So I watched the second of the debates between Gordy, Nick and Dave. This time everything was razor-sharp enough to slice the corneas from my gloopy eyeballs as I was watching the show on the newly launched Sky News HD. Ahhhh, the joys of High Definition television are still a novelty in this house as we “upgraded” last Christmas when our last satellite box bit the dust and it turned out to be cheaper to upgrade than to get a new box via eBay.
Now when the wind is blowing in the right direction and the broadcasters decide to actually broadcast high-definition content, you can witness the joys of Doctor Who, Come Dine with Me and these Prime Ministerial debates all funky-looking. Yes, the picture is sharp, the colours appear more vibrant and there’s plenty more detail on the screen (down to the level of open pores, hairs descending from nostrils and the texture of fabric). In fact, when they showed “The Robe” in HD over Easter, I cooed more about the detail in the costumes than the actual film itself. I love a good Victor Mature movie – he’s a real dreamboat.
Anyhoo, back to the debate. It was more of the same really and I was surprised that some of the same topics were revisited (war, sleaze, etc) and this took up a lot of the debate. Cameron really doesn’t seem to be projecting in these contests. I am really surprised by this because at PMQs there is a flicker of a personality there, but this time around he really does seem to act like a stuffed suit.
Again, Nicky Clegg – though I’ve been called the three of them Compo, Foggy and Clegg after “Last of the Summer Wine” – put on a brave effort, but you could see his opposition were gunning for him and this time around El Gordo appeared to be taking his performance a lot more seriously. I like Brown’s little talk about our tolerant society and his joke comparing Cameron and Clegg to his naughty son’s arguing in the bath. That joke actually got a considerable snigger from the audience, which was meant to remain dumb.
Of the three, Brown is very much Prime Ministerial material and you can feel his gravitas – while the other two seem a little lightweight in comparison, but the anarchist in me would love the momentum for Clegg to increase and for the British electorate to pull the biggest tactical switch in the history of our parliament and put him in Number 10. I don’t want this because I think the country needs “a change”. I don’t want this to teach Labour a “lesson”. I want this to happen just to see the look on his face when he is ushered onto the steps of Number 10. I can imagine his face plastered with a rictus grin while the voice in his head is screaming: “What the fuck am I going to do nooooooooooow!?!?!?!?!?”
However, I will still be voting for the Labour candidate. Why? Purely because I received today’s copy of “Retail Newsagent” and I absolutely loved the mock-up cover for their election special which had El Gordo photoshopped into the role of a servile newsagent. He felt like one of the boys and for that reason, and that reason alone, I am voting for Gordon. Thanks to some clever Photoshop my political decision has been cast.
But it was interesting to see a report on the ITN Evening News two nights ago where Mr Brown was doing a visit and some disgruntled business owner wanted to see him. This fellow was in a right old state but demanded Brown’s attention, claiming he was doing nothing for a the small businessman and he was due to go bankrupt for the second time (once is unfortunate, twice is bloody irresponsible).
So the Labour team usher the guy inside and after his meeting, the businessman wanders into the light, looking shell-shocked and confused, his demeanour completely changed. He had gone from impotent rage to being as soppy as a box of kittens.
“Well he’s just this guy, you know,” he said (I’m paraphrasing here), “He really does want to make these changes, but he’s just one man. I completely misjudged him”.
It truly was a fascinating piece of TV, the likes of which I’ve never seen before.
Category: Diary
Seeing as this is going to appear in the Evening News and Eastern Daily Press this week, I thought I might as well break from cover and post this myself. After having the place for sale with a commercial agent for nearly a year (we went to market as soon as the paint dried) with almost zero interest. We approached a couple of residential agents with regards to working out the value of splitting the property up, as we have the planning permission to do this, but they recommended we keep the place intact. Also, in terms of value it would be almost exactly the same value to split and sell separately minus your building costs.
