The Last Post

Instead of letting this blog die by an undignified, long and painful fizzling-out, I have decided to kill it humanely. Think of this post as a swift lethal injection. Or a sudden, painless beheading.

One of the nation's favourite historical facts is that when Charles I was beheaded, he wore two shirts so that he wouldn't shiver and look nervous. Everyone knows that, but fewer people know that when they lopped off his head, some sick fell out of his neck. Even fewer people know that they did an experiment on sheep where the animals were still able to see, after being beheaded. The sheep wouldn't know that their heads had come off and would just see the bottom of the bucket coming up towards them.

Coincidentally, I am also wearing many layers of clothing today. Not because I am nervous about destroying this fountain of creativity and brilliance, but because it is snowing.

So thanks to all those who have read, mocked and commented over the past two years. Much appreciated.

Au revior.

Snow! We've got more words for it than the Eskimos...

So 'Eskimos' have seven words for snow, do they?

This idea was started by linguist Benjamin Whorf in 1940. Since then, we've all got a bit carried away by the idea: in 1984 an editorial in the New York Times claimed the number was closer to 100.

Obviously, all this depends on which Eskimo language you're talking about and whether you count just the lexeme (i.e. 'snow' in English) or all the inflexions it produces('snowing', 'snowy', 'snowed'). And where do you draw the boundary as far as the meaning of 'snow' goes? Do you include ice and hail?

American Linguist Anthony Woodbury looks at one Eskimo language, Central Alaskan Yupik, and counts 15 words:

(1) snowflake/to snow

qanuk/qanir/qanunge/qanugglir

(2) frost/be frosty
kaneq/kaner

(3) Fine snow/rain particles
kanevvluk/kanevcir

(4) Drifting particles
natquik/natqu(v)igte

(5) Clinging particles
nevluk/nevlugte

(6) Fallen snow on the ground
aniu/aniu/apun/qanikcaq/qanikcir

(7) Soft, deep fallen snow on the ground
muruaneq

(8) Crust on fallen snow
qetrar/qerretrar

(9) Fresh fallen snow on the ground
nutaryuk

(10) Fallen snow floating on water
qanisqineq

(11) Snow bank
qengaruk

(12) Snow block
utvak

(13) Snow cornice/'get caught in an avalanche'
navcaq/navcite

(14) Blizzard, snowstorm
pirta/pircir/pirtuk

(15) Severe blizzard
cellallir/cellarrlir/pir(e)t(e)pag/pirrelvag

Now here are 20 English words for snow:

(1) snow

(2) snowman
(3) snowflake
(4) snowstorm

(5) avalanche

(6) blizzard

(7) hail
(8) sleet

(9) dusting

(10) powder

(11) frost

(12) ice

(13) black ice

(14) packed ice

(15) icicle

(16) frost

(17) flurry

(18) igloo

(19) slush

(20) bank

And if you don't want to include all of those you could use some of these instead, more befitting to snow in 20th century England:

'London's panic button'

'snow-day'

'massive excuse for skive'

'abandon car'

'armageddon'

'sledgetastic'

They'd probably have more trouble getting this through the taste and decency detectors now, I would have thought... Very funny though

Get me off facebook

Many, many years ago, when I was young and foolish, I joined facebook. I wrote offensive and witty notes to my friends about people I didn't like; my friends jokingly accused me of crimes, illnesses and addictions, all for laughs. I did the same in return. Jade has never had AIDS and Richard doesn't even like bananas. Appalling photos which in any other decade would only ever have seen the light of day for, well, a day, are now circling the digital ether for eternity.

Others, however, are luckier. Signing up to the big blue book at a ripe old age (or even just 26) they did none of these things. Their profiles are clean, non-incriminating and tame. They do not accuse their elders of being heroin addicts and their friends do not accuse them of bleeding from the eyes when they see puppies. Because that just isn't funny when you're a grown-up.

I'm increasingly sure that there is a cut-off age. If you are currently 27 or under, the chances are high that your social networking history is highly incriminating, defamatory and a personal liability. You will probably have signed up to myspace, bebo, fb or twitter at an age when you accidentally reveal everything, most of it not true. Your predicament will probably be worse if you were a student because it is more likely that you had a computer and more likely that you played strip poker. If, however, you are old enough to have once owned a pager and bought a WHAM record, you will have signed up to the net with two children, a job and a dog - and you're fine.

Today's sprogs and students know what the net is, know that their parents, teachers and employers use it, and know that it's just as daft to publish a naked photo of yourself on the college noticeboard as it is to stick one on facebook. In fact, it's worse, as no one ever reads notice boards and they tend to disintegrate. My small generation, however is lost. We were foolish. We threatened to blow-up the librarian in her sleep but we thought it was a doodle, not a publication. We are sorry. Now we are screwed: The Guinea-pig year group (first to do SATS, AS-levels, tuition fees - New Labour's educational experimentees) will now amount to nothing. Could you elect a PM, or a head of Mi5 who up loaded a video to YouTube of them injecting Vimto into their nose wearing only a donkey costume? If Obama put his smoking photo into a locked safe during the election, where the hell are we going to put the internet?

So when work colleagues befriend me on facebook? What am I supposed to say?? I say yes, obviously and tragically. I have to unlock the door: Welcome to my foolish past.

My god it's probably the same for blogs.

Your Christmas turkey has been raped

For almost a quarter of a century NOTHING has made me want to bend to the taunts of the guilt-ridden, goody-goody, eggs-have-protein-preaching, meat-loathing bean-munchers who dub themselves 'vegetarians'.

I'm 100% with Auntie Palin when she says: "If God hadn't meant us to eat animals, then how come he made them outta meat?" YEAH. HOW COME??? Well, OK, he also made babies and our mothers out of meat, technically - and we wouldn't want to eat them (unless we were in a plane crash in the Alps or something and they were all ready dead, but that would be EXTREME). But by and large I'm with Sarah P. I like chicken, beef, lamb and pork. Yum Yum Yum. I especially like Turkey With Christmas Dinner.

But Oh My God Not Any More.

New-boy-at-work, Will, comes from farming stock. Granted, Norfolk farmers, who we all know are slightly crackers, but farmers nonetheless.

