I Write Like...

While mucking around with the internet yesterday, I stumbled on this little engine. It's called "I Write Like..." and it claims to be able to use a sample of your own work and, by the magic of modern electronics, analyse it and then say whether your style is similar to a famous author - or not, presumably: who you "write like" in other words.

Apparently, after extensive testing with different blog posts, I write like H.P. Lovecraft. Good grief!

I'd never really understood exactly what people meant when they described this blog as a horror story. I thought they were just being rude. But thanks to "I Write Like..." dot com, I now know it's because I write like the father of the grizzly modern horror genre. So there you go.

If you're a blogger or just curious about your general writing style, then give it a try. You might find you're (yet) another H.P. Lovecraft. Or possibly even worse.

Saturday Night Music Special

I'm oddly happy with the state of the news just now what with Mandelson coming out and scuppering the irrelevance that is the Labour leadership fiasco and that tragic Moat bloke finally doing our idiot police a favour and putting himself out of their heavily-armed misery, and the awesome Booker planting another hobnailed boot in the sweaty groin of climate change fanaticism.

The great Gove's rearguard after his crew's cockups and his brave resurrection of political accountability seems to be working reasonably well too. Excellent.

In other words, there's nothing much around that's annoying enough to talk about, so I think this a downtime moment - a time for some nice music, perhaps.

How about this: "Dream Away" by my hero, George Harrison?


I suppose we're all "Time Bandits" really, one way or another. We all dream of reliving our past so we can correct it in whatever way from a position of knowledgable strength. That's the ammunition known as hindsight. Sadly, of course, it's an impotent trick of memory.

Be content you own the human gift that is regret. It keeps us little people honest - and (oddly) free :)

Moscow Centre Still In Business

Putin honouring ex-Soviet spy George Koval, 2007

I love John LeCarre and his greatest creation, George Smiley, so it's super to know that whoever the real Karla is, whatever the real Moscow Centre actually is and however many times the KGB has changed its name, some things will never alter. The Russians' eternal paranoia being one of them. From the story:

They were alleged to have met US government officials given codenames such as "Farmer", "Parrot" and "Cat" as well as engaging such tried and tested espionage methods as dead drops and brush passes.

And so it goes on. Whoever thinks LeCarre was writing fiction can think again, as, indeed, the newspaper points out itself. Con Coughlin has also written a good little comment piece on the real spy ring bust but, much more importantly, Radio 4 has just finished the last instalment of an excellent, year-long re-working of the complete Smiley collection with the superb Simon Russell Beale as the planet-brained superspy. Sometimes they still get it right. Well, rarely.

Still, I think I might buy this one. I've come over all nostalgic

Besides, in this case truth and fiction are the same thing anyway, but with one, small exception: Smiley is serious but the truth is bloody hilarious.

North Korea's World Cup Mash

NORTH KOREA CELEBRATES FLAWLESS 8-0 WIN

16-06-10

NORTH Koreans were celebrating last night after their team's long-predicted 8-0 thrashing of decadent capitalist Brazil. Glorious leader win 1966 Word Cup after beating Harold Wilson 195-0 Footage of Korea's nine-foot tall players scoring goal after goal past a weeping and unusually Oriental-looking Brazilian side was beamed across the country to over 35 million people, 11 million more than its actual population. The first three goals saw their goalkeeper earn the 47th hat-trick of his career, with the last being a remarkable bicycle kick from the halfway line. Each goal was celebrated by the players running to the corner flag and delivering an impassioned five-minute lecture on the nation's rising factory productivity to a rapt crowd of 52,000 Korean fans. Tom Logan, World Cup analyst at Madeley-Finnegan, said: "North Korea's footage differs significantly from the rest of the world, inasmuch as Ellis Park appeared to be a dilapidated velodrome on an industrial estate and Korea's fourth and seventh goal was exactly the same footage." But Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Il said: "Our glorious players showed what discipline, moral fortitude and being repeatedly beaten can achieve. I personally coached the team myself, shortly after writing my 375th novel Super Kim Slays Moth-Ra & Has Sexy Fun With Madonna, and fighting a bear with a claw hammer." A North Korean government spokesman added: "Some may think they remember a goalkeeper called Ri Myong-Guk. They are mistaken. If anybody meets somebody claiming to be a member of his family, they are actually Western demons and should be shot on sight." North Korean fan Jong-Se Park said: "Much appreciation and fraternal joy to the mighty footballers of our land! I do so hope my family can please be released unharmed so they can witness the ultimate triumph in the final!"

As reported by the Daily Mash!

Jobless Bloke: "I Love Lisa"

While I was messing around with the word 'hypnosis' on YouTube, I stumbled on this gem.


