Baby Barton and the Bad Writing

Fairly famous person becomes a father for the first time. The newspapers cover it. Fair enough. The punters are provided with a diet of trivia. This is understood. Nothing new there. But, in the case of the birth of a child, can't it be left at a simple reporting of the bare facts? The child's name, birth weight and the fact that mum and baby are doing well. That sort of thing. Isn't that enough? Even in the case of parents who court publicity? Just for common decency's sake? Because it's a special and unique time when perhaps it's in poor taste to use the story to make a point or to poke fun? Right?

No, not for the sort of bloody awful 'papers we have in this country.

Consider the recent arrival in this world of the first-born son of Ms. Georgia McNeil and Mr. Joey Barton, captain of QPR. According to the Daily Mirror, the fact that the boy's name is Cassius "has caused eye-rolling at the registrar's (sic) office". Really? Those of us who are parents will recall that a visit to a register office (get it right, you lazy tabloid hacks) is not something that is usually done within just a few hours of the birth. So, nameless hack at the Mirror, whose eyes have actually rolled? At which register office? Which registrar has been unprofessional enough to comment on a couple's choice of baby name? What is his or her name and when did you do the interview? Ah. So there hasn't been any "eye-rolling" at any register office, then? It was just a crap rhetorical device in your hastily written article? Why do you do that, though? Why just make up imaginary incidents? Is the truth not enough to work with?

Oh, and I see your article claims that Barton's son was named after Cassius Clay. But that hasn't actually been properly confirmed yet, has it? It's just an educated guess isn't it? While it might be true, you are reporting as fact something about which you're not actually certain, right? If you'd been listening in your journalism classes, you would remember that you can hedge your bets simply by inserting a modal verb such as might or could into your sentence. After all, some hacks have mastered this simple technique. On the same day that your piece came out, an unnamed Daily Mail reporter noted that "it is not yet known why the name Cassius has been chose (sic), although Barton is a boxing fan so it could be in reference to former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, who was born Cassius Clay."

The Mail, however, was also guilty of making up imaginary details when reporting the birth of Cassius Barton. In a separate article, Kirsty McCormack alleged that though "he's known for his bad boy behaviour... even Joey Barton's fans were shocked when he opted to play in a game while his girlfriend went into labour."

Guess what? Not a single "fan" of Joey Barton is named or quoted. If Ms. McCormack really did find any such "fans" who were "shocked", perhaps she'd be kind enough to name them and let us know when she conducted the interviews. Ahead of such proof being provided, let's just assume in the meantime that she was just inventing this detail of her story. It also seems odd that anyone might have been shocked when a careful reading of McCormack's own article suggests that the real sequence of events probably went more like this:

1. Ms. McNeil checked into hospital on Boxing Day
2. Joey Barton went to Swansea to play in QPR's 1-1 draw there
3. the match ended
4. Ms. McNeil went into labour
5. Barton headed to the hospital and was there in time for the birth

Why can't tabloid hacks just stick to the facts? Are they absolutely determined to be among the most despised people in the country? A year of Hackgate revelations and the embarrassingly shambolic TV performances of Paul McMullan have done nothing to moderate the routine habit of lying for a living, it seems.

Those of us who are not famous are quite fortunate in some respects. When we experience the joy of a first child coming into the world, we don't have a national newspaper guessing why the kid's name was chosen, even if we tweet about the birth, as more and more new parents doubtless choose to do these days. We also don't have to endure snide comments about our motives around the timing of the new father's arrival at the hospital.

Regarding Barton sr., we supporters of Queens Park Rangers will presumably all be hoping that the new arrival is not causing sleep loss to point of our skipper being tired and listless on the pitch later today. Coming away from the Emirates Stadium with even a single point looks like a big ask. But success away at Arsenal on New Year's Eve is not without precedent. Cast your mind back to December 31st 1994. Gunners fans were pleased to see the goal-shy John Jensen finally hit the back of the net. They were less pleased by the goals from Messrs. Allen, Gallen and Impey. A great day. Oh what fun it was to see the Rangers win away. More of the same, please, with Barton running to the away supporters to lead one of those 'rock the baby' goal celebrations.

