Crime is the disease...the Daily Express is not the cure

Fury as a potential criminal arrested

A couple of posts ago, I wrote a smart-alecky series of jibes at the 'you can't even defend yourselves in your own home' tabloid right winger types who all seem to operate under the misconception that they'd be really, really badass and totally wouldn't noisily do a poo in their pyjamas and cry if anyone smashed their way into their house in the night.

Tabloid bullshit of the month award: September 2011

It's that time of the month again. No, not that time of the month, stop looking for werewolves.

It's time for the 5cc tabloid bullshit of the month award. Yee-hah! Here I am! Rock you like a hurricane!

It had been a slow month for most of September, until the government released a bunch of immigration stats that predictably got the tabloids in a lather. Tabloid immigration fiddling is so 'meh' by this point in the life of the bullshit awards though, so for the longest time the front runner was Jo Willey for her nonsense in the Express, suggested by a lovely reader.

Don't worry, she must be in the running at some point. I've read her column.

Then - hoo-boy! The Mail on Sunday and it's sister paper came a knockin' with a brand spanking new Winterval style myth to thrill us all with tales of the end of Western civilisation at the hands of evil Political Correctness Gone Mad, and with the BBC as the culprits!

Never mind Nicholas Cage, John Travolta and Keanu Reeves as vampires - what about this guy?

There's a bit of a meme going around the internet at the moment because some old photos and a painting have surfaced of people who look a little bit like some celebrities so they must be vampires or something.  Here they are:

Vampires? Via

Vampire? Via

The Mail joins the Brigade

Except, no it doesn't.

It's been a good week, this week, for the Mail forgetting itself and calling for the things it hates in its ridiculously ill thought out panics.

Earlier in the week, the papers were up in arms about the scandal of cage fighting children. Except the children involved were doing something far less scary than 'cage fighting'.  'Where was their headgear?' asked the knee-jerkers, without being aware that the kids were taking part in a bout where punching and kicking were disallowed, punishable by disqualification.*

Won't somebody think of the cage fighting children?

JUDO CHOP! Lyoto Machida executing
the sort of move that today's 'cage fighting
kids' weren't allowed to.

This morning, sitting with a barely surpressed scowl on the East London Line to work, I looked up from my phone and caught a flash of the Metro in the hands of the person sitting opposite me.  The headline yelled something about CAGE FIGHTING KIDS alongside a picture of two boys fighting in a cage.  "Meh," I thought, a split second after being shocked at the lack of gloves and headgear. "Bet they weren't allowed to hit each other and were just wrestling."

You should be allowed to brutally kill anyone you like, what are you, communist or something?

There aren't a lot of things to love about reading the right wing press and the assorted blogs that orbit around it, but one of the the few is the sight of grown adults convinced that life in 21st Century UK is exactly like a dodgy 80s film set in the Bronx, that given half the chance they'd be as badass as Snake Plissken, John Rambo and the Punisher all rolled into one bladed, spiky ball of tough-guy awesomeness and the only thing that's stopping them taking out the trash is the lily-livered liberal laws that favour criminals.

In fact, the only thing that comes close to being as good is watching the logical contortions they have to go through to maintain the illusion.

Tabloid bullshit of the month award - August 2011

It's here!  It's great!  It's late!  Ha haah!

It's the 5cc tabloid bullshit of the month award for August ought eleven!  There's a line of them medieval blokes with long trumpets that have coats of arms hanging off them tooting out a fanfare.  In my mind.  And yours too now, because I put them there with the magic of words.