New Will decided to spend Wednesday lunch time telling me and Sarah about the process of turkey insemination. Basically, farmers rape their turkeys (with machines) in order to get stocks up for Christmas. Did everyone else know this? I bet they did. But I had no idea. It's not even a bit of run-of-the-mill sexual harassment, it's completely List A.

I'm not going to go into any offensive details, but let's just say that the whole sorry process we pass off as 'farming' involves a rape chair, a dispenser and wellies. And there's a video on YouTube.

And in the video, the farmer carries out the whole obscene process in the dark, with a flash light.

Call me old fashioned, but what's wrong with just leaving two turkeys on their own, in a nice green field, under a full moon with half a bottle of feed and letting the animal magic happen? 'Efficiency' is the problem. Love does not meet the requirements of our purses and our dinner tables.

So where pictures of caged birds, stories of carbon-breathy globally warming cows, cheap sausages and other people's consciences have failed, turkey rape has succeeded. I just don't think I can ever eat animals again. It's not right.

How to avoid redundancy

If your workplace, like mine, resembles a political execution chamber with redundancies happening more often than phones ringing, I hereby present you with a game plan.

A friend of mine, who teaches at a rather exclusive public school told me a little story about how a teacher tried to avoid redundancy.

The teacher, who we'll call 'Peregrine' was told that not enough kids were taking his subject and he faced the sack.

Not to be outdone by his administrators, Mr P went visiting his students in their rooms, explaining that if they didn't take his subject, he would lose his job.

Now old Mr P was a bit of hit with the students, coaching teams and generally being a good guy. So guilt-tripped kid after guilt-tripped kid signed up for his mickey-mouseish A-level.

Suddenly cunning Peregrine was faced with full classes and excellent employment prospects.

Or was he. At some point the phone calls from parents starting rolling in.

"Rupert can simply forget it. That is no subject to equip a lad for a recession. And I believe he was forced."

"Billy has never before displayed an interest in this area of academia..."

Outed, Mr P. The redundancy went through.

See if you have more luck.

Sesame Street gave me nightmares

There was a really horrible episode where this one that lived in a bin made it rain. Rain Forever.

And this one used to chase me in my dreams. It was scary: he could run pretty fast on those nasty orange legs of his.

I think this one taught maths. Which explains a lot.

So happy birthday, Sesame Street.

I couldn't care less whether Gordon Brown can spell or not

I really, really couldn't.

I recently met some of the kids who won this year's Times Spelling Bee. As a sort of Times treat, we took them to meet Ed Balls. One of the things they chose to ask him about was the decline of spelling standards in schools.

Yes: I understand why kids who've just been nationally praised for their spelling think it's important.

Yes: of course you have to spell things properly, especially the names of other people's deceased children (didn't someone check Brown's letter?). But really, give Brown a break.

It is perfectly possible to display intelligence, to write well, to think clearly and communicate gracefully whilst being a cack-handed speller. There are far too many people who change what they want to write and who avoid writing at all because they're worried they'll be laughed at, because they can't spell well.

The boys who won the spelling bee were bright. But they weren't bright because they were good at spelling. They were bright, and good at spelling.

Brown couldn't spell the boy's name properly because he's half-blind. Some people can't spell properly because they're dyslexic. Others can't spell well because they spend too much time working and bringing up children to read much. Others because it's just not something they're great at. And what does it *mean* if someone makes spelling mistakes? That they're stupid? That they're lazy? Well, actually it just means they've just made a spelling mistake. It could be indicative of anything; it could be indicative of nothing.

Too much is read into mis-spelt words. Spellings of words are fluid: they change over time and according to place. Can Brown do his job? Whatever you think the answer is, it doesn't lie in his handwriting. If you want to hold someone responsible, hold the person to account who posted the letter - it probably was their job to check it.

And let's be honest, with spell-check - who cares? Perfect spelling is an increasingly redundant skill if you ask me. It's like being amazing at flower arranging.

Ingenious marketing plan

When you have to pay for News International websites, instead of referring to the 'pay wall' we will all refer to a 'value fence', apparently.

I like what they're doing with that.

Tesco: the spin, the learning difficulties and the lies

My first job out of university was in my local Jobcentre Plus. I was a 'front line advisor', I dressed like my mum and I wasn't allowed to have anything on my desk that could be used a missile.

I dressed like my mum because I couldn't afford to buy office clothes and had to wear her rejects; I wasn't allowed missiles on my desk because sometimes the unemployed people wanted to throw things at me. (It wasn't just me - it was everyone I worked with. One person I worked with was a woman with a beard.)

Anyway, stay with me, this will get relevant.

Around the time I started work, a huge Tesco store opened just around the corner. It was a jobbing gold mine for us. Dozens of long term unemployed people were taken off our books as the supermarket giant swallowed them up - benefits, work issues and all.

So I know what sort of people Tesco employs. If you're a bright school leaver, a student, someone between admin jobs or someone with a university education and want work on the shop floor - forget it.

If you have a learning difficulty, if you're practically illiterate or if you've been unemployed for years, you've got a good chance. Tesco seemed to be looking for people who were going to stick around. People for whom trolley shifting and shelf stacking was going to be a job for life.

And it makes perfect sense. Why shouldn't they choose people who really really want the job rather than waste time and money on training an endless cycle of educated people who happen to need the short term cash? Not only that, giving people with learning difficulties a chance is highly ethical. Many of them are written off far too quickly.

I'm sure Tesco also employs many blue collar workers to manage and administrate, but the bulk of its workforce is not literate, educated people. It does not want them.

So when Tesco claims that it has a problem with the falling standards of education, I don't believe them.

Read about Tesco's employment woes here, here, here and, of course, here.

So what is Tesco playing at?

It's engaging in some artful PR. A single, full page colour advert in The Telegraph, for example, allegedly costs around £70,000. A news story is free.

By releasing that story, Tesco says to middle Britain: 'Education matters to us. Your problems are our problems. We share your concerns. Tesco cares.'

Tesco does not care. Tesco wants to sell food and products. By aligning itself with you, your politics, your family, your concerns, Tesco tries to creep its slick, corporate way into your life.

So what are you supposed to do, as a journalist, if a huge company makes a statement which is interesting and relevant, but you strongly suspect is actually a self-serving advertisement? Publish anyway. ' Tesco wants customers to like them' is not a story. Tesco expressing a political opinion is very interesting, even if it's essentially guff.