I certainly like to listen to the sound of her woyce and I really dig the deep, hype-notic sleep that her beautiful, green-eyed woyce generates with a little of what amounts to your basic counting, as far as I can tell.

Good/bad, this puppy would definitely sleep with Lisa. (That is what she said, right?)

Whatever. But you know what? I reckon this is a Tory party political aimed at indolent male dole spongers. Brilliant! This will be one of the most effective deficit reduction strategies of all time. A government-subsidised young Russian(?) dominatrix's sex promise in exchange for significant efforts finally to find a job and stick with it.

It's definitely novel and it could be a winner. So well done, George Osborne! (As long as that's not your sister. That would be weird.)

Serendipitous Oil Spills

Dizzy has found a remarkable website charting the spread of the Gulf of Mexico BP oil spill. It's a hefty leak, and what you can do with this tool is superimpose its vast expanse on wherever you like in the world to see just how huge it is. I suppose there is some valid environmental message in such an exercise somewhere. I'm not sure what it is, exactly, beyond 'Cor, that really brings it home to you', or maybe, 'Cor, isn't the ocean big!'.

There is another use, however, of this program, as Dizzy demonstrates. You can bury your least favourite bits of your own country under thirty million barrels of oil slick. Neat. Dizzy chose Scotland. I sort of approved at first, but in the end it wasn't target-rich enough for me, so I opted for an alternative ground zero of Huddersfield so that I could take out the entire expanse of the two giant northern English conurbations and Labour heartlands.

Unfortunately, I had to take out York, Harrogate, the Peaks and the Dales in order to get Tyneside. Oh, and half the Irish Sea, all of North Wales - and Shrewsbury. Well, sacrifices had to be made to get them all under the one spill - without threatening the Home Counties. Besides, who's really going to miss Mold? And I did save the Lake District...sort of. You just can't get to it any more.

Danny Alexander's Challenge

This is the global lending merry go-round as explained for the general public by two leading Australian economists, wisely employing a variation of the Socratic method.



There is an answer to all this, you know, and it's called 'cuts'. I wonder if young Danny Alexander is up to the challenge. Ha! Fat chance.

Remember John Redwood? We might have had a chance with him.

Hat tip: Tangled Web

New BBC Weather Plans Cause Uproar In Newsagents

I was informed by a reliable source today (my dad) that the BBC's new plans for recruiting weather presenters could well be in breach of every employment and equality law ever made. He told me that he heard from a friend he bumped into while he was getting his newspapers this morning that the BBC is planning to employ only Muslims from now on to present the weather - and no one else. When he asked the bloke what prompted this hairbrained decision, he was told:

"Because sometimes the weather is Sunni, but more often than not it's Shiite."

Naturally, I was outraged. Jokes really don't come much worse than that.

RIP Ray Allen - And Lord Charles

Widely regarded as the best ever ventriloquist - and the funniest - Ray Allen passed away yesterday at the age of 79. Part of my childhood sadly gone, but not forgotten. Gottle o' geer!

Take Me To Your Leader

Not sure how Matt manages to be so damn funny - and spot on - every day, but he's done it again.

Election Quote

"One day the 'don't knows' will get in and where will we be then?"

Spike Milligan

Hat tip: Inside Out: a jaxxland perspective

The Hopefuls - And One Other

Lol. Peter Brookes is a top 'toonist.

The Best Downfall

The best Downfall mash was this one. Why? Because it perfectly captured the massive Labour wobble about Brown in 2008, when they could have got rid of him. It also reminds us why the Guardian has switched sides today, and regrets reversing the position it took at the time: that Brown should have gone.

Mind you, it's bloody funny too. Be warned, however, that there are tons of swear words, and I usually try to stay away from that kind of language. I bloody do.

Bigotgate: The Game

As Crash Gordon becomes Car Crash Gordon (how weird was that? Watch it here), a new game's been released to celebrate Wednesday's Brown-inspired campaign disaster, when he manfully took on a sweet old lady and was battered.

Be the gaffe prone jinxed PM, who can cause a car accident from 100 yards just by opening his gob, and pit your wits against Duffy, the Vampire Slayer (cheers for that, John Ward). Can you do better than Brown? Can you go more than one round before you, too, are devoured! See if Cameron or Clegg would do any better (they could hardly do any worse ;)

Play Downing Street Fighter (now with Gillian Duffy bonus round) here.

Bell On Bigotgate

Been too busy for Bigotgate today, more's the pity. But I've had a chance to skim through all the papers now and have been struck by one thing in particular: the schizoid coverage of Brown's epic fubar by the Guardian. Its snob-Left middle class are smelling their own farts (a la South Park's 'smug alert') like crazy over some touchy feely rentapole called Millionovus Poppinova or something's, mortally wounded by the OAP's comments about Eastern Europeans 'flocking' into Britain act. Well, I don't know about you, but I'd call a million or so permanent new members of the community, all from the same origin, a pretty hefty 'flock', wouldn't you?

