9 unarmed, innocent antagonists lie dead at the hands of an occupying state. Sounds familiar? Add 4 more death (and go back 28 years) and you’ve got Bloody Sunday (sort of). Here are 2 things that i thought of reading about the Flotilla massacre.
The wrong people for the job:
Israeli commandos v peace protesters armed with crude weapons: chairs, sticks, rocks. Not a good match. The commandos and the British paras can be compared: neither were used to taking low-level aggression and provocation; both were willing to use live rounds when they perceived threat (when other, lower-level state armed ‘battalions’ would have approached this situation in a non-lethal way cf. constant antagonism in occupied lands against armed forces)
Excuses:
Another parallel can be drawn from the excuses made. Netenyahu actually said there was ‘reports’ of gunfire, the same excuses made by Paras in the Widgery Report (such claims are utter bollox, the only gunfire came after 12 people had been shot dead (a carbine was fired from Rossville flats by someone purported to be from the OIRA)). As soon as I heard him say it, it sounded so much like excuses made in 1972, utter crap, and will be proven to be later.
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Crude post, will get more detailed and more paralleled as the details unfold. The similarities are amazing: Israel know they have completely fucked up, they’ll have to stand by their commandos, white-wash the report, possibly claim some acted aganinst orders, continue to insist on gunfire being heard, stand by their decision to use crack troops to absail down and kill unarmed protesters.
This was originally going to have 500 different clichés, then I settled for 500 characters:
Little girl sage, architect, she’s a secretary cos she’s a woman, friends are lame with dames too, list of conquests, rain walk, high school hot boyf, no tv interaction, playing penis game, conceptual art gallery, Berg
man chess lols, loses job, quirky, impossible job, tanktops, being bonkers on the bus, failed blond date, drunk karaoke, catching wedding bouquet, ring misunderstanding, shopping in dressing gown, lovesick drunken meeting ramblings, inexistence of love, drawing again as showing artistic verve, walking in the rain to apologise, old films in cinema, mixtapes, blackboard wall, trading books on architecture, favourite bench, reading literature in public place, dour voice-over, piano, success through employment, destiny
It was a very silly film
Having re-read the prophetic post on Woolworths, and remembering password, and having a WordPress Android app, web3point11 is back. I’m even putting alerts in g calendar to write posts x.
Nick Clegg’s assessment that Julia Goldsworthy gets patronised, and Chris Huhne does not have enough emotional intelligence for a Climate Change role are absolutely correct.
Julia Goldsworthy is a fixture on Newsnight, like Shirley Williams in this respect.
I find myself patronising her: her youthful, university style grates. Why is she giving me information on the intricacies of London Financial District? It’s very hard to take, my only experience of her is on Newsnight.
I wonder how mutually exclusive being the patroniser and the patronisee are? She is really patronising, she has Michael Howard’s weird wrist/hand gestures, the ones that are supposed to make Gordon Brown more electable.
I think the phrase ‘not done an honest day’s work’ comes to mind. If you asked her what’s the most embarrassing job you’ve ever done the answer would probably be ‘I had to go and find Ashdown some kleenex when he was getting laid’.
Speak to any other Newsnut and they will say the same.
They will also say Andrew Rawnsley can piss off, and that Douglas bloke from Labour is a right gimp.
Chris Huhne has the voice of an Angle.
He is a maths-man, the power-hungry nerd, who is backing the wrong horse. A ‘Leadership at all costs’ man during the Leadership contest, his Will to Power leaves a bad taste in the mouth, hence why LL Cool Clegg got the gig.
‘Hello Menzies, please do you mind awfully if I run for leader please sorry?’
I think both of the MPs above have a very defined image in most Lib Dem voyeurs: both seem suspiciously willing to talk on any part of policy, they are the keenos saying ‘I’ll drive 200 miles on a Sunday in the rain to do the BBQ, no problem!’.
I really like the Lib Dems’ recent policies, and I will probably be voting for them in the next election.
A link to these chaps, the ZX Orchestra got me pondering about my times with Sinclair Computers at home.
