Phew! A busy day today. My piece on Martin Bashir's strange outburst at a journalists' event in Chicago is in The Guardian's G2 section.
And I spoke on BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show at 1.10pm about the Beijing Olympics. Available online for seven days.
6 comments:
And you were great comrade....
I meant to say the dish your friend Denise had prepared looked lovely (and this coming from a vegetarian!!)
Hi Harpy and Splinty,
Thanks v much. Denise's paella was indeed mouthwatering — and tons of it. Plus she made one of her wonderful tiramisu puddings. Yum! OK, standing in a pool of drool just thinking about it.
Splinty, that was the problem — he looked at the audience and decided his words would meet with approval and the tinkling laughter of little Asian people all queuing up to give him a massage ... or sumthin!. Who knows what went on in his mind?
Weird!
MM-
What a tool. He replaced Ted Kopple on Nightline (which passes for high journalism here). Kopple always took himself too seriously, Bashir takes Paris Hilton (too?) seriously.
Yet another case of a British accent being employed here as mark of sophistication. Even local news outlets in the states are lining up to hire talentless British communications majors. I blame Simon Cowell and American Idol and that woman from the Weakest Link.
Oh lord, Rustbelt. Is Ann Robinson big in America? Ever had the feeling you woke up in the wrong dimension?
I wonder when our Amurkin cousins will cop to the fact that even the biggest plonkers can come with British accents. Make the most of it, fellow Brits, before they find us out.
Ann Robinson is/was popular here. I think she was one of the first "Brits with brains" motif on TV. The glasses helped too.
Bashir apparently got the "hard news" job on Nightline by virtue of an interview he did with Michael Jackson.
Brtis get to play elitist baddies too. Since the states are loathe to admit we even have class here we have to have substitutes less we begin to think in class terms.
Since Brits apparently speak English they are kind of like us, but better read.
Both Madonna and Gwenyth Paltrow have donned English accents; pissing off the rubes over here.
> Let's spend a few moments browsing the list of books Mayor Sarah Palin tried
> to get town librarian Mary Ellen Baker to ban in the lovely, all-American
> town of Wasilla, Alaska. When Baker refused to remove the books from the
> shelves, Palin tried to fire her. The story was reported in Time Magazine
> and the list comes from the librarian.net website.
>
> I'm sure you'll find your own personal favorites among the classics Palin
> wanted to protect the good people of Wasilla from, but the ones that jumped
> out at me were the four Stephen King novels (way to go Stephen, John
> Steinbeck only got three titles on the list), that notorious piece of
> communist pornography "My Friend Flicka," the usual assortment of Harry
> Potter books, works by Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain
> (always fun to see those two names together), Arthur Miller, and
> Aristophanes, as well as "Our Bodies, Ourselves" (insert your own Bristol
> Palin joke here), and the infamous one-two punch of depravity: "To Kill a
> Mockingbird" and "Little Red Riding Hood." But the cherry on the sundae,
> the topper, is Sarah Palin's passionate, religious mission to clear the
> shelves of the Wasilia Public Library of that ultimate evil tome:
> "Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary." That's the one with
> "equality," "free speech" and "justice" in it.
>
> Go over to your book case and take down one of the books you'll find on the
> list (I know you've got a couple) and give it a read in honor of the
> founding fathers. Then tell me I'm not the only voter who doesn't want this
> woman within thirty feet of the United States Constitution.
>
> Sarah Palin's Book Club
>
> A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
> A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
> Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
> As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
> Blubber by Judy Blume
> Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
> Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
> Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
> Carrie by Stephen King
> Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
> Christine by Stephen King
> Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
> Cujo by Stephen King
> Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
> Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
> Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
> Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
> Decameron by Boccaccio
> East of Eden by John Steinbeck
> Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
> Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
> Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
> Forever by Judy Blume
> Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
> Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
> Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
> Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
> Harry Potter20and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
> Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
> Have to Go by Robert Munsch
> Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
> How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
> Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
> I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
> Impressions edited by Jack Booth
> In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
> It's Okay if You Don't Love Me by Norma Klein
> James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
> Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
> Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
> Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
> Lord of the Flies by William Golding
> Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
> Lysistrata by Aristophanes
> More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
> My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
> My House by Nikki Giovanni
> M y Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara
> Night Chills by Dean Koontz
> Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
> On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
> One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
> One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
> One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
> Ordinary People by Judith Guest
> Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Collective
> Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
> Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
> Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
> Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
> Separate Peace by John Knowles
> Silas Marner by George Eliot
> Slaughte rhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
> Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
> The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
> The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
> The Bastard by John Jakes
> The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
> The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
> The Color Purple by Alice Walker
> The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
> The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
> The Grapes of Wrath by John20Steinbeck
> The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
> The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
> The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
> The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
> The Living Bible by William C. Bower
> The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
> The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
> The Pigman by Paul Zindel
> The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
> The Shining by Stephen King
> The Witches by Roald Dahl
> The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
> Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume
> To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
> Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
> Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster Editorial
> Staff
> Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols
> by Edna Barth
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