January 23, 2012 Several Hundred Words About Money
Sad about something? Don’t even bother reading this then - have another piece of chocolate, you deserve it, everything’s going to be just fine.
In Britain, welfare amounts to over 30% of overall public spending. If we ignore the bail outs – and we should, because £1.2 trillion could have built schools on the moon – then that’s the single largest area of public expenditure; a provision to guarantee a basic standard of living for all those in financial need.
The Welfare Reform Bill of 2011 was the biggest change to the welfare system for over 60 years. One element is the introduction of Universal Credit, a ‘streamlined’ replacement for six of the main means-tested benefits and tax credits that is said will ‘ensure work always pays.’
A fortnight ago, another change – the replacement of Disability Living Allowance (DLA) with a Personal Independence Payment (PIP) – was the reason hundreds of thousands of Twitter users were trending #spartacusreport, relating to Responsible Reform, a 37 page independent report into the alleged general awfulness of the DLA reforms.
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Tags: Britain, Journalism, Money, Politics
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- Posted under News & Comment
January 17, 2012 A play without words and some thoughts on attractiveness
Yesterday we were loaned expensive recording devices and instructed to tell a story without words. This involved questionable bathroom conduct and some multitrack fun with Adobe Audition.
And today I was asking people around campus what they found attractive in members of the same sex.
Shits and giggles really.
Tags: Britain, Journalism, Multimedia, Nudity, Students, Vox Pop
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- Posted under Homework
December 30, 2011 A Gentle Hogmanay for Edinburgh’s Pandas
Tian Tian staying out of the morning rain on her side of the new home she shares with male panda, Yang Guang.
Tian Tian (Sweetie) and Yang Guang (Sunshine), Edinburgh Zoo’s latest guests, are “settling in well” and “very happy” according to our well informed and friendly guide during my Christmas visit to the zoo’s new £250,000 panda enclosure.
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- Posted under Science & Nature
December 23, 2011 A Gløgg is Not Just for Christmas
Get your coat, love - you've mulled.
Wherever you are right now, dear reader, my money’s on it being cold outside. Granted you could be somewhere temperate – the southern hemisphere for instance – in which case why not bookmark this for winter, because the last thing you want right now is a hot mug of spice infused heaven washing down your bare, tanned, fortunate throat. But for those of us who have to wrap up warm to walk the streets and – in a job without windows – wouldn’t see the sun until March, I have a tasty little treat for you that, like all treats, is ripe for abuse.
I only discovered Gløgg – hot spiced wine – a few years ago in Scandinavia, and much like when I first stumbled across masturbation, I decided it surely had to be my own invention rather than an encounter with something people have been enjoying for a long, long time; otherwise however did people manage to leave the house in winter?
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- Posted under Science & Nature
December 13, 2011 Santa Claus arrested in connection with phone hacking probe
NAUGHTY OR NICE? Santa Claus is the latest name to be implicated in the phone hacking scandal.
Children across the world had their world shaken today when the Leveson enquiry into phone hacking saw Father Christmas taken into custody by Northumbria Police.
Exact details are not known at this time, however it is understood that the arrest took place at Santa’s Magical Christmas Grotto in The Mall Shopping Centre, Middlesbrough just before 9am this morning.
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Tags: Britain, Christmas, Leveson, Middlesbrough, Phone hacking, Politics
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- Posted under Mockery & Satire
December 11, 2011 Three years of cuts and closures…
As I mentioned already, I intended on working my weird rant against non-recyclers into the last real work of the year – the vox pop assignment. However, the apathy of others and the growing realisation that I am just another hypocrite – three paychecks and some half decent head in a fast car away from turning my back on mother nature and concreting over the lot – gave me pause for thought.
I’ll get back to it in due course, once I get my mojo back. In the meantime I decided to work on something probably everyone’s sick of reading about by now but it remains a subject that really gets people’s backs up, and with good reason.
I have censored the names and faces of the people I spoke to as I’m not sure of the rules on putting stuff like this online without permission; it was hard enough to get anyone to speak to me as it was (I was mostly in the pub, mostly) so I’m going to play it safe and only let my teacher see the full version.
