Chris Page's Blog, page 15

The proof, the underwear, and the pudding

And here we are, this very evening, the proof of King of the Undies World has arrived.

Kim Jong-un, be very afraid. This ain’t The Interview, you know.

Now watch this space …

(out in January)

Cover of Undies World uncovered

King of the Undies World will be published in January.

That cover uncovered in full

Just to raise the excitement to fever pitch, here’s the cover.

The cover art and layout was done by some guy called Chris Page.

The files have been uploaded to the printer and checked. The man with the ink has dispatched a proof copy and if that’s OK, we’ll be taking the reading by storm in a couple of weeks.

There will of course be a lot of noise and palaver and flashing lights on this page when the book is out.

The is the second novel, and the third book counting the collection of fiction Un-Tall Tales.

The follow up to King of the Undies World is The Underpants Tree, and that will be available in the spring of 2015.

Kim Jong-un fails to halt publication of King of the Undies World

So, Kim Jong-un has taken on the might of the United States and forced the cancellation of the release of the film The Interview.

Who would have thought that the ‘might’ of the United States meant ‘we might stand up to North Korea telling us what to watch, or we might not’.

At the time of writing, the Dear Leader has not yet blocked the publication of the forthcoming novel King of the Undies World (a comedy like The Interview, but funnier) even though it features a tyrannical leader of a despotic state located in North Korea, who (don’t want to commit a spoiler here or anything) is outwitted in his evil plans by the cunning use of sticky buns.

Perhaps the sexiest man alive is bashful about taking on author Chris Page. Or perhaps he hasn’t yet heard of King of the Undies World because it hasn’t quite got off my hard drive yet.

King of the Undies World is slated for release absolutely definitely as soon as I’ve finished the cover file and checked the proofs, and not when Mr Kim says it can come out.

But anyway, Kim, thanks for giving me this excuse for shameless self promotion on the back of a real news story.

McDonald’s threaten my son with police

Today, my son G received a letter from McDonald’s demanding the return of a uniform or they would turn the police on him.

G worked part time at McDonald’s until about six months ago. Fair dos: it’s their shirt and trousers, they should have them back and it’s teenage chaos that had led G to not bother.

However, the curt warning about setting the police on him caused a serious outbreak of hilarity at Page mansions.

My son is a university student with two minimum wage jobs, one in a clothes shop and the other in a convenience store.

McDonald’s is an international corporation with net earnings in 2013 of $5.6 billion.

Clearly McDonald’s must be struggling with the absence of this uniform. I hear of one employee at G’s former workplace serving in unbranded vest and underpants.

Of course, we should not be surprised. McDonald’s warm and fuzzy approach to  legal matters and employee relations is well known. In Britain they took two unemployed people to court for defamation in what turned out to be the country’s longest and most costly libel trial. Also in the UK, 90 per cent of McDonald’s employees are on zero hours contracts, and in the UK and Australia, the company has been successfully prosecuted for breaking child employment laws. In the US, where fast food workers are using $7 billion of public assistance annually, workers have been on strike for a living wage.

This naming and shaming stuff: I’m lovin’ it.

My angelic teenage daughter just used a foul word in front of me

My daughter just said ‘awesome’.

Yes, I know. Thank you for your sympathy.

In mitigation, I can say that English is not her first language.

My daughter is a very intelligent, very bright person — yesterday, we were at her school open day and we were impressed with the way she answered all the questions correctly without appearing even little bit swotty, and even when her classmates were floundering. She was confident and socially at ease and her mother and I were very proud.

And then today she said ‘awesome’.

Is this the same child?

Ironically, I was complementing her on her English. She had written an email to her grandmother in Britain on the occasion of her birthday and I told her that her note was perfect.

‘Awesome’, she replied and my world buckled and wobbled.

She obviously picked it up from somewhere outside the home. She didn’t hear that word from her parents.

Regardless of where it came from, there it was. She used it. In my home. To my face.

It was a reminder that we cannot insulate our children forever from the stupidity, ignorance, and bad sense of other people no matter how hard we try.

I explained to her that awesome is an American expression. She replied ‘LOL’ and that she ‘totally’ didn’t know that.

Sigh.

