Author: Max Frances
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Top of the Populists
This week’s edition of Top of the Populists comes directly from Downing Street as Boris looks straight into the camera while surreptitiously abusing members of the audience. Blondie and the gang are rapidly closing the gap on Jimmy Savile’s scumometer needle reading, but surely not even Jim could have fixed this clusterfuck. Even keen Brexiters…
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Moonage Daydream
Moonshot testing. What planet (or astronomical body orbiting the Earth) is this schmuck on? Today, I listened to Moonage Daydream, and for the first time ever, it never felt even remotely bonkers. In a few weeks’ time, I Am the Walrus will feel like a contemporary social commentary. Shooting for the moon is somewhat risible…
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Britannia Waives the Rules
The current UK Government, which has been unravelling at an unparalleled rate of knots since Christmas, is about to traverse the fundamental red line of any respected nation state. They have announced that they are pondering a deliberate transgression of international law in relation to the EU Withdrawal Agreement – because it suits them. This…
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Give Us a Break
‘I’m taking a break from Twitter‘, say an increasingly hefty swathe of Tweeters. Typically, this is coupled with a reference to the essential preservation of mental health. This must be an affliction of the new millennium. Even an exercise in withdrawing from the social scene ostensibly to avoid the spotlight morphs into a supplementary attention-seeking…
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Buggers With Large Lies
In recent weeks, I’ve been working with an organisation on some recruitment activity, which has proved to be eye-popping candy. Now, I’m well-conversed with the approaches of recruitment charlatans; in fact, their peccadilloes were once the object of intense personal curiosity. The UK recruitment sphere has long since been a social large intestine. But now…
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Rumpy Pumpy
The US Presidential race is gathering pace on the uphill side of pretty warm, and with that we have started to witness a corresponding stoke-up of rhetoric. But for all the criticism of Mr Trump – all the bonkers, collapsible car/squirty flower clown stuff – he made it to the White House. And that route…
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Clark Kent
The actor Chadwick Boseman passed away earlier this week at the age of 43 years. Now, I’m typically sceptical about the cringe-inducing missives concerning the dearly departed from those who never knew, nor even considered the dearly departed when he or she was alive. And to an extent, this was the same. Shoddy, self-serving Twitter…
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Suck Cess
It’s the $64,000-dollar question: how do you achieve success? I would say, precisely on your own terms. But that is not the way the world is turning. As COVID clowning forces more and more people into relative isolation, online technology has snagged a wider window of opportunity. And hot on the heels of any online…
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Rowing in the Wrong Direction
Psycho-federalist keyboard warrior Guy Verhofstadt is in the boat rowing for migrants this week. Purportedly. Pithily, he reminded us that migration has been central to human history, and wryly noted that, ‘reportedly, even Nigel Farage’s ancestors once fled to England to make a better life.’ As barbs go, that wasn’t bad for a bloke who…
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The Golden Turd
I remember a time when the favourite educational pastime was slagging off Media Studies. That has hardly aged well. Most people seem to be neither able to accurately identify fake news nor to understand the relationships between discourse and power. And no, reciting Homer at tiresome dinner parties for the entertainment of twittering hoes, who…
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