MORE MARY RACHEL LOVE

not the first time that this blog has bigged up the videomakinggenius of Mary Rachel. having marvelled at the mishmashdelishness of her interpretation of a My Dougie remix, this is my england is now finding new supplies of love for a newer effort  of hers. here she brings plenty of cray(zee) to the Pelican Fly All-Star remix of Blueberry (Pills & Cocaine), a collaboration between Detroit rapper Danny Brown and UK producer Darq E Freaker. blissfully bonkers.

Leon Knight: from mediocrity to madness

A much re-tweeted joke doing the rounds today reads as follows: "People are currently having to Google who Leon Knight is... and then Google the team he plays football for."

So who is he?

Well, some QPR fans will remember Leon Knight. He is the pint-sized ex-Chelsea forward who failed to make an impact when on loan at Loftus Road more than ten years ago. Eleven games, zero goals and a terrible attitude. He did go on to a more successful loan spell at Huddersfield Town, and when he later made a permanent move to Brighton he scored thirty goals there over a three-year period. But since then he has failed to settle and failed to score many goals at most of the numerous clubs at which he has been a complete waste of space. On his travels, and during what should have been the prime period of his playing career, he has slipped further and further down the lower reaches of professional football, first in England and more recently in Greece, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The list of clubs from which he has been ejected for that bad attitude includes Swansea City, Milton Keynes Dons and Rushden & Diamonds. In Ulster, Coleraine F.C. suspended him for failing to turn up to training and matches. Then, last month, his next club in the province, Glentoran F.C., fired him for making homophobic comments.

So Knight is a currently unemployed and totally underwhelming player with a proven record as a trouble-maker and gobshite. So why are people talking about him on Twitter today? Why are people joking about how obscure he is?

Because although Knight has been steadily been building a reputation as one of the most unpleasant people active on Twitter, in the last twenty-four hours his nastiness has switched up to a higher level altogether. For some reason, he has decided to direct vile abuse at the Wolves midfielder Jamie O'Hara and his wife Danielle Lloyd. While Ms. Lloyd may have a bit of a chequered past in terms of her own behaviour on television and in public places, there can be no justification for the hateful, misogynistic bile that Knight has directed at her and her husband.

Although this latest nonsense may be the low point of Leon Knight's notoriety as a Twitter pest, his comments are not without precedent. Knight regularly makes it clear he that he dislikes women:

Knight is a father. One of his young children is a girl. Are we to suppose that when his daughter is older, he will be comfortable with men speaking about her in these terms?

Leon Knight - constantly aggressive, constantly provoking people, forever getting fired for a lack of discipline and decency - is clearly a very damaged and deluded person. Perhaps he is mentally ill. Perhaps he is a sociopath. Either way, surely no football club will ever again touch him with a bargepole. Not even at the very lowest levels of the semi-professional game. However horrible he is determined to be, really he is to be pitied -  as are his children.

bright sunlight away from the limelight

Kudos to QPR media man Ian Taylor and his colleagues. Thanks to their good work, Rangers fans were able to follow the team's adventures in the Far East and feel pretty close to the action.

Two of the three matches played in Asia could be watched live online. One of these games, the fixture in Indonesia, was viewed via Ustream, which offers a live chat window alongside the video screen. So those fans who work in offices were able to follow every kick of the ball and exchange comments along the way - all while pretending to get on with their jobs, of course.

Between matches, Taylor was busily tweeting about everything else going on, as were other club officials and the players themselves. So the Rangers were thousands of miles away. But at times it felt like we were with them on their pre-season Asian tour, sharing their obvious enjoyment of what seems to have been a useful and brilliantly well-organised trip. Not least by decorating one of his aeroplanes in QPR colours and naming it in honour of the late Alan McDonald, Tony Fernandes saw to it that the team got to feel like superstars while away from home. All the tweeting from inside the Rangers camp seems to suggest that this has done much to establish a high level of morale in the squad. Now supporters must wait with interest to see if this translates into a good start to the new season.

While those on the tour enjoyed both the experiences it offered and the limelight shone on the club by Asia's media outlets, those few senior players left behind in England have been toiling away in obscurity.

The club's website has not featured very prominently the various friendlies played by the reserves. For example, there is not yet a match report on the site for the most recent of these, a dull affair played down in Aldershot on Tuesday evening.

Aldershot Town vs. QPR: not much fun the evening sun

For anyone really keen to know the details of how that fixture turned out, this blog is certainly not the best place to look. A few comments about the match will follow below. But the details will be very sketchy indeed. As ever, any this is my england match 'report' is only ever going to be a brief jumble of impressions. For a more conventional and more detailed account of the match, Aldershot Town's website offers the best option right now. It certainly offers some clarification for those of us who did spend a warm evening in north-west Hampshire and failed to recognise some of the fellows in the blue-and-white hooped shirts.