In citing the American origins of the expression I am afraid I misled my daughter because that is not the reason I object to it. In characterising my sense of offence as a matter of regional difference I failed to seize the opportunity to explain something important about language. America doesn’t really come into it, except as being part of the world we live in, and I really have nothing against American English. The abuse of awesome may as well have started in Lithuania or Margate and my reaction to it would be the same.

Both my daughter and I were on our way to different things and I reached for a shorthand explanation: It’s American; you’re not; neither am I. Which is the kind of lazy thinking that leads us to people saying awesome in the first place.

The point is that awesome is a foul word because its current usage has nothing to do with what it means.

For those of you who don’t know (apparently anyone under 40 now) awesome means full of feeling of terror and wonder. It is a very strong word. However, a large proportion of the English speakers of this planet throw the word around as often as they can and for any reason — or, more accurately, no good reason at all.

Awesome has become a catch-all for the bland, the banal, the quotidian, the commonplace. Awesome has become a synonym for ‘quite good’, ‘not bad’, ‘fairly nice’.

Clearly, it is an expression that has been born out of affectation, exaggeration and appalling ignorance. Someone somewhere decided that using normal vocabulary for normal things didn’t make them or their life sound utterly fantastic, so they plucked from the rarified heights of language anything that sounded good and to hell with what it actually meant.

Not so long ago, to be truly awesome, something needed make you stop and feel giddy with real, strong feelings. It needed to make you feel your tiny, insignificant place in the grand scheme of things. It needed to rock your soul (that’s rock as in move, kids, not rock as in guitars and drums). Awesome conveyed the sense of being filled with the terror of revelation.

Here is a random sample of things that are properly awesome:

•    the crab nebula

•    infinity

•    a sunrise viewed from a mountain whose peak you have just scaled

•    becoming a parent and realising you have created life

•    Mozart’s Requiem

•    the universe

•    the fact of life in this universe, with special reference to this spinning ball of rock and gas

•    the power of nature as manifested through earthquakes, tsunami, typhoons, erupting volcanos

Here are some things that are not awesome:

•    socks

•    chocolate you bought in the convenience store

•    coffee in plastic cups you got from the same convenience store

•    last night’s television

•    hairstyles

•    Justin Bieber, Will Pharrell or anyone you have seen on MTV, ever — trust me, I’ve looked into this

•    a current absence of precipitation

•    the Pikachu tattoo your friend just had done

So you see a pattern there? If you are still not sure about what is awesome and what isn’t, try this as a rule of thumb: if it is a normal day and your are doing your regular things, and you find yourself claiming that something is awesome, you are almost certainly completely and utterly wrong. Awesome just doesn’t happen in a normal course of events. That’s a pretty simple guide, don’t you think? The only people for whom this rule of thumb might not work is astronauts and pre-Christian deities, two groups whose livelihoods are inextricably bound up with transcendent amazingness.

Even worse than the reflexive invocation of ineffable wonder at the least significant and blandest thing is the invocation of relative ineffable wonder: it’s kinda awesome, it’s fairly awesome. Again, the logic of the construction should be ringing alarm bells, even if the object of your wonder doesn’t. You are saying that something inspires partial feelings of terror and wonder. What would those be like? A vague sense of curiosity and unease, perhaps? An odd tingling behind the kneecaps?

Perhaps there is a logic there after all. Perhaps ‘fairly awesome’ touches a truth: these socks would be awesome if they were in fact not socks but a supernova, but they are not a supernova they are just socks, so they fall short of full-on awesome.

We used to have the word ‘nice’. A vague and twee word, notwithstanding, it was built for the essential dullness of the everyday. To debase a stronger word to substitute a word that is already sufficiently insipid for the day-to-day is asinine.

Does this matter? Isn’t it just a matter of semantics and, well, words, and stuff?

Yes, it does matter. It matters because thoughtless expression is a result of lack of thought.

It matters because careless use of words diminishes what can actually be said.

What if you encounter a lunar eclipse framed by the aurora borealis and you have just used up ‘awesome’ on a YouTube video of a kid falling off his bike and cracking his balls? What word do you have to convey what you are feeling now?

We will have to reach for a new one. How about ‘gosh’? I don’t think we’ve used gosh in a long time. Perhaps we can dig it out of the naff old word drawer and dust it off. We can say things of truly inspiring magnitude are goshsome because they fill us with feelings of gosh.