It's a shame: in the short term, you grant yourself the news story, but in the long term you open up the media as a forum for companies to promote themselves as and when they choose.

So corporations, roll up: With public opinion very anti Labour, the bandwagon is there to be leapt upon. 'Dettol says NHS wards have become filthy under New Labour!'; 'Heinz says that food in schools and hospitals is inedible under Gordon Brown!'; 'Ford says public transport is shocking!' Sigh.

From The Onion

U.S. Condemned For Pre-Emptive Use Of Hillary Clinton Against Pakistan

Steve, Harry, Judi and Al

Cheltenham is all about pashminas, tweed and very unfashionable skirts. Big hair, big blazers, a horsey laugh and a small family fortune are also helpful Chelters accessories. The Cheltenham Literature Festival is all this, plus books and celebrities.


Interview Task 1: Go and interview Harold Evans, of Sunday-Times-Editor fame.


Big old Harry Evs is a Sir. I've wikipedia'd and googled him so I'm all set. I double check what I should call him with the communications lady, who says it's all very informal so just call him 'Harry' or 'Mr Evans'.


A tiny alarm bell rang, but oh, how tiny it was.


I call him Mr Evans. He tells me he is a knight of the realm.


Bugger. I call him Sir Evans. No, wrong again, Sir Harold. Crap crap damn. Old Sir Harold really isn't best pleased. I apologise profusely and admit I should've done more research. He keeps telling me he doesn't mind and isn't a ruddy faced pompous person, but he clearly does care, a bit.


Then I ask him about the future of journalism, pay-walls and the web; and he gives me the goods. I make one final apology about the title thing, and what does Big H do next? Gives me a pep talk. 81 year old Sir Harold tells me my questions were excellent, not to worry about my cock-up and that he's trained lots of young journalists and knows the score. Then I get a one-armed hug from the man himself. I think it's probably because he spots my natural talent, but possibly because I still look utterly mortified about the 'Sir' malarkey. But I swear it's not my fault: I just haven't met enough Knights.


Fry-Time


Like the rest of the nation, I wish that Stephen Fry were my uncle. He would come over every Christmas (and occasional weekends) to play board games, drink wine, eat roasts and chat. He would tell jokes, we would all laugh.


In my head, we know each other well. How can he possibly, possibly live up to any of this in the flesh?


Weirdly, he does. Part of the Fry-charm is clearly his ability to make each and every person feel like an old and special friend. We shake hands, we make small talk about The Times, we laugh at people who don't understand the internet. He remembers my name. It's all so perfect.


Then, in front of the camera, I ask him one question and he takes eight minutes to answer. But it's such a lovely answer.


Judi Dench's scarf


Dame Judi (I got the title right this time, but Dame Judi prefers plain old Judi, so, wrong again) was very sweet. She's quite small, was dressed all in white, has very short hair and an outrageously gripping, gravely and gorgeous sounding voice. Thom told me she was prickly, but actually she was about as prickly as a teddy bear in bubble wrap. The clip-on mic wouldn't play ball with Judi's silky scarf, so I fiddled and fiddled (Dame Judi didn't mind) and eventually we just jammed it into her cardigan. She think the X-factor is cruel.


Alastair Campbell


Thinks Labour can win. I have two pictures of Al Cam in my mind. One is that moment when he stormed into Channel 4 news to set Jon Snow straight over the Sexed-Up dossier; the other is that interview he did just before Tony got Sedgefield in 1997 where he was all annoyed with the reporter who was ultra-desperate to talk to him. Al won, the journo lost.


So after the usual whispered bargains, hinted deals and slimy cosy chats with his peeps, we secured Al. Campbell struts into the room, in a great mood, and oozes charisma, charm and friendly confidence. Labour will win, the media is too right-wing, David Cameron is his true heir (communications-wise) and political spin has gone too far. And he's written a great book and it's mental health awareness month. Campbell is happy talking about his break-down and his depression. All a bit moving, really.


--


So now I'm a fame-whore. Famous people give better quotes and a bigger adrenalin-rush; they know how to use a mic and you're more likely to get a news line. They've got stories to tell - and they're good and being very personable very quickly. A good weekend. Now it's back to topping Wapping and re-hashing other people's stories. Yey.

Getting your House in order: How Hugh Laurie spells out the dilemas of the US Healthcare system

Ever watched House? You should. Hugh Laurie plays a grouchy, but kind, and brilliant doctor (Dr. House) who specialises in treating ailments that no one else can. He's rude, crude, dismissive, bigoted and extraordinarily gifted. He's a maverick. Dr. House and his crack team of dumb blond assistants spend hours solving a medical mystery every episode using lots of fancy and expensive equipment.

Ever been treated in a US hospital for cancer? You should. You're much more likely to survive. 88% more likely to survive, for example, if you are a woman with breast cancer.

Dr. House embodies the brilliance, the exuberance, the crudity and the terrible injustice of the US health care system.

In the States, if you can afford it, you can have the best of the best of the best. The blue-eyed American dream team will fight beside you, in a team of four, thinking outside the outside of the box. For House, there is no box.

In England we very much have a box. It is the shape of waiting lists, rationed treatment, budget cuts, C-diff and efficiency savings. But it's so, so fair. That beautiful simplicity, free at the point of need, that cuts out so much stress, money and discrimination from the system is totally lacking from the mentally unstable show-off that is House.

House is addicted to painkillers which give him hallucinations - just as the US is addicted to the insurance companies which promise so much quality yet let the poorest people down, fail to deliver when things get tough and devour so much of the GDP. Buying perfect health care is a hallucination; it looks real, it's tempting, it's manipulative, it looks like it can deliver - but it's actually a very dark promise which alienates the poorest people.

And if you've been watching recently, House is crumbling. He's falling apart. His dodgy leg has always given him a limp (he's such an excellent metaphor) but the drugs he uses to stem the pain are destroying him from the inside out. Town hall meeting, anyone?

Gordon Brown: The Movie

Some working titles:

From Highlands to high places: The Scot who saw it all

Who stabbed Caeser? Or, The Story of New Labour

Five go on an Adventure: Gordon, Tony, Cherie, Al and Mandy the Dog

Gordon: Unelected and Unappreciated

The stuff that loans are made of

Red bag; black sheep

Be careful what you wish for

One man, One eye and a whole lot of politics.

