Good Afternoon, Dear Reader. As I haven’t posted for a while, I thought I’d pop in to share my thoughts about some of the big news stories of the last couple of weeks.
Usually, researching this kind of post involves spending quite some time rummaging through the lesser seen regions of Google news, seeking out oddities, anomalies and the downright strange. Not this week, or last week for that matter. No. It seems the great and the good have decided to gift bloggers and columnists everywhere with the kind of material that one really couldn’t make up.
- I begin with Ricky Gervais and his one man crusade to reclaim* the word, ‘mong’. Mr Gervais has now issued an apology saying he had been “naive”, and, “(n)ever dreamed that idiots still use that word aimed at people with Down’s Syndrome”. However, prior to his climbdown, those who objected were labeled, “humourless”, while his fans described the criticism as political correctness gone mad and an attack on free speech – which is odd because the last time I checked the laws surrounding freedom of speech didn’t include a clause advocating bullying.
- The saga of Liam Fox and his ‘friend’, the delightfully named Werritty** rumbles on. Mr Fox has now resigned but not before blaming everyone but himself for his downfall saying the criticism of his take-a-mate-to-work policy was due to “vindictiveness” and “hatred”. I suppose I can see his point. If plumbers and bricklayers can take a mate to work, why not defence ministers who are involved in secret strategic talks with key allies? Surely unblocking a sink and discussing the defence of the realm are exactly the same thing? No? OK, I see your point – Mr Fox still needs some persuading though.
- And then there is Oliver Letwin, millionaire and MP for West Dorset, who was photographed dumping official papers into a rubbish bin in a central London park. It turns out this is also a perfectly normal thing to do because the papers weren’t top secret or anything***, just letters from his constituents. So, the good people of West Dorset now know how their elected representative treats their correspondence. So far, Mr Letwin hasn’t come up with an excuse, or found anyone else to blame, but if he wants to I suggest pinning it all on St Eric Pickles, patron saint of the garbage obsessed – if only Eric had reintroduced weekly collections sooner ….
- In (very much) related news: still available on BBC iPlayer, Holy Flying Circus is a “fantastical re-imaging” of the controversy surrounding the release of Monty Python’s, Life of Brian, which is quite apt considering the Ricky Gervais story I opened with. Life of Brian is a perfect example of comedy being used to challenge preconceived ideas. Contrary to what the anti-Brian propaganda said, the film did not attacks Christians, it challenged blind, unquestioning belief.
I suppose Ricky Gervais fans could argue that attacking preconceived ideas was their intention, but I’m not so sure. I have a feeling many/most of them unquestioningly retweeted Gervais’ mong tweets simply because of his celebrity status. They didn’t stop to think about what they were doing, they just followed along because some famous person was leading, a bit like the Brianists, really****.
- And finally: the death of Dennis Ritchie earlier this month was a little overlooked, which is very sad. Mr Ritchie was the inventor of the programming language C, and the co-inventor of the Unix operating system. Although he was hardly a household name in the way people such as Bill Gates or the late Steve Jobs are, his influence on the technology that has become so much a part of our everyday lives can not be overstated. It is no exaggeration to say that pretty much everything you see or do on your computer you owe to him. Yes, there were other languages, and there were other OS, but the ones he worked on were most elegant and the most practical. He truly was a pioneer!
*Not entirely sure how he intended to do this, because I thought you could only reclaim a word if it had been applied to you. For example: gay people and the word gay.
** Werritty sounds as though he could be a cousin of Raggety from Rupert the Bear.
*** I suspect he’s not trusted with the really serious stuff.
**** I blame their parents who obviously never used the traditional response, ‘And if all the other boys jumped off a bridge, would you follow?’, when their offspring tried to blame bad behaviour on the influence of others. I’m guessing they never said, ‘Stop swinging your school bag, you’ll have someone’s eye out’, or, ‘ But superheroes eat all their carrots, that’s why they have super powers!’, either.
Updated to add: Life of Brian is also on iPlayer – just watching it now, it’s still funnier than a very funny thing indeed!