In my lifetime we had a 48k, then a 2+ 128K, then an absolutely astonishing piece of home-made wizadry which was i think a 128K with an Opus floppy disc drive attached, which meant games were loaded in seconds rather than minutes. And it had a save option too, so instead of having to complete Chuckie Egg 2 in one 20 hour sitting, you could save and go back to it.
Apart from the top two blocks of pixels across the top went funny, so descending a tube became more of a 16 colour lottery.
I would have traded in our Spectrum for a Commodore 64 or Please Father Christmas an Amstrad or Amiga at the drop of a hat. Now i am willing to wear my 128K badge with pride, it becomes a bit like the Yorkshiremen sketch:
-You had an in-built cassette player? Ooh we could only dream about In-Built cassette player.
We had to get out of bed at 4am-half an hour before we’d been to bed-to turn the TV on so it could warm up.
Once the telly had warmed up we had to find the two copies of Gauntlet part 1 and 2, that me brother had copied off a friend at school.
The first tape would take 10 minutes to load, and then we’d put in the other one. This would normally break after 10 minutes, so we’d have to start the whole process again.
Meanwhile me younger brother would be moaning saying why aren’t we playing Metal Army? And me older brother would be trying to play Lords Of Midnight.
We’d start again, and this time pray really hard that both tapes would work.
By now my sister is trying to watch television on the only telly in the house and wants us off.
So i’ve now got one wanting Metal Army, one Lords of Midnight and one Neighbours, and no one’s happy. But we put the copied tapes back in.
Whilst Gauntlet copy one Load “”s i’m amusing myself with the pictures of the Amstrad version of Magicland Dizzy on the back of a Dizzy box set my brother got for Christmas, dreaming of what it would be like to play that game with the colours filled in.
The second tape goes in at what i think is the right point.
Another ten minutes go by and it’s loaded; three of us are encamped on the keyboard: one using 1,Q,CAPSLOCK,A; another TGHJ; the other ‘/,. for UP DOWN LEFT RIGHT respectively.
As the wizard i am weak but i’ve got magic. My little brother is the nimble archer; my older brother the tough Barbarian. The game lasts for 2 1/2 hours, then we want to play something else so we turn it off and start the whole process again.
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I am sure that many Spectrum users will recognise parts of this. The feeling of completeness that came with getting an Atari ST for the house can not be surpassed: Wonderboy was the greatest thing.
Nostalgia about Spectrum is not misplaced, nostalgia is nostalgia because you remember the emotional bits: the part where the baddies became blue outlines on Hong-Kong Phooey; when i got the game for my birthday that no one could work out how to play at all ever etc. etc. Not the bad bits such as the lame graphics and the loading time.
Spectrum was brilliant, but Dragons Breath and Wonderboy must not be overlooked in a whistful moment.
I think this will be the end of the opinionated web3point11 blog. I can be quite opinionated so it will be a challenge. I want to strip back and not to follow the last five years of blogs that have turned it fom a journal to an Opinion column. I was influenced by this decision by watching Paxman talking to Huffington on Newsnight last night. It was an interesting chat*, i didn’t realise Arianna Huffington had such an accent.
So this blog will now transform slowly into an opinion-free zone. It will be something to focus my mind, a bit like trying to write in the present tense. Please see my twitter /poohugh for all silly opinions about everything.
*At this point i would normally start slating one or the other for having a stupid argument, or as my drunken Twitter put it, ‘protecting her own ad revenue by bigging up the internet’
I would like to put my tuppence in.
Here’s a story about about them stopping selling CD singles.
This doesn’t stop them selling:
-Pick and Mix
-Indoor TV Aerials
-Paddling Pools
–£2 book on Violent Crime (which i purchased, a blog post will follow on this!)
-Sandwiches
-Bicycles
-Computer Games
-Mobile Phones
-Cafe food
CD singles are the least of the company’s problems. In an age of specialisation Woolworths seems to be one big discount bin of everything and nothing, a hardware store trapped in a confectioner’s. It is the True Crime of the high street: horribly cheap; garish; classless; morbidly fascinating but not something you’d admit to liking.