Half a man, half an eye and an un-regulated banking system

Possible £5.50 reduction in your TV license fee, apparently. So....

Which BBC programmes should go?

Gardeners' World

Horrid Henry

Snog, Marry, Avoid

As seen on TV

Breakfast

Strictly come dancing

This is an awful poll: I love all BBC output

Other

Please Specify:

ugg boots

Top 10 news stories this year

Some people think that a year starts in January and ends in December. They're wrong.

I'm not sure how many years out of education you have to be to have lost sight of the academic calendar, but it's probably hundreds. So for those of us who have the September to August template as deeply embedded into us as our skeletons, this is for you.

The Top 10

Kieron's been a Mirror man for a while now and so is convinced that Katie and Peter have some sort if importance. I was listening to him until he said that, but then I obviously had to disregard his opinion. And Thom's been world servicing for too long now: he thinks that foreign wars are interesting, even if you haven't been to that place on holiday. So I had to disregard him too, a bit.

I've gone for:

1. Obama's election
2. Lehman Brothers being allowed to collapse
3. Swine flu
4. Mumbai attacks
5. Israel's invasion of Gaza
6. Michael Jackson's death
7. MPs' expenses
8. Obama's inauguration
9. Jade Goody's death
10. G20

And the most over-hyped stories:

1. The Beatles Re-mastered.

Why we've all had to go bonkers over a dead pop group re-releasing their old albums is beyond me. It's just massive PR stunt. Of course some of their stuff was great, but they also wrote Yellow Submarine for God's sake...

2 Hadron Collider

It didn't work, did it.

3. Sachsgate

Russell Brand rang Andrew Sachs and was rude down the phone. We've all prank-called a grandad in our time, surely.

The journalist, the unqualified cheater and the President's daughter

Oh, wait, that's a stupid title for this post. All those characters are the same person.

Horror, horror, horror. CNN's latest 'news correspondent' is Jenna Hager, formerly Jenna Bush the First Daughter of the US of A. She's 27 and she's going to be reporting on 'issues like education', apparently. According to AP.

What issues are 'like education'? Issues that aren't education. So she's going to be reporting on education and possibly issues that are not education. So they've made a ham-fisted job of explaining that one. Unless they were trying to be funny.... this whole thing could be a joke! 

CNN have said they're hiring someone with 'White House experience'. Yes, I'm sure Jenna will be able to show us all where the best places to play hide-and-seek are and where her dog slept. But I'm not sure that's normally what journalists mean when they talk about White House experience.

In response to her new appointment, Jenna said: "I don't think it's that interesting... I'm pretty normal".

Wrong, Jenna. You are not normal. And congratulations on your first major journalistic error: this is very interesting.

But on the up-side, to all those graduates trying to work out how to get into journalism, here's a massive tip: Scrap journalism school, scrap work experience; your degree is probably a bit of a joke as well. Get a new dad.

Top five classroom disasters

I have a lot of friends who are teachers. Some are bad teachers. Most are good teachers, but good teachers who have bad things happen to them. Or to their young charges. Here's a list of my favourite moments... of when teaching goes bad.

1. On her first day teaching at her new school, Anna was a tad nervous. Going over her lesson plans as she drove up to the school, she turned left into the drive. Then she ran over a child.

2. Lee worked in a challenging school. Josh was a challenging child. As Gloria the teaching assistant helped Josh with his work, Josh got out his lighter. He held the lighter under Gloria's cardigan. The flames began to take hold. The elderly teaching assistant didn't notice a thing as her clothes began to burn steadily. Luckily Lee noticed, ripped Gloria's clothes from her back and flung the flaming cardigan out of the window.

3. Rosie was an intern teacher. Kelly was her guide: "Here's the lesson plan, Rosie. Just get them to draw a 'success-o-meter' in their books and colour it in to indicate how well they think they did." Rosie lazily drew a thermometer shaped object on the board and told the kids to copy it into their books. As she turned around she noticed the children were staring at the front in horror. One child ventured: "Erm, excuse me, why have a you drawn a giant penis on the board?"

4. Anne taught science. The children were doing an experiment with test tubes and bunsen burners. To this day Anne doesn't know why, but eight glass test tubes blew up, almost simultaneously. One hit a child in the face.

5. Brian was frustrated with some of the children in his PE class. One in particular kept kicking her ball over the hedge on purpose. Annoyed, Brian told the girl to stay where she was and went to get the ball himself. He kicked the ball back over the hedge as hard as he could. He heard a thump. Then a scream. Brian returned to find the nine year old child slumped unconscious in the mud. (After locking several of the more disruptive children in his class in a cupboard during an OFSTED inspection, Brian was later fired.)

Anyone know of worse?

House hunting in London

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,

Ex-council houses with crap kitchen fittings.
A Landlord whose property properly mings,
House-hunting is of my favourite things.

Actually it's not. House-hunting in London is one of the worst, most demoralizing, most tedious, most frustrating things it's possible to experience. Everywhere is awful.

My mother has a theory:

"People in London don't take care of their houses, just like they don't take care of their souls."

So as Tom, Louise and I continue the search for a non-rat-infested, non-urine-stained home in London which doesn't look like the scene of a murder and isn't situated so far out of the city that we'd start spending our whole lives on public transport (not just a third of our lives) we fail. Over and over again.

The highlight of Friday was perhaps when Tom and I got into an unmarked car with a strange man and drove through a 'short-cut' (a series of blood-stained back alleys) to see a flat which hadn't been lived in for about 20 years.

Tom politely enquired about minimum lease terms and arrangements for bills; I couldn't stop staring at a plastic wardrobe which I swear was concealing a body.

More on Elephants

I've just re-read that last post and am now not sure I agree with what I've written. To make matters worse, a kindly relative recently told me they would rather stick root vegetables in their eyes than pay for news on the internet.

The Elephant in the Newsroom

So it's out. Murdoch has formally announced that all News International sites will operate behind a paywall.

And our rivals are unable to suppress their glee. If you're The Guardian or The Telegraph or The Daily Hate Mail this is a classic win/win scenario. If Newsint falls on it's backpages, you win; if Newsint gets subscribers, so can you and web journalism is saved. In other words, Murdoch's Paywall Take Two = money4u.

