It’s been Snow Panic! week this week, except here where I have been relatively calm about the weather. More hot drinks and a wooly hat is all I need, although the emptiness of Office Town yesterday was a bit like a really cheap post-semi-apocalyptic film. Anyway, never one to let the chance to publish a load of old wank, The World’s Greatest Newspaper went all predictable and gave me more retweets on Twitter than ever before when I caught an early glimpse at one of their headlines:

Panic begins by encouraging readers to panic about gas supplies being low which is always the case with gas supplies so shut up. Also: it’s Diet Week at the world’s greatest newspaper. No change there then, and no I do not want my starsign’s coffee grains read thanks.

CHAOS in the Express! The infamous “Weather = Climate” head/desk nonsense returns! Diet Week has gadgets to “fight the flab” which is kind of cheating. Did Skinnier Than Before Woman Who Was Off The Telly use them and then split up with Man Who Was Off The Telly? Do we care? No. PANIC!

After encouraging all that PANIC! we are told to keep calm and carry on. It’s hot on the other side of the world so here are some boobs. Phew! Diet Week shows how you can lose weight and keep it off forever but I imagine it involves getting someone to take a chainsaw to your arms and legs.

The infamous retweet story from yesterday:

Yeah those biased scientists, eh? What do they know? I reckon…

… he’s not biased at all, what with having written a book about the climate change ‘scam.’

Tomorrow: World freezes over, Express builds giant Diana effigy out of snow.

Final batch of Express shite:

Category Seven: SWINE FLU STORIES
Swine Flu (PANIC!) was the perfect event for The World’s Greatest Newspaper as it combined several of its main agendas. If only Princess Diana could have had it too, it would have given the ‘journalists’ an excessive amount of journo-jizz:

Love the panicking headlines followed by a headline moaning about people panicking… and bonus anti-points for the obligatory having a go at migrants. Such a quality newspaper.

‘Fish diet cuts your chance of going blind’ on the Pig Flu Kids front page also deserves a mention so I have linked to the original story. It is, like almost all of their food stories, involving tests on mice. No singalongs please.

I am of course now dead from piggy flu as is everyone who has ever read this blog.

Another day, another load of best worst covers from the self-proclaimed World’s Greatest Newspaper…

Category Six: LUNATIC DIET STORIES
Like their Batshit Health Stories only more specific due to being slightly rewritten press releases from organisations who want their bullshit promoted to idiotic morons who’ll believe any old tripe:

The Tea Council got a nice bit of publicity this year when the independent expert the Express quoted was on their payroll so I imagine The Breakfast Club is not just an 80s brat pack film.

Food Top Trumps continued with Coffee beating Alzheimers, Tomato Pill beating Heart Disease (but what about good old plain Tomato?) and then Broccoli beating Heart Disease and probably scoring higher than Tomato Pill as it is real food and not just a pill. Who knows? It’s all bollocks.

Eggs were previously not good for you in Express World (???) then became good until some foreign eggs came over here by sneaking into our egg cartons and made eggs bad again. Luckily Apple Juice was around to help Coffee with Alzheimers by being a blody miracle.

Apple Juice may well be a miraculous drink but Appletize was still dangerous due to being a drink of the fizzy variety (let’s not mention the free Pepsi previously given away). It’s so hard to keep up with all the developments. Sweetener was a silent killer so another reason to switch to savoury but then that was ruined by hidden salt killing loads of people every year…. silently. Shhhhh!

Tomorrow: Swine Flu, if we are not all dead from it as predicted by the Express.

After a short Christmassy break it’s back to the Expressive covers of the year and on with the next category…

Category Four: PRINCESS DIANA STORIES
Diana’s stock plummetted this year as Madeline McCann’s rose in Expressland, which was a shame as I loved the batshit insane theories about why she died, even when the bleedin’ obvious was proven to be as bleedin’ obvious as any sane person thought all along:
Fad diets and the People’s Princess in the same headline? How cheeky. Diana was also an INXS song and then she was axed except this was bollocks.

