Meeja Hoors
Further reasons for breaking your chains
Cull “tuned in” (went downstairs) late for the start of the Engerland-Spain friendly but in time for the main events. On show was another great advert for the beautiful game. After being shown how to pass the ball for 30 minutes, the English as they are wont started “putting the boot in”: specifically Rooney pushing Casillas into the stands, and a follow-up challenge that led to his substitution; Ashley Cole’s aggressive challenges; Neville taking out Reyes; etc. Rooney is now under the tutelage of Mullah Al-Ferg, so his concept of fairness will obviously be twisted.
Not to say the Spanish players, with their laughable over-reaction to every half-challenge, weren’t complicit in the kakistocrats’ cabaret. But it was the Spanish fans who were the real hijos de putas*. Taking coach
Aragones’ lead (how clever not to comment on his comments re: Henry; though at least 33.4 per cent of it was probably taken out of context), from Rooney onwards Cole, Shaun Wright-Phillips and to a lesser extent Jermaines Jenas and Defoe all got a repulsive volley of monkey chants from every side of the Bernabeu, Sieg Heils sometimes accompanying. Had McGroot been drumming up support? (Unlikely, southern Europe is too exotic for him). Naturally the Motty & Lawro show was slow in realising the racism; it started at the end of the first half, not when SWP came on. The UK contingent, usually responsible for ripping up quaint medieval cities in the name of the septic isle, took full licence for righteous unction, returning with the usual Rule Brittaniaisms.
While UK Sports Mins Caborn called for a full enquiry, apparently the main comments on the malevolent monkey business from the Spanish sports dailies were about Atletico being after SWP. And that it was England’s fault because of their “stirring up” (raising) the issue of racism and their heavy tackles: neither of these directly encourage a regular chorus of “If you’re not f**king black jump up and down,” sung by large sections of the 55,000 crowd.
Nationalism, race. Atavistic, abhorrent irrelevancies both? When modern identity is bound up by so many other aspects (some of them more important than what’s on your iPod playlist) last night’s phlangist throwback and braindead boorishness were proof enough that we should be able to stand up tall without reference to either of the above….
*call me names, but not English cunt, if I got that wrong
Marital fission blamed on Bush's cult of fear
From an Oakland, Ca-based seller of a Tiffany platinum ring (which finally went under the virtual hammer for $202). We thought this
micro tale tells a wider story about leftist despair amid Republican consolidation in post-election US
‘The man has obviously gone insane. I’ve had enough. I’m packing my bags and filing for divorce. It’s a beautiful ring, you take it.
It started (and ended) with 9/11. That was the day my husband was taken over by aliens. He now thinks he’s a neo-con. “What’s a neo-con?” I ask him. “A good guy,” he says. “But what do they stand for?” “Whatever’s right.”
I ask you. This is not my husband. My husband was a pillar of our small Pennsylvania community. He was a county commissioner, even. A stand-up guy.
Now he’s a sit-down guy. A foolish, irritable Fox News watcher. He sits on the sofa all day watching Fox news and throwing drive-thru food and bad beer down his throat. He looks like a scowling sack of potatoes. When he speaks, he never says, “Let’s play a round of golf, dear.” or “How was your day?” He just spews a stream of incomprehensible abuse of democrats.
This morning he said to me “Do the Democrats tell us of the New Jerusalem they would have us build as our City on the Hill? No, they take us into the slums of the soul.”
What the fuck does THAT mean? IT MEANS NOTHING! The man has become a drooling moron! (Not that I have anything against drool.) Okay, he’s not the only one. Plenty of people lost their minds after 9/11. Possibly me. Okay, definitely me. I think the whole country suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Not that I have any idea what that means.
But so what? Who wants a spouse who farts all day and calls George Bush “our supreme commander?”
And he blathers on about God. God God God God God. He and George Bush, he informed me, are “On God’s side.” Does God want drilling in heretofore protected wilderness areas? Does God want Polar Bears to become extinct? What kind of arrogance makes us think we are more precious than the rest of God’s creatures?
