It has been announced…

Item! Hmm… the Twitter hashtags experiment of #slapamailreaderday was fun but I still despair for the future of humanity what with them Northern Koreans with their nu-clear sounds and the Californians terminating human decency and respect. Hashtags came about because I got rather hacked off (I know, don’t look if you don’t want to be annoyed) by puny humans who read a certain paper for people who don’t like to think for themselves about how everyone should be able to marry the person they love and stuff:

I am almost proud of my red arrows. They don’t do no flying tricks in the sky though.

Nice to see that Mail readers approve of slavery. Not all that surprised, just ashamed. I blame this “Stalinist socially-engineered dictatorship” we arte living in. Or is London now an imdependent state and I missed the memo?

Tracey is quite right. Why make a load of fuss and nonsese about civil rights when there are people starving in Africa? I hope Trace eats all her din-dins.

Meanwhile Paul (who appears to live in prison) is “not homophobic in any way but…” then is. And this is meant to surprise me? He thinks same sex marriages are the siliest thing has has ever heard of so I assume he doesn’t get out much. Well he could be staying in for a long time. Oh shame.

Item! Hard Times indeed, Patrick Wolf. The video looks like what a musical episode from Doctor Who in 1972 would look like if they ghad more money to spend. I like it but then I would.

Item! While I remember, here’s episode 9 of The Apprehensive:

Avin’ a bladdy larf, etc, etc

It was Bank holiday Monday so we went to see the family and learnt many exciting things on the journey and in the houses:

The BNP billboard slogan is ‘People like you voting’ which is not accompanied by a photograph of a big old racist so I do not understand. It certainly is not people like us*

There is a Christian Party running in the elections too. They do not like the BNP (they called their mums slags apparently) so therefore I am agreeing with the church for the first time ever in the history of me.

*Series 1 is on DVD and well worth a watch.

My mother will only drink tea if it is boiling hot but coffee has to be colder. Soya milk is better than long life milk. My dad is immune to caffeine with approximately a dozen cups of coffee drunk every day. They think I enjoyed our childhood family holidays that were mostly in a caravan in Belgium. I did not: the chemical toilet alone was reason enough to dislike and they now know.

Jamie’s mother did not know what LOL meant but she does now. She also knows that it is only used by dickheads and that becoming a fan of laughing at people falling over on Facebook is not acceptable.

Cakes are nice. Bacon is a nice treat if your vegetarian husband does not allow it at home and taking a chunk of a freshly cooked chicken home in the boot of the car will lead to chickeny smells. I will make him eat it in the garden.

Andi Peters’ choice of the top pop songs of the 1990s on 4Music was marvellously poor (C&C Music Factory, Chaka Demus and Pliers, Corona…) as was the advert every 10 minutes for Dizzee Rascal’s top 100 pop videos with sexy ladies in them, co-presented by something called a High Street Honey who was just a disinterested model sort.

We learnt that Billie Piper’s video for Because We Want To definitely inspired Russell ‘Tea’ Davies’ Doctor Who many years later:

A big old spaceship flies over a street and Billie is beamed down. Hmm…

Billie points at the bin and her magic powers make it start to melt but not like an Auton…

The bin is not an Auton but becomes a silver man who does a little dance and does not shoot her.

Billie goes to a club where the bouncer is a man with a rhino’s head. But not a Judoon…

The not Judoon lets her in even though she is underage. Nil points, space police rhino!

Next week: Vespiform in Honey To the Bee?

I blame Ben for reminding me that Ash still exist. I had forgotten about them since Ms Hatherley went solo, bad me. Anyway, they are doing something interesting and alphabetical with a whole load of singles being released in a new way which is explained on their website far better than I could here.

There is a bonus song going free if you give them your email address so there’s no excuse not to listen to and like Return Of White Rabbit now is there?

I used to have an indierockcrush on Ash’s Tim Wheeler. This blog post was not just an excuse for a picture.

But it helps.

I have been spoilt by the CDs that came in the post this week. Aside from my cheapo re-purchasing (what happened to loads of my old 90s music?) Temper Temper and Melanie Williams albums, the first two Saint Etienne deluxe re-releases were (re-)released.