Jack Yan
The problem with the internet? We have the wrong kind of wrong people
Recently, I’ve noticed a big increase in the number of people being wrong on the internet. Oh I know, people have always been wrong on the internet, but usually they were wrong in the right way: they disagreed with you, but they did, at least, have an informed opinion, it was the wrong opinion but they sincerely believed it, and could argue their point rationally.
I’ve spent many happy hours engaging with the right sort of wrong on the internet. I’ve shared my thoughts on the great DeNiro vs Pacino debate; wrestled with the thorny issues surrounding the whole Led Zep vs BOC controversy; I’ve even waded in to the toxic swamp that is Bruce Lee vs Jackie Chan. I can even tolerate the dissenting voices of Man United fans, they are of course wrong, but it’s the right kind of wrong.
No, the wrong people I’m talking about are those Attila the Mom* mentions in her most recent Asshat of the Week post, those who are wrong because they seem to lack the ability to actually read the words in front of them. Instead, they read a title, assume they know what lies beneath, and rattle on about what they thought the writer had said, rather than what is actually written there. Alternatively, they’ll ignore both the title and the article, and drone on about something else entirely.
These people are everywhere. At one time you only found their UK brethren on the Daily Mail website, but now they’re branching out. They’ve even infiltrated the Guardian! Nowadays, Charlie Brooker makes an amusing point about some aspect of popular culture, and a boatload of the wrongs turn up to berate him for not caring that penguins don’t have any socks because they’ve been stolen by chavs**. Meanwhile, another bunch of wrongs will post what appears to be a random assortment of letters that make absolutely no sense***, ‘u suk u libral twet’.
And now they’re even turning up here. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been merrily deleting what I thought was spam, until I took a closer look and realised they were genuine comments. To give an example: one wrong person left me a comment predicting the end of something, possibly the world****. I dunno. But, the wrongest thing about the comment was the fact that the commenter, somehow, believed this was my fault. I have no idea why. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out what I’ve done that could be so influential it could effect events thirty years hence, but I’m flummoxed. Maybe they know something I don’t, maybe I have some hitherto undiscovered superpower. Gosh! I wonder what it is. I’m guessing invisibility because I know I can’t fly, I don’t have x-ray vision and I have absolutely no talent for shape-shifting – truly, if I could do the latter I’d spend most of the day as a cat. Anyway, I apologise for whatever it is, and would like to thank the wrong person for alerting me to my apocalyptic tendencies.
I do think it’s time we re-introduced the concept of the walled garden website especially for the pathologically wrong. Such places were commonplace in the late 90s/early 00s. The idea was you signed up with an isp whose website then became your home page. The problem was once you accessed it, it was extremely hard to escape and access the rest of the internet because every link led to another page on the same site so you just trundled around, eventually finding yourself back where you started. When I first went online, I spent several days trapped on Compuserve, endlessly going round in circles trying to figure out where the real internet was kept; it felt like someone had used Portmeirion as a template. Fortunately, I then discovered Google, and made my escape.
A walled garden site was a bad thing for most people because it kind of defeated the object of the internet – that it gives people from all over the world a chance to interact with each other. However, for the very wrong it would be a very good thing. They could just hang out with kindred spirits, all being wrong (and inarticulate, and crazy) together. Meanwhile, the rest of us can get back to the right kind of wrongness. Heck, we could even finally resolve the age old dispute about shuffling zombies vs running zombies which, like this post, has gone on for far too long.
In the meantime, the very wrong should consider themselves slapped with that wet haddock.
*I’m a little jealous of Attila the Mom. She came up with Asshat of the Week, and managed to find a photo of a donkey wearing a hat to accompany it. I decide to slap people with a metaphorical haddock and can I find a photo of such a thing? Can I heck
** OK, I’ve never seen that ‘exact’ comment, but it’s only a matter of time.
*** No, they are not teenagers using text speak, these are usually middle aged men who have lived their entire lives in this country, yet have somehow managed to avoid learning the language. It takes a very special kind of wrong to be able to do that. For a while I did wonder if these people were getting their dogs to comment for them …. but it can’t be that, dogs are far brighter and have much better social skills.
**** It happens in 2042, so make a note of that if you feel you might like to make plans for whatever it is.