Tag: Charlatans
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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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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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Debbie ‘Nam
A conference call and off you pop. It may be the end if an era, but the demise of Debenhams should not perturb the cognoscenti. Yet at one time, they were rocking. Great products with modern designers and all-round accessibility. So what went awry? Well, this is not a COVID horror story per se. Yes,…
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Lying Low
The UK Education Secretary Gavin Williamson foreshadowed the latest Government debacle with a warning on the danger that school students might be over-promoted into jobs that are beyond their competence. I can only admire his steadfast ability to deadpan that message. That’s weapons-grade irony, right there. This is a man who probably hides a spare…
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They Don’t Half Pick Them
Grim news from the Lebanon where Beirut has been left looking like, well, Beirut. Domestically, commentators on all sides were shaken by the proclamations of Sir Iain Duncan Smith who has concluded that the EU Withdrawal Agreement – that he voted for – is in fact a juicy steamer. Even a nine-month old baby would…
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24/7
On 23 June, the Government offered up a perspective on masks: ‘the evidence of the benefit of using a face covering to protect others is weak and the effect is likely to be small’. As we now know, the world can change very quickly. The new norm dictates that the same goes for science. Not…
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Pop Go the Weasels
Some time ago, I raised the possibility that the Black Lives Matter strapline had been appropriated by every fake woke bandwagon-bandit under the sun. It was not a popular suggestion. Neither was the view that many had taken up their woke standpoint after a lifetime of pretending that racism didn’t exist. They were knee-deep in…
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Plane Daft
A banner reading ‘White Lives Matter Burnley!’ was towed by an aeroplane over the Etihad Stadium during Burnley’s game against Manchester City. The plane circled over the stadium five times just after kick-off after players and staff had ‘taken the knee‘ in support of the Black Lives Matter movement moments earlier. Predictably, the reaction to…
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