Of course, we’ll have to ascribe it a whole new meaning. Where gosh used be something run of the mill, we’ll have to switch it in our lexicon with awesome. Those of us with faith can be in gosh of God. Those of us without, can gosh our hearts out to black holes and rain forests.

Awesome is not the only word to have been eviscerated by our mad dash for effect or our inability to use a dictionary: unique, epicentre, forces, iconic, and beg a question are among a long list of victims.

Instead of rendering our reactions to the world meaningless by beating them with our desire to dramatise ourselves, we could stop and identify what we actually think, and express that idea instead. How about that?

Now that I’ve got my thoughts straight, that’s what I would like to tell my awesome daughter

Scientists succeed in turning mice transparent

Got up this morning, thought to myself, what I really need is a transparent mouse. Imagine my delight and relief then when I logged on to Kyodo news and discovered that Japanese scientists had invented just such a thing.

It’s as if they read my mind.

Good question.

The boffins from the University of Tokyo haven’t simply made a transparent mouse, they started with a regular opaque mouse and marinated it until it was transparent.

They made it transparent right through it’s blood too, apparently.

Yes, transparent mice. Just what we need, if only I knew what for.

Imagine having a transparent mouse as a pet. You would have an uninterrupted view of the shredded paper and poo in the bottom of its cage. When it was running in its wheel you’d have clear sight of the wallpaper behind.

There is an obvious military application. Transparent mice could be trained to deliver transparent bombs unobserved into the wainscot or pantries of terrorist hideouts.

Perhaps there was a misunderstanding in the brief issued to the scientists who created this thing. Perhaps the research funding was provided by a pest control service who wanted a way to make mice disappear.

Meanwhile, my cat is less than impressed at the concept of a mouse you can’t see.

Lydon and Brand not minding the bollocks

John Lydon sneering at Russell Brand is like the left testicle calling the right testicle a bollock.

It all started when Lydon, née Johnny Rotten, was invited to a Guardian readers’ Q&A in which Lydon explained his stance on the burning issues of the day: he likes his bacon butties with any kind of sauce, lime yoghurt is his religion; voting is good and Russell Brand isn’t.

“I suggest everybody votes,” Lydon said of the former.

“I think [Brand has] absolutely clarified himself as arsehole number one,” said Lydon of the latter.

The last two comments were considered so noteworthy by The Graun they were given their own breakout in a video chat between Lydon and the normally astute political columnist Polly Toynbee, in which the Sex Pistol expanded on his theme: “It’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard,” he said of the famously anti-voting Brand’s calls for revolution.

The most idiotic thing he’s ever heard? Evidently, Mr Lydon doesn’t get out very much.

Yes, Lydon’s dander has been raised by the comedian’s recent engagement with politics, and he may have a point or two.

For a man who knows a lot of big words, Brand is strangely inarticulate. There might be a real case for not voting but you wouldn’t know it listening to the hairy one’s prolix tangles. There might be a good reason to rise up in revolution, but Mr Brand has serially failed to explain what this revolution might be about, how it might happen, and what might replace the system we have now. It’s as if he has realised that if you get on a soapbox people will stare, which he likes, but has failed to click that words need substance to have any weight or meaning.

Brand’s call for revolution just hangs there on it’s own with nothing round it, a lot like a single bollock.

All we really know is that he wants a revolution and he wants it now and we are left to infer the rest — presumably the rest being that it provides another talking point to keep him on TV and in The Guardian. Which has worked very well.

Attacking Brand’s politics is a bit like shooting a large, stunned fish in a small barrel with a big scattergun. It’s very easy, and you have to ask whether there’s any point to it.

Meanwhile, Mr No-Anarchy-in-the-UK-After-All is looking snug in his political cardigan, peddling out the quaint and conservative view that voting is inherently good. “I suggest everybody votes, everybody should try to make the best of a bad situation, and for me I despise the entire shitstem because it is corrupt, but that corruption has only come about because of the indolence of us as a population.”

Has he thought this through? What if, Mr Lydon, your voting choice is between a cold cup of tea, an oil stain, a puff of smoke, and a jelly fish? Which would you choose? Or making an analogy closer to home, if your choice is between a small selection of careerist, muppets who have never done a real day’s work in their lives and who are falling over themselves to be sucked by lobbyists and grasp the corporate dollar, who are you going to choose? Tell us, really.

