a lot more time attacking this competition than I ever remember him spending complaining about the Bloggies (he described his award for Best European Weblog as "faintly ridiculous but nice enough").
So I guess it's not the idea of a competition per se that bothers him as much as the question of who does the judging. ('Make them start their own weblogs!' has a nice ring to it, but overlooks the fact that the majority of the independent members of the judging panel have, or have had, some sort of blog of their own.)
True, unlike the Bloggies, few of the judges are what are sarcastically referred to as "A-list" bloggers. But are A-list bloggers really the be-all and end-all when it comes to judging quality?
Although I value compliments (aka links) from my fellow-bloggers much more than I enjoy praise from people who have never actually set out to maintain a blog in the first place, I don't write exclusively for my fellow bloggers, any more than I write for my fellow queers, my fellow drunks or my fellow sad old people who hate the way they look in photographs.
I guess I write for anyone that cares to read me, and the more the merrier.
And if they, or some subset of them, decide to get together and choose a favourite: I can't find it in my heart to condemn them for it.
Which is not to say that I particularly welcome the Guardian competition, nor that I'm intent on entering.
I suspect Blogadoon is too strong on cock and spite, too weak on tech and eye-candy to rate well in any kind of mainstream beauty contest.
But hey: you read me. Which is cool.
Thursday 18th July 2002
Liberal ex-leader Jeremy Thorpe may well have allowed himself to think that the gossip over his sexuality had been laid to rest by his two marriages, his increasing age and his Parkinson's - until, that is, his weird weepy ex-boyfriend, Norman Scott, surfaced on ITV this Sunday, being interviewed in a documentary that revisiting the trial at which Thorpe was acquitted of trying to kill him.
Closely followed, ahem, by a book review in the Telegraph (archly entitled 'Upstairs, backstairs') of what sounds like camp hoot of an autobiography by Guy Hunting, sometime Royal Footman, who - amongst other adventures - "at an official dinner at the Palace for Kruschev and Brezhnev... is picked up by Jeremy Thorpe, then leader of the Liberal Party, an occasion which marks the beginning of a relationship which was to continue for some time."
If Thorpe thought it was just him whom the media had it in in for, he was no doubt reassured to hear Jeremy Paxman on television this evening asking the current Liberal leader Charles Kennedy: "What do you say to the fact that every single politician I told I was interviewing you said to me 'I hope he's sober'?"
Paxman then went on to demand to know if Kennedy drinks alone at home...
And, speaking of politicians of dubious sexuality, let's raise either a half-hearted cheer or an eyebrow for ex-minister Ron Davies and his announcement that he is to marry again - despite the enormous publicity that surrounded his infamous 'moment of madness' with a man on Clapham Common.
Wednesday 17th July 2002
Both Ronaldo and Ronaldinho have been playing in attack for Brazil. In Futebol Alex Bellos points out that Ronaldo was once himself known as Ronaldinho, because there was already another Ronaldo in the side, as well as a Ronaldão.
When the current Ronaldinho came along, this could have meant that Brazil were fielding Ronaldão, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, and Ronaldinhozinho: big Ronald, normal-sized Ronald, little Ronald, and even littler Ronald.
Instead the former Ronaldo dropped out, the new Ronaldo became Ronaldinho Gaúcho (after his place of origin), and the former Ronaldinho was promoted to Ronaldo, a title he still holds.
All this is gripping.
But what I want to know is, why are so many Brazilians called Ronald?
- John Lanchester in the LRB
In the novel, Reta calls 'unless' the 'worry word of the English language'. It is one of 37 'little chips of grammar' that Shields uses as chapter titles - among them, nearly, once, thus, yet, hence, despite, hardly, since, hitherto and not yet - which provde continuity and coherence in a narrative fraught with the dread of accident and unexpected disruption.
- Elaine Showalter reviews Unless by Carol Shields in the LRB
Tuesday 16th July 2002
Even though I'm reading - and really not enjoying - Ben Elton's Dead Famous (about murder in a Big Brother household), I bet I'm not the only one who went "Ooh" when they saw this morning's Daily Express headline:
Jade killed by five ecstasy tablets
Sadly, the Jade in question is a ten year old child.
Monday 15th July 2002
Probably just my overactive imagination, and/or the start of a massive hangover, but some of the headlines I stumbled across this morning paint an unusually surreal picture:
Mice sperm trains form fertilisation express
Man faces prison over smelly feet
(That last story bears a closer look for anyone who thinks they had a bad time at Mardi Gras: Fatboy Slim's party on Brighton beach suffered from a host of transport problems and severe over-crowding, to the extent that people had to escape by sea...)
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