Category Five: RACISM AND XENOPHOBIA STORIES
The nasty non-comical side of The World’s Greatest Newpaper is best shown in the way they can make The Mail look like a loony lefty 1980s style fanzine with their attitude to anyone who is not English or white enough for their particular world view:
Several examples of lies about immigrants, jobs and money: I wonder if they have an agenda?

“They” are having a baby boom. “Muslims” (all muslims of course , not just a few loonytune extremists) demand Sharia Law. So far so BNP voter recruitment. But what’s this? The biggest lie of all when they call uncle Nicky G a disgrace to humanity.

Pull the other one you racist c*nts.

Tomorrow: Those crazy fad diet stories (oh the irony)…

What’s the greatest headline of the World’s Greatest Newspaper this great year? So many categories to choose from.

Category two: MAD CANCER STORIES
The Express loves its batshit health stories but when it can splice a bit of Cancer in there it goes mad like a child whose been at the Um Bongo:

Did the Ten Easy Ways To Beat Cancer include oxygen, mushrooms and avoiding red meat & jabs? I hope so. It’s mushrooms for breakfast for me again, with a drizzle of oxygen.

Category Three: MADELEINE MCCANN FANTASIST STORIES
Like the Princess Diana Fatasist Stories category (see tomorrow for more on that one) but involving people who will actually sue them for all those mental front pages(oops):

A lot of 2009′s Maddiethon was The Express asking random questions about what happened so as to not be sued again. It’s so easy (and cheaper), although the one about the McCann’s stalker showed a lack of self awareness not seen since Katie Price opened her monotone inflated robo gob.

Tomorrow: Princess Diana: It wasn’t just about not wearing a seatbelt in a speeding car driven by a tipsy man, oh no… and a flood of dirty foreigners!

I have a love/hate relationship with the Daily Express, what with it being The Daily Mail For People Who Find The Mail A Bit Too Sane and Left Wing. What with the self-proclaimed ‘World’s Greatest Newspaper’ brag on the front cover every day and the barely factual ‘exclusives’ it’s almost The Onion but I have to remind myself that it is real when I see copies in other peoples trolleys in the supermarket. I’ve been unadmiring the best worst front pages all year over on my Facebook page and thought it would be nice/horrible to share the high/lowlights in several key categories with the bloggy blog world so…

BATSHIT HEALTH STORIES
The Express loves their health stories more than any other paper and not just because they are cheap barely re-written press releases from strange organisations like The Tea Council. Here are some of my favourites of 2009:

Magic fictitious obesity bugs you can catch or miracle blindness curing eyedrops or wonder jabs or wonder pills or Doctor Who style Cyber enhancements or magic sunshine or *SNIIIIP* So many to choose from, I cannot decide which should win the coveted gold-colour-covered microscope souvenir award. Any ideas?

Tomorrow: Cancer! Serious like a prancing dancer.

We all like a nice cup of tea but the self-proclaimed World’s Greatest Newspaper likes it a bit too much. With lots of world news to choose from for today’s headline they decided to go with something very odd (but not that odd for a low grade almost-spoof of tabloid trash like the Mail):

A DAILY cup of tea can fight heart disease, boost brain power and even help you live longer, experts said last night.

A global review of research papers on the health effects of caffeine has found that drinking up to eight cups of tea a day offers “significant health benefits”, including a lower risk of heart attack and stroke. Caffeinated drinks such as tea, coffee and cocoa also have positive effects on mental function, increasing alertness, feelings of well-being and short-term memory. The research even suggested that people who cut out tea and coffee from their diet in a bid to be healthy may be doing more harm than good.

The major review of 47 published studies was carried out by independent dietician Dr Carrie Ruxton.

Remember that name, it will become relevant later.

She found that an optimal intake of 400mg of caffeine a day – equal to eight cups of tea or four cups of coffee – delivered “key benefits in terms of mental function and heart health” without any adverse consequences.

