Comedy

Jacob Rees-Mogg: Veritas ex Intestinis

Dear Underlings,

It will not have escaped your attention that the Style Guide I introduced to the office has made it’s way into the national media. It is a statement of regrettable fact that I have received a great deal of mockery from so-called experts. Experts, soothsayers, astrologers are all in much the same category. Do you think that I consulted experts before moving my hedge fund to Dublin? Do you think that I consulted experts before ordering the renovations of my mother-in-law’s stately home? Of course not. As an Upper-class Englishman, I know that veritas ex intestinis. If you would believe the word of experts then you would believe that I have only the intelligence to achieve a second-class History degree, and that belief is simply intolerable. I shall expand gradus per gradus upon the reasons behind some of our new departmental rules.

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Film & Television Opinion

Daenerys’ Dark Side

Spoilers for S8E01 ahead.

I wasn’t as excited as some were going into the final series of Game of Thrones, because I wasn’t completely optimistic about the creators’ ability to end the show successfully. After seeing the season opener, I now am.

In seasons 6 and 7 the revenge against Walder Frey felt rushed, the Arya and Sansa v Littlefinger plot wasn’t well-handled (though it had a fantastic concluding scene) and even something as basic as the travel time between areas of Westeros shrinking made the previously large nation feel smaller. But my main objection is that over the years I’ve not been sure that the show realises that Daenerys is a villain. After S8E01, I’m confident that they do.

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Analysis, Egotism

Reflective Analysis – Freedom

Freedom 20180217_1725 cropped
Yesterday I published a poem here on the blog – Freedom – which I’ve also written a ‘reflective analysis’ about. This is a form of literary analysis which involves the writer going back and thinking about the choices they made – often on a subconscious level – as a way of better understanding their creative impulses.

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Read my Poetry

Freedom

Once a month the nation bow their heads.
One nation under God.
Check the killer’s skin:
Is it ‘seal the borders’
Or is it ‘nothing could be done’?

Thoughts and prayers.
Think and pray.
Do not act.
The nation could be torn apart,
If someone were to act.

A sacrifice to Freedom,
The true god of America.
The freedom to tear flesh from bodies at 1200 feet.
The freedom to end the lives of others on a whim.
The freedom to make one’s rage another’s problem.
The freedom to become important.

Jehovah does not live here.
One nation under Freedom.
Human sacrifice is demanded
And the great god is appeased.

A gun in every classroom,
A sniper in every tree.
When paranoia and chaos reign,
All men shall be Free.

  • David Stringer
Praying People Playground Helmet Kneel Bench Man
Kneel-Bench-Man 2599320 by Unknown via MaxPixel
Comedy

Toby Young’s Eugenics Speech

Toby Young has been mired in controversy this year, with the latest revelation being that he attended the London Conference on Intelligence, where several pseudoscientific arguments on the superiority of white and male genetics have been made over recent years.

I’ve decided to discover a memo written while constructing a speech delivered to the LCI. It might be real for all you know.

Lynne,

I’m sending you a draft copy of the speech I’m going to give to the secret eugenics conference, just to check on the scientific accuracy of my speech. [I’ll see what I can do. Though I’m not keen on the phrase ‘secret eugenics conference’.]

Welcome ladies and gentleman. And welcome also to the not so gentle men, such as the the guy in the third row with the swastika tattoo on his forehead. (Wait a moment for people to turn around.) I’m joking of course, there are no members of the working class here.

I’m here to talk to you today about eugenics, an area of science that has a negative reputation as the result of some misapplications in the 1930s and 40s. Because of these…unfortunate uses of eugenics – the whole genocide thing – many people reject the idea entirely out of hand. I personally have been no-platformed by Teach First, who deleted my blog on eugenics. [That’s not what no-platforming means. I’ve been rejected by many journals, you don’t have a right to be paid for your words in whatever publication you want.]

This conference has a long legacy of brave speakers, willing to challenge taboos. One of my predecessors at this podium, Emil Kirkegaard, argued that paedophiles should be allowed to rape sleeping children provided that they’re unaware of what’s done to them. Many of the ideas expressed at this conference and those like it will be considered controversial to mainstream ivory tower elites. But the development of new ideas requires debate. Without an in-depth discussion, can we really say for certain that it’s wrong for a paedophile to rape a sleeping child?

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Politics

The Storytelling of Donald Trump

I’ve tried to keep this blog apolitical over the years I’ve been writing it, on and off. I think it can be obnoxious when writers and entertainers use their pulpit for a different purpose to what the reader wants, especially when those political arguments are not particularly unique, insightful or intelligent.

But the election of Donald Trump is an event which I feel should cause me to break that principle. Storytelling is important to politics, and Donald Trump won the election because he’s a better storyteller than Hillary Clinton. He has a stronger history of corruption than the Clintons, and his charity foundation is less transparent than theirs.

donald_trump_by_gage_skidmore_2011-02-10
No caption could make this funny.

