(no subject)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The world's gone mad.

What are the top news stories in the UK this morning? Ranked by level of media coverage, I guess it must be:

 Harry the Nazi;
 Sir Mark the revolutionary (failed);
 Manslaughter by salt poisoning, of a three-year old;
 Asian Tsunami.

To be honest, I'm not sure I'm right about the tsunami; that might not be ranked as high as number four any more.

The point is, there's a lot of important news going on around the world at the moment, and yet the harmless, if thoughtlessly insensitive antics of a 20 year old idiot hog the headlines and push more important items to one side. Even the Times is carrying four full pages and an editorial on Harry. I dread to think the coverage it's getting in the red tops.

The point is an idiotic, immature, inbred, and incredibly over-privileged 20 year old made a thoughtless gaffe. He upset a lot of people with too much time on their hands, and too little to occupy their minds. He apologised.

So what?

I think my list of current news stories is probably in reverse order of importance, and without much effort, anyone could slot something more important (and interesting) in, this pushing the twaddle further down the frenzy list and into the routine news pages. And it needn't cover much more than a column or two.

Now, I've never particularly been a socialist, much less a communist, but when I was at school, we had a biology teacher who was a Leninist-Marxist (or Marxist-Leninist, though I don't believe the two factions get on), and he subscribed to the Morning Star in what I guess was its '70s heyday.

The old papers would end up in the art room for the students to cover desks with, to protect against spilt paint, or to be turned into papier maché (or paper aeroplanes, or spitballs - the possibilities were endless).

Anyway, the point is, I remember as 14 year old, reading about the wedding of Princess Ann to Captain Mark Philips in 1973. As you will imagine, the media was almost orgasmic in its coverage, and the newspapers for a couple of days contained virtually nothing but fawning tributes to the Royal Family, and photographs of the wedding.

Not the Morning Star, bless it. That erstwhile* mouth piece of British communism, the day after the wedding, when everything else was covered in pictures of the wedding, contained a single short paragraph, lost somewhere in the middle of the paper:

The wedding of Ann Windsor and Mark Philips disrupted traffic in London centre, yesterday morning.

That's the way to handle it.


*Ironically, I think it's since gone bust.

(no subject)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The world's gone mad.

What are the top news stories in the UK this morning? Ranked by level of media coverage, I guess it must be:

 Harry the Nazi;
 Sir Mark the revolutionary (failed);
 Manslaughter by salt poisoning, of a three-year old;
 Asian Tsunami.

To be honest, I'm not sure I'm right about the tsunami; that might not be ranked as high as number four any more.

The point is, there's a lot of important news going on around the world at the moment, and yet the harmless, if thoughtlessly insensitive antics of a 20 year old idiot hog the headlines and push more important items to one side. Even the Times is carrying four full pages and an editorial on Harry. I dread to think the coverage it's getting in the red tops.

The point is an idiotic, immature, inbred, and incredibly over-privileged 20 year old made a thoughtless gaffe. He upset a lot of people with too much time on their hands, and too little to occupy their minds. He apologised.

So what?

I think my list of current news stories is probably in reverse order of importance, and without much effort, anyone could slot something more important (and interesting) in, this pushing the twaddle further down the frenzy list and into the routine news pages. And it needn't cover much more than a column or two.

Now, I've never particularly been a socialist, much less a communist, but when I was at school, we had a biology teacher who was a Leninist-Marxist (or Marxist-Leninist, though I don't believe the two factions get on), and he subscribed to the Morning Star in what I guess was its '70s heyday.

The old papers would end up in the art room for the students to cover desks with, to protect against spilt paint, or to be turned into papier maché (or paper aeroplanes, or spitballs - the possibilities were endless).

Anyway, the point is, I remember as 14 year old, reading about the wedding of Princess Ann to Captain Mark Philips in 1973. As you will imagine, the media was almost orgasmic in its coverage, and the newspapers for a couple of days contained virtually nothing but fawning tributes to the Royal Family, and photographs of the wedding.

Not the Morning Star, bless it. That erstwhile* mouth piece of British communism, the day after the wedding, when everything else was covered in pictures of the wedding, contained a single short paragraph, lost somewhere in the middle of the paper:

The wedding of Ann Windsor and Mark Philips disrupted traffic in London centre, yesterday morning.

That's the way to handle it.


*Ironically, I think it's since gone bust.