According to an amazing story which broke this afternoon, George W Bush’s administration was going to award Harry Potter author JK Rowling the Presidential Medal of Freedom - the highest civil honour which the White House can bestow - but eventually decided against it because the books “encouraged witchcraft” in children. Sigh…

Sadly, nothing about right-wing America’s inability to distinguish truth from fiction really surprises me any more; I wouldn’t bat an eyelid if the story were later updated with details of widespread spontaneous town hall meetings featuring rednecks exercising their rights to bear arms and calling for the arrest of Steven Spielberg for facilitating the illegal immigration of trapezoid-headed extra-terrestrials.

(To be fair to the Republicans, their fear of witchcraft is sort-of understandable; after all, someone previously had turned their Speaker of the House of Representatives into a Newt….)

#1 in a very occasional series of cleaning products which wildly and emotionally overstate their purpose or efficacy - I found this container of “Doom! Doom! Doom! Mothproofer” in my grandmother’s cleaning cupboard over the weekend, alongside a bottle of “Armageddon! 500-Megaton Explosion! Global Mass-Extinction Event! Air Freshener”, which I stupidly forgot to photograph.

An interesting story from the weekend; Chris de Burgh (real name Christopher Davison, by the way) has attacked a newspaper critic over a negative review of one of his shows, issuing a statement which deals in exactly the same ad hominem insults which the journalist had used to savage his performance. And why shouldn’t he? To be honest, I have a great deal of sympathy with de Burgh; he’s a serious musician, and ALL of the opprobrium which is continually heaped upon him (including this particular review) is because of one track - The Lady in Red - which, whilst obviously awful, is just one song in a canon of 17 albums. Like most people who criticise him, the only other song of his that I’ve even heard of is “Spanish Train” - yet despite all the ignorant brickbats, he’s still massively popular with his considerable fanbase.

Easy pops at unfashionable targets are the stock-in-trade of way too many lazy hacks; Chris de Burgh is such a niche market that a paper should really send someone who’s at least a BIT of a fan, otherwise they’re wasting everyone’s time and might as well not review the gig at all. The whole “Lady in Red is mawkish” thing has been done to death for twenty years now, and by considerably funnier people than any journalist.

I remember that Phil Collins was the subject of a similar witch-hunt a while back: on the probable basis of nothing more than his cheesy Cock-er-nee appearance in “Buster”, and the slightly preachy tone of “Another Day in Paradise”, he was judged uncool, and regularly pilloried by a clique of pallid NME-employed girlfriend-free nerds with bum-fluff and readymeal-stained t-shirts. It took the fact that Collins’ impressive talent and legacy was (and remains) hugely respected by movers and shakers in the R’n'B / hip-hop world in the States - oh, and of course the gorilla advert - to put these twerps back in their box.

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…)

A shocking story, this, and one which shows how far the BNP has crept into mainstream society; the British Legion has accepted a donation from a BNP fundraiser. The lady concerned, Rachel Firth, spent 24 hours living in a box to publicise the plight of soldiers returning from the frontline to poverty - half the money she raised was donated to the Legion, the other half to the BNP. The Legion at first refused the money and then backtracked. The BNP, having promised not to gain publicity from the donation, of course went and splashed it all over their (ironically) stridently-multi-coloured website.

On the one hand, the fate of soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan is of course an issue which deserves airing - but on the other, the BNP are continually cynically seeking political capital by association with the issue, and hence charities which play along and take the cash are, to my mind, directly endorsing BNP views. I mean, the BRITISH LEGION, FFS! Can the charity’s management not see the obvious dichotomy between what their members fought for in World War 2 and the fact that they’re taking grubby money from a party just as racist as the Nazis which contains active holocaust-deniers?

This year’s run of poppies for Remembrance Day is already in production, but apparently in a new colour: white only.

A few weeks on from England’s cricketers gloriously regaining the Ashes from our Australian colonial underlings, normal sporting service has been resumed; England are now 2-0 down in the One Day Series to a scratch team of unemployed sheep farmers and former prisoners from an ex-penal colony somewhere in the South Pacific.

However, despite the see-saw excitement on the pitch, the state of the game as measured by the all-important amusing nickname remains dire - at least it does if the current crop is anything to go by. Gone are the creative days of “Dizzy” (Jason Gillespie), “Dickie” (Harold Bird), Graham “Picca” Dilley and “Fat Ting” (Mike Gatting. Actually, I made that one up); instead, here’s a few examples from the current squads:

England -

Andrew Strauss - “Strauss-y”
Ian Bell - “Bell-y”
Graeme Swann - “Swann-y”
Andrew Flintoff - “Freddie” (it alliterates. Coo!)
Rob Key - “Key-y” (probably)

Australia -

Stuart Clark - “Clark-o”
Michael Clarke - “Clarke-o” (subtle difference in pronunciation)
Mitchell Johnson - “John-o”
Mike Hussey - “Huss-o”
Ben Hilfenhaus - “Hilfenhaus-o”

Commentators -

Jonathan Agnew - “Aggers”
Henry Bloefeld - “Blowers”
Phil Tufnell - “Tuffers”

… you get the picture. There’s about as much creation, intelligence and design as there would be in a book about the history and development of planet Earth by Richard Dawkins. So here’s a few lame ideas for improvements; maybe you too could pitch in with a) your own suggestions, b) transatlantically-ignorant-yet-actually-fairly-pertinent questions along the lines of “what the fuck is cricket and why the fuck do you play it?” or c) withering, contemptuous silence.

Strauss - “The Waltzer”
Bell - “End”
Swann - “Owned-by-the-Queen-y”
Hilfenhaus - “Home Help”
Agnew - “s-Dei” (VP points for knowing what I’m on about here)
Rob Key - “The Florida Thief”
Mike Hussey - “The Amplified Slag” (Mike / Mic? No? Bloody sod you then…)

Q - What did the German say to the Kings of Leon as he was convincingly beating them in a game of dice?

A - “My sechs is on fire”

A brilliant story from that bastion of ground-breaking journalism, the East Anglian Daily Times (tagline - “ALL the local news, not just crop reports!”). It concerns a certain Sharnie-May Allwright who has just been stripped of the title of Colchester’s Carnival Queen over allegations of ill behaviour; to wit, “swearing in front of the young carnival princes and princesses at a photoshoot”.

Looking closer, you suspect that the photoshoot in question may well have been organised BY the East Anglian Daily Times, because they don’t exactly go out of their way portray Miss Allwright in a very sympathetic light. For a start, it’s written by a bloke called James Hore (although I’m sure that’s coincidental). Then there’s the pictures; a couple of Shaneecia (or whatever her name is) her looking frankly frumpy compared to her replacement Carnival Queen. Also - compare and contrast the fairly damning quote about her alleged bad behaviour (”it was just terrible - very loud, very angry and very hostile. There was swearing going on and a lot of bad feeling.”)… and the incredibly lame defence provided by her mother (“It is just ridiculous. She is just a 16-year-old girl and she has had something like this taken away from her.”)

But the real sting is saved for the last line of the piece - “Sharnie-May was the only girl to turn up to the judging about a month ago.”

Ouch…