The good doctor has just started a new blog, more like a video roll as Dan mentioned.
The Kermodian curve shows an exponential incline, in paradox to his quiff height.
Key points:
Move to 5Live
The Pirates Of The Caribbean
Sex Lives of the Potato Men
BBC Newsnight Review-along with Tortoise Tom Paulin and the other Greer he was able to eulogise on such diverse topics as Tom Stoppard, The Life of Pi and The Exorcist. His anti-establishment stance and barnet coming across to viewers a lot better than Humpty Lawson.
Cannes – ‘And we go over to Mark Kermode who is in Cannes hello Mark’ ‘Can I just say….’
Podcast
Re-launched BBC 2 Review: hosted by Kenickie woman it’s ticking the BBC Charter boxes whilst appealing to the same 40 year-olds buying albums off the back of Paul Morley’s reviews.
New Video Roll Blog
What happened to his Observer contract? and Where will this end?
Kermode used to have an every other weekend section in the Observer Review. The Review now has no room for him, or did he want out? It seems strange that a writer as good as Kermode wanted this to finish: now only has space for Philip French and Jason ‘5 News on a Friday’ Solomons. A great shame, and although he still does the odd one-most recently on Haneke I think-he still does not do enough.
I would like to think that Dr. Kermode is now positioning himself to take over from Wossy on Film Two Thousand and whatever with Jonathan Ross. His public image has never been hire; he is towing the BBC line more than ever; Wossy has had his time in the sun and there is great pressure on the amount of money he demands [is this right? Sounds like a lot of crap Ed.]
I think there would be a great reaction to Kermode’s appointment in this place, and I don’t think Ross would be that sad to see it goes, he must be frustrated by Barry Norman’s old scriptwriters still doing his autocue spiel. As Kermode has shown he would do it, he is thriving in his new found stardom and is very passionate about his subject.
And Dwayne Ladeyjo is part of it, new name ‘Predator’.
Dwayne was last seen running 400m Hurdles (i think) at the time of Jonathan Edwards jumping 18m+ in Gothenburg, towards the twighlight years of Roger Black when he was trying to become a presenter, when Colin Jackson’s 12.91 110m World Record would never be beaten, when Coleman still commentated on races, when Clare Balding was but a Sports Reporter on 5Live Breakfast Show, when John Inverdale presented Rugby Special, covering Craig Chalmers’ heroics for Melrose, when cider was only drunk by students and tramps, when Gary Glitter was still looked of as quirky, when Sally Gunnell ruled.
Any other favourite sporting memories from 1994-1998?
London England – Sitting on a bus, Hugh McCallion was reading Times 100 Most Influential People List. In these days of PDAs and motion sensors I found the style of the big American puff more apparent fitting itself to a Katie Couric autocue. Reading the NY Times/Washington Post crossover in The Observer has helped with this. Perhaps this country has the tabloids to thanks for the proliferation of pictures, the internet thanking porn and star trek similarly.
The structure: the introduction takes a top-down overview of the situation; the body an aggrandising pompousness; the end references the beginning. With a shorter sentence to read on the bus.
George Clooney spoke of Brad and Angelina saving the world, Ben Stiller spake Robert Downey Junior ‘a genius’ in the upcoming Stiller-penned film Tropical Thunder, Ethan Hawke from Training Day lauding Tom Stoppard. I was reminded of Denzel Washington’s character witness statement (!) for Wesley Snipes (3 year maximum sentence for tax fraud): “Wesley is like a tree — a mighty oak . . . Many who know him have witnessed the fruit of his labours, have sat in his shade and even been protected by his presence”.
Perhaps the biggest puff was from Desmond 2:2
“I first met Peter Gabriel on our mutual friend Richard Branson’s personal tropical Necker Island… He taught me how to swim”. He then went on to talk about the puffiest thing ever made: the Philosopher Kings-lite Elders group, led by peanut-head Jimmy Carter and 2:2. They have a spare seat for Ang-Sang-Sue-Qi at this Elder table. Go figure.
Wesley Snipes has got funny hair at the moment.
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