Author: James Aylett

JohnF has a go at crap comedy cliches.

Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s ease up on the dumb blonde jokes, because they just don’t understand them.

Going through old emails I discovered that I had written:

I don’t want to upset people (because I’m weak like that (unless they’re David
Blunkett; he can roast in hell and I’ll toast marshmallows)).

For which I apologise. Sorry, David: obviously you’re not all alone as an outcast in my otherwise pleasant society. Charles Clarke and Tessa Jowell are there with you.

(Tessa, if you’re reading: I know you’re all happy that we’ve got the Olympics, but can we try to prevent a six year drought in British arts funding just a little bit? You could auction your children or something.)

It’s thundering overhead, and I’m quite worried. I have another six thousand words to dictate tonight, and how will it look if every other sentence has “rumble” in the middle of it?

I get home about eight o’clock these days, which is – quite suddenly, and unexpectedly – around dusk. This means that the balance in my eyes between cones and rods starts to shift, so that although I can still pick out shapes well, only quite bright colours are obvious – sunsets, for instance, are all the more vivid, and so quite beautiful.

Of course, the same thing is happening to other people, which means I really should start using lights when I cycle home.

Maybe not now, no. Now they’re happy, philanthropic people dedicated to good things like bunnies and cold toast. But it hasn’t always been this way – in the 1920s in America they were sadistic little bastards who hazed their initiates just like in those awful frat house movies that used to be popular for no obvious reason.

Only they had companies selling them toys to make it even more fun! Fun! With electricity!

It’s pretty unnecessary for me to say anything general about Mo Mowlam, as everyone’s got there before me, and many of them are more eloquent anyway. But she was the first person in politics who made me think that they weren’t all a breed apart, and that maybe there might be someone there who shares my opinion. (Which isn’t to say that there weren’t others, just that I hadn’t noticed them.) So to the extent that I’m not nearly as disaffected with politics as my friends, it’s down to her.

It also means that if I ever somehow end up in politics rather than just growling at it on under-read websites, it’ll be her fault.

Except that it’s invisible. In their search for new ways to feel sexy, a company has invented backless lingerie, so you can wear low-slung trousers without that tell-tale hint of panty to make you look stupid, leaving the low-slung trousers to manage that all on their own.

Since the dawn of time (or at least since the 1920s), women have been making the perfectly simple decision between wearing panties and something to cover them (such as skirts, trousers or bathing machines), and wearing no panties and not caring about what covers them (such as skirts, trousers or nudist beaches). And then recently, for a couple of years, people thought that wearing visible panties would be cool. (Or maybe just sexy, although it’s not really. It makes men think about sex some more, but probably not enough to be measurable.) Now they’ve realised it wasn’t.

What to do if you’re a young girl about town? You have all these low-slung jeans and so on, but it’s not fashionable to show your undergarments any more. Thank heavens for Backless Lingerie, or you’d have nothing to wear when you go out. Which might be fun, come to think of it.

Here’s a thought: when low-slung trousers go out of fashion, but everyone has backless lingerie lying around taking up wardrobe space, will we see low-slung skirts on the market?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now our human rights are being defended against creeping governmentitis by … Michael Howard. How did we get here?

Well thank you, Mr Blair. I hadn’t realised! I thought that certain people were always going to become terrorists, since nature wins over nurture, we’re all subject to predestination, and the Lord God Made Us All (in his image, although we must suppose he ran out of crayons by the time he got to western Europe).

The problem isn’t that people don’t have the option not to become terrorists – of course they do. To trot this out with a heartfelt face as if everything will sort itself out now is either incredibly naive or incredibly optimistic.

What’s needed is for people not only to have the option but to have a reason not to become terrorists. Potential terrorists aren’t using Iraq as “an excuse” for what they do – he’s right on that, at least – because Iraq is merely one more time we’ve gone stomping around the world causing havoc under the guise of kissing it better. (And before that, when we just considered it our God-given right. And before that, when we just considered it our Gods-given right.)

If we’re going to “stand up and confront the ideology of this evil”, then this means standing up and confronting what we’ve done, as well as bitching about what they’ve done – and we’ve done some evil things ourselves.