However, if you're a punter, this doesn't look so great. We're so used to having free news at our fingertips that it feels like a democratic right, not a market product. The idea of paying for an understanding of our world smells rotten.

In a situation like this, there's only one place to turn. So I go to MediaGuardian and I read in the comments:

'We don't pay for opinions. Opinions are like NOSES, we all have them.'

'Well good luck with that'

'the idiot Murdoch doesn't understand that allowing free use of the site is probably making him more money than it costs him'

'no chance'

Etc., etc., etc. All 483 of them on one story.

Basically: you're wrong. We don't have to pay for all opinions but we do have to pay for considered, informed and articulate opinions. Good columnists cost a fortune because they've seen things and done things and heard things that 'Norwich1977', 'Playa28' and 'OutragedInHull' have not. And almost everything has been done to try and make free internet work, but while it doesn't work (and at the moment it doesn't: no one is making money on their websites) we can't simply suspend journalism.

Someone told me yesterday that James Harding is now a convert. He prefers to read his Times content online than read it in the paper. And good for him. A good online operation dispenses with the limits of time, space and two dimensions. A good online operation has text, video, slideshows, audio, interactive timelines, reader feedback, live debate, instant 24 hour news, leader writers and editors engaging directly with their readers, endless archives, hyperlinks and backstory...and it's always always fresh.

So of course you have to pay for it. Whether it's through manipulating you into buying holidays and watches through the ads, taking more taxes out of your pay-packet or by just taking your cash in a more upfront, old-fashioned and honest paywall, you have to pay. Journalists have to eat, travel and write: and that is not free.

So you have three options:

a) get rid of independent journalism and settle for a single, state-run, tax-payer funded news organisation

b) have independent journalism which is totally funded by ads. The instability of this funding model means that journalism will suffer terribly in the bad times when ad revenues are down (like now). Local news organisation will be prone to closure and long term investment will be tricky. Also, there will be more pandering to ad-providing companies and therefore news will be more prone to bias.

c) Pay for your news. It's quite cheap, really.

Flying the technological nest

How time flies. Before you know it, they've stopped depending on you for everything and have set out on their own journey of discovery. Nothing beats family: isn't it wonderful watching them grow.

This is the first text message my mum ever sent me (circa 2001)

HELLORHODASTOPALLWELLHERESTOPHOPEYOUAREENJOYINGYOURHOLIDAYSTOP

She had it stuck on capitals, couldn't work out how to create spaces and wrote 'stop' to mark the end of phrases, as if it was a telegram. Bless.

Here is a recent one (circa the weekend)

On train arriving kings x 10.35 will get tube and ring you love mum

Note the ability to differentiate between caps and small letters. Note also the ability to use numbers. However the understanding of full stops is still only partially developed: one has been used to communicate the time code, but several have been omitted from the grammar of the sentence. Alternatively, it could be that she does understand how to use full stops and has simply chosen to omit them to save on time and space; this could be a rudimentary attempt at text slang. This theory is supported by the abbreviation of 'cross' to 'x'. The tone is also significantly different. Signing off with a 'love mum' as opposed to 'stop' amply demonstrates the user's ability to interpret and generate a suitable tone. A marked improvement: well done.

How to save newspapers

Charge more? Ban t'interweb? Charge less? More t'interweb? No, no no.

If you're reading this, Mr Murdoch (and I know that you are) Slate has the answer:

Multi-video articles: to be or not to be

It's a debate we're having at work.

They look great, they're creative, they're interactive and they provide a fun way of telling a story.

But they're expensive, they load badly and they're hard to find with search engines.

Here are a couple I've tried recently:

Four Apollo 11 gadgets

How to make your own Harry Potter film

Personally, I think that good journalism and good presentation have to lead the way and the SEO, money and technology just have to follow suit and catch-up, but we'll see.

the problem with group emails at work

From: One person
To: All Users

Apologies for the global but do you know of anyone who plans to throw a "sickie" or who will be taking a day's holiday tomorrow, or part of the day, in order to watch the tennis and who would be prepared to talk to a journalist? Anonymity will be guaranteed.....

Thanks.

SARAH ACCIDENTALLY HITS 'REPLY ALL'
From: Sarah
To: All Users

Hahaha! My partner and I did it a couple years ago... ended up hiding during rain breaks as we knew the cameras usually pan the crowds at that point!

Of course this was all in another job, you know....!

10 seconds pass. Whole room starts to laugh.

From: Sarah
To: All Users

Obviously I would expect my anonymity to be guaranteed, wouldn't want that getting out at work...

I ate a pig's head

Its cheek, its tongue, its neck, its bristles and even a trotter. I ate them.

It was delicious, and yet hideous; it was efficient, eco-friendly and we wasted nothing - but it was an attack.

This is the sort of fiendish madness you engage in when you have dinner with professional foodies. Watton and I ventured into the kitchen where the pig's head lay, grinning up at us from the tin foil. It had no eyes and too many yellow teeth. Its ears were burned black and the soft skin at the tip had burst into hard carbon bubbles.

The pig's head was never really meant to be eaten, it was decoration. But we wanted to taste it. Edward jabbed his thumb into the cheek. The skin had been roasted into a deep brown and was dripping with grease. Edward snapped off a bit of cheek, crunched it, then he pulled grey brown meat out of the side of the head. It was soft, rich and sticky with all the fat. As we watched him we joined in. More fingers snapped, plunged, dug and pulled at the side of the head, feeling for bits of meat and plucking bristles out of the golden crackling.

Henrietta was the first to eat a trotter. She bit into the side of it, found the meat and licked the bone. Then someone wrenched the lower jaw from the upper part of the skull. As the pig's face snapped in half, more meat fell out of the head. And we ate that too. Edward pulled the purple tongue out of the bottom of the neck - it came out too easily - and he bent it like a soft brush so that the spokes of grey meat stuck out like bristles. Like hungry minions of Satan, we ate them too.

There was no conch and there was nothing to make it stop. There was just a dead pig which we had attacked like flies. It lay in the middle of us, defenceless and ripped apart, it's face smashed and torn and broken down into muscle, skin and fat, most of which lay in our stomachs, the rest scattered and ripped across the sideboard. It looked like a murder.