Tea is Britain’s most popular beverage, drunk daily by 77 per cent of the population. A number of studies have already linked its healthy antioxidant properties and high flavonoid content to preventing heart disease and cutting the risk of some cancers.

So why is this established fact front page news exactly?

One cup of coffee a day has also been found to halve the risk of cancers affecting the mouth and gullet. However, large amounts of caffeine can result in negative health effects, such as a higher risk of having small babies. Dr Ruxton’s review aimed to “debunk” many of the myths surrounding caffeine.

Sod coffee, I want to hear more about lovely tea. I wonder why she is so tea-obsessed?

I have cut loads of the article at this point as it’s rather tedious and repetitive. Basically, tea is the elixir of bloody life.

Dr Catherine Hood, of the Tea Advisory Panel, said: “Caffeinated drinks have been unfairly demonised.

They have a Tea Advisory Panel? Is it for tea ladies to try new blends?

“Black tea, in particular, contains polyphenols, which are natural plant antioxidants. These have beneficial effects on many biochemical processes in the body because they protect cells against harmful free radicals. Flavonoids are thought to be especially useful, with a number of studies reporting a link between them and lower risk of heart attack.”

So The Expresss has a load of boffins saying hurrah for tea, tea is great, blah blah blah, as their top story? How could this be? And why is chief boffin Dr Carrie Ruxton so into her tea trivia?

Oh. That’s why… how odd that her membership of a tea pressure group is not mentioned in the article. The same article which is a slightly rewritten version of the Tea Advisory Panel’s press release. I know the World’s Greatest Newspaper doesn’t have the funds for proper journalists seven days a week so the Saturday girl must have done this piece. It doesn’t mention immigrants or muslims after all so something’s not right. I wonder if Express owner (Dirty) Richard Desmond is a member of the Biscuit Advisory Panel (which I just made up)?

I’m not going to keep on about the two C@nts Of The Week after this… probably. So indulge me?
Question Time was interesting last night, in the way that awful shitbag man showed his true colours (no Cyndi Laupers please) to any doubters. Jack Straw was still an irritating waffler, no change there, and Baroness Warsi started off well but fell apart with her “I love the gays really, honest” bit. Generic Lib Dem Man was yawnsome but Bonnie Greer made my day, week and month with the way she dealt with Griffin. Excellent body language (slightly turned away from him, bored teenager expression) and dismissive put downs by using facts against his sinister twisted version of the world. Watching him squirm and twitch as he tried to deny all the quotes correctly attributed to him and his dodgy pals such as holocaust ‘reclassification’ , his mental idea that Churchill would join the party and dismissing his links with Mr KKK was a treat to watch, with bonus points to the nice lesbian who told him his “feeling of revulsion is mutual.” There’s a little interview with her (Beth Mellington-Pritchard) here.

I am going to spend the weekend being mostly indigenous (What the hell was Griffin on about with his love for that word? I have at least a quarter of ‘foreign’ in me and am far superior to those supremacists) and kissing my man to continue my quest to repulse all big old racist gay-fearing weirdoes. Might even do that in the home town as we have a trip to Essex planned. If every time I kiss him a BNP member tuts I wonder how much damage a kiss and a cuddle can cause? What about a ‘romp’?

Pretty much the only other thing that got a look-in (I am having flashbacks to a Bucks Fizz comic strip now) on Question Time was that other c@nt Jan Moir. She wrote what she saw as an apology in the Hate Mail today but what normal people would call a steaming back-pedalling piece of bullshit.

Here are some of the ‘highlights’ of her ‘apology’:

Absolutely none of this had anything to do with his sexuality. If he had been a heterosexual member of a boy band, I would have written exactly the same article. Yet despite this, many have interpreted my words as a ‘bigoted rant’ and suggested that my motive was to insinuate that Stephen died ‘because he was gay’. Anyone who knows me will vouch that I have never held such poisonous views.

Is she going to use the “some of my best friends are queers, sorry, gay, line?

