Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

In 2003 the Challenger shuttle broke up on entry to the Earth’s atmosphere, because damage caused to the protective heat shield on launch caused a systematic break up of the entire shuttle.

Now NASA has made a noble attempt to share the critical moments for the crew with the space community, with the valuable aim of making safety better when space flight becomes common place, like it will do with Virgin Galactic.

So what’s it like for an astronaut to die?

In the lead up to the disaster only a few of the astronauts had their ACES helmet on, and those that did had the visor open. This had to be shut manually, but before they had a chance to do this it was too late as the cabin de-pressurised.

For 40 seconds the crew knew the spacecraft was out of control, and 40 seconds is enough for fear to turn to sheer terror, which comes from the certain knowledge that you’re about to die in the worst possible manner.

The 2nd killer event occurred when the break up of the outer shuttle caused the ballistic characteristics of the shuttle, now a mere projectile, to change. In plain-speak this basically means the shuttle became so mangled it suddenly hurtled through the air like a rock zig zagging and spiralling it’s way to the ground.

At this point, the crew were to become almost certainly deceased as their necks and heads were not restrained whilst their lower body was. The result was that their head’s snapped off.

If this wasn’t enough, god had an Act III whereby the cabin began to break apart, exposing the already dead or dying crew to a rapid thermal heat death and “dynamic material interactions”, such as the material of the cabin interacting with the crew at very high speeds.

The report of course does not put the facts across as trivially as I do, for the men who wrote this valuable report are not court jesters, but scientists of the highest order.

But the report doesn’t stop there. The fourth section detailing an event with lethal potential concerns exposure to near vaccume conditions, aerodynamic accelerations and cold temperatures.

Section 5 is the final event, ground impact.

Mercifully, there is a god, because before the really nasty bits happened, most of the crew were unconscious due to cabin de-pressurisation.

These astronauts represent the best of human life, the pinnacle of achievement.

For the priceless sacrifices of the few comes the saving of the very many.

Maybe there is a God.

Censorship and naievity are a great asset but sometimes my anger builds up such a head of steam that it has to come out of the spout.

Otherwise the tea pot would explode and nobody would like that.

My little tea pot has been whistling for a while and now it’s time to let off a bit of steam.

First of all has anybody noticed what’s happening to the shops? Maybe it’s the threat of all the staff losing their jobs or maybe it’s the long seasonal opening hours but there are now some spectacular bastards out there.

In Tesco for instance, there is the Monster Munch Man. I’ve lost count of the amount of money the obligatory Tesco shopping trip has sucked from my soul over the years, but my soul surely deserves more politeness than Monster Munch Man is prepared to concede. The remarkable tuff of dreadlocked hair resting on top of his idiotic brain like an upside down frisbee does little to hide the bitter and twisted dolt beneath.

If he doesn’t want to work there, then he should have tried harder at school.

The first altercation was at the quickie counter, where he refused to let me buy two packets of Monster Munch unless I also bought cigerettes, after letting me wait in front of him for 10 minutes while he chatted up a girl. One woman got so irate she shouted down the cue for him to ‘cut out the life story’ and get on with his job. He rubbed me up the wrong way so much I ended up throwing the crisps at his head.

The second altercation, regretfully in the company of my girlfriend, happened when he came to interfere with our packing on the rubbish self service tills, a cost saving measure which transfers all the stress of working at Tesco onto the customer.

The baggy trousered twat had the cheek to suggest I was scanning the items too quickly, despite the fact that it was his cock eyed manhandling of the bag change over which caused the problem in the first place.

A petty problem like this is the shop-bastard’s perfect excuse for an argument.

The shop-bastard’s favoured tactic for ‘leveling the balance of power’ in their silly made up little worlds.

The shop-bastard’s technique for generally making a shopping trip even more unpleasent than it normally is at Tesco.

I’ve decided in future to go back to my normal tactic of listening to music through sealed headphones, blissfully unaware when an item doesn’t scan, naive about the moronic behaviour of anti-social store dummies and completely oblivious to any back chat whilst also getting some of the lighter items for free.

