You know who you are, I’m talking to you. The sort of people who, back in the 1960s and ’70s, would go around wearing a sandwich board bearing the legend, “THE END IS NIGH”.  Nowadays, you hide indoors, sitting on the internet wearing nothing but your old Y-fronts and a string vest, but you’re no less doomladen than your predecessors.  Hark! A bell!  For whom does the bell toll?  Well, ting.  Yes, your microwaved meal for one is ready – go fetch.

Seriously now, the world’s not going to end, we’re not all going to die at the same time and (you’re not going to believe this, but I’m going to put it out there anyway) 2010 is… Just. A. Fil-um.

OK, everyone else, just to explain: hundreds of people are accidentally discovering the many and varied joys of I Have Grave News by Googling the words “The End”. Sadly for them, they’ve only been directed to an article I wrote for U Magazine about how a true lover stabs you in the front, and not step-by-step instructions on what to do when the world suddenly starts to crumble and die.

Oh look, here are more “The End-ers” coming along now.  Well, while I have you here, can I just ask what you are planning to do with any information you find?  Are you going to go all Bruce Willis, or maybe old-school Charlton Heston, and try to avert global catastrophe all on your Tobler?  Are you going to spend more time with your friends and family?  Are you going to spend your final hours cavorting with the love of your life?  Or is it finally time to exact revenge on that school bully, by kidnapping him/her and making them endure tortures beyond their wildest imagination all the way up to Armageddon?  It’s your call, obviously.

Me, I’m just going to carry on, like the world inevitably will.  The only thing I wanted to know was, how will we know when the world is about to end?  You’ll love this: apparently, bees will begin to die out and there may even be random, mass starfish suicides. Now, see how that goes down with your lonesome mug of cocoa.

Well, the self-appointed security ‘gaffer’ has thrown in the towel.  As mentioned here last week, my office’s gent’s toilet seat was stolen by person(s) unknown.  While expecting our marauding Mr DayGlo Jacket carpark attendant to conduct a thorough investigation via his bluetooth earpiece, no doubt twitching his moustache, Poirot-like, in the process, it seems that the scoundrel responsible has eluded him. 

So, here he is, forced into fitting a new one – and, as you can see, it’s a real quality one too.  In fact, it says ‘Quality Toilet Seat’ in the instructions, so it must be.  Good to see there are many special features involved in the hinges too.  All in all, it looks like it ought to be a very comfortable place to hide for the better part of a morning. 

Unfortunately, there was no appearance of his Village Idiot sidekick at the time of these photos, but I expect he and his pet hoover were along shortly afterwards to clear up the debris of DayGlo’s labours.  So all’s well that ends well. 

Well, apart from the culprit evading justice, that is.  All the same, if you’re reading this, thieving scum, you’d better beware – our eagle-eyed security staff will leave no seat unlifted in their pursuit of you – and when they catch you… they’re going to tell your mum!

Halloween guises suit some people more than others, but surely none better than Aslan.  The Dublin band “rocked” Trim during the festivities while dressed as a rather convincing  jazz sextet, ”accordion” to this photo in the Meath Post.

I must say, it’s nice to see the band swapping their Michael Guiney jumpers and tracksuits for the sophisticated all-black look.  And fair play to Christy for having his head shaved for the occasion too – obviously, he’s cleverly living the part of Charlie Moonhead.  Spooky stuff.

Hard on the heels of their Up To Now compilation, Scotland’s, Norn Iron’s, Britain’s, Ireland’s, Europe’s and SouthYemen’s finest band ever Snow Patrol are set to release a double spoken-word album* of singer Gary Lightbody’s endless platitudes to audiences all over the world.

His stock, crowd-pleasing utterances, in which he compliments the size or quality of any given venue or audience, have charmed armies of the converted for years. No matter the occasion, he seems never to tire of telling crowds from Belfast to Baranca, that they are simply the “best audience ever”.

Back in 2004, I wrote the following as an introduction to a review of the ‘Patrol’s somewhat underwhelming gig at Dublin’s Olympia:

‘Is Gary Lightbody the jolliest sufferer of chronic déjá vu in the world? Every Snow Patrol live review you read, the frontman always seems to say what he told us tonight: “We never thought we’d be playing anywhere as big as this!”; and he says it with such apparently sweet, wide-eyed bewilderment that you almost believe him. At some point in 2004 though, in between thunderous rounds of adulation, he must have heard the sound of a penny dropping; Final Straw is a massive album, the tours are moving to progressively bigger venues and a US tour with U2 looms. Lightbody might want to pretend that Jennifer Love Hewitt’s favourites are just a tiddly indie band but they are fast becoming a skyscraper-devouring, stadium rock monster.’