U RRRRRRRRRRRRRRssssssssssssssssss

ciao, giovanni

saw bert again

a wet walk and a haircut.
my barber says that all the butch lesbians in town
are coming to him now.
word of mouth, he says,
seven of them, just today.
and on the way there
I saw bert again

A Little Mix of Mail Morality

Do any readers still keep up with UK singles chart? Is it still of any interest? It feels like ages since the young people of the nation waited en masse and with keen anticipation to see which artists had sold the most records in any given week. Once upon a time, though, the Number One slot was so coveted and of such significance that accusations of the chart being fixed in order to secure it were not unknown. A notable example is the case of the Sex Pistols' irreverent God Save the Queen allegedly being fraudulently bumped down to Number Two in favour of a Rod Stewart track in 1977, the year of Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee.

It seems like a fair guess that many who were appalled by Johnny Rotten's lyrics and the antics of the controversy-seeking punk band back in the seventies might be feeling more positive about the current UK Number One single, Wherever You Are. For the uninitiated, this is sung by a choir of the wives and girlfriends of military personnel deployed on the protracted and expensive nation-building exercise in distant Afghanistan, which continues to be marketed to the British population as somehow being connected with our own security here in the UK. The lyrics are drawn from letters between the women and their boyfriends and husbands, and the song came into being via a television programme in which choirmaster Gareth Malone worked to boost the morale and raise the profile of his choir. Along the way, the programme explores the women's vulnerability in the absence of their other halves.

The programme and the song both seem unobjectionable. Neither appear to glorify the open-ended and somewhat opaque nature of the British presence in Afghanistan, and proceeds from the song are directed to charities that do the worthy work of providing financial, social and emotional support for military personnel and their dependants. For as long as this country's governments continue to shovel professional soldiers and airmen into foreign adventures of dubious worth without providing properly for their ongoing welfare, such charities will clearly continue to play an important role.

The public have been provided with an opportunity to understand the women's situation and support their good cause. Hundreds of thousands of people have responded by buying the track, which outsold the rest of the top twelve singles combined. Congratulations all round.

There seems nothing remarkable, then, about any media commentary which praises the efforts of Mr. Malone and his choir. But perhaps it's not surprising that Melanie Phillips, writing in the Daily Mail, could not confine her remarks to a simple expression of admiration for Malone, the singers and those members of the public who have decided to support their work. The tabloid 'paper is relentless in its mission to induce feelings of fear, loathing and scorn in its readers. Not a day may pass without the Mail causing its buyers to splutter indignantly into their morning cornflakes, horrified by some new offence against family values and supposedly venerable British traditions. Common targets of this bile include immigrants, gays, mothers who hold down jobs, the BBC, 'loony left' councils and the mythical 'PC Brigade'.

In her Boxing Day piece about the Military Wives Choir, Phillips picks a much less obvious target at whom to take a swipe. She notes that Wherever You Are has sold six times as many copies as the Number Two single, the début track by X-Factor winners Little Mix. She then uses this piece of information to make a point that seems entirely spurious.

"Wherever You Are is composed from letters between these wives and their men - Britain’s heroes - as they served on the battlefield. By comparison, Little Mix’s Cannonball - of all titles! - seems quite exquisitely tasteless and inappropriate. 

This triumph of The Choir over The X Factor represents the victory of courage over celebrity and endurance over inanity.

The X-Factor song stands for wannabes - however winsome - dazzled by the prospect of fame and money. The Choir’s song stands for courage, patriotism and true, enduring love."

Love for the X-Factor is not something you will find expressed here at this is my england. The only time that the TV talent show has had a mention here was in a poem that listed it among the bread-and-circuses items fed to the television watching public in order to keep them docile. But Phillips references the televised singing contest in an extraordinary way. For her, there exists an ideological battle between "courage" and "endurance" on one side and "celebrity" and "inanity" on the other. The singing wives of some servicemen willingly represent the forces of the former. They have consciously taken up arms and have prevailed. You imagined that they just wanted to enjoy the experience of recording a song and raising some money for charity? No, no. Not the case. Knowingly, they became valiant warriors in a fight between qualities-Melanie-Phillips-likes and qualities-Melanie-Phillips-doesn't-like. Their firm intention was to make a statement by trouncing Little Mix, those representatives of everything that the Military Wives Choir avowedly despises. Doubtless, not a single member of this choir of heroines has ever sullied her noble soul by watching the X-Factor on TV, so disgusted are they all by the programme's shoddy values. Phillips doesn't need to interview the choir members to find this out because it's just so obvious to anyone with a shred of decency about them.