I haven't heard anyone talk about it this morning. No one will ever talk about it again. It will be our terrible secret that the pig is dead and that we ate its face.

Olds, News and Times

Daily Show reporter goes inside the New York Times.

"Name ONE thing in this paper that happened today"

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
End Times
http://www.thedailyshow.com/
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

Tube strike in London: no one cares

So there's a tube strike. So what? Only a tiny tiny proportion of our vast and glorious land knows such things as underground trains: outside of the self-centered metropolis, no one cares. No one.

Even people inside the stinking black pit of greed and ambition (London) don't necessarily care.

I, for one, experienced a perfectly healthy and fully functioning tube line this morning (on the northern line - note the mild and comforting irony at work there, note it).

Yes, it was busy. No, it was not unbearable. Admittedly one woman was a bit freaked out by the number of squished bodies and cried out 'Lord have mercy on our souls!' But then she said calmly: 'Could everyone move down a bit? Thanks!' So that was fine.

Yet somehow, it's a national, front page, news story. And we see this:

It's like the 'snow' story all over again. After one day of snow in London, the whole of the nation was bombarded with pictures of Londoners on sledges for weeks. As for the rest of the country, not only did they not care, most places north of Birmingham have twice that amount of snow every year without an iota of interest from the media. Read Jenny's rather excellent account of that, here.

Weather reports were banned in my house for three days in 1995 when a weatherman said: 'We're all in for a lovely weekend as the rain clouds start to head up north...'

Get over yourself, London.

Racism in the City

Is it just me?

Or does Nick Griffin look like a fat version of Big from Sex in the City?

Stone Age Alert!

I'm half way through Bill Clinton's autobiography. And... (beware: plot spoiler) he's just been elected President. But I can't help but be HORRIFIED to learn that the The White House still wasn't using email in 1992.

How did they communicate? With letters? It would genuinely be quicker to use carrier pigeons.

You'd think that the central hub of the world's superpower would have harnessed email by the 1990s, considering the first one was sent in 1965.

And I recently discovered that at work we have a 'fax machine'. I know. And people actually use it sometimes. Probably only for a joke, but still. Pretty retro.

OFCOM and the Freak Show, or, Britain's Got Problems

Before Saturday, the most disturbing and horrific thing I had ever seen on television was either the moment in Candy Man when all the bees come out of the hook-handed man's mouth or the first scene in Enduring Love when the old man falls out of the hot air balloon and his body snaps in half.

After Saturday, it was 10 year old Hollie Steel singing Edelweiss on Britain's Got Talent.

Sweet Mother of God. I was eating at the time and had to stop chewing mid-mouthful. Real, honest, uncontrollable stage-fright is more upsetting to watch that any amount of blood, guts and insects.

It's only acceptable to put children under that sort of pressure on live TV if you're fairly sure they can handle it. Pop Idol and X-factor both ban under-16s and also put contestants through audition after audition before they're allowed anywhere near a live show. Not Hollie: after one performance to a semi-filled auditorium her act was tweaked, the stylists summoned, the live cameras turned on, millions tuned in, the lights dimmed and the song started. Then the voice cracked. Then came the pleas and the tears and the awful embarrassment that must be bad now, and will continue to be bad for the whole of her adult life.

Every birthday party, every new introduction, every YouTube visit, every viewing of The Sound of Music, every TV talent show she tunes in to: Edelweiss will haunt Hollie for ever.

She should have done more auditions and had more screening before they put her in front of the nation.

If OFCOM had something to say about Boys and Girls Alone (a programme, where, if you missed it, Lord of the Flies was re-created on a farm in the south of England and the kids had water fights and yelled at each other for a month) they should certainly find something to say about Britain's Got Talent.

And SuBo's in the Priory. Of course she is. She only became famous because she was ugly. And she wasn't even that ugly: she became famous because she had crap hair. The contrast between the hair and the voice was stark. Poor SuBo. A Boyle on the face of Britain. An angry Boyle. Boyle flares up. A weeping Boyle. I could go on.

My Euro Hero

What with Wogan's wobbly and whatnot, Watton took over the reins at our house to provide some Eurotastic commentary.

Went like this:

"Here comes the first leather pant of the evening."

"She's fat, sure: but she's got a voice."

"Outstanding use of geometric shapes."

"Great lighting - they've really gone to town with that. Probably because they don't have electricity in nasty old Albania. Or towns."

"Here's the winner: someone's brought out dancing twin dwarfs. They're really playing hardball this year."

"Smacked in the face with a violin stick: deserved."

Katie and Peter: One Harrowing Week On

Where were you when you heard? I was sitting at my desk eating an apple.

At first I thought it might be tablols but now I think it's totally foreal. Omg I haven't cried so much since Take That split. And I took that news against the comforting backdrop of Lizo Mzimba and some sick newsround beats. Where was Lizo a week ago when the KP bombshell dropped? Gone. I only had the austere glow of Microsoft Office in my face.

So anways, since Black Monday I have been mostly watching 'Katie and Peter: Stateside' to console myself and remember how things once were. But you can't live in the past. I totally think KP can make it through this if they work together and work with some psychiatrists. I heart u guys 4eva b strong.

My local paper is better than your local paper

The most heart-wrenching copy:

MANY people in the village of Newbrough were saddened last week to hear the news that one of their best loved friends had died. Jack, the local cat, had been a friend and confidant of many adults and children alike for a good few years and his death has had a huge affect on everyone who knew him. Those of us who shared him with his real owners miss him greatly.

A story for everyone:

AFTER being made redundant from his job at a local saw mill, Hexham’s Gavin Herold spent six months on the dole.

News for those who lamb:

WHAT an incredible variety of weather we’ve experienced in the last week. At one point we did indeed have all four seasons in one day, which isn’t much fun when you’re lambing up on the hills.

The most gripping headlines:

TOWN OFFERS FRIENDLY SERVICE FOR SHOPPERS

Hardcore investigative journalism:

TYNEDALE is notable for its binge drinking, and the Public Health Intelligence agency knows where the immoderate live.

(The immoderate? Yes: you know who you are...)

Crap names for pubs

The twitter feed that's taking off... (#crapnamesforpubs)
I'm not sure how many of these are real, but my favourites are...