In August this year, he’s still at it, in this report from NME.com:

‘Earlier, Snow Patrol had discovered that despite jeers greeting news of Oasis’ cancellation earlier in the day, they were warmly received as headliners by the V Stage crowd.

“Already you’re one of the best crowds we’ve ever played to,” Lightbody declared after just two songs. “It’s a dark, dark time but we’ll try to shed some light on it.” ‘

Well, in the spirit of Gary’s ebulliently understated niceness, can I just be the first to say that Snow Patrol’s album, A Hundred Million Platitudes, is the best spoken word album ever.  I never thought I’d be listening to anything this good…

*may not be actual album, at all. Sorry.

Desperate times call for desperate crimes.  But now, another kind of ‘desperate’ have nowhere to turn.  In a case that’s baffling even the most astute and eagle-eyed amongst us, the gentleman’s toilet seat in the office block I ‘frequent’ has been stolen. It’s used by at least three separate businesses in the block and also, no doubt, by several visitors, delivery men and couriers every day.  While it’s always tempting to believe that a stranger is responsible for such an opportunist crime, I have too much bitter experience of internal theft in the workplace to automatically believe that one.

Unfortunately, the “security” staff who “patrol” the industrial estate are as much use as a pair of glass buttocks.  Laurel & Hardy, I call them, but only because Stan and Ollie are no longer around to be insulted by the comparison.  One of them is the self-appointed, self-important gaffer. He resembles your average, jobsworth, pain-in-the-arse council worker or, more accurately, considering his capabilities, car park attendant; short, baseball cap, moustache, bluetooth earpiece (why does a f**king car park attendant need one of these?) and regulation day-glo jacket.  He also has a regulation limp in one leg – although, it’s probably meant to be a swagger.  All he ever does is demand to know who parked their bike in the corridor on any given day.  Such is his pedantic Health & Safety concern on this issue (alone) that a bike park was installed in the corner of the estate. Within a week, a bike was stolen, in broad daylight.

His colleague is, if anything, even more useless.  A graduate of the Co. Dublin School of Village Idiots, he has been known to spend the better part of an afternoon staring at spent bulbs, possibly trying to guess at how many village idiots it might take to change one.  His greatest skill, however, is taking his pet hoover for a slow wander through the corridors, gradually collecting pieces of dust just before they naturally biodegrade. 

So, theft is probably rife around here.  If Chewbacca out of Star Wars had wandered out of the estate wearing the stolen toilet seat as a necklace, neither of these goons would have lifted their heads from The Sun’s racing tips or their join-the-dots book to challenge him.  So, all I’m saying is, if anyone offers you a cheap toilet seat in a pub in the Dublin 3 area this weekend, just say no. There are a lot of people with unfinished business awaiting its swift return.

Great crime prevention advice for the good burghuers (sic) of Monaghan in this weekend’s Post.  Perhaps the writer of this headline is obsessively over-fond of one my favourite crap jokes: How do you kill a circus?  Go for the juggler. 

Perhaps not.

Amazing footage of 5000 people all staring at the sky, many of whom claim they saw the sun “dancing”.  If you look closely you can just about make out…

…a bird flying past, some nice clouds, and a curious dot in the sky.  Could it be an apparition of Dot Cotton?

Of course, this isn’t the first time a dancing sun has been caught on camera.

Nastiness Is A Thing Called Snark

Sunday Business Post, 11th October 2009

What is the lowest form of wit? What has replaced the golden age of satire, spoof, burlesque and ingeniously dark comedy? According to David Denby, it’s something known as ‘snark’ -a phenomenon he ominously calls the ‘‘angry fanfare attending journalism’s decline’’.

Denby is a film critic for the New Yorker by trade, but here he turns his critical faculties to issues of style -specifically, the proliferation of a particular type of abuse, which he describes as ‘‘personal insult, low, teasing, rug-pulling, finger-pointing, snide, obvious and knowing’’.

One of Denby’s chief contentions is that snark -a term borrowed from Lewis Carroll -  has grown in popularity in recent years due to the internet.  He demonstrates how blogs and social networking sites like Twitter have become tools for those who simply wish to draw attention to themselves by being as vile and insulting as possible, often without substance or morality to back up their ‘argument’.  In cases like these, where abuse goes viral or becomes self-replicating, the object of the ‘snarking’ can fall victim to a sustained and widespread campaign of low insults – much of it dished out entirely anonymously.

Celebrities can often ignore or brush such criticisms off, but what concerns Denby more is the effect of this ‘‘free-floating contempt’’ on the innocent non celebrity; for example, the scenario of the college girl, who might sleep with another student, and then be identified by nicknamed internet ‘trolls’ on the campus forum, under headings such as ‘‘Who are the biggest sluts?”

While this is humiliating in the moment, internet mud can stick; prospective future employers might easily Google the person, thus accessing ‘‘a dossier of your follies [which] trails around after you like a finger-pointing ghost’’.

