One of my more minor claims to fame is that donkey’s years ago, when I first got digital TV, the lady in the shop made the assumption that, because I’m a bloke, I would be wanting the full sports package. She was genuinely shocked as I was the first man she’d met who turned it down.

Competitive sport bores the arse off me. I think it comes in part from having been forced to “enjoy” playing rugby in the pissing rain on a Wednesday afternoon. I went to that sort of school, you see – grammar turned minor public, playing fields of Eton and all that bollocks!

Nowadays I try and live in a largely sport-free household – or as close as I can get these days with saturation coverage of the Olympics going on 24/7.

I’m sure I’m not alone in being fed up to the back teeth with 2012 and all the hoo-ray-henrying – although, at least, I don’t have to share the fate of my friends and colleagues who live inside the London boundary and, as a consequence, have had their council tax bills hiked to help pay for it all. Continue reading Seb’s Multi-Billion Pound Wankfest →

As a follow up to my post on 18 February a friend has just posted this in Facebook.

Just thought it deserved a wider audience!

Just what the hell does the Sunday Telegraph hope to achieve by today’s ill-mannered attack on Richard Dawkins?

OK, so the Dawkins family tree has some rotten branches which were involved in the slave trade, but that was more than two centuries ago – and is not relevant to what the man is now. One might just as well suggest that because Conrad Black was imprisoned over Hollinger then the Telegraph stands convicted alongside him. Utter nonsense, of course, but just about as ludicrous a waste of time as Adam Lusher’s article. (You can read Slushie’s dribble of irrelevant piss here, Clicky, and Dawkins’ more reasoned and dignified response here, Clicky.)

It wouldn’t be that difficult for any one of us to find a bad apple in our plethora of ancestors. One of my forefathers, for example, was transported to Australia for stealing a loaf, but that doesn’t mean I should spend the rest of my life wearing a hair shirt or paying compensation to Warburtons!

Seriously, Lusher’s article is the sort of effluvia you expect to see emerging from the back end of the lower portions Murdoch’s empire – although that readership would probably think the slave trade was a heavy metal band. You do not expect such inept, facile junk from what purports to be a serious newspaper.

Lusher is just being shoddy and cheap and we can only hope that someone with more time on their hands delves into his closet to see what skeletons are lurking there.

If ever there was a reason to believe that parts of the USA are completely degenerate I found it this afternoon!

We were round at the sister-in-law’s and idly flicking through her Skybox (Ooo, Matron!) we stumbled on this uniquely American offering. I’ve watched a lot of “wrong” TV in my time, I’m a big boy, I’m allowed to! But this was wrong on so many levels it’s difficult to know where to start.

For those of you lucky enough never to have encountered it, Toddlers and Tiaras (we will call it TaT for short) follows kids as young as 18 months as they prepare for and appear in what the yanks call pageants. (Over this side of the pond a pageant tends to involve lots of am-dram societies and battle re-enactment clubs performing scenes from British history in a muddy field outside a stately home!) TaT is on an altogether bigger scale of tasteless yukkiness.

I would have to go back nearly 30 years to when I worked in a school to recall such displays of pushy, ill-tempered, self-centred and selfish brattishness. And some of the kids were just as bad as their parents. One has to wonder, as one watches a three year old being tweezed, spray-tanned and blinged-up to the eyeballs, how much of this is for the benefit of the child and just how much is “mommy” living vicariously through her sprogs.

It’s quite obvious that some of those kids don’t want to be there and don’t want to do it, but it’s easy to rebel against your parents when you’re 14 or 40. It’s not so easy when you’re four to explain your objections to being objectified.

The pushy “mommies” are worthy of note. Quite aside from the major mommy hissy fits, here’s just a few examples:

Quote – “When I see her on stage it’s just like having a life-sized doll.” Well, if that’s what you want, then buy one and let your daughter lead a normal life!

Quote – “We’ve spent a quarter of a million to get the girls started.” I can’t help feeling that would have been better spent on a college fund!!

Mommy reducing her daughter to tears while she’s on stage because she forgot part of the dance routine. She’s FIVE, for crap’s sake.

I could go on, but if I watch any more of this dross I WILL chuck the coffee table at the telly.

However, the most worrying and sinister part of all this is the overt sexualising of these children. A three year old dressed as Madonna, complete with conical boobs, is very disturbing. It aint cute. It’s nothing short of soft porn for paedophiles. Mommy and daddy should be ashamed.

One could almost weep for Trevor Kavanagh! Where does he leave his brain and his moral compass when he opens his mouth and shoves his foot firmly in it?

Kavanagh has today complained about the way some “journalists” from The Sun have been treated following police raids on their homes.  He says that such intrusion into their lives is “out of proportion”.

This is quite staggering in its level of hypocrisy. This man works for The Sun, for crap’s sake – the lowest form of life in the media sewer. (And SHIT! Is there some shit down there!)

Just a couple of snippets:-

“He said money sometimes changed hands while unearthing stories, and this had always been standard practice.” That may be true, but it doesn’t make it legal or moral.

“ The company would always consider the public interest first when a story was under consideration.” Fuck RIGHT off. They consider the profits and nothing else.

If/when the rat-pack end up back at their desks perhaps they will ponder on the experience and accept that it really isn’t very nice to have your skiddy undies paraded to the world.

At least the police are investigating suspected criminal activity – not muckraking or trawling  through dustbins to satisfy the prurient interests of knuckle-draggers.

Yeah – I know it’s a Bank Holiday, but you don’t expect such august a body as the BBC to field the second eleven on the sub editor’s desk. Just lifted this straight off their story about the Emmy’s:

“Sheen’s third outing as former British prime minister Tony Blair earned him his first Emmy nomination, for The Special Relationship.

But he lost out to Al Pacino, who scooped a rare TV award for his role as an advocate of doctor-assisted suicide in You Don’t Know Jack.

It is an account of the close working bond between Mr Blair and former US president Bill Clinton. Dennis Quaid, who portrayed President Clinton, was also up for an acting award.”

If there really WAS a suicide pact between Blair and Clinton I think we should be told.