Elsewhere in shopping land the number of marauding window shopping rapper gangs increases by the day. If the shit service, sheer amount of overpriced tat, skin peeling heat and clubland level music doesn’t put the highstreet out of business then the petty criminals surely will.

When approaching these floating spectres of evil, it’s hard to know which body part will be stabbed next, which pocket will be picked first and which sports wear brand will flash before your eyes for the final time before you head off to the knife crime victim’s cloud in the sky. Nike or K-Swiss? One thing for sure, said item of clothing will be black.

Piccadilly Gardens, is now not so much a garden, as a prison forecourt. Walking across from one side to another is not something you do unarmed. One wrong glance, one wrong connection with the wrong eyeball and your eyeballs will never rotate again.

Well, they would. But only to look at the sky whilst blood pours into a puddle around your head.

It’s a fate that Monster Munch Man will be quite familiar with if he keeps up his completely out of order Righteous Shopworker act.

He wouldn’t do it if it was his own business and he wouldn’t do it if he was buying his own packet of Monster Munch.

Unfortunately for the Righteous Shopworker, after 2008 he can no longer afford to do either.

Illustration by Sam Griffiths (http://www.sg-illustration.co.uk)

“The only persons with the power to remove Robert Gabriel Mugabe are the people of Zimbabwe”

During the last election the people of Zimbabwe who voted as a majority to remove the Giant Cunt had their heads beaten around like hockey pucks on the end steel rods. 200 killed, 5000 abducted and 200,000 forced from their burning homes.

“Only God could remove me from power”

Maybe what he meant to say the first time?

“People are free to campaign and they will be free to vote. There won’t be any soldiers, you know, at the queues.”

Ah, no I stand corrected. Sorry.

“Our votes must go together with our guns. After all, any vote we shall have, shall have been the product of the gun. The gun which produces the vote should remain its security officer - its guarantor. The people’s votes and the people’s guns are always inseparable twins.”

Does Dr Mugabe have an evil twin named Dr Jekyll? Certainly, it appears that neither Mugabe Jekyll or Mugabe Hyde have a very good grasp on the truth.

“There is no cholera in Zimbabwe.”

That’s not quite true though is it, Robert Cunt Mugabe. 1,123 people have died from over 25,000 infected. In fact its like a scene from 28 Days Later.

“It’s unnatural and there is no question ever of allowing these people to behave worse than dogs and pigs. If dogs and pigs do not do it, why must human beings? We have our own culture, and we must re-dedicate ourselves to our traditional values that make us human beings…we will never allow it here. If you see people parading themselves as lesbians and gays, arrest them and hand them over to the police!”

That quote is from 1995 but it’s only 18 years later that the world is now catching on. Could the early warning signs, that Mugabe was another Hitler, have been picked up earlier?

“Hitler had only one objective: justice for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their rights over their resources…If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold”

Okay, let’s be fair he didn’t mention the Jewish holocaust or the world war but let’s stick to what he did mention. Hmm. Justice, check. Sovereignty, check. Independence, check. Imprisonment of homosexuals… um, check. Although Mugabe’s idea of giving his people justice, sovereignty and independence is to plunge them into poverty and starvation, whilst letting them die from cholera.

Now, has anyone noticed the similarities with that other great dictator yet? No. Certainly not the Queen or the University of Edinburgh, it seems, who saw fit to bestow a honours on him. “Honoured not only for his extraordinary intellectual discipline and energy but for those qualities of statesmanship which made him one of the great figures of modern Africa”, said the University of Edinburgh.

“The only white man you can trust is a dead white man.”

Meanwhile The Queen gave him a Knight Grand Cross in the Order of Bath for ”significant contributions” to relations between Britain and Zimbabwe.

“We pride ourselves as being top, really, on the African ladder … We feel that we have actually been advancing rather than going backwards.”

In the 1960’s and 70’s Zimbabwe was once the jewel in Africa’s crown, able to feed itself, heal its sick and educate its people to the highest standards on the continent and then Mugabe came into power during the 1980s. Zimbabwe is now in a pitiful state. The main hospitals are now completely closed. The country’s economy is not just in free-fall, it has ceased to exist. In 1990 life expentancy was 64 years, and after Mugabe cut health services this now stands at 34 in 2008.