As for Stephen’s civil partnership, I am on the record as supporting same-sex marriages. The point of my observation that there was a ‘happy ever after myth’ surrounding such unions was that they can be just as problematic as heterosexual marriages. Indeed, I would stress that there was nothing in my article that could not be applied to a heterosexual couple as well as to a homosexual one.

Almost…

To say it was a hysterical overreaction would be putting it mildly, though clearly much of it was an orchestrated campaign by pressure groups and those with agendas of their own.

Was it? Really? Oh come off it, Moir. You must have read some of the press about it and seen the timeline. Balls.

However, I accept that many people – on Twitter and elsewhere – were merely expressing their own personal and heartfelt opinions or grievances. This said, I can’t help wondering: is there a compulsion today to see bigotry and social intolerance where none exists by people who are determined to be outraged? Or was it a failure of communication on my part?

It’s Daily Mail policy to have bigotry and intolerance in everything so maybe she has a point.

Yet as the torrent of abuse continued, most of it anonymous, I also had thousands of supportive emails from readers and well-wishers, many of whom described themselves as ‘the silent majority’. The outcry was not as one-sided as many imagine.

Oh them! The ‘Silent Majority’! The ones who were so silent until Jan decided to fill us all in on their existence.

The other weird and not wonderful newpaper related thing today was this:

The World’s Greatest Newspaper is now also the World’s Most Hypocritical Newspaper.
The Express and the BNP share most of the same opinions (they both hate foreigners, muslims, gay people, immigrants and are batshit mad evil types) but they can’t be seen to support fascists so we get that ridiculous front page instead. What a crock of shit.

Bank Holidays (I don’t even work in a bank and I get a paid day off, how about that?) are weird. We hadn’t exactly done a lot this weekend and I couldn’t deal with any more lectures on tile grouting, how bathrooms work, what the difference between white and off-white is… well you get the idea. I think I’ll have to put finished bathroom photos on here when we get to that stage, just to draw a virtual line on it. So we went off to Old Bookshop Town to buy shirts, a lamp, a wallet (no pigeon) and Nut Hut chocolate covered nuts. No lamp but we did visit the old bookshop of course and said hello to some of the people I like to say hello to there. Some had a day off because they do not work in a bank as well, like we do. I think I am rambling now and getting confused so I should eat more blackcurrants, right?

Riiiighttt…

Other things learnt today:
I had no idea Rashida Jones (from The Office and Parks & Recreation) had been in Freaks and Geeks but then everyone else had so it shouldn’t have been a “huh?” moment.
There is nothing on telly on Bank Holiday Monday. But not literally.

Those Babelcolour Doctor Who YouTube productions continue to entertain.

There’s a new Roisin song that is rather spiffing… thanks XO’s blog.

What a golden Daily Mail Thursday this is…

Zoinks!

Social networking sites such as Facebook could raise your risk of serious health problems by reducing levels of face-to-face contact, a doctor claims. Emailing people rather than meeting up with them may have wide-ranging biological effects, said psychologist Dr Aric Sigman.

Hang on. Apart from being balls why is this psychologist going down the “I reckon” path about biological effects?

Increased isolation could alter the way genes work and upset immune responses, hormone levels and the function of arteries. It could also impair mental performance. This could increase the risk of problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease and dementia, Dr Sigman says in Biologist, the journal of the Institute of Biology.

Dr Sigman thinks that it’s Facebook or go outside, sit at a computer or move around, black or white. He may not be right. He thrn reckoned things about physical interraction being on the decrease, which is the fault of those evil interwebs.

“In less than two decades, the number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled. Parents spend less time with their children than they did only a decade ago. Britain has the lowest proportion of children in all of Europe who eat with their parents at the table. The proportion of people who work at home alone continues to rise. I am worried about where this is all leading.”

I have a table but no children. I am bloody well doomed.