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Egotism

IWSG: Back to Blogging

This is an entry for the Insecure Writers’ Support Group, which cross-posts on each others’ blogs on the first Wednesday of each month. It’s not quite the first Wednesday, but it’s close enough.

InsecureWritersSupportGroupIt’s been a while since I last posted on this blog. Although I’ve had gaps in my blogging before, the 11 month gap between the last time I posted here and today is by far the biggest. I began the blog back in November 2011, with the intention being that it would be a place for me to write about writing, and to whet my readers’ appetite for the fiction I actually manage to get finished.
I seem to have a remarkable talent for losing faith in the projects I begin, and I tend to be indecisive about what to do with the rare short stories I actually finish, which pretty much cancels out any use this blog would have as an advertisement for my writing. I have, however, written various reviews, analyses and thoughts on various types of fiction, as well as links to my writing on other websites and publications. The things I’ve written aren’t totally without merit, and writing them has helped focus my mind when I’ve been lost in big, ambitious projects.

One of the main things distracting me this last year has been political activity, but with the election now over, this should take up a little less of my time. My political activity has included a little bit of writing – on a separate blog and on one other site.
I tend to think it’s fairly obnoxious to push your political opinions on an audience who haven’t signed up for that reason, so I’ll try and keep this blog politically neutral. My moral beliefs will probably bleed through and become slightly apparent in some of what I write, but I won’t make any overt arguments expressing my very strong and genuine belief in Northumbrian independence, or my support for the settlers betrayed by the Demilitarized Zone being handed to the Cardassians. Or any of the other things I absolutely, genuinely believe in.

Now that I’ve got a few of my distractions out of the way, I should be able to return to more regular blogging, and fiction writing, in the next few days. I’ve been looking over some old, half-finished or unsatisfactory stories, in order to collaborate with my past self. It’s actually quite exciting to look back on what I’ve written before, and see that it’s not entirely awful. So I’ll be working on something soon, plus a few half-formed ideas I’ve got locked away in my brain which should be worth writing.

Comedy

The Leaky Wiki: Developing World Objects to The Label ‘Developing World’, Finds it Patronising

Continuing my effort to repost all my material from The Leaky Wiki, the latest post is from January 2012. It’s not particularly topical, and if I’m honest, it’s not one of my best, but as it’s not topical at all, it’s aged well. I think that’s lowered expectations sufficently.

You can see this in it’s original context here, or carry on reading.

Developing World Objects to The Label ‘Developing World’, Finds it Patronising

UN_General_Assembly_hall by Patrick Gruban       Taken from Wikimedia CommonsIn a staggeringly short five hour speech at the UN yesterday, the ambassador from the recently re-named Developmentistan criticised the terminology used in defining the wealth of nations.
“It is about time you know how we feel about you in the west,” he announced from the podium, speaking in that unusual manner where individual syllables were pronounced slowly and slightly oddly, as people of his nation do. “You are so full of yourselves! Oh, we have reached a good point, you aren’t as good as us, and must be arbitrarily judged by our standards at any given moment. I mean, give me a break!” He paused dramatically, and wiped the sweat away from his brow. “You still have children dying in poverty, despite having the medication right there in your own country. How about you get down off your high horses, and realise that we are people too, just like you? Wouldn’t that be a nice thing to do?”

The country was renamed Developmentistan last month, in what has been widely construed as some sort of sarcastic jibe taken too far. Many media commentators have pointed out that roadsigns, hospitals and airports will have to be renamed and relabelled, at massive expense.

Sarcasm analysts believe this is the most expensive sarcasm related incident since a producer on the set of Waterworld angrily joked ‘why don’t we put Costner in charge? After all he’s a BRILLIANT director! He did SUCH a good job on The Postman!’

“At least when you called us the ‘Third World’ you were honest about how you saw us,” continued the ambassador, as he drew towards the end of his five hour speech, remarkably short by UN standards. “At least that was good, honest condesencion. We knew where we stood with that kind of attitude! We knew that you saw our society as inferior not only to your own, but to the communists who sent millions of their citizens to death camps! But now… Now….” He paused, looking very slowly around the hall, as if he was perhaps trying to make eye contact with each of his fellow ambassadors, perhaps to induce feelings of guilt in them. “Exactly what makes a country developed? Hmm?’ He paused, once more. “I bet you don’t even know where my country is, do you?”

Comedy

The Leaky Wiki: Leading Tea Party member sceptical over the existence of ‘America’.

As previously mentioned, I’m currently re-uploading the pieces of satire I wrote for The Leaky Wiki following that site’s demise. The whole project is inspired either by vanity (that people NEED to be able to see the jokes I wrote over two years ago) or laziness (why should I go to the trouble of writing new material?) but both are good reasons.