But after all, these quotes are only words, you see.

What does Mugabe do when he’s not talking bullshit, after all they say actions speak louder than words?

In 2000 Mugabe stopped talking the talk and commanded a self-styled Hitler fanatic named “Chenjerai ‘Hitler’ Hunzi” to invade farms owned by white people in a co-ordinated land-grab.

Mugabe’s parliament pushed through an amendment, taken word for word from the draft constitution that was rejected by voters, allowing the seizure of white-owned farmlands without due reimbursement or payment.

One farmer was forced to drink diesel fuel as a form of torture, some were killed.

Mugabe himself stole three posh farms to use for his own leisurely activities, like reclining in his deck chair in the warm African breeze whilst watching white bodies swinging from trees

The rest have fallen into ruin.

Since these actions, agricultural production has plummeted and the economy is crippled. Once the “bread basket” of southern Africa and a major agricultural exporter, Zimbabwe is now a “basket case”.

In order to avoid starvation, a third of Zimbabwean’s require aid from the World Food Programme.

It’s hard to think of an aspect of Zimbabwe that Mugabe hasn’t ruined, although his wife is nicknamed Gucci Grace by the Zimbabwean people, for her luxury shopping lifestyle. I suppose this however is a small consolation for having to sleep with a giant cunt.

4AM, Swire’s voice begins to shake as he tries to counter the argument. “No, it’s not true… it’s not fair to suggest that I…”

But his friend is impertinent as he stomps past the window, his head pointed always directly in Swire’s direction. “Yes!” he would shout with more stomping around in between. “Yes. Yes. Yes”. By now, Swire regrets offering his deranged acquaintance whisky during their night long conversation.

Swire sits in a powerless hunch and waits to see where the ‘conversation’ goes next. Not forgetting of course, to thumb the security button under the table several times.

His mad friend continues: “Walking around the block watching steamy windows in China town. Lights flash and then go out, just as memories of her do. Climbing barefoot on the hill - watching the clouds on the horizon pulling in still - sunbeams flash and then go out, just as memories of her do…strolling to meet her outside the club and she is there reading her book, concert lights go out and then fade in just as memories of my love do!…”

Suddenly - security guards knock down the locked drawing room door and still Swire’s friend continues:

“Now travelling into some future time, like a journey which will come to nil.”

He’s pulled to the ground.

“I will return to speak to you, Swire! I will return! I will return for you Swire!”

A relieved Swire smiles uneasily as his friend is dragged from the room, still yelling.

Its 4am by now but Swire isn’t ready to sleep, instead he gets into his sports car and travels down through the city, past stubbornly monolithic warehouses and living quarters. He parks his car outside the giant silver tower, a food bank of which he is president.

As the lift rises through the lower decks on it’s way to the top floor, Swire blows circles of smoke from his cigar. One, two, three.

The building is empty, but for Swire, as he strolls to his office. On his desk is a glowing screen, and he sits down on his dark green leather executive chair, with crocodile skin arms.

He counts to himself - one, two three. And presses 3 times on his keyboard adding 3 zeroes to the end of his bank account, before exiting the room and driving calmly back through the city.

The bright lights of his car illuminate a strange object on the road near a bridge over which runs a silent disused train line, he can’t quite make out what it is.

Suddenly it rises like a ghostly spectre, the misty outline of a human.

Some silver ambulances pass Swire in the opposite direction.

Swire slows to a halt and stares in wonder at what he thinks he sees. In a trance like state he slowly opens his drivers door, he steps out and stands with his bewlidered body pointed at the ghost, head hung slightly lower than normal struggling with the bright reflection of his car headlights.

The ghost speaks.

“Mr Swire…”

And Swire recognises the voice even though it’s heavily distorted and low in pitch, slowly he also begins to recognise the misty face.

“I’m not free. Help me Swire…. I’m trapped.”

My advice to my children will be: don’t get a job that has anything to do with technology. You’ll be hounded for the rest of your life by a marauding gang of naggers.

I wonder if it’s the same with vets?