The Turgid Prawn

The Ducks Nuts

The Swollen Gland

The Struggling Monkey

Temperance Arms

The Spanking Roger

The Dogged Barmaid

The Parrot and The Prostitute

The Chris De Burgh

The Black Cock (apparently this one is definitely real, and you can visit it in Australia)

The Broken Arms

What would you do to get ahead?

I regularly pretend I can remember television presenters from the 80s who peaked on air before I was even a foetus. I consider this reasonable, some things are not.

From information gleaned in the last month or so, I can confirm that people I know have done the following:

• Flirt with a 90 year old carnival man with no teeth and yellow eyes
• Read other people's emails
• Set up fake twitter/facebook/myspace accounts, purely to stalk
• Pretend they are interested in interest rates
• Sit on doorsteps, for seven hours at a stretch, waiting for the bereft and mentally ill to come home. (Read that on as many levels as you like.)
• Drop the C bomb in the pub (to look verbally dangerous)
• Drink coffee when they hate it
• Do an 80 hour week, lose their eye sight as a consequence - then say they're just really 'into' their job
• Suffer hoards of 50 year old women in pashminas who speak three languages
• Hurl themselves down the side of the News International building (under the guise of abseiling to raise money for war heroes)

These look like the acts of desperate journalists. Since I (and all of my friends) have only ever been recession news hounds, as opposed to boom ones, I have no idea if all this stuff is normal, or if it shows people responding to the media jobs shortage. Perhaps as we shift from the Credit Apocalypse to the Pig Flu Apocalypse, journalists will start to demonstrate their extreme health rather than their extreme unsackability.

For the record, I am very healthy and have never had flu. But I did once touch a piglet's ear. (It was hairy)

Darling's little number

The whole world is watching you.

The intense gaze of every concerned British citizen will be fixed on you and you alone for half an hour while you speak.

This is Darling on budget day. Aside from the contents of the red bag, the Chancellor must have thought long and hard about what he was going to wear.

And he chose this tie:

Investing in the future? Then why wear pastel colours that hark back to 1984? Oh, Darling.

Gin

So much to say, so little time.
More to follow

In defence of Jacqui's porn, plant pots and bath plugs

Journalist: "Is it true you spent tax payers' money on [reads list] 'plant pots, garden furniture'...and even 'bath plugs'?"

Home Secretary: "Errr...yes, well it's possible..."

Journalist: "So you don't know."

Home Secretary: "No, it's not that I don't know..."

Poor old Jacqui Smith. It's so incredibly unfair that some slimy sod in Westminster is drip drip dripping all her personal expenses while all the other MPs have their (probably very similar) expenses concealed from the schizophrenic attention seeking nut-job with a loudspeaker that is the media.

Smith has every right to furnish her second home with plant pots, bath plugs and bed spreads. The media should really take a step back and remember why MPs have second home allowances and expenses in the first place.

Before 1911 MPs did not receive an annual salary. By paying MPs properly, you allow everyone to compete for the job, not just those who can afford not to work and spend all day in the commons. Likewise, by giving MPs enough money to fully furnish a pleasant second home, you allow anyone to stand for a constituency, not just country squires with a town house and a country house. And furnishing a proper second home with pots and pans and plugs is not excessive; a comfortable and free second home for an MP is democratic.

As for the videos - hilarious. But Jacqui Smith just looks like somebody's mum: giver her a break, she's clearly mortified.

The Golden Panther

Have you ever wondered why some people manage to get amazing contracts for their mobile phones and others (despite gifts-of-the-gab and powers-of-persuasion bestowed upon them by the gods) have to pay 30 a month for 10 measly minutes of talktime only available after ridiculous-o-clock?

I have solved the mystery.

The Hitch (who you might remember from posts such as 'Hitchen sink drama' and 'Kate and Niall's birthday ho-down') recently got an amazing deal from a very well known phone company who we can code name 'Purple'.

Whilst on the phone to Purple, The Hitch overheard them talking about her. Her customer status was described as 'Golden Panther'. This is obviously amazing in itself, but also appears to mean she can have anything she wants.

So how did she reach the dizzy heights of Golden Pantherdom? Easy. Apart from being able to run like the wind, stalk with the stealth of a hungry cat and shine with the brightness of priceless treasure (which is what I presume most people do to be branded a Golden Panther) Hitch once accidentally ran up a phone bill of 300 pounds.

Skinflints and Papers

Polly Toynbee wants state-funding for local press to stop it going under. She finishes off her column today by writing:

"If you always read this on the web, go out and buy a copy, skinflint. Use it or lose it."

This just sums up the attitude that newspapers shouldn't take. You can't bully people into buying a product by calling them 'skinflints'. And to force people back into old consumption patterns instead of embracing new ones, and the technology that drives them, is ridiculous.

Nobody wants the local press to vanish, but it does not have a god-given right to exist. If it will cover coffee mornings with eight pensioners and show endless pictures of people holding giant cheques for £3.50 then it will get what it deserves. If however, it learns to harness the overwhelming power of hyper-local news in the way that social networking sites have done; if it merges the public and the personal in the field of local politics as the nationals do; and if it exploits the fact that local newspapers can, due to distance, do their own serious video reporting within a reasonable budget, then it should not die.

And Mervyn has told us we can't afford any more bailouts anyway, so that's that.

not sure 10 Downing Street has really understood the spirit of twitter..

'The PM has welcomed moves from a number of countries to close tax loopholes'

Posted by 10 Downing St., 4:56, March 16th

blogger's block

I haven't written anything on here for a while.

Maybe I've got writer's block.

J.K. Rowling got writer's block twice: one when she was writing HP and The Chamber of Secrets - Harry and Ron go on a long, pointless and rather unsatisfying trek into the forbidden forest where you just know that as JK is writing she's going round and round in her own little mental forest thinking: 'Merlin's beard, where am I going with this?'

The second time she gets stuck is in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The camping trip which last for about 500 pages is simply Harry, Ron, Hermione and Rowling simultaneously going: 'errr....what's next - what should we do?' That said: the rest of HP and friends is a big magical flow of blockage free wizarding fun.

I like the way Rowling writes her way out of writer's block: it's very noble (if a bit dull to read). My publisher friend Jon hates it and says he would kill to take a big fat editor's red pen to both books and scratch out the moany 'lost', 'searching' foresty crap.