I have a cousin, Marg, who was tricked by the Republicans. She thought she was signing a petition about AIDS, but it turned out she was really registering to vote as a Republican. Not only that, but they changed her polling place! (Marg became a Democrat in 1992, she liked Mr. Clinton very much. Perhaps too much, but that’s another story.) When I told my husband about Marg, he looked at me gravely for a very long time. He seemed to be thinking, reconsidering. Then, finally, he blinked. And burped. Does he even go to church? What, leave his beloved sofa? Hahaha. I go by myself. I don’t think he’s had a bath in weeks. His eyes are crusty.
We were both registered Republicans for years. I live in a tiny city in Ohio where people hardly knew there was a democratic party. Last year I became a democrat. I didn’t want to believe that George Bush is a lying friend of Ken Lay, but, really, he is. Bush and Cheney are always calling Kerry cynical and acting only for political expedience. (Bush uses a stupider word than “expedience” but I can’t remember what.) “But it’s they who are cynical,” I told my husband. “I think it is called ‘projecting.’ And they’re trying to scare us so that we pee in our pants and vote for Big Daddy.”
“Kerry and Ted Kennedy are members of the communist party,” he said. I think he’s sedating himself with food and TV and maybe he’s got hold of some Oxycontin.
Naturally our physical relationship is over. I can’t bring myself to touch him. He’s way too annoying, also smelly. I have found magazines such as “Jugs” and “Young and Tight” under the sofa. I’m afraid to sit there anymore.
My goodness I am going on and on and you probably only want to know about the ring… It is in near mint condition, only a few tiny scratches, unlike my the train wreck that is my marriage.’
Magic. If I were a woman in America (and I might be; I quite like tights) I would be especially scared of the next instalment of Bush and his religious-right judges - Clarence Thomas et al will be passing ‘they asked for it’ type sentences in rape cases; imprisoning women who have abortions and the doctors who perform them (if they survive the murder attempts by the rank and file pro-lifers); throwing out segzual harassment cases (Mr Bill O'Reilly might be breathing more than a sigh of relief after the election result) and ensuring that women earn less when in the same jobs as ‘guys’.
Fellow execs: we must waste our bottomless budgets on even more hyperbolic bullshit
Marketing update: it comes to something when even the wrapper for your morning toast has an advert on (in this case for online travel site Wotif… you fuck off out of my face). For the following brand peddlers consumption is no mere simple task of service and transaction. Agencies are obsessed with mapping the mind of the modern Brit Kapitalist, be they fifty-quid bloke, yummy-mummy or other recent stereotype they’ve invented.
* Don’t ever buy from Waitrose online supermarket venture Ocado – after joining up you will be bombarded by an endless trail of virtual spam and physical junk mail. Ocado’s promotional material resounds with sheer desperation. One mail-out explains over an angelic heart how Ocado is “devoted to” my wife. A few days later, a postcard came through saying “if the deliveries were late... you can spank us”. An harassment charge has been filed at Hornsey nick.
* I was particularly moved by a recent tube ad for a films-on-demand satellite channel. ‘Isn’t it great’ blah-blah ‘to know’ blah-blah “that you have worked hard all day but can come back to [chinned Sloane] Keira Knightly…” Ooh, the things I’d do to her; if she was real.
* Cull has long tracked developments at
McDonalds, and judging from its try-hard campaigns times are hard at the UK franchise of
Les Arches d’Or (scroll down) . They now make unhealthy salads too, their ads full of the typical female media types not usually enthralled by the red-yellow livery. They have even been doing mail-outs, entitled ‘We thought we’d come to you for a change’ (ha-ha), offering vouchers, grounded self-deprecation and some exceedingly old-school gender stereotyping – burgers for the boys, (unhealthy) salads for the girls. No matter how hard you try, we’ll never be “loving it”. Prospects: continued drops in profits in face of competition from the new sterile joints such as Subway.
* Despite the successful move compact, the Independent shows no sign of surrendering to the Guardian in the attempt to be THE arbiter of taste for Highbury man. Advert splashes tell us “The Cool Guide” will be coming to us soon, presumably to run alongside the daily ‘Ten best’, Saturday’s ‘50 best…’ and the clinical ‘The Information.’ Appropriation, assimilation, that’s lovely.
Common-sense shows us that they’d all probably do better without such desperate tactics…