Vet’s mum: “Our dog isn’t working.”
Vet’s son: “What’s wrong with him?”
Mum: “His eyes are closed and he isn’t responding.”
Son: “Oh, that must be canine diabetes, I know how to fix that.”

Doctors face a similar problem. They have pagers, and when a member of the community is on the verge of popping their clogs, a loud beep goes off and they race to the rescue. It must be really fucking annoying.

During a medical emergency on a plane, coming back from holiday, a doctor doesn’t even like it when there is a life to save. What hope for the unfortunate technically minded minder of his own business, when word catches on that he can cure numerous sick computers?

I think it all came to a head recently, when my mum’s Apple Mac laptop broke down for the 5th time. Something to do with cheapo Chinese replacement batteries, or maybe not.

Trying to bridge the sciasmic gap in knowledge between generations is hard enough at the best of times but often it occurs down a phone line, which makes me livid. If your car broke would you expect a mechanic to fix it over the phone, having been briefed with the precious nugget of information “it’s broken”?

If it couldn’t be fixed, would you then persuade the mechanic to drive on your behalf, all the way to the shops to by some Christmas presents? Well, that’s pretty much what happened to me tonight, as I ended up being instructed by my mum to read her emails for her over the phone, on my working computer, and surf the internet for obscure Christmas presents all the while using one finger to use the keyboard, and one hand holding the phone up to my ear.

It’s as if they think they’re calling some kind of oracle, who has all the answers to their rediculously unspecific questions at the top of their head. A none-family member wouldn’t ring out of the blue with a technical problem, but parents think they can do it whenever something crops up, with the implication being: you have no choice, it’s your mum.

The family computer(s) are complicated beasts, approaching dog conscious levels of complexity (compared to our dog anyway), yet the symptoms are usually nothing more than a blank screen or an error message comprised almost entirely of complete gibberish. So the oracle sits oncall constantly with his mobile by his side and sure enough gets the dreaded call: My computer “has broken”.

That’s all they know. That it doesn’t work.

Well, what am I supposed to fucking do about it?

I don’t have a physic connection with the electronic world, currents running through my blood vessels instead of blood, quarks dancing on top of my skull, signals jingling and jangling through my toes at 10 mega hertz.

You are never free from the pestering, it’s an ongoing saga. They expect you to manage their entire electronic lives from the purchasing all the way to the disposal, not to mention the endless quibbles and foibbles in between.

Does a terrible shadow hang over a vet’s head, knowing that if they finally choose to dodge the bullet of off-duty dog fixing, they’d be forever tarnished as grumpy unhelpful obstructive dog killers?

I suppose a vet is happy to fix a dog, because they’re animal lovers. I can’t feel the same way towards a Windows desktop I’m afraid.

Does the car mechanic have the same problem? Is his every living moment sullied by some overriding responsibility to sort a relative out with a good little runner?

The problem is, everybody knows how to buy a car, but for some reason buying a computer is a challenge they’re unwilling to learn anything about, information they’re unable to absorb, a failed initiative that never gets off the sofa.

Whilst my mum could edit an entire monthly glossy magazine in Photoshop, when it comes to the computer itself, it’s nothing but a mysterious plastic box.

Also, judging by the state of most people’s computer hardware, if the same primitive lack of regard to quality was applied to car ownership, they’d all be driving around in soviet bathtubs with pram axles.

Beep beep - sigh - got to go.

And so, the NME’s readership, a 13 year old boy trying to learn the drums, has spoken. MGMT are top of their Best of 2008 chart.

MGMT are a fantastic new band, but their new album is not a ‘generational marking monolith for our times’. Come on, NME, your readership will understand about 3 words of that. You’ll have to do better next time.

How about “yet another good album from America which sounds a bit like the Beach Boys but cooler and more modern”.

But then again, the new NME has never lets integrity get in the way of a good sensationalist bit of hype. This is a magazine that has spent the best part of 2008 hyping up the biggest bands and artists to boost sales, and then completely ignoring them for the end of year album list, due to a change in the weather.

This wouldn’t be so shocking if the ‘hidden gems’ they filled the chart with were actually worthy of such praise and high fashion, but when you miss out new albums from REM, The Killers and even NME’s favourite Brazilian band CSS and stick Glasvegas, Vampire Weekend and Metronomy in the top 6, it doesn’t make any sense.