Foxbase Alpha is one of my favourite albums ever ever and I already had it on cassette and CD but this was too goods to avoid. Extra tracks on disc 2 include the previously-loved Filthy, People Get Real and Fake 88 but we also get brand new (old) odd Cracknell track Sally Space, peculiar Donna Savage sung Winter In America and some weird instrumental bits and pieces. Which actually doesn’t make it sound so good but I am having an off day with my big words.

Continental was only ever available on import (via Japan) so this new double disc version is rather essential. It includes lost classics like Accident (the missing link between Weekend A Rome and He’s On The Phone), the manic Gary Numan cover Stormtrooper In Drag, the previously unheard by me Star, the lovely Satuday and Lover Plays The Bass, some Sarah Cracknell solo demos and both very different versions of Burnt Out Car. Think of it as the ‘lost’ 4th Saint Etienne album.

Tori Amos has released her 10th album and in a similar way to the last few Abnormally Attracted To Sin sufers from ‘Prince Syndrome’ i.e it is too long and the good bits have a tendency to get lost. My advice to Ms Amos? Ditch the dreary Give, the half dark and repetitive half tuneful Police Yourself, the dull electronic title track, the tedious Mary Jane, the b-sidey Starling and Ophelia and the dull Lady In Blue. Ditto for the unnecessary bonus track Oscar’s Theme. Make an album with 10 good songs on it. Good songs like the stringy Y Kant Tori Read-style Strong Black Vine, the minimalist Flavor, the perfectly nice MOR of Fire To Your Plain, the Scarlets Walk-ish 500 Miles, and the basically fine Fast Horse. There are some great tracks here too: the plinky plonky Bowie-vowelled Welcome To England, the feisty percussion-happy obligatory Neil Gaiman-mentioning Not Dying Today, the shiver-inducing suicide discussion of Maybe California, the music industry comment of Curtain Call, and the melodic soundtracky That Guy. They have a tendency to get buried in the other stuff which is a terrible shame.

Any comedy show starring a man and a cactus with a Dolly Parton fixation, a fear of dogs and a tendency to flip out on occasions has to be blogged about. If it comments on the absurdities of presenting with a puppet and challenges a group of children to eat chunks out of a cake in order to make it resemble the face of TV’s John Barrowman then all the more reason. The fact that it is made for the Childrens BBC and not some fancy grown-up (but never TV’s Grownups) channel is irrelevant… Ed & Oucho’s Transmission Impossible was bloody marvellous. Saturday morning TV like the old days when we had fun (and too much sugar), and I’ve managed to get the husband hooked already. There are over 500 old Ed & Oucho CBBC links clips on their YouTube page and it’s a daily treat for me now. It could be the same for you too. But not U2.

I do wish Husband Jamie wouldn’t listen to DOLLLLLLYYYYY! in the car though.

Ed & Oucho have the same appeal to me as early Lucas & Walliams stuff like Mash & Peas and Rock Profile, i.e. silly but not stupid. Talking of all that, the new Rock Profile starring Pete and Amy was also a good old laugh.

Freaky email of the day:
Hi, Dan Hollingsworth. Dr. Tobias Funke is now following your updates on Twitter.

Oh what a load of cockin’ arse (missus) …

Someone in a guide to adoption refers to people who are against gay adoption as “retarded homophobes” so the Daily Wail takes offence and calls then “Nazis.” Then the nazis pulled the retarded homophobes’ hair and made a rude joke about their mum. Cue Richard Littlejohn with his crowd-pleasing (retarded is an offensive term but…) ‘satirez’:

We’ve become used to the tiresome bigotry of homosexual fundamentalists smearing anyone remotely opposed to even the wilder excesses of the gay ‘lifestyle’. But the accusation of mental handicap is relatively recent. It marks a new low in the nastiness of what was once a perfectly respectable cause.

Littlejohn has a short memory. Who was it that called Gordon Brown a retard recently? Gordon was up against Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, on UK Gold. If you want to see some accident-prone retard, 30 years out of date, stumbling from one fiasco to another, Frank Spencer wins hands down. Like the man ‘hilariously’ says every bloody week, you couldn’t make it up.