So it turns out that the lad in who pulled off a few decent saves was the young Australian 'keeper, Aaron Lennox; and it transpires that the no. 5 and no. 6 shirts were worn, respectively, by Taylor Parmenter and Ben Brown. A side mainly made up of youngsters, then. Of these, teenage midfielder Frankie Sutherland was felt to have perhaps had the best game, judging by occasional murmurs of approval from the travelling contingent of QPR supporters who spent the first half squinting into the fierce glare of the low evening sun. Left-back Mo Sharif also drew attention for having the audacity to lash a couple of long-range shots at the home 'keeper.

The little gaggle of senior players on display, however, did little to suggest they will be at the heart of Mark Hughes's plans for the Premier League campaign - Tommy Smith was largely anonymous, operating from a curiously deep position for much of the time; Rob Hulse did a convincing impression of Rob Hulse; if DJ Campbell's contribution will be remembered at all, it will be for knocking a penalty kick wide of the post.

For all of these senior players, perhaps the inference we should draw from their omission from the Far East tour party is that the club is seeking to offload them, whether permanently or on loan. Will any of them be greatly missed? Well, onlookers would be forgiven for feeling a twinge of sadness at seeing Smith relegated to the second string while his colleagues were out in Asia basking in the enthusiasm of the public there. The former Portsmouth man, after all, scored the Rangers' first Premier League goal last season, has been a useful contributor at times, and may not yet be a spent force. Hulse? No, perhaps his eventual departure will not be widely lamented. One of Neil Warnock's least successful signings, he has simply never made an impact at the club.

As for Campbell, when the time comes for him to leave QPR, some supporters may well wonder what might have been. He joined the Rangers in the wake of a decent campaign at Blackpool, having scored a good number of goals for a team that was eventually relegated. Of the players acquired last summer prior to confirmation of the Fernandes takeover, Campbell surely looked the most promising. But dogged by injuries and eclipsed by the arrival of Zamora and Cisse, it seems that the opportunity for him to make a mark at the club has now slipped away.

The match in Aldershot finished with the home side prevailing 1-0 and some of the Rangers supporters in attendance schlepping home with familiar questions on their lips. Why do I go to games like this? Am I a masochist? Am  I mental?

In some previous seasons, questions like these could have been accompanied by worries about whether the first choice players were very much better than the ones unfortunate enough to be playing their pre-season games with the reserve team. Happily, the footage from Malaysia and Indonesia and the excitement about some of the new arrivals suggests that there is much more room for optimism this year.

Perhaps it's fair to ask whether a couple more signings are needed to create a better balanced squad. Are the Rangers a bit light in terms of choices at centre-half? Could we use another left-back, given that Armand Traore seems to look better when roaming forwards than he does when called upon to defend? The arrival of Andy Johnson notwithstanding, might it be prudent to splash the (salary) cash on a proven goal threat such as Jermain Defoe or Craig Bellamy? Time will tell. Perhaps there will be more signings soon. Perhaps not. Either way, it seems to be an undeniably good, fun and hopeful time to be QPR fan. We deserve it, don't we? We deserve a bit of sunshine after living so long under dark clouds, right?

U RRRRRRRRRRssssssssssssssss

LINKIN STU

that man stu is driving traffic to these parts from his informal gallery space:

THANK YOU, STU

ROAD SAFETY

wet

not a fan?

WELSH GIRL IN A SILVER DRESS

the cab pulled up
in early daylight,
right on (or maybe just off)
the harrow road,
with her (a curvy nurse, a dirty mouth),
her friend (an indistinctness),
me,
& my heated visions
of chemical-tasting sex
with either one of them,
didn't matter which.

but of course,
upstairs
in her narrow flat, they
didn't change
out of their little bits
of LOVE RANCH glitter
into something comfortable, and they
didn't change
into people who noticed I was even there,
into people I could really imagine
wanting to talk to
or be with
or think about
on the other side
of the bitterbright haze
of the pills
I passed them
by way of paying
for their time,
for the warmth of the living room,
for the mug of sweet tea,
for the having somewhere better to be
than outside the locked gates
of victoria station,
aching for the first trains to start up
and take me home
to a comedown sunday,
and too many questions.

so when it got late enough, I was off,
lighter by three red-and-yellow capsules
and the taxi fare,
wondering
if they even knew my name, because
I don't think they ever asked and
I might have never said, and maybe they
were like
who the bloody hell was that
the moment
I was out of there.

but the funny thing is,
it's, what, twenty years later
and I'm thinking
about them now, certain
that neither one of them
thought about me
ever again.

it's not important.

when public art goes wrong

- So tell me about Goldington Crescent Gardens.
- It's just a little triangle of grass and a few trees in Somers Town.
- What happens there?
- It's a cut through from St. Pancras Station. Commuters walk through in the morning and evening.
- Yes, and?
- People walk their dogs there. The dogs crap on the grass.
- Anything else?
- Street drinkers congregate on the two or three remaining benches.
- Remaining?
- Yes, there were more benches but we took them out.
- Why?
- Because of the street drinkers.
- Well it seems the place definitely needs to be improved with a nice piece of public art.
- Agreed. What kind of thing?
- I do have an artist in mind. Here, I've got some pictures of his work.
- Oh, I like this piece. What's it called?
- Giant Twiglet Sprayed Silver.
- Fuck it. That'll do.

average thursday

Freshly cut

Morning light

But she didn't