This is 'grow up, do' territory, but, relentlessly, this stupid person instead drones on and on and on with this fake victimhood horse manure, possibly designed to deflect us from criticising the true villain of this piece: el Gordo. If not - if it is somehow genuine - then in terms of spectacularly missing the point it's hard to trump. The point? The point is that Brown simply lowered not just his, but his entire political party's mask for a moment and revealed in all its stark reality how very, very much the middle class snob-Left (the Toynbee and Harmans of this world, to name but two out of hundreds either in politics or in journalism or both) fear, despise and resent their own core vote. You see this not so much in the article, which is just bluster and drivel, but in the comments below it, which are generally disgusting. If you really can stand it, you can see what I mean here.

On the other hand, though, you have Steve Bell. Artist, a committed Tory basher with plenty of previous and a dyed in the wool lefty, but at least he's got a sense of humour. He hates hypocrisy even more than he loathes David Cameron:

Ah well, home time. But, oh joy unconfined, another debate to look forward to tonight. I do hope Dave and Nicky tease little Gordy about all this.

Mercilessly.

A Few Lefties Make Me Laugh; Dave Miliband's Not One Of Them

Yes, one or two - but only sometimes. This effort from Guardian 'toonist Martin Rowson I thought was pretty good, although it might still be a bit too soon to include the pontiff, given the scale of the Foreign Office cluster-fluff with the email scandal. By the way, on that, isn't this a clear test of the principle of Ministerial Responsibility? "Ministerial what?" I hear you say. Yes, Ministerial Responsibility - a novel idea from yesteryear that meant ministers took responsibility for whatever happened in their own departments, warts, (23-year old, leftie Oxbridge piss artist uncivil servants) and all.

In the past - pre-Nulab, you might say - with a diplomatic incident as serious as this one, the minister would almost certainly have had to consider his position. Some would have gone and some would have tried to hang on. You know, the Carrington/Prior dilemma. Point is, all would have considered it, given the gravity of the offence. In Carrington's case, with the Falkland's in 1982, he chose to go; Prior (and in-so-doing some might say he set a precedent) on the Maze escapes in '83, refused. But both considered it, and that's the clincher.

What are the chances of that ever happening with one of this gang of undignified, amoral parasites? Miliband, resign! The thought would never have even crossed his mind. He didn't even bother to speak out about it initially - that was left to Jim Murphy (one Labourist minister I actually do - shock horror - have a bit of time for) who's not even in the department, (unless the Scottish Office is part of the FCO these days and I hadn't noticed).

But that's the point: not the resignation, but the principle. That the thought never crossed Miliband's mind speaks directly to his contempt for the principle by which he was supposed to abide as a minister of the Crown; the behaviour of the boy civil servant and his superiors to a culture of general contempt in the entire ministry, possibly the entire government.

What is more, this poisonous Labour decadence has seeped into many, many other facets of British public life, including most of its institutions. The scandal over the papal email merely serves further to highlight that tragic reality. Hell, Miliband probably thought the note was funny.

But there is an antidote to the poison on May 6th. Yeah, you guessed it: vote Conservative.

Right Target, Wrong Ammo

If you want to take out a troublesome enemy tank, in this case an obsolete knockoff Russian T62 (also known as the Liberal Mk1 Main Battlebus), you don't use a bunch of tracer bullets. However accurate the rounds might be, and however many you loose, not only are they simply going to bounce off the turret of the lumbering, sputtering war machine (in this case the 360 degree swivelling Nick Clegg), they will give away your position too. The newspapers that profess a bluish bent have done just that with their suspiciously timed, well-aimed but poorly armed, poorly co-ordinated full frontal assault. Over the top, chaps!

No, what you need to do, tactically, is to bide your time, choose the correct ordnance and then open fire with the radar-guided, state of the art heavy guns. A battery of that nature would be (would have been/will be?) decisive; the fireworks delightful and the result, devastating. So Iain Dale and John Ward are dead right in their assessment, that the attack was ill-conceived, will backfire and the Tories should have nothing to do with it.

Having said that, I recognise the possibility that a charge of hypocrisy might be coming my way. Well, so what? It would be unfounded. What I deposit here is personal opinion. And I stand by my opinion that nothing has happened to alter my long-held view that Nick Clegg is a two-faced, overhyped, establishment lightweight that no one in their right mind should ever consider as prime ministerial material. He's benefited from the anti-politics thang, for sure, and the TV media's desire for a Close Run Thing (hung parliaments mean higher ratings), but that's it. On policy he's nowhere. At least with Labour you just have universally bad ideas, most of which have been discredited already after thirteen lost years, and involve, if we were to have to suffer five more lost years of them, plunging an increasingly authoritarian UK into social and economic oblivion.

