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 9, 2011 Bullet points for an insipid presentation on library cuts
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In a Middlesbrough council meeting on the 5th October of this year, 78 budget reduction proposals were drawn up for 2012/2013.
Tags: Middlesbrough, Money, Politics
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- Posted under Homework
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
November 28, 2011 Video Killed the Radio Star
Pterosaur's-eye view of Click Teesside
I’ve decided to put my stratospheric rise to the peak of radio broadcasting on hold for the time being. Perhaps I’ll go back to it once the NCTJ exams are out of the way or perhaps it’s not the right medium for me.
There was the feeling that I was just one slip of the tongue away from getting sued or stomped; I mean, I can’t go to a party without telling some nice chap from Singapore that my Grandfather cut off heads there for Her Majesty, back in the day. It’s like I have no internal filter – my inner monologue just spits out whatever, be it harsh truth, niche humour or phonetically remembered foreign chat-up line.
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Tags: Alcohol, Dinosaurs, Middlesbrough, Radio, Students
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- Posted under Homework
November 24, 2011 God is in the Radio
"Give me three Hail Marys and the rest of those chips."
My Mother once said to me, “You can go to Australia on your own but you can’t go down the corner shop.”
I find that succinct in a way no GP, shrink or bar-room confidant as yet has managed.
I can’t seem to get out of this slump but the show goes on around me so rather than hide in Hyrule or Modern Warfare or – God forbid – an actual book, I gave it my best today. This morning began at 7am and saw me presenting my second solo radio show for ClickTeesside – ‘Your Campus Radio.’
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Tags: Alcohol, Australia, Dinosaurs, Drugs, End-times, Middlesbrough, Radio, Students
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November 23, 2011 The Press: Articulating our Rage or Skullfucking our Souls?
Another devil’s advocate exercise; this one weighing the pros and cons of a free press. Mark Lewis, speaking at today’s Leveson inquiry had far more intelligent, insightful things to say on the matter.
This kind of writing is good fun but can also be quite confusing; I often need to take a step back to reaffirm my beliefs having just convinced myself, for example, that Squirrels are the real source of all the pain and sadness in the world.
Squirrels: Plotting our Demise?
“The press should be free to do what it wants.”
A Government should be answerable to its electorate and the press should be the voice for those that have no voice.
Numerous cases such as the expenses scandal; bribery of public officials; David Kelly and the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction; the sometimes heavy handed tactics used by Police during protests and riots; the developing rift in the coalition – none of these would have come to light if the same institution implicated in wrongdoing controlled the method with which it is held publicly accountable.
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Tags: Journalism, Leveson, Phone hacking, Politics, Press
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- Posted under Politics
November 21, 2011 Our Rock is an Alcoholic and We are Happy-Hour. Part Two
“In 2010 the world emitted 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. If you want to know how big 30.6 gigatonnes is, look at your children and imagine them dying from skin cancer and lack of water, and then stop asking stupid questions and just do your fucking recycling.”
- Frankie Boyle, Work! Consume! Die!
Empty bottles and cans; a big bag of papers and a broken piece of redundant electronics - a typical week's worth for an unmarried male in his thirties. Teenagers produce twice this.
I’ve spent the majority of my adult life living abroad, and for the most part I found it more bearable than not doing so; but if history has taught us anything it is that all foreigners are little more than vile savages before a fear of the Christian Lord and a good command of the Queen’s is raped into them.
One thing that some of them do seem a hell of a lot better than us at though is recycling; from India’s slums to the supermarkets of Denmark, it is understood that there is money in ‘waste’, be it sorting through what others throw away or collecting the deposit on all the dog-end filled empty bottles littering your apartment after a party.
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Tags: Denmark, End-times, Journalism, Middlesbrough, Radio, Scotland, Students
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- Posted under Science & Nature
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