Monday
You know, I was looking at this Starlink business, and I’m not entirely onboard, because the internet is rubbish and ruins everything.
We perfected technology at about the stage where we had VHS and books, but not everyone was forced to have a phone and a laptop to be able to perform the basic functions of a civil society. If you wanted to buy something you went to a shop. If you wanted to talk to a friend you rang, and if they weren’t home you tried again two weeks later.
Movie nights meant going to the video rental place for an eighties action movie, and not the respectable ones that starred Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. You watched movies headlined by Chuck Norris and Michael Dudikoff and Cynthia Rothrock, and it made you a better person.
Sundays were for the chart show on Radio One, and you sat there for three hours with your fingers over the record and play buttons, getting the songs you liked. And you loved it, you wanted to sit there poised for three hours, it was your favourite. You didn’t pay a monthly fee and have all of the music, ever, made available to you. If you saved up you could buy one album and you had to listen to that for six months. It was brilliant.
If you were really deeply trying to impress someone, you made them a mixtape. In the mid-nineties my friend Stuart made me a mixtape and it was a straightforward declaration of love. Occasionally people do this sort of thing to me, because I am usually somewhat distant and distracted, but if I decide to notice you, my glorious attention is like the first time you feel the sun on your face. I say that with all modesty.
The Stuart I speak of here, by the way, was an earlier Stuart in England, a friendly Stuart, and not Falkland Islands Crown Counsel Stuart Walker, who is my deadliest enemy.
But I was explaining why you don’t want Starlink. Basically, I’m suggesting you freeze time at that exact moment when milk came in cardboard cartons with those flaps that you had to fold back into two halves, then push the halves in the other direction with such precision that a spout was formed, and if you did it you got a Btec in Applied Engineering. That’s when we were at our best as humans.
Starlink might improve connectivity, but is that what you want? Not to be a Gloomy Gus about it, but it’s not long now until the world collapses into environmental catastrophe, racial and civil wars, nuclear exchanges, starvation, disease, zombies, the four horsemen reaping their due as God himself turns his back in despair. Is that what you want to be connected to? Stock up on mixtapes and Monster Munch instead, you’ll be happier for it.
Tuesday
Having written recently on my dislike of the ‘it’s more complicated than that’ trope, there is another we often see deployed: Tough choices. In context, that always, always means to take more from those who have the least. The ones with the smallest voices and no power. I think we’re supposed to understand that our brave decision makers find it emotionally difficult. As in, ‘Yes, I am going to keep the minimum wage disgustingly low, but I can assure you it just breaks my heart’.
You hear it everywhere, even the Falklands. We might have to make some tough choices, in fact we’ve already made some tough choices, and they were so tough, they were chewy like old leather, and bitter it was, tough bitter leathery choices, that’s what I’ve had between my teeth, in many ways I’m the real victim here, so why is Blackmore being such an arse about it?
The reason, apart from I just naturally have the demeanour of a kicked testicle, is that I suspect it would be very much tougher to take from those with the most money and power. That seems much more difficult to me. Those guys have a voice and lawyers and will try to hit you back. The day I see that happen, that’s the day I’ll commend you for making a tough choice.
Wednesday
I say, a chap can get quite worn down by watching the world’s public figures demand you believe them and not your lying eyes. Donald Trump at a rally declaring that America does not have a gun problem, as he stands behind bulletproof glass so he doesn’t get shot again.
Kamala Harris claiming the US is trying to end the slaughter in Gaza when the US provides most of Israel’s weapons.
That said, there was one Harris interview this week that surprised me. She was talking about her proposed policy of making sure children get school meals, and was asked how she was going to pay for that. Harris’s answer put British politicians to shame. She said that everything we know about economics proves that this kind of investment in the young and the less wealthy results in massive savings in other areas, such as healthcare, policing, benefits, prisons. It pays for itself, many times over.
It’s not as if I didn’t know this. I suspect everybody knows this. But you don’t normally hear people admit it. Which brings me to the short report in last week’s Penguin News about the government’s operating surplus, which at the end of June stood at £58.5 million, more than half the total annual FIG budget. Sometimes I think my best qualification in writing up public meetings and legislative assemblies was a functional memory, so that whenever I heard your esteemed representatives talk about withholding pension rises, or real-terms pay cuts for government workers, or cutting budgets by 5%, I would be able to compare that to the absolutely massive surplus my memory insists they are hoarding.
Of course, these things are complicated and tough choices must be made. That’s what you have to say when you’re sticking it to the poor. It’s written on the back of a get out of jail free card.
Thursday
World news round-up now! The world’s oldest person, Maria Branyas Morera, has died at the age of 117. This woman was pushing 30 when the Spanish Civil War broke out. She previously said her longevity was due to “time spent with family, and staying away from toxic people.” Pick a lane, Maria, which one is it? Anyway, doctors suggest it was more likely because of the time she was bitten by a radioactive Galapagos tortoise. The title now passes to young whippersnapper Tomiko Itooka of Japan, who is just 116, and enjoys skateboarding and playing her music too loud.
In the US, a video has emerged of the actress Blake Lively taking a clear dislike to reporter Kjersti Flaa, and behaving like Regina George being forced to interact with a nerd. I had a look at the video to let you know what you should think, and I can confirm that Blake Lively is the most attractive one, and is therefore in the right. Next!
Algerian Olympic woman boxer Imane Khelif is taking legal action against some of the people who had a few things to say about her gender during the competition.
If you missed it, Khelif was repeatedly called a man after an Italian boxer quit in the first round of their fight. Except it soon emerged that Khelif was born a woman and is still a woman, at which point we were treated to formerly hardline members of the ‘Gender Critical’ movement arguing that gender fluidity is a thing, actually, and even if Khelif was born with a cervix her jawline is a bit strong to be a proper lady. Sensational scenes.