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Tags: Britain, Journalism, Middlesbrough, Politics, Vox Pop
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December 3, 2011 Lingerie, Whiskey and Burning Flags
Two Chinese Pandas are being loaned to Edinburgh Zoo. The thinking is that they'll be so cold they'll have to fuck continuously to keep from freezing to death.
Hey, am I wearing lipstick? When I’m getting fucked I want to make sure my face looks pretty.
- George Jung, Blow
I put the news in my brain today. It didn’t help my depression. Not one bit.
I hear the cuts with which we are being punished for the avarice and incompetence of our betters is going to plunge this country into a Dickensian level of class divide and destitution; the eurozone is breaking apart, another mistake that will have us all over the sodomy table before the decade is up.
Stories of increasing numbers of honour killings and the grooming of children are a proud racist’s wet dream – proof positive in their bloodshot eyes that if they were right about Europe then how about all these dirty immigrants taking British jobs. All the while the justice system is too PC to tackle problems by race, leaving the idiots among us to judge entire swaths of their communities by the diabolical actions of a few.
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Tags: Alcohol, Britain, End-times, Journalism, Leveson, Middlesbrough, Nudity, Phone hacking, Politics, Press, Scotland
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- Posted under Rants & Tirades
December 2, 2011 Notes from a Dusty Box
The majority of the people who have read my earlier books regarded them as little more than poorly structured character assassinations, each a pathetic cry for help and a waste of ink and time.
But then again if someone painted me in a less than favourable light, twisting my fondest memories and strongest triumphs into an obscene and dreadful version of events that bore little relation to my own recollection, then I guess I’d be a wee bit narky too.
Well, earlier today I found a rough beginning of a story from a year or so ago; I’ve been busy and not worked on it but I guess this is as good a place as any to get feedback/advice/cruel rejection.
I can’t write academically worth a shit and my journalistic skills reject objectivity like an astronaut with a scorpion in his helmet. Perhaps fiction is where I should stay. It’s safe here.
So, should I continue this story?
The Dark Audience (2007)
Someone’s been abducting children. Cutting the chips out of their arms and doing God only knows what to them before the end. No ransom notes or anything else the parents never even expected – tearful pleas broadcast nationwide fall on death ears.
People keep finding pieces here and there; messages written in pre-pubescent remains whose content the Police refuses to release to the public.
A growing epidemic some say, give it time and you’ll see how it unfolds – try taking a step back. It might not be too late for you they tell you with relish – it warms them to feel the world around them is damned.
They invite hell in – this dark audience that lives out the corner of your eye.
December 1, 2011 Our Rock is an Alcoholic and We are Happy-Hour. Part Three
'Tis better to gasp one's last breath twixt the unspoiled hill and valley than suffer the ignominy of the turbines!
Question Time. BBC One, 10.35 Thu, 17 Nov 2011
Against a more newsworthy day’s backdrop of the biggest strikes in 30 years and my own Senior Lecturer – a former journalist at the News of the World – being arrested in connection with the Leveson phonehacking enquiry (later bailed until March), I have a deadline. I should’ve written this a week ago but I’m shit and lazy and I think I might be losing it, again.
All we had to do was prepare a three minute talk on one of the subjects discussed in the above episode of Question Time. There were plenty to choose from:
- The one million 16-24 year olds that are now unemployed. (Make ‘em join the armed services, teach ‘em some farkin discipline. The conscientious objectors can look after the old, infirm and disabled – at gunpoint, so they behave.)
- Bankers tax? (£700 Billion bail out? By my drunken maths that’s £10K for every man woman and child in the UK. We could’ve bought Greece for that AND cut our carbon emissions by never flying home from holiday.)
- As the strongest economy, Germany is able to dictate policy to us. (It’s better this way – remember what happened the last time the Reichstag burnt?)
- Syria. Why no Libyan style intervention? (Iran.)
I chose: Why is our Government pushing up our energy bills by giving subsidies (£50 for every £100 worth of energy produced) to windfarms which are proven to be uneconomic?
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Tags: Alcohol, Britain, Denmark, End-times, Journalism, Leveson, Middlesbrough, Phone hacking, Politics, Press, Robots, Students, TV
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- Posted under Science & Nature
January 26, 2012 New International Students at Teesside University
Tags: Britain, Journalism, Middlesbrough, Students, Video, Vox Pop