Other writers lock themselves up in caves and go on long mountain hikes when they've got writer's block. Can't be bothered with that.

I don't think I've got writer's block anyway - I'm just getting hideously lazy in old age. I keep thinking things, and instead of writing them down I just make a cup of tea and think how great it would be to have a secretary or PA or paid slave or whatever who could write them all down for me. Then I watch some TV.

Plus I don't have the internet at the moment. Plus, people keep telling me I should be tumbling, twittering, facebooking, netvibing, iphoneing, gloggubbing, cybersweepstaking, newswirehyperclocking and going on all sorts of other mental sites when I just prefer blogging. (Some of those are made up but someone will probably invent them soon. Maybe I'll get a patent in quickly.)

At Birmingham University, in the English dept, you can apparently get an extention for your dissertation if you say you have writer's block. I doubt anyone's ever tried it. My university essays were always too crap to pretend that they were ever 'written' in the artistic sense. If you could claim "churner's block" or "plagiarisers' plague" more students might have claimed.

The opposite to writer's block is writer's spew. A classic case of this has been Julie Myerson who clearly can't contain her writing even when it involves psychologically damaging her own children. In my house we used to call 'Living with Teenagers' (her Saturday Guardian column) the 'car crash column' simply because it was horrible but we couldn't stop reading it. It's incredibly entertaining but still only really amounts to a big sick flow of embarrassingly personal revelations. And looking at her 19 year old son Jake, being lost in Rowling's forbidden forest is surely preferable to being Myerson's Lost Child.

A cruel parent

I missed my blog's birthday.

The guilt is overwhelming.

Afternoons etc. is one year and eleven days old, today.

New logos for the recession

Friday Afternoon

Me: Sarah, do you know what I need?

Sarah: A lobotomy.

Me: What's a lobotomy?

Sarah: It's where they take out the part of your brain that determines free will. You're left being easily manipulated and obedient.

10 mins later...

John: Really annoying people keep ringing me

Sarah: Lobotomies all round!

Twitterphrenia

Recently I cocked up a twitter feed. Apparently the Iranian revolution was 30 years ago, not 20 (oops oops oops).

So when I got an email from Digidan saying 'wah / wah / wah....' I thought I should probably reassess the twittersphere, twitterati, tweetpad, twits (or whatever) because I've always thought it's just a bit, well, crap.

Twitter has taught me...

That Stephen Fry drinks 'voddie' before bed
That Lilly Allen likes to catfight in public
That random people want to know what I'm doing
That I can stalk the SEO team at the Telegraph

Twitter is overrated because....

It does not go beyond being a giant, superficial message board. With a limit of 140 characters twitter cannot facilitate any real debate; the very constraint that keeps twitter tight, fresh, light and fast-paced also keeps it bland, limited, unadventurous and simply a toy rather than a serious news tool. Twitter is a fad: endless short updates do not allow users to connect with each other or with stories or with ideas in any meaningful way. Users are essentially connecting with the technology (a giant message board) which allows them to self-publish, rather than connecting with any substance.

Streaming feeds into different inboxes such as 'news', 'special interest', 'friends', 'celebs' etc. could help to control the flood of unconnected information which hits you when you login. Enabling users to read a conversation they've had with someone in one place, like facebook allows you to do with wall postings, could also help connect the mass of tweets. Stretching out updates to 300 characters would keep twitter's sharp vitality but could also allow more debate and more substance. Tweeters might say that any story can be told in 140 characters and twitter is not about opinion or discussion; it's about a drip feed of information. I'd say that 99% of the updates I've read are emotive, descriptive and argumentative.

When I explained all this to medical-Ella she reached for one of her textbooks. She then read out some symptoms of a schizophrenic, stuff like: 'hears unconnected voices', 'cannot gauge what is real or fact and what is not', 'paranoid, concocts conspiracy theories' (there's a function on twitter called 'Find people. Follow them.') And that's when I decided that twitter imitates the symptoms of madness.

Ella's book said: 'But we need to discriminate less against the mentally ill. We need to accept them into society and be tolerant.'

I said: 'Ells, have you ever met a schizophrenic? What are they like?'

Ells said: 'Yes. They're fucking crazy.'

A red carpet, a blow-up mic and a host of crocodiles

Did you know that blow-up mics are banned from red carpet events? Well they are.

'And why would I want to take an inflatable mic to a red carpet event?' You might ask. You might well ask.

As my journalistic companion crouched behind some scaffolding, sneakily blowing-up a bright yellow, juvenile-looking microphone, I tried to distract the PRs who patrol the BAFTA red carpet like crocodiles, looking for stray, unofficial-looking hacks to pick off and kick out.

The army of the stars is both both efficient and brutal. A particularly hardened Freud Communications officer clocked my non-conformist friend and pretty much tore him apart. Entertainment reporting might seem trivial, amusing, light and often silly to the majority of us, but for those who guard and craft the images of the wealthy for a living, it's horribly serious. No blow-up toys allowed.

But the PR crocs are nothing compared to the autograph hunters. 'Angelina, Please! I've come all the way from Liverpool!' Watch them scream and beg, here.

On Tony's spending more time with his wife and Gordon's ailing treasury

Snow ice cream - a way to die?

The Telegraph is puffing this, this morning:

Make snow ice cream:
Ingredients:
1 can (12 fl oz/ 350ml) of evaporated milk
2 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
5oz (150g) of white sugar
100 fl oz (3 litres) of clean powder snow
Directions:
Take a large bowl, mix in evaporated milk, eggs, vanilla and sugar until smooth. Gradually stir in snow until mixture reaches desired consistency. Eat at once!

Probably getting lots of traffic. But I ask you this, Telegraph: Is it really a good idea to encourage your readers to eat raw eggs and snow? I appreciate that you emphasise the snow must be 'clean' - but is this ever possible? What about pollution and acid rain and dirty feet and the dirty ground? Is it wise to consume the stuff in ice-cream quantities? And everyone knows that raw eggs can carry salmonella (and occasionally baby chickens).

I can only conclude that The Telegraph wants to be sued. This online recipe calls for a revamp of the recent twitter craze, STT. Sue The Telegraph!