Today's Suggestions

1. Yeah, so K. tells me that the human race is doomed because of a shortage of bees. If you have any bees, now would be a good time to release them.

2. Can I also suggest that you go and see In The Loop (pictured, yes I am insisting on manufacturing all my visuals in my kitchen, it's part of my new look)? Just take a moment to consider all that writer/producer, and scholar of Milton, Armando Ianucci has done for British comedy: The Day Today, Alan Partridge, The Thick of It and the, IMHO, vastly underrated Time Trumpet.

You see, even if it weren't excellent, you'd basically owe it to him as decent human being to go and see his film.

Dunno if Time Trumpet ever came out on DVD, but you can watch it on YouTube:



I believe some of the sketches in that were written by the Mantlepies - once creatives at Agency.com, now full-time comedy writers by the looks of it, and quite right too.

In The Loop is a political satire, I wonder if six-form drama classes of the future will perform it endlessly, like The Government Inspector, even once the system it satirises has long been overthrown by violent revolution. It is also a farce in the true meaning of the word, being "a proceeding that is ludicrously futile." The whole of the action springs from a soundbite, that a war in the Middle East is "neither forseeable or unforseeable", a phrase which means nothing at all.

This is salient now when people are saying that Brown's leadership is under threat because of the Damian McBride affair (OK, the Evening Standard is saying it is, Brown will never ever resign because he's a shameless, tenacious little shit.) The other major player in the whole McBride disaster has been the libertarian blogger Guido Fawkes. As mentioned previously GC has long been a fan, establishing his own online identity for use in Guido's comment section, as a terminally bored DM writer in 2006. Guido was enormously prescient about the power of bloggers, realising that a politically unaffiliated, independently-wealthy citizen might be far better placed to report the truth than professional lobby journalists, who have to stay on good terms with the MPs they're reporting on in order to ensure a continuing supply of leads and fully-expensed lunches.

(As an aside, one might consider Guido's rise as roughly parallel to Scamp's - both of them starting out as personal hobby sites, in industries inadequately reported by lazy, editorially pussy-whipped industry presses, and eventually commanding circulation far surpassing that of their respective industry rags. Both have ended up basically teaching the institutional outlets how to do web, indeed Damian McBride was given his job expressly to counteract the effect of order-order.com, which became a rallying point for anti-government commentators of all stripes. Both have given themselves silly online names.)

What really gets me about the Damian McBride thing is that nothing has happened at all. The emails only recorded an intention, and anyway, they were just emails. Since this crisis has its source in the immaterial world people quite quickly start thinking it's a moral issue. It's not, it's a digital issue.

It's like having an apocalyptic banking crisis based on figures which only exist fleetingly on computer screens.

3.5. We are living in an age of futility.

4. Buy and fill window box. I did and it improved my day no end, although I keep hurrying to the window to check that it hasn't been stolen by a heroin addict. It will be within the next few days I imagine.