I don’t understand; why is everyone getting so excited about a delegation from an online money-transfer company visiting the UK? (I assume that’s what they mean by the Paypal visit to Britain…)

Guffaw. No, seriously - Benedict XVI, His Holiness the Pope, Defender of Paedophiles and Mighty Scourge of Birth Control in Africa is coming to a town near YOU. (And YOU’RE paying for it, despite the untold wealth of the Roman Catholic Church.) Hurrah!

The radio and television waves have been abuzz with unctuous priests smoothing the way for Big Ben and reassuring everyone that modern Catholicism is open and tolerant (apart from the odd one) - but what do YOU think about the visit? Surely it’s good news that such a high representative of God’s bountiful and endless love is here to bless our country (apart from gays, of course)? Time for some pope ‘n’ poll…

Recently visited a good friend of mine whose job has taken him to the Midlands; despite the grinding poverty and socio-cultural deprivation of the area, he and his young family are doing well. However, I couldn’t help but notice that his eldest daughter (3) has inherited a horribly debilitating speech impediment from her mother - she pronounces words like “bath” and “class” with a short “a”, like what they do in the t’up t’north of England. The girl’s father is, like me, of good southern stock, so it must be absolutely mortifying for him; but it seems as if the defective gene wins out in cases like this.

I’m sure resident linguistics expert LZ will back me up when I state categorically that no research WHATSOEVER into this has ever been conducted; so in the name of science, and in order to determine the demographic / probable wealth and good looks of you, gentle reader, I’d like you to tell me which side of the isogloss you fall, by means of voting in the latest Very Poll.

(NB 1 - Since this is such a ground-breaking and scientifically vital study, I’ve taken the unprecedented step of disabling the “Couldn’t Give a Toss” feature.)
(NB2 - If you’re Americo-Canadian and that, I assume that your life-chances aren’t damaged in the same way by having a short “a” as they are over here.)

So Michael Jackson, now in the advanced stages of putrefaction, fulfils the promise he implied in the “Thriller” video and has returned from the grave with a new hit, “This Is It”. Well, sort of. In fact, it’s an unfinished demo from the 1991 “Dangerous” sessions that has been resurrected (rather than MJ himself) - which explains why a) it sounds like he was singing down a telephone with a clothes peg on his nose (remaining nose surface area permitting), and b) there’s a comparative lack of overdubbed “heee-heee!”, “Shamone!” and “OOWWWW!” noises. The record company has roped in Tito, Marlon, Randy, Glenda, Colin, Samuel L and various other family members to provide backing vocals - which they manage to do, to their credit, mostly in the same key as their deceased brother.

Actually, for my money (which is exactly what the record company is after), it’s not a bad track, despite evidently having been left off “Dangerous” because it’s pretty much same song as “Heal the World”. The uncluttered production is a refreshing change from the current irritating bleepy R’n'B norm, and Jackson’s voice sounds surprisingly fresh, similar to how it did in the glory days of “Off the Wall” and “Thriller”.

Obviously none of that matters, and the only reason I’ve mentioned it at all is because the poll needed changing, and the song’s title allows me to indulge in some appropriately low-rent wordplay. Nevertheless, you can check the song out using the link above; whadday’all think?

TM posed a very interesting question earlier today; “What does one have to achieve in one’s life to be the subject of a musical?”. Man-eating plants, American chat-show hosts, old testament patriarchs, French revolutionaries, Nazi-defying nuns - even tubby Australian cricketers with Berlusconi-esque hair-weaves have all made the grade - but is there a formula? What is it that makes Lord Lloyd-Webber gasp, splutter into his morning cornflakes and exclaim “YES! That’s a BRILLIANT subject around which to once again work the exact same four or five (probably plagiarised in the first place) melodies which I’ve been using for my entire fucking forty-year career!”

Ultimately, I have to confess that I don’t have a clue. But that’s not going to stop me putting it to a poll; obviously, all your ideas are welcome too.

(Actually, following on from a post earlier today, perhaps Nick Griffin could be the subject of a musical…here’s the title track:

“Griffin! Your name derives from a Greek mythical creature;
Griffin! In your ideal society coloured people don’t feature.
Griffin! Your rhetoric’s loud and your rants are belting,
Griffin! Shame for your electoral prospects that your face appears to be melting.”

What do you mean, no? It NEARLY scans…)

Crikey! What a hullabaloo over the NHS we’ve seen over the last few days; it started when right-wingers in the USA campaigning against Barack Obama’s health reforms described it as an “Orwellian” example of what they want to avoid. Sarah “How about you quit making stuff up?” Palin then jumped on the bandwagon by, erm, making a load of stuff up about our health service and labelling it “evil” (largely, I suspect, because she isn’t really sure what “Orwellian” means).

Then a gratifying backlash; a huge Twitter campaign from the UK leapt the the NHS’s defence, politicians on all sides have got mushy about our unwieldy bureaucra-tastic health monster, and nearly everyone in the UK, no matter how crap they might think the NHS actually is, has quite rightly rallied round to defend it from the ludicrous criticism by ignorant racist scaremongering hate-filled God-bothering former colonial fucktards.

But what REALLY matters is what YOU, my ever-dwindling loyal(ish) readership, want from YOUR healthcare provision. And with that in mind, plus the fact that the poll desperately needed changing and that this was the only thing I could come up with, I’ll put it to a public vote…

Aaahh, the first week of July - the sun is shining; birds are singing, flowers blooming, various other flora, fauna and weather patterns are doing whatever they do, and your editor is suddenly feeling very, very much older.