With Clegg's Libdums, you get either conflicting policies, badly thought-out policies, unfundable policies or policies (and these are the really interesting ones) that will lead us to being kicked off the UN Security Council, subsumed by a federal EU and relegated to third rate power status (see Simon Hughes). I'm not entirely certain anyone in this country is quite ready for any of that particular brand of 'change', or ever will be.

But it's up to the Tories, and the pisspoor papers (if they can get their heads out of their collective fundaments) to make people see that.

PS:
One online rag really does provide a case in point:

Nick Clegg dossier reveals his Martian roots

DAS BUNKER, Whopping, Tuesday (MSBBC) — Your Super Soaraway SUN has found the blueprint for Nick Clegg’s top-secret TV debate strategy in the back of a CAB, revealing he is a MARTIAN INVADER.

It reveals the Lib Dem leader STOLE DNA from David Cameron to DUPLICATE his style and cover Britain in a ROBOT ARMY OF CLEGGS, with BlackBerrys to be installed in all citizens.

“It’s very SLOPPY to just leave it in my CAB in a locked and alarmed SUITCASE,” said the cab driver, Andy Coulson,” and I thought people should know. That’s why I SOLD it to The Sun.”

Clegg DISGRACED himself in the television debate last Thursday, winning a mere 37% in BIASED COMMUNIST POLLS, while TORY SUPERSTAR Dave “Dave” Cameron topped the charts with a SURGE to 31% — despite foolish commentators claiming Clegg was less terrible than GORDON BROWN attempting to SMILE or the picture of DAVE CAMERON someone had PHOTOSHOPPED onto the screen.

“I used my PSYCHIC POWERS to talk to ADOLF HITLER after the debate and he would DEFINITELY vote Lib Dem now,” reveals luscious, pouting MYSTIC MEG in her political opinion column on Page 3 today.

The Tories have responded by DISTANCING themselves from the Liberal Democrats’ WASHED-UP, SOCIALIST POLICIES and put out new posters blaming the recession on the people responsible: POLISH ASYLUM TERRORISTS on THE DOLE.

“The Conservative Home web forum got out MS Paint and came up with some great stuff,” said Tory webmaster Andy Coulson. “Though they thought we should distance ourselves from those WISHY-WASHY, NUT-CUTLET-EATING LIBERALS at the Daily Mail, who are SOFT ON VOLCANOES and soft on the CAUSES of volcanoes.”

An article in the Völkischer Beobachter on Sunday by Andy Coulson REVEALED Clegg’s SPANISH wife, RUSSIAN grandfather and MARTIAN allegiance, and how he would definitely fail a proper Tory BRITISHNESS test.

“Fuck,” said Rupert Murdoch, speaking to his editors about the ACTUAL poll numbers.

I mean, shocking scaremongering!

+Update+

This is what Clegg really said (just in the spirit of accuracy, you understand - no smearist I):

“Watching Germany rise from its knees after the war and become a vastly more prosperous nation has not been easy on the febrile British psyche.”

“All nations have a cross to bear, and none more so than Germany with its memories of Nazism. But the British cross is more insidious still.”

“A misplaced sense of superiority, sustained by delusions of grandeur and a tenacious obsession with the last war, is much harder to shake off. We need to be put back in our place.”

Hmm. The change we need.

The Liberal Mystery Tour

Cleggmania grips Britain!



Far out man! Scrap the Bomb! LSD rules! "Liberal Sychedelic (sic) Democrats". Clegg's bigger than Jesus, man! Gotta grow a beard, dude. And get some sandals. Free love!

(Good effort from one of Guido's imaginative minions.)

Make Your Mind Up

Please, please promise these people you will get out and vote. Then, perhaps, they'll never make a video like this one again! You can thank Iain Dale for it.

Honestly though? I think it's awful, silly and excruciatingly camp, but has a very sound message about supporting your democracy - and looked like a lot of fun to make, too.

Wonderfully British.

The Next Debate

I think the debates format should be more informal, maybe with a musical flavour. It's been done before.



Not only would this give the country a sense that our idiot politicians ultimately had only our best interests at heart (instead of theirs, shock horror), and would cooperate out of a sense of duty and in that spirit of grownup-ness, it'd be a shitload more interesting than the first one. Massively.

Maybe Cameron and his band could get the ball rolling with a sharp and uplifting nostaliga set. Eighties stuff, perhaps.

Clegg could follow up with some sort of vicious, meaningless goth/death metal fusion crap. (I hear he's obsessed with that sort of thing.)

Brown will just be the roady. If he's lucky. Well, hey, at least he'd have a chance to be involved. That's fair.

He'll need the work.