The latest re-upload (which you can see in its original context via the Wayback Machine) was originally published in December 2011, and makes fun of those silly Colonials, who think that you brew tea in a harbour.

Leading Tea Party member sceptical over the existence of ‘America’.

Boston_Tea_Party by WD Cooper Uploaded by Cornischong              Taken from Wikimedia CommonsJoe T. Plumber, one of the leading organisers of the Tea Party, has today expressed his disbelief over the existence of America.
“I’ve been skeptical over President Obama’s birth certificate for a while,” he revealed in an exclusive sit-down interview.
“After all, you can’t blindly believe everything you’re told. Yes, there may be masses of legal documentation, a birth announcement in the local Hawaiian newspaper at the time, and witnesses who remember him as a young boy.” admitted Plumber.
“But, even given all that, it could be some kind of con – his father would want him to be involved in the greatest nation on Earth. And, how do we know he’s not playing a long-con, like in those Ocean’s films? How do we know he’s not a Kenyan Muslim terrorist bent on destroying America? You can never be too safe.”

Plumber is a man who loves America, so much so that he regularly dresses in cowboy boots, shirts in the colours and patterns of the American flag, and similar patriotic apparel. Plumber, formerly Michael Edwards, renamed himself when he first took an interest in politics in January 2009, choosing the name of his favourite Founding Father.

“All of that got me thinking – what else am I not sure about? People say we put a man on the moon – but we just have to take NASA’s word for it. It’s not like we can go up there to look about, is it?”
This uber-patriot was now in full flow, giving an argument he had clearly had to give many times before, given the opposition to his line of argument.
“In fact, the more and more I thought about it, the whole American revolution thing started to seem a bit iffy. I mean, think about it – a young nation stands up to the greatest empire in the world – and wins? That’s just the kind of crap Hollywood would make up. Sure, there’s loads of documentation, thousands of books and articles written about the events – but all that exists for Obama as well!
“In fact, how do I know you’re not a lizard man, part of a vast conspiracy that secretly runs the world? I bet you can’t disprove that right now, can you? Here, let me cut your face off.”

It was shortly after this point that I decided I had all the quotes I needed for the story, and left, with only minimal scarring to my face.

Comedy

The Leaky Wiki: 2022 Qatar World Cup NOT Chosen as a Result of Bribery

The Leaky Wiki, a satirical website which I wrote for between 2011 and 2013, eventually fell apart, somehow unable to make huge profits despite internet sarcasm being in high demand and low supply.

Using the Wayback Machine I’ve combed through the wreckage, recovering what was mine, which I’ll re-publish here on my blog in the coming weeks and months.

My first piece for The Leaky Wiki came back in November 2011, a distant time, very different from today, when there were questions about why Qatar had been chosen to host the 2022 World Cup. It’s like another lifetime entirely.

 

Qatar World Cup NOT Chosen as a Result of Bribery, Leaked Emails Show

2014_FIFA_Announcement_(Joseph_Blatter)_6 by Marcello Casal Jr.                Taken from Wikimedia CommonsShocking emails have been leaked today, which show that Qatar was chosen as host of the 2022 World Cup, not because of bribery, as had been previously widely assumed, but because FIFA delegates genuinely believed them to be the best choice as host.

Critics have pointed out that the bid was plagued with problems as Qatar had no existing football infrastructure, and the heat regularly reaches fifty degrees Celsius in the summer. Sepp Blatter even announced that they may play games indoors, and alternately may move the whole competition forward to January.

‘It just made sense that Qatar was chosen because of bribery,’ commented one leading Premier League footballer, who asked to remain anonymous. ‘I mean, I’m no brain cutting person, I struggle to keep track of which Page 3 girl I’m banging. But even I know that when choosing the hosts, it makes sense to make sure the players will be able to stand up during matches.’

These new revelations have shaken what little faith there was in an organisation that has elected Sepp Blatter as it’s president 4 times, with many administrators wondering why Qatar would be chosen were it not for financial self-interest.

‘Qatar has no football history or infrastructure,’ said one leading English FA administrator. ‘I’m the guy who keeps suggesting we put David Beckham forward as part of our bid teams, despite his sounding like a ten year old girl, and not a very bright one at that. But even I can’t understand how the delegates can be so stupid. We had all thought that the fact that we were promised more votes than we received for our bid was a betrayal, but I’m starting to think that the delegates didn’t realise our ‘donations’ to their domestic football programmes were meant to be an implied bribe. Honestly, I have no idea how you’d work with that kind of person.’

In related news, other emails leaked at the same time reveal Saudi Arabia to be a frontrunner to host the 2023 Women’s World Cup.