CALM DOWN!

What the hell’s going on with folk commenting on here? As Hector said, if you don’t like what somebody says, then don’t interact with him/her. Folk are going on about ‘snide comments’ and the like, which, I have to say, I haven’t noticed. All I’ve see is somebody that disagrees with what most of the rest of us believe; should I ban him for that? That would be McMurdo-like, Hun behaviour and I’m not prepared to indulge in it. I’ve contacted the guy regarding the accusations of him having multiple accounts. He’s replied and has disowned any responsibility for Mohammed McConaughey, which, to me, implies that he is using other usernames. But, really, who gives a fuck?

Is he attempting to defraud anybody? Is he a Hun in disguise? If he is, he’s doing a bloody good job of staying undercover. It seems only certain people have an issue with him and the only advice I can proffer is that suggested by Hector. As for banning him, Der Fuhrer gets on my tits frequently; should I ban her from the house, throw her onto the street and barricade the door? Get a grip, people!

If you’re knocking on a bit, like me, you probably read music papers back in the late 70s and early 80s. Melody Maker pretended that punk had never happened and continued to beat the drum for prog-rock dinosaurs. Record Mirror didn’t take itself, or music and musicians, too seriously and was only ruined by the arrival of Paula Yates. Sounds was my paper of choice, since it had folk that were passionate about music and saw that, not themselves, as their major consideration. In contrast, the NME saw itself as a repository of intellectualism and had writers that were full of their own importance.

The worst culprit was one Julie Burchill, whose flowery prose was so difficult to get through that you never knew whether or not she liked the band she was talking about. Worse; it was difficult to understand what the hell she was on about at all. She always reminded me of what Disraeli said of Gladstone, that he was, “A sophisticated rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.”

I can’t stand over-descriptiveness and trying to show off with lots of adjectives, adverbs, similes and metaphors. It makes for writing that’s boring and pretentious, like Tolkien’s works. That’s why I try to avoid such things in my own writing, while also avoiding being as stripped-back as Samuel Beckett. It’s also why I can’t indulge in all the praise that’s being heaped on the late Hugh McIlvanney. If anything, he should be castigated for leading to sports journalists trying to be romantic novelists. Nowadays, nobody can just arrive, they have to ‘jet in’ and they can’t just be rich but have to have ‘wealth off the radar’. Reading McIlvanney’s prose it soon becomes clear that the most important thing was not the sport he was reporting on, but the man himself.

He was also, apparently, a bully on a par with the obnoxious Alex ‘Candid’ Cameron. I can’t find any reference to him condemning, or even mentioning, the sectarian signing policy of Rangers. He did, however, have plenty to say about RC schools, to the joy of the Huns, who still like to quote him. I’m willing to be corrected, but he doesn’t seem to me to be much different to Traynor or Jackson, except that he had a bigger thesaurus.

Since McIlvanney influenced other sports journalists to use flowery prose, he was responsible for my favourite piece of sports commentary ever, which I’ve probably mentioned before. It was back in 1984, when I was listening to a Celtic game on Radio Clyde, that Jimmy Sanderson came out with the classic, “And Maurice Johnston leaps for the ball, his blond hair glinting in the autumn sunshine!” Maybe I should be praising McIlvanney after all.

Just like the phantom Chinese bid, it turns out that there was no bid for El Guffalo from Nice. Patrick Vieira, the Nice manager, when asked about it, had no idea what they were on about. The Daily Record, uncharacteristically, decided to report this story. Rather than do their usual, however, and attribute it to a ‘Record Reporter’, they decided to let somebody put his name to it. Do you think it’s a coincidence that the ‘reporter’ has the first name Liam? Christ, they’d have been as well telling the Huns explicitly not to believe it!

“El Whatalo? Who he?”

Honest Dave, meanwhile, has finally put that money in an escrow account. I wonder what he’s got up his sleeve this time. No doubt there’ll be gangsters going round to the door of every shareholder to tell them not to accept the offer – or else. King didn’t get where he is today by doing things ethically.

And what about that DR front page? Talk about trying to influence proceedings! Again, they should just have been more explicit and said, “Hang the bastard!” The Daily Record has previous for jumping the gun like this and making a complete arse of themselves. Remember that time their front page announced the death of Rangers? Oh, wait…

I was reading in the DR about some woman talking about cleaning her lavvy brush in the dishwasher. As well as being disgusted, I thought about my classroom assistant when I was a teacher, who was constantly taken the piss out of by me and the pupils for being posh. I don’t know what we were talking about in the staffroom, but she informed us that she refused to have a lavvy brush in her toilet since they were filthy and harbingers of all manner of germs. As well as informing her that we commoners let the things soak in neat bleach, I asked her what one did in her house after doing a shite. Did you have to get down on your knees with a bundle of Dettox wipes? Imagine if there were skid marks below the water line; would you want to put your hand in there? And suppose you had the spam fritters? I think we’ll just leave it there.

Finally, as there usually are at this time of year, the TV is full of adverts for new kitchens. Strangely, the women in the ads all look as if they’ve eaten nothing more substantial than a lettuce sandwich (made with Slimcea, of course) for years. What the hell do they need a kitchen for? I suppose it’s par for the course in adverts. Most Pringles are munched by fat bastards sprawled out on the couch watching the telly. To see the adverts, though, it’s all young people that eat one or two Pringles and then it’s party time. They must lace the things with cocaine or something!

“Awright, troops? Huv ye heard aboot aw they fuckin’ Tarriers thit run riot in Amsterdam bein’ let oaff? Ah mean, they attacked wummen an’ weans, overturned trams, smashed windaes, burned buildin’s tae the grun’ an’ viciously attacked polis officers. Noo, the courts ower there hiv decided thit the polis wur lyin’. If that’d been Raynjurz supporters they’d’ve been banged up fur life. ‘At’s whit happns in a papish country like Holland!”

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https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B07HGVKC7X

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