In the imaginary world of Melanie Phillips, it is "inappropriate" and "tasteless" for the pop charts to feature a routine love song in the same week that the soldiers' wives release their charity track. In this imaginary world, all other recording artists should withdraw their material from sale in order to avoid causing offence. In this world, it's not enough simply to feel pleasure that a charity single has massively outsold the other stuff on offer. Instead, one must characterise a gaggle of wannabe pop stars as a vanquished enemy in a ludicrously described battle for the good moral character of the nation.

you can keep the costa brava

kent coast
turner contemporary
nothing in the world but youth
and full-on famous sunset right on cue

boxing day

I got a £50 gift token for a chain store

so I went to the branch in the town where I grew up,

but locusts had stripped the sale items,

leaving only horrible tat.

so I just wandered about a bit

sticky

firmly in the top two christmas gifts received this year:

STICKERS: Stuck-Up Piece of Crap:

FROM PUNK ROCK TO CONTEMPORARY ART

by DB Burkeman and Monica LoCascio, 

illustrations by Shepard Fairey & Carlo McCormick

hundreds of lush pages stuffed with adhesive art 
across a broad range of contexts:

music, skate culture, consumer brands, graffiti,
fine artists and more;

also contains some real stickers:

let's see if they get stuck anywhere

ho ho ho

fucking bacon

A crack salesman and noted gourmand returned to his desk with a man-sized lunch of fish 'n' chips. A big fan of generous portions of both salt and vinegar on his chips, he nevertheless lamented how soggy that latter condiment had made his meal.

"What I need," he mused, "is a dry mixture of salt and vinegar."

"Like vinegar flavoured salt?" asked a colleague.

"Yeah," came the reply, muffled by a mouthful of damp chips.

Then a light bulb appeared above the salesman's head. "I should make that," he exclaimed. "That's a cracking business idea. The market for that would be huge. Loads of people like the taste of vinegar but don't want soggy chips."

"I hate to break it to you," another colleague chipped in, "but it already exists. It took me about ten seconds to find it online."

Malt Salt, it turns out, is just one of a number of products developed by the seasoning geniuses of J&D's Foods of Seattle, Washington, USA - and the vinegar-flavoured condiment, by dint of not tasting of bacon, is not really part of the firm's core range. Founders Justin Esch and Dave Lefkow, after all, have developed an obsession for the taste of bacon and have gone on a mission to find ever weirder applications for the uniquely distinctive flavour of the cured pig meat. Often without actually using real bacon, it should be stressed. Some of J&D's products are, incredibly, even certified as Kosher.

The pair started out with just $5000 that Lefkow had won by submitting a winning entry to America's Funniest Home Videos. The bar must have been set pretty low for that particular episode of the show because Lefkow's clip of his son knocking a baseball at him is not exactly a rib-tickler.

From these humble beginnings, the self-styled Bacontrepreneurs have built an empire founded on the strong sales of Bacon Salt (bacon-flavoured powdered condiment) and whose range now includes:

• Baconnaise - bacon-flavoured mayonnaise
• Bacon Pop - bacon-flavoured popcorn
• bacon-flavoured croutons
• bacon-flavoured gravy

But these are the more pedestrian examples of working to realise the vision expressed in the company's slogan (Everything should taste like bacon). When really thinking out of the box, Esch and Lefkow have come up with truly outré offerings. These include:

• Mmmvelopes - envelopes with bacon-flavoured glue
• bacon-flavoured lip balm
• Bacon Lube - a bacon flavoured/scented massage oil and 'personal lubricant'

The last item in the list is real. Really real. What next? Bacon-scented anal beads? Bacon-scented condoms? Bring it on.

gone but not forgotten

Just a week ago, this is my england discovered a top Twitter loon in the form of someone who appeared to be an Everton fan and whose profile picture was of Adolf Hitler wearing the latest Toffees shirt. He was into hurling abuse at people in the public eye. Lots of abuse at lots of different people.

One of his last tweets read "I'm fucking destroyed off going to work. the thought of doing that shit till i die makes me want to cut my self. anyone fancy running me over".

Maybe someone did run him over. On Twitter, at least, @efc1978 is no more.

thirteen christmases ago?