Meanwhile, it was more doom and gloom to go with my Facebook Cancer…

No wine for me then. Mail readers were not amused:

I give up. I might as well stop eating or drinking anything as all the medical researchers have said at one time or another they are all unhealthy. Over the past decade or so it seems that every week there’s another U turn on life style choices to the point that people might as well ignore these so called professionals. Would the medical profession please go away to a remote island somewhere and do some serious research for a change. When you’re absolutely certain just what we can or can’t eat or drink to remain healthy, come out of hiding, publish your results and leave it at that. Thanks !
Click to rate Rating +85 Mike, Alicante, Spain, 18/2/2009 11:14

Rather than go on a hunger strike like Mike I’ll just take the Express’ advice:

Two coffees a day cut the risk of a stroke. I call that a fair deal!

Also: Diana is back! Secret letters are never going to be shown to anyone! Because we made it up!

When is He Is A Fanatic Now Get Him Out Of Here coming to ITV?

Duffy! Lady! Blonde! Reasonably Attractive! Awards! Yawn!

Back to the Mail:

LOLz all round for the headline there.

You couldn’t tell he was gay by his photos. He could be the Marlboro man with all his ruggedness. I hope his wife can stand by him as no fool would marry such a flamboyant man without having some suspicions. Hopefully they can make it work.
Rating +1 Jess, Arizona, US, 18/2/2009 17:56

That’s that sorted then.

This is a bit embarrassing as the readers all seem to be raving BNPers who thumb down any nice people:

Oh the irony. Songs we associate with a war to defeat an unspeakable evil being used to promote a party who would crush Britain beneath their own jackboot. This is not what the WW2 generation fought and died for.
Rating -303
Rich Edwards, Leeds, UK, 18/2/2009 12:48

303 red thumbs down?

I’m surprised at Dame Vera. I thought she of all people would be above this sort of politically correct nonsence. Besides, the song was written to rally the hearts of the British….is that now so terribly wrong?
Rating +263 Kathy Gilbert, Yorkshire., 18/2/2009 13:12

Are we still allowed to refer to them as the WHITE cliffs of Dover, then?
Rating +318 Pierre de Rochefort, La Rochelle, France, 18/2/2009 13:26

Bonus LOLz for the excellent pseudonym there. Mr Cheese from the place in the Tricolore textbooks. I know it’s a real place too (a friend comes from there) but what wit!

And finally, Mad Melanie Phillips decides that the police were never institutionaly racist because she is white and knows so:

It is nothing other than institutional intimidation, a kind of McCarthyism which, because it is based on a fundamental lie, can produce an Orwellian state of affairs where truth and lies, right and wrong are turned on their heads and injustice, far from being stamped out, actually increases. So it has proved.

She’s going gaga for the big words again.

To protect themselves from the dread taint of racism the police turned themselves inside out to become the coercive arm of the culture of political correctness – which meant downplaying crime by minorities on the grounds that they were the victims of racism and targeting instead white people on the grounds that they were institutionally guilty of racial hatred.

Is this remotely true? As usual Mel does not show her workings.

Commenters went a bit doo-lally over this:

The Police are no more institutionally racist than any other organisation in the UK. Which is not to say that they are not. This country, like so many others (France and Italy in particular) has a problem with race. It’s an ingrained way of thinking that is not going to go away in 10, 15 years. Give it a hundred and see where we stand. The latest twist in it is the nonsensical claim by people who say that now white people are the only ones to suffer racism at the hands of institutions. People feel disenfranchised, and so they lash out at others they perceive to be receiving a better deal. They have not walked in the shoes of a young black male who is stopped weekly by the police, or an asian female who can never make it through customs without being body searched.
Rating -134 Kelly, London, 18/2/2009 13:00

134 red thumbs down. Well done.
All our public services are institutionally racist – they hate white people born of English parents.
Rating +145 Steve Jacks, London, 18/2/2009 14:05

145 green thumbs up. I am so angry about all the horrid racism I face every day for being white so I can sympathise.

If the Police are racist then surely it has the Black Police Association to thank, after all there is not a White Police Association.
Rating +126 Pickles, Lincolnshire, 18/2/2009 14:25

My favourite old “I’m not racist but…” argument! 10 points for originality and brains.

Tomorrow: Those records that came through the letter box – Any good?