Not convinced

Is it just me, or is everyone who heard the Chancellor's announcement yesterday ('Darling's stimulus', as one headline unnecessarily, and disturbingly, put it) thinking 'Oh shit. We really ARE fucked after all!'

I don't even know what I pay VAT on, and I'm not going to suddenly run out and buy a new suit because it will be, what, £2 cheaper than it would have been yesterday. On the other hand, I am going to think things must be really bad for the Government to put us all in hock for the next seven years - and that the best thing to do is sit on my hands and not spend any money at all. On anything. Ever.

Thanks, Darling.

Bring on the recession

Prompted by James’s hopes that we’ll see no more of The Apprentice, here’s my list of programs we can use the recession as an excuse to get rid of…

1. Location x 3: easy one to start. Doesn’t it make you queasy when you remember the sexual innuendo they dressed the presenters in? Plenty of reasons why this goes: high smug-factor, the aggressive goading of first-time buyers to get ‘on the ladder’, an even more offensive spin-off show that judged the best places to live (= most middle-class, least diverse, what a surprise), the fact that one of them now advises the conservative party on housing policy, the attempt to make box-ticking sound like a fun thing rather than the bureaucratic waste of time it is, and most of all for its popularisation of the phrase ‘the wow factor’, which my employer has now adopted as a slogan to describe the added value it gives to its ‘clients’. Mmm, classy.
2. All the other property programs and their miserable, humiliated prey: amateur property tycoons, incompetent DIY enthusiasts, holiday colonialists, small-minded aspirants with a vision of a chrome kitchen, neighbours badgered to do up their street by someone who moved cannily into the online dating business in 2006…
3. Top Gear: I’ve been watching this show so long I remember accidentally recording it over Prince’s Purple Rain guitar solo in something like 1985. It jumped a whole load of sharks a while ago
4. Secret Millionaire: this shouldn’t need justifying either (actually this list is too much like shooting fish in a barrel): poor people learn that angels exist, rich people learn that poor people deserve help (‘What you gonna do?’ says my Marxist colleague, ‘Convince them one by one?’)
5. Noel Edmonds’s guess-what’s-in-the-box show. They should shift this to Newsnight and use it to demonstrate sub-primes. What’s in the box? NOTHING

Oh dear, this is far too easy. Celebrity chef shows, Wife Swap, Who do Celebrities Think They Are? Celebrities wandering round the world shows… It’s all of TV, basically.

Any other suggestions? Or ways to adapt these shows to make them suitable for these cash-strapped times?

homing

hooray! the bird's back!

A waffer thin bail out

So farewell, neoliberalism, and thanks for everything.
No doubt some of the more doe-eyed members of the SWP are waving their copies of Das Kapital in the air and shouting 'This is it! This is the BIG ONE!!'. Of course, it isn't - but I'd say that the sight of George Bush telling the people of America that nationalisation is the only way to save the economy from complete collapse is a pretty significant moment. Now that two of our biggest banks have been nationalised, along with one of the biggest banks in Europe, the days when anyone can try to argue that deregulated, free market capitalism is the only future for humanity (Jeez, it's not that long since people took Francis Fukuyama seriously) have surely been consigned to the dustbin of history. Who knows what's next. John Gray (no doubt gleefully thinking 'I told you so! Doomed, I tell you. Doomed!!!') reckons it's the end for the last 20th century superpower. I dunno. It's got to be curtains for the turbo-capitalist chic of programmes like The Apprentice, though. Which is a Good Thing. Rob, you're in the thick of it. What's the view from Docklands??

They breed them - and then they exorcise them!!

Yep - Sarah Palin's 'I done heard of that there Russia place, and Canadee too!' sure was embarassing to watch. But if you think that was bad, watch this and be afraid. Be VERY afraid!!!

art crimes!

I suppose one of the things I could have been doing all year was give you a running commentary on Liverpool’s Capital of Culture exploits… Truth is, I’ve seen very little of it – tho this is more an indictment of my own inability to get out and about, I guess. We had one of the superlambananas at the top of the street, and they replanted the sections of garden in the boulevard at that end and halfway down (if this is part of the City of Culture redecorations then I guess the rest of the boulevard was deemed a bit less cultural).

Biennial opened last weekend and some of that looks really good – enjoyed the FACT and Bluecoat exhibitions, yet to see the Tate and Walker material. But here’s a different art-in-Liverpool story you may have missed, sadly with a few elements that could run as symptomatic of Scouse life in the tabloids’ cultural pages…

Tracey Emin’s bird stolen! Then returned! Then stolen again! Then returned again! The sculpture (‘Roman Standard’) has been in the grounds of the Oratory by the Anglican Cathedral since 2005, a welcome sight for me on the walk to work. It got the usual complaints about the cost of public art when it was installed, and the hospitals-not-art camp got more encouragement after the first theft when they discovered that the original £60,000 was a commission, not a purchase, and since the owner had not reported the bird stolen the police were unable to investigate. (see lazy article from The Telegraph.)

Quaintly, the bird was returned anonymously in an envelope with the message ‘We would have returned it sooner but we were scared…’, but it got taken again a couple of weeks later. The Echo reported it had been handed in to the police on 15 September, and since then there’s been a statement from Emin that it will be permanently removed if there’s more trouble (BBC 26 Sep), but there’s as yet no sign of the bird on the pole…


Perhaps this could be Liverpool’s empty plinth? A series of temporary works on the pole: answers London, brings more people to the site, remembers the bird and its flight more evocatively than having a nasty plastic replica on top… I propose a balancing man made of a cork, nail and pipe cleaners.

da street

cool as f***

do they breed these idiots

sorry sorry sorry. i hope you guys can welcome me back - the guilty prodigal son (without the partying). its been so long i dont know how to start. so let's begin with an easy one: Palin on the foreign policy advantages of living in alaska. looks like she could be a bigger fool than george bush. in which case the democrats have a formidable enemy...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vh6WDmb-Rc&feature=user

HAPPY BENDY BIRTHDAY

Two years and counting...

Do not click #2...

...on this link either. Unless you want to get yourself sacked from yet another job for compulsive timewasting...

Con(CERN)? Na du!

The five-billion-quid Large Hadron Collider has been successfully switched on, in an attempt to peer back into the moment it all started.

Scientists have fired a beam of protons around the 27km-long tunnel which houses CERN's Large Hadron Collider, and among the fundamental questions in physics scientists hope to answer with the LHC, is what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the Big Bang.

Eventually, two proton beams will be steered in opposite directions around the LHC at close to the speed of light. At various points around the tunnel, the beams will cross paths, smashing together near four massive "detectors" that monitor the collisions, in the hope that new sub-atomic particles will emerge.

Including dark matter (23%) and dark energy (73%). Brilliant.

Of course, there have been the usual panic stories - in particular from German chemist Professor Otto Rossler - that black holes created by the LHC will grow uncontrollably and "eat the planet from the inside".

As suggested above, project leader Welshman Lyn Evans does not agree.

As someone who is perpetually in awe of these mind-wrenching attempts to further our understanding of such complex mysteries, I wonder if the answer is anything like 42...