AUTHOR | ELDERLY SCHOOLBOY | IDIOT
Middlesbrough’s Teesside University has a student body of nearly 30,000. Of that number, more than 1,500 are international students. The ones we tended to notice are female but there is hushed talk of males.
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. Continue reading “Santa Claus arrested in connection with phone hacking probe”
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. Continue reading “Three years of cuts and closures”
In a Middlesbrough council meeting on the 5th October of this year, 78 budget reduction proposals were drawn up for 2012/2013. Continue reading “Bullet points for an insipid presentation on library cuts”
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. Continue reading “Lingerie, Whiskey and Burning Flags”
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:
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? Continue reading “Our Rock is an Alcoholic and We are Happy-Hour. Part Three”
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. Continue reading “Video Killed the Radio Star”
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.’ Continue reading “God is in the Radio”
“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!
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. Continue reading “Our Rock is an Alcoholic and We are Happy-Hour. Part Two”
Middlesbrough has today launched its bid to be Britain’s newest city.
In 2010, the Government announced that a new city would be created as part of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations next year. Many locals feel that there’s a real chance that 2012 will prove to be third time lucky in its bid for official status.
The town currently acts as city-centre for the Teesside area and the wider Tees Valley city region. With a population of 720,000 people, this is the largest conurbation in the country not served by a recognised city.
CHRIS PARLETT 