Dadblog

I am indebted to Facebook’s advertising platform for introducing me to SugarDaddie.com, which promises:

Quality dating for financially stable men and beautiful single women. Members are busy professionals, bankers, lawyers, models and more. Featured on CH4 Television.

Last time I looked, I thought soliciting was illegal.

Disqus is a new thing from Y! Combinator that turns comments on blogs into forums. I’ve set up to work with all new comments on Dadblog, so let’s have some fun and see if this thing works.

And why should you care? Read Westmonster and find out.

To the Brixton Academy last night to see The Enemy, about whom I knew almost nothing. I had mentally stuck them in the increasingly overfull “white boys in skinny jeans pretending to be Joy Division” bucket. How wrong I was. It was a proper sticky, thrashy night - people throwing lager at each other, crowdsurfing, and a bassist stage dive. A fan even got on stage, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen under this Labour government.

The point was, though, that The Enemy are the new Jam. Three piece, guitarist-singer, thrashy and angry and defiantly up yours (I’ll probably find out that they’re nice privately-educated boys). It was, in a word, authentic, and British independent rock hasn’t done authentic properly since The Smiths split up.

Go and see them. They’re excellent.

After Cookiegate, Noddygate and Queengate and all the other gates the BBC has given us (I’m looking forward to Logicgate, under which newsreaders don’t actually have laptops on the desks in front of them and aren’t really tapping into them at the end of the broadcast), Danny Baker alerted me to a new piece of media manipulation on his excellent football podcast. He claims that at the England v Trinidad & Tobago game in the World Cup, there was a very beautiful Nordic looking woman who was completely disinterested in the game, apart from random moments when she would rise from her seat and act excited, to appear instants later on the cutaway screen in the stadium.

Fictional placement of totty in a football crowd? This obviously explains why there are always so many beautiful women at Brazilian games, even since their team because pig-ugly.

Anne Enright’s written a piece for the London Review of Books about her reaction to the McCanns. In it she uses language that constantly blindsides you, hurling you from outrage one minute to admiration the next. Essentially, the piece rather honestly lays out all the conversations she’s had about the McCanns (in ways which, if we were honest with each other, we’d all find deeply uncomfortable) and asks the question: why does she occasionally find herself disliking the McCanns? How can it be even possible to dislike human beings who’ve been through what they’ve been through?

Now, speaking personally, I’d like everyone to shut up about the McCanns. I’d like everyone to stop treating them as a blank canvas for self-expression. I’d like them to be given the time to deal with this, however they see fit. I’d like police to stop leaking, newspapers to stop using them as a marketing device, and I’d particularly like middle-class people with no access to any of the evidence to stop spouting bollocks at dinner parties like they know what really happened (you know who you are).

But given that none of this is going to happen, and other things that I would like to happen are likewise unlikely (world peace, to be two stone lighter, to be able to play the guitar better), I’m going to have to live with the McCanns. And I’d prefer the Anne Enrights of the world to be able to say their piece without getting shat on from all sides.

Read to the end of the piece. The last line says:

Then I go to bed and wake up the next day, human again, liking the McCanns.

Exactly. It’s not the McCanns who make us dislike them. It’s everybody else.

Formula one: How ironic that he’s black, says Spanish F1 chief | Motor sport | Guardian Unlimited Sport:

The Spanish Motorsport Federation president managed to play the race card in a suitably crass fashion yesterday, just days before he will be the guest of the McLaren team at Interlagos, by telling Publico newspaper how ironic he found it that a racist country such as Britain was relying on a black driver, Lewis Hamilton, to win the world championship.

“It is perfectly normal for a British team and British fans wanting to succeed in formula one but it is ironic that the racists in England are having to rely on a coloured pilot,” said Carlos Gracia.

Luis Aragones, and now this. What the hell is their problem?

Ming is toast - Westmonster.