But then again, fashion rarely makes sense.

I want to find out who’s turned the flagship of British music press into a children’s comic, and squeeze his skull over a glass orange juicer until all his brain juices run out.

I saw Metronomy supporting CSS in Liverpool, and they looked like they’d all swallowed light bulbs. If the thing that defines ‘next big thing’ is the ability to look like a candesent twat at all times then Metromony have succeeded admirably. All this wouldn’t matter as much if their album was any good.

It isn’t.

And as for Vampire Weekend, I gave them a chance, even suffering an entire Young Knives concert to see them in support. They didn’t bother turning up because their album had a good week in the charts and they were too busy pretending to be clever English people from Oxford, when they’re just a pretentious bunch of rich kids from suburban New York who make plinky plonky music.

I can count on one finger nail how many albums I’ll download from the NME 2008 end of year list, and that fingernail (when not being used to scratch out the NME editor’s retinas) represents an album I already have.

Crystal Castles.

But even this has it’s pitfalls, as I discovered whilst listening to their album whilst walking gingerly through Piccadilly Gardens late at night. It scares your eyeballs into your ball bags.

Though I shouldn’t be surprised at the latest folly by NME. It comes to something when the only reason for buying it today was because contained within was a full page advert featuring a greyhound wearing goggles (for Blur’s reunion gig, no less).

I promptly scanned it in so I could print it on glossy paper and frame it, but instead I spent 3 hours trying to remove print moire from it before finally framing it and realising my £1.69 Ikea picture frame had a perspex front which would stick unevenly to the glossy photo paper, making some bits of the picture darker than others.

So, with my girlfriend away in Italy and my faith in the music industry shattered once again thanks to NME, I have no option but to spend time compiling my Biggest Nobs In Music, chart, 2008:

10. Hot Chip - boring vacuous electro ponces, hyped up as ’super-intelligent’ beings by the music press and scene kids.

9. Mogwai - pretentious wannabe-avant-garde bores, who slag off Blur for no reason at all, whilst trying to be funny but failing.

8. Oasis - squeezed out another turd, years in the making, and then spent the rest of the year slagging off other, more creative, bands.

7. Glasvegas - “breathtaking poise and beauty, reaching stratospheric emotional magnitudes absent from anything else released this year” said the NME. No: drab uninteresting Glaswegian dirge more like.

6. Metronomy - incredibly pretentious and depressing electroshite made by giant lightbulbs which gives me a craving to stop listening and go for a pint.

5. Music press photographers - a shocking lack of originality. How many more haircuts are we going to have to see gazing nonchalantly into the camera like a dead fashion models before another Anton Corbijn comes along?

4. The Artic Monkeys. Laddy lad lad lad black tie lad lad skinny jeans lad lad lad pint pint pint pint lad lad lad. (Oh, is it December already, I nearly forgot they even released an album this year)

3. Britney Spears - nothing but a fat slag corrupting the world’s youth

2. Queen - God awful album, wrong choice of replacement for the irreplaceable. I’d rather listen to the electromagnetic buzz of Brian May’s telescope for 17 hours. It’s like the worse Brian May solo song from the 1990’s combined with the worse Roger May solo song from the 90’s extended to 90 minutes.

But the king cunt is….

Drum roll please!

1. Vampire Weekend

They might sound like early REM with their jingly guitars but where REM combined salty down to earth levelheadedness with an edgy mysterious shyness, Vampire Weekend replace ALL THAT WITH SHEER ARROGANCE.

Who gives a fuck about an English comma? Who gives a fuck, really. Bearded twonks.

I walked through Manchester at midnight last night I didn’t see a single chav. The city centre was quiet - the Spar bouncer, the homeless person emailing on his Blackberry in the chilled winter air, the prostitutes leant up against the lamp posts reading Heat.

Then, on Market street was a lone girl in hotpants. She staggered up the street dressed in neon. She’d been to Clubland Live! at the Manchester Evening News Arena.