It’s bad enough that the adoption service has become an instrument of social engineering, obsessed with furthering the new state religion of ‘diversity’. Time and again we read of children being taken away from their families and handed over to gay couples. Why the hell are we bankrolling these fanatical cultural fascists? The next Tory government should immediately stop funding these spiteful gay rights activists and outlaw adoption by same-sex couples.

How many cases have there been exactly? I can only think of the one where the grandparents were turned down and the children (who had been in care for quite some time) were ‘handed over’ to a gay couple. Cue grandparent rebranding, cue the usual suspects, cue the music…

I love the new ‘mark it good or bad’ system where Mail readers can agree or disagree with the comments left on the stories. Take this example:

Minus 21 from someone who was actually in care themselves expressing their own opinion. What clever Mail readers and their “I reckon” opinions.

Tony from Bushey is obviously wrong because he only knows someone with gay parents and didn’t get told what to think by a man who lives in a big house in a gated community in Florida where he gets paid a fortune to churn out shit about how bad this country is.

Amanda Platell got upset later in the week because some nasty gays didn’t like the endless shit-flinging in her columns. She can give it but she obviously cannot take it (no bum fun pun intended):

I was subjected to a vile and filthy campaign of personal abuse from the gay media. In one online forum, a contributor suggested the only reason I held such views was that I obviously ‘wasn’t getting enough’.

It wasn’t me, honest. I just questioned her qualifications for preaching about marriage and parenting when she is a childless spinster.

I know it may seem a cliche to state that ‘some of my best friends are gay’. But in this instance, it just happens to be true.

Uh-oh I can see where this is going…

My best friend, whom I regard as a brother, is gay and a high-profile advocate for gay rights. Several of my close friends have had same-sex civil partnerships. I have lost two dear friends to Aids. I don’t have a homophobic bone in my body. I just happen to believe that vulnerable children face the best possible life-chances when they are adopted by married heterosexual couples – a view backed by an increasing weight of academic evidence*snip!*

I think that’s quite enough of that sort of thing now. What about the readers’ comments?

That’s an awfully big opinion for someone who says they have no opinion. Also: Is it retarded to not know how to turn the CAPS LOCK off?

Bloody TV, the last few weeks have seen the end of Pushing Daisies (forever), The Inbetweeners (for now) and Heroes (until next season). The final ever episode of The Shield is on next week. Lost and 24 are almost done for ages too. So what to watch?

Well there’s Aussie import Underbelly on FX and Bit Torrents (where series 2 which is set in the time before series 1 (I could have just said it’s a prequel) which is a fast-paced mature crime drama and makes The Wire look like the 1965 William Hartnells do when compared to recent Doctor Who episodes. This is not a criticism at all as I love all of these things bur Ver Wirez has been known to make me fall asleep and not even Queer As Folk’s Stuart Jones’ American accent acting (and bum scenes as per usual) can keep me involved if I’ve had a long day.

Just the quality of The Apprentice, Snog Marry Avoid and Extreme Male Beauty then. Oh joy.

What’s that? SMA finished this week too? Oh you cruel telly scheduling Gods.

There’s still Party Down which can fulfill your freaky comedy needs and it comes from the braintrust of Veronica Mars and other geeks. It’s been recommissioned for a second season if that helps to persuade you.

Buffy lives on in the comics, so bonus geek points.

There’s also The Apprehensive to watch of course.

Pants.

Not Doctor Who and Bananaman, unfortunately… but this trailer for Delta and the Bannermen is quite the polished turd.

I don’t think the cover has been released yet but the Region 1 one is pretty enough for me:

But remember, kids: Ken Dodd is not funny enough! The story is still ghastly but I have it on pre-order because of my lifestyle choice.

What is good and Who-ey is this:

As listened to on the buses this morning, The Scapegoat is a fine piece of audio adventures in timeywimey spaces. I think having Pat Mills writing it might be a big part of its appeal… and Sheridan Smith’s tits are on the cover a bit, which will return those popular Google Analytics chart toppers to their rightful prime position*.

*Missus.