But none of that matters, because the country is in the collective grip of Wimbledon fever. Every year, millions of armchair slobs who don’t normally give a monkeys about tennis will go crazy apeshit bonkers for it; a schedules-monstering 12.6 million of them watched the first ever match under the new roof on Monday night. And this year,  the normal gallant British tryhard-doofus has been replaced by someone who actually has a chance; step forward Andy Murray.

Despite looking as if he’d be better suited to “World of Warcraft” than to actual physical activity, and despite suffering from an alternating nationality (British if he wins, Scottish if he loses) and a stroppy teenage personality, Murray is (whisper it soft) very good. But what we really want to know is - WILL HE WIN?

One for the poll…

Despite a tumultuous couple of weeks and a biblical hiding in various elections, it looks like Gordon Brown is keeping his job as PM. Which might just make sense; Labour strategists probably figure that they’re facked in the next election whatever happens; better to let Gordo take the rap and then start with a clean slate, meanwhile allowing the Tories to become fully embroiled in the consequences of the financial meltdown during the next term of office.

Nonetheless, I haven’t had a poll for a while, so let’s indulge in some not-particularly-fevered and now-irrelevant speculation as to who the God-fearing, upstanding people of this noble land might want as PM instead of our current unelected jaw-dropping Youtube-gurning charisma-vacuum.

Choices in the usual location to your right (and, in Nick Griffin’s case, to nearly everybody’s right); feel free to nominate your own…

Gentle reader, like many of your good selves, I was always inclined to believe the oft-quoted line about our MPs being “good people doing a difficult job who get into politics for the right reasons”; however, that was before I found out the precise nature of their financial arrangements. They’re allowed £24,000 per annum for a second home (a free mortgage on a loan of about £180,000, in other words), they get a generous “expense” allowance (and don’t even have to provide receipts if the expense is under £25 - which makes you wonder what sort of bongo film Jackie Smith’s husband was watching if it DID need a receipt….) - and on top of this,  they can have as many outside jobs as they want.

Dangle these kind of carrots in front of any group of 600-odd people, and they’re going to collectively ensure that the words “trough” and “snout” quickly become appropriate.  Of course, the worst offenders are the Tories - eg David Cameron’s cousin Sir Nick Ffoulking-Lloadsamoney, MP for Rottenborough in rural Lincolnshire (a place he has never actually visited, of course - it’s absolutely ghastly), has as many as 7 outside posts; he has directorships with British Gas, Ponzi Banking, Badcough Tobacco, Blood Diamonds PLC of Sierra Leone, Rainforest Logging and Barone Sanitation, as well as being Fred Goodwin’s accountant. However, Labour aren’t much better: thanks in no small part to the housing allowance, the entire borough of Islington has been bought up by Labour MPs and their Guardian hangers-on, and now every house has its own Banksy mural, and the whole place stands as a metrosexual espresso-reeking testament to the death of real socialism.

So what should be done? Well, I don’t bloody know, do I?  How about a poll? (Only the second new poll this year or something; and here’s me moaning about MPs not earning their corn…)

Gentle reader; you know my grammatical ways by now - highly knowledgeable about correct applications and strongly in favour of fierce correction of all mistakes (except when I get something wrong, at which point prescriptivism becomes pointless and correction becomes negative reinforcement of meaningless rules / language is ever-changing / people should be encouraged to express themselves how they want blah blah blah.)

Last night, in written conversation with an esteemed colleague, I decided to use “to wikipedia” as a verb; a fairly common occurrence, in much the same way as “to google” has entered the language. But I needed to use it in the past tense, and was somewhat stumped; “wikipediad”?  Looks too much like “Olympiad”, and therefore as if it should signify a worldwide competition for shoddy editing or something. “Wikipedia’d”, then? Surely that’s far worse than any of the apostrophe-based mistake’s you see every day. In the end, I went with “made reference to a popular encyclopaedic website whose editorial and funding practices are somewhat controversial” - but there MUST be a more succinct way of putting it.

Maybe you clever blogosphere types with your computers, jobs, wide range of knowledge and different experiences of life can help me… I’ll put it to a poll.

Ahhh, Christmas. A time for giving and receiving and God and stuff and junk. Carols will be sung, yule logs will be burned / flushed (after a couple of days for that bloody stuffing to digest properly), crackers, turkeys blah blah…

What? I’m over a month early? Well don’t blame me; I just believe what the adverts tell me. Bar a brief pumpkiny break a while back, retailers seem to have been desperately screaming “Christmas!!!” at me since mid-August, so I figured that we must be nearly there by now.

Anyway, now is Christmas for most online retailers, myself included; what happens in the next two or three weeks can make or break their year. It’s prime present-buying time in the increasingly dominant online market, and since I’m pretty much surgically attatched to a computer, I’ve just finished all my purchasing, barring, of course, a few last-minute large and inexpensive items which will make my under-tree present stack look more generous than it really is.

But as we know, ’tis better to receive than to give*; so what will you be getting for Christmas? There’s only one way to find out…

( * - unless you’re in my extended family. Some in clan Tafkass are in the habit of hoarding unwanted presents to be “re-gifted” to other members of the family at a later date; there have been at least two unfortunate incidents of someone receiving, several years later, the exact same present they’d once given (the present having “done the round” of family members) - and I once received a tie from my aunt which, when taken to Marks and Spencer’s to exchange for cash, turned out to have been last actively stocked over 8 years previously.)