Rewind a bit - I am walking through the city centre - 6ish rush hour - Piccadilly - hundreds of 16 year olds with their waddling fat thighs poking out of skinny hot pants behind belt sized neon mesh dresses - glow sticks round their heads - neon paint smeared across their chubby arms - like a plague of zombie ballerinas.

3 or 4 of them ran across a road clutching a bottle of vodka each and as one girl dropped her glow stick she stopped to rummage around on her knees to pick it up in the middle of traffic - car tyres screeched and came to a halt - 30mph to zero mere millimetres from her head.

The kids, pissed out of their heads proceeded to the MEN Arena to witness:

“Slagland Live, not just a successful dance brand of Eurodance: it’s a phenomenon.

“Twelve thousand youngsters with an average age of 16 threw themselves around the concert hall to the repetitive thumping beats of Heartbeatz, Ultrabeat, Darren Styles, Scooter and the headline act Cascada.

“Mental and insane hardly seem appropriate words to encapsulate the behaviour of our region’s youth. If ever these youngsters needed a release, this was it and boy-oh-boy were they going for it…”, froths the MEN Arena website.

It continued with a healthy dose of irony which is welcome in a world full of froth, but it didn’t go as far as I would have done if I’d have written it, adding hateful insights such as “When did teenage rebellion become a form prostitution?” and “When did a music gig start to resemble a mass suicide by alcohol?”

“The formula is simple. Use a four to the floor beat, speed it up, then speed it up again and just keep adding base.  Then take the lyrics from a cheesy track of the Eighties, e.g. ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham, or an early Nineties dance tune like ‘Everytime We Touch’ by Maggie Reilly. 

“Remember to keep adding bass. Get a pretty female singer, preferably blond. Doesn’t have to be that skinny, the audience will relate to her more that way. 

“For added sex appeal use four female dancers wearing belts and a couple of camp blokes just to tick all the boxes and hey presto - you have a chart success. 

“They then played the Logical song (serious amount of irony used there) and everything calmed down, again very ironic. 

“By the time Cascada came on - the biggest dance act in the world at the moment - the crowd were a little more subdued. No less enjoying Natalie Horler in a corset with a gold bikini underneath, they were just running out of steam. 

“Bless their little fluorescent socks. They had been there screaming, gyrating and bouncing on-stop since 7.30pm and it’s now after 10pm.

“Mum and Dad will be chuffed: these kids will sleep for days.”

Imagine a place so Christmasy it’d melt your heart like butter in a frying pan. Bustling Christmas markets, snow laden forests under a bright night sky with shooting stars illuminating the thick snow on the ground, imprints from your kid’s tiny feet leading to the candy store. Hmmm candy!

Now imagine what a gypsy can do to a car park. 

Lapland New Forest. It was a plot more ill-conceived than walking naked across the Arctic and the greatest shambles since Mr Blobby visited Morecambe. Lapland New Forest: a strange gypsy twilight-zone on the border between Hampshire and Dorset, suddenly an amazing theme park sprang out of the ground, promising to show off (amongst other things) “Hollywood special effects”.

What the theme park’s website forgot to mention was that for your £30 you got a muddy car park with some trees sprayed white.

The boss, who’s spastic brainchild this was, appeared on the BBC news today saying he “aint’s spent no money from my bank account on this”. Whilst that was pretty obvious, he then told us about the revelation that “one of them might loose a house over this” and that his kids were a “bit upset”.

That was because they found out Daddy was a moronic swindling buffoon.

The kids who did visit the park however, happily, now see the business exploitation of family Christmas time for what it really is: A plastic donkey tied to a fence, a portaloo in a muddy car park and a dead husky chained to a cage. What a brilliant commercial exploitation of our young, impressionable minds!

Son: “Daddy daddy can we go to that park where they tied a dead reindeer to a tree and lit it up neon blue?!”

Daddy: “No, son.”

Son: “Oh please!!”

It would have been more of an eye opener than yet another games console for Christmas. “Come and see the elves! (When they’re not having a fag break behind the portacabin or being beaten by irate customers)”.