It wasn’t ever thus.  There was a time, as Denby illustrates in two hugely entertaining chapters entitled A Brief, Highly Intermittent History of Snark, when such criticism was less about injuring the subject harshly, and more about delivering the insult with memorable wit and elegance.

In the drinking clubs of eighth century Greece, these early forms of sniping took on more structure, and proponents of it often risked their safety by specifically targeting rivals or powerful public figures. Another early example cited is Jonathan Swift’s ironic and satirical masterpiece A Modest Proposal, in which he suggested that the poorest people in Ireland should sell their children to the rich as food.

These days, Denby argues that, as a bad journalistic style, snark is sneaking into the mainstream because traditional media is in an economic panic; on the one hand, the fall-off in advertising revenue suggests the old media business model no longer works, while those working in new media cannot yet make enough money.

He is scathing of internet journalists and bloggers who claim that they do a better up-to-the-minute job of reaching the truth than mainstream journalists – and yet somehow‘‘ don’t have time to check all [their] sources properly’’.

The author acknowledges that separating snark from satire is not always an exact science. For example, as a noted Anglophile, Denby shines a light on the consistently excellent British satirical magazine Private Eye, and demonstrates that, often, in trying too hard to find subjects to ridicule, it reveals many of its own underlying prejudices.

However, as a resolutely liberal observer and writer, Denby may inadvertently reveal his own. He is hugely critical of the ways in which parts of the American media snarked Barack Obama’s election campaign, arguing that concerted efforts to insinuate that Obama was, by turns, a socialist, Muslim and/or terrorist sympathiser could have stymied his presidential aspirations – many of these insinuations emanating from the Sarah Palin camp.

Yet he is also, perhaps, a little too eager to let the relentlessly snide Bush-bashing TV satire of fellow liberal Jon Stewart off the hook as ‘‘excusable’’. Nonetheless, Snark is a book which might make those of us with an internet presence think twice before clicking ‘publish’ in future.

While Denby is certainly under no illusion that it’s possible to eradicate snark entirely from the culture, he presents his case clearly and concisely, and as the beginning of an argument. The campaign for real wit starts here.

It has to be.  Andrew Ridgeley’s 1990 ‘comeback’ single Shake truly is car crash stuff.  The video is appropriately nasty, but ignore it if you can and just listen to the song: after the cak-handed, overwrought acoustic intro, there’s this ‘intriguing’ and ‘dramatic’ pregnant pause – during which, it seems, Ridgeley trips up and falls into a drum kit.  Incredibly, they kept that bit in the final recording and somehow passed it off as a real drum intro.

Few remember Ridgeley’s solo debut (and, thus far, only) album Son Of Albert.  Fewer still own it, or remember it with any affection whatsoever.  Arguably, it is the the worst record ever made – of course, we’re not allowed to say that accolade applies to Freddie Mercury’s Mr Bad Guy anymore, because he’s dead.  But that’s another discussion for another day.

Poor Andrew, though; while George Michael got all the credit and plaudits (i.e. blame) for Wham!, the man Smash Hits called “the Rickmansworth cowboy” was generally thought to be a bit of a lemon; eye candy for some, rhinoplasty model for others, purveyor of misplaced shuttlecocks to everyone else.

Then, in 1986, just as George donned his aviator shades, stubble and leather jacket (and somehow sold that image back to the Americans!) to become one of the planet’s biggest stars, Andrew went off to try his hand at Formula 3 racing – and promptly disappeared into the high-life’s equivalent of obscurity.

Of all the ways Andrew could have come back into public view, Shake and Son Of Albert were quite possibly the biggest miscalculation of his career.  Track after track of quite incomprehensible musical incompetence, marketed, without irony, in the earnest belief that Ridgeley originals featuring guitars and real drums were somehow brave and boundary-pushing. No, no, no.  And as for the stetson…

Quite what anyone involved was thinking when the completed album was signed off is anyone’s guess.  1990 was, bear in mind, the beginning of a UK recession, with all that entails: job losses, venerable UK businesses and music publications going bust, property going into negative equity – no one at CBS (soon to become Sony) seemed to realise that taking up the option of an Andrew Ridgeley solo album may just look like devil-may-care opulence of the worst order.

It was all academic anyway.  Those who bought the record quickly regretted it, and Son Of Albert took no time whatsoever to disappear from record shop racks and be deleted from the CBS catalogue, almost as if it had never happened.

Cheerfully for all of us, it did happen.  God bless you, Andrew Ridgeley, wherever you are.

The über stylish German act, Goombay Dance Band, featuring the incomparable Oliver Bendt, performing their only UK hit, Seven Tears.  This spent three weeks at Number One in 1981.  Wouldn’t happen nowadays.