Both agents then said “Hey! We can sell this for you” so we thought we’d give them a try. I mean, I’m basically selling the four walls and roof and throwing the business in for free. What a bargain, eh? The reason…oh come on – you know the reason. After all that has happened, we want a fresh start. That’s understandable, no?
But we’ll see if anyone bites. The housing market is a little depressed at the moment anyway, but miracles can happen…right?
Folkie strummer Billy Bragg attempts to confront Richard Barnbrook, notable for his career in gay porn and being a BNP poster boy, over the BNP in Barking.
Every morning, when I rise, I go to the mirror and look at my fat, aged, balding head with baggy eyes and loose jowel and look ruefully at myself before saying:
“You really are a useless pathethic cunt, Darren.”
It’s a psychologically trick to toughen myself up against the world, because if you insult yourself enough you develop a tough skin. And you need one when comments such as the following appear on the back of my recent “Death to the Music Biz” entry:
Dave Curse (or Mr Made-up-Name) wrote:
. . .Yes, you are an idiot dreamer. You’ve never had any success so you direct your anger and bitterness at anything failing, you pathetic hobbyist asshole.
Oh my feelings are hurt, they really are…
I think I’ll just sell my guitar and quit recording right now because you are right. I’ve achieved absolutely nothing in my 39 years. I really am a pathetic wretch, ain’t I?
Following on from my post yesterday, I can see that lots of people are in the self same situation as me and are being linked to by qq829.com. The most information I can glean is from this link. The general opinion there is that the owners of the domain have been involved in malware and spamming in the past but there’s no real explanation for this. Big website and small websites have been targeted. Perhaps it is a way of Chinese surfers side-stepping the government control of the Internet in that country? Perhaps it is something more sinister and possible the first inkling of a Chinese botnet or DOS attack network being put in place?
There is no answer at this moment, but if you, like me, are feeling a little uneasy about being linked via this dubious sounding website then I would suggest that you made amendments to your .htaccess file on your webserver to block out any traffic from China. It sounds drastic but it would certainly put an end to the issue and block out these strange links.
Further reading: http://www.parkansky.com/china.htm
** UPDATE **
A fellow suffer of this condition posted the following answer to this question and it seems that this is a variant of an adclicker trojan, which when you click the referrer in your stats, it puts a trojan in your cookies which helps generate fake stats for another website.
http://hubpages.com/hub/qq829com-What-is-it
Paranoia reigns supreme as I notice on my access stats an individual from Beijing in China accessing my site twice daily via this curious link, which appears to be some kind of Chinese stat website. Why would anyone be that interested in my little old site, especially those in China? Perhaps my fame has reached to foreign shores and my music pirated far and wide in China to the point that I’m a national celebrity? Of course, I jest. But I do wonder what this link is? What is it? What does it do? Make yourself known whoever you are…
http://www.qq829.com/web_stat.asp?dn=www.darrenlock.com
Meanwhile, as an addendum almost to my post about the music biz the other day, it seems that the shady shenanigans and “win-win” machinations of the fame machine strike agani. This time Britain’s Got Talent winner George Sampson is on the wrong end of the sweet smell of success and claims that despite having a top-selling DVD he’s in debt to Simon Cowell because the percentages are against him and he has to foot the bill. Who wants fame, eh?
I’m a media whore. It’s true. Whether it be radio, newspaper, TV or newsprint, I consume media the same way a crack whore or meth-head searches for their next hit. So with the prospect of history-making TV being made before my very eyes, I sat down and steadied myself for the great three leaders debate on TV. The original title of this post was going to be “Let’s Have a Mass Debate”, but the 90 minutes of talking heads wasn’t exciting enough to get even the ardent CameronCleggBrown supporter whipped up into a frenzy of onanistic pleasure.
It was a strange thing to behold. Each candidate had a minute to have their say and when the camera panned around behind the three amigos, you could see large digital timers counting down near the cameras, so each of the protagonists knew exactly how much time they had left. So this rendered the answered into semi-cogent, sound-bite responses…all in the name of fairness.