The indignation of the suburban families visiting the nativity scene (a painted wall in the muddy car park) could be heard from Bournmouth to Lands End. Many of them complained to the animal wellfair people as well, about the husky dogs chained to their kennels - and shock, horror - LIVING OUTSIDE in the cold!!

These dogs, looked very miserable and thin, they said. “They’re not sipping chardonay by the fireplace on a warm rug whilst munching on salmon. They had them actually living outside, with the trees sprayed white.”

I hate to stereotype but I’m pretty sure some of the visitors to the muddy car park “event of the year” arrived in Porsche 4×4s and therefore get what they deserve.

Well sod this consumer christmas insanity. I’m spending the 25th of December in a shed decked out with fairy lights, whilst munching on crisps.

It will be my home once the Christmas shopping is over. 

 Recently the BBC wanted to expand their regional news, and part of the plan was to create decent online hubs for local news, a bit like a YouTube for your street, which would report via someone’s Sony handycam the latest major developments at number 32, where Bob the 72 year old retired shopkeeper would be boiling an egg.

But a dreary government think tank report conculded that it would send existing regional news businesses to the wall because they could not compete with the sheer might of the publicly funded BBC.

I never really read the local newspapers because they’re shite but I have to admit that I think the BBC would probably have done it much better - and that’s the key thing (plus creating many more jobs in the process).

There is a need for good local online offerings, to get a sense of community going, and I really do want to see how Bob’s egg turned out.

Current regional media from various businesses just don’t cut it, especially their online offerings. 

Why the government report anyway? If the BBC had gone ahead and hadn’t have done it better, then we’d all keep reading the Manchester Evening News and surfing their website wouldn’t we? So what’s the problem? Either way we either win or keep the status quo.

The BBC and Channel 4 also recently wanted to set up a video store website, selling their programmes online. But yet another dreary report written by useless government stooges on the BBC’s Trust board thudded onto doormats with a resounding NO, thus stifling any innovation that may have been involved there, warning that the project would send many shops and businesses into the gutter. For a start Dan the porn shop owner would have to remortgage if Channel 4 started selling their wares online.

Tough cheese.

So who are these cute and vulnerable family businesses which have benefited from decisions like these, then?

Why, only Trinity Mirror owned by Rupert Murdoch who are delighted that the BBC won’t be launching the regional web-TV channels providing local news around the country.

Sly Bailey, true to name, said “We can now continue to invest without fear that a publicly funded giant would be duplicating already existing services”. She forgot to mention that her ‘investments’ included last week’s closing of 44 regional titles, 40 offices, a print plant and the sacking of 1,200 staff, most of whom would have been perfect candidates to work for the new BBC project.

That’s progress.

In a roundabout way I don’t really want my money being used for the BBC to give me less and to give shabby businesses owned by mega rich corporations a leg up as a result.

We own the BBC, we own the banks, the Americans will shortly own their car companies.

The banks are rediculous creations of fiction, the car companies are as dead as dodos and the BBC puts out stuff like John Sargent on Stricly Come Dancing.

We need a purge. Let the BBC put crap rivals out of business. Let the publicly owned banks give us our money back and let the car companies be saner and slimmed down, to hell with the lost jobs - that’s life, get a new one in a company which is actually relevant in 2008. 

The global economic crisis is called ‘global’ for a reason, all car companies are suffering because new cars are needlessly expensive, but the only car companies who are in really dire trouble are American ones and they’ve been struggling for years due to being badly managed.

Somewhere down the line they’ll go bankcrupt anyway because the public, having handed all their money to shore up huge banks and car companies, won’t have any left to spend on cars.

To take huge short term pain is much more preferable to keeping hold of outdated status quos, preventing change, preserving the wealth of the rich and having almost the entire population suffer huge economic problems for the long term afterwards.

Good times always come to an end, change happens. Desktop computers used to cost the earth but now you can buy one for £100 as the technology is proven, already designed, and cheap to produce in a cheap factory.

Why isn’t it the same case with new cars? Just bits of metal on rubber, been around since the 1900’s.

It’s a bloated industry and all but the top end luxury stuff is in for a major correction, but the people who stand to loose out won’t want that to happen, even though it’d benefit the entire world. 

So here they come, cap in hand. I smell a fish.