The lack of applause or any kind of feedback from the audience also made it an almost sterile event as if a large bell glass had been lowered over the proceedings and all the air had been vacuumed out. So in an effort to make politics exciting and relevant and appealing to the man on the street, the complete control of who cheered, who booed, who clapped, who muttered, rendered the whole thing as appealing as a Sunday school lecture. It was a million miles away from the cut and thrust of the House of Parliament and I remembered with fondness the cut and thrust of Kinnock versus Thatchter, Smith Versus Major and even Haque versus Blair. That energy and wordy brinksmanship wasn’t needed here. Everyone had to have a fair crack of the whip – which kind of reflects the sterile, dull “correct” times we live in.
I’m not talking about political correctness – though there is a fair amount of that – but this middle-class need to appear to do “the right thing” to act in “fairness”, when the opposite result is usually achieved. Unfairness abounds in these fair times, usually because we fit rules and regulations and health and safety and human rights until the simple human process of common sense has been bludgeoned to death. Cripes, I sound like a Daily Mail reader there. But the debate would have been much more engaging if we’d been allowed to see the actual character of the three leaders instead of this clipped, precise, “fair” system.
I know that questions of the day were asked by carefully selected members of the audience. Again, they were selected the basis of geographic location (supposedly they were only supposed to come from a catchment area 30 miles from the studio) and a fair spread of political views. So law and order, immigration and MP corruption were trotted out for the three leaders to carefully reply. I know lots of things were said, but because of the presentation (I believe) I have no recollection of the event. I know I sat and watched it. I know that these things happened, but I only have a vague sense of anything actually happening or being said. It’s almost as if Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones walked in afterwards and zapped me with their memory eraser devices…
When the debate initially started I had a weird flashback to the 1980s and a vision of Cilla Black appeared with the three leaders sitting on stools behind a garish barrier and the suitable over-the-top set of “Blind Date” with the electorate on the other side of the barrier quizzing their prospective suitors.
“I’d like to ask leader number one, where would they take me for a romantic first date, ” the electorate would ask and each leader in turn would reply in a suitably witty, pre-written quip.
Then my mind wandered further and I started imagine that the electorate was feeling a little fruity and started asking the leaders about their favourite sexual positions and I started feeling bilious and I snapped to, back to the proper debate.
But seriously folks, my impression of the debate was that it was an interesting attempt to engage with the public, but it failed in so many ways (for me anyway). In terms of performance, Gordon Brown was steady. He’s fairly rock solid in these speaking engagements and little can ruffle him and it is this setting that you realise what a consummate politician he is and how his years of experience speaks volumes. I also though Nick Clegg put in a brave performance, but you could see this was a man who had little to lose and he put in a good effort. He made an impression – though not as personable as “Champagne” Charlie Kennedy (who if was still leading the Lib Dems, I’d probably vote for because he is a true man of the people) – this was someone who was at least trying to impress.
Meanwhile, David Cameron came across as a bit of a wet fish – this was someone who was out of his comfort zone and it showed. He was either desperate to play it safe and not to put his foot in his mouth or he really lacks that real fire required by leadership politics. Of course, some might say that I’m bashing Cameron because I’m a Leftie Socialist, but I’m not. I was expecting him to do well and Brown to take a bit of a drubbing – but it was a bit like one of those heavyweight boxing contests that gets hyped into overdrive and then the reigning champion floors the contender forty seconds into the first round with a well-placed left hook.
Moving away from the debate, the interesting thing about this election is how the media is thrusting the wives of the leaders into the spotlight. I am not sure if it is an attempt by the press to move towards a more American view of politics and to move us towards having a “first lady” or it is the priapic editors of these newspapers backhandedly trying to ask us which of the leader’s wives would we like to fuck.
Of course, I could just be reading too much into all of this…