Why validate any of these choices with your valuable vote?

Lydon is perpetuating the even quainter belief that simply voting is participating in civic life and expressing your will about the society you live in. Voting only makes sense if any of the choices make sense. Voting for the corrupt shitstem will simply perpetuate it.

It is a fair point about the ‘corruption’ being a product of indolence (or disengagement to choose a better word). Your choices are indeed likely to be unappetising if you have done nothing to shape or determine the choices on offer.

While we are on the subject, would it be unfair to ask what Mr Lydon has personally done to make the system any less of a corrupt shitstem?

Lydon himself has financed his anti-establishment musical career through real estate, selling butter, and appearing on I’m a Celebrity, none of which looks like political activism — or political coherence.

He has gigged in Israel, and when challenged about the ethics of this, responded that he saw no need to stand up for the Palestinians because they had no democracy. This is not evidence of a capacity for joined-up thinking.

In The Guardian Q&A he spoke up for a Ghandi-inspired belief in non-violent opposition, but how this squares with his outward lack of any opposition at all or his arrests for violent assault is left to our imagination.

Given a choice of Lydon or Brand, it’s hard to decide which one makes least sense.

Worse, what does it say about us that our political discourse is conducted by celebrity gobshites?

If it is an alternative view that we seek, why not ask Natalie Bennett, who has just been excluded by the TV media from the upcoming leaders’ debates? Or representatives from some of the other parties that get scant mention in the news?

If you specifically want the views of artists or non-politicians there are many who actually can string meaningful thoughts together. I can provide a list to interested parties.

Is it possible that The Guardian isn’t bothered? Might they be fine facilitating this celebrity spat? It won’t have escaped your notice that The Guardian is currently promoting Lydon’s autobiography for their own bookshop and hosting a live revolution-themed event with Brand. Might Brand and Lydon spitting at each other generate more clicks than a coherent alternative perspective? Just a thought.

This trading of ill-formed views by fame-deformed minds is all part of the very (post-) modern phenomenon of the blurring of politics and media spectacle. Bono? Sting? Boris? Geldof, anybody?

Never mind, it’s all just celebrity bollocks, isn’t it.

David Cameron: man of the piffle

Clearly Mr David Cameron is a man of passion, a man who loves his country very much. In addition to loving his country, he also loves Scotland. Or at least the union. Or he has had a sudden sphincter-gripping image of himself going down in history as the prime minister that lost Scotland.

I know this because of the email he sent me this week asking for my personal help in saving that union. (See previous post.)

It was a very impassioned email. ‘I desperately want our family of nations to stay together – and if you do too, please do everything you can to help save our great country,’ he writes.

(His plan: lots of English people would call random Scottish people and plead with them to stay in the union — he had the phone numbers to share with us. That’s not satire, that was the plan.)

He clearly believes that a yes vote on Thursday will spell the deaths of us all. He says ‘Millions of people in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland could not bear to see our country, the greatest country on earth, ending forever on Friday.’ Apparently the British Isles will fracture down the middle and sink beneath the waves like the Titanic if the vote on Thursday goes ‘yes’.

Mr Cameron explains what makes the UK so great at gushing length, presumably with a view to convincing us why the Scottish people should cling to the union.

This, he tells us, is ‘country that launched the Enlightenment, abolished slavery, drove the industrial revolution and defeated fascism.’

The email goes on to tell us that this is ‘a country with the British values of fairness, freedom and justice. Values that say wherever you are, whoever you are, your life has dignity and worth,’ and that it’s ‘The greatest example of democracy the world has ever known, of openness, of people of different nationalities and faiths coming together as one.’

This really is an impressive list of achievements for one country — or two countries, or one union.

You wonder how the planet would have got on without us. If it were not for Britain, it seems that the entire world would now be wallowing in its own filth with everyone trying to eat one another or capture each other as slaves, presumably reading Mein Kampf in breaks from unremitting murder. That would be eat one another raw and unwashed because there would have been no Enlightenment to teach us about morality or cooking and no plumbing for washing or knowledge of cookers because there would have been no industrial revolution.

Wait! Cameron missed one. He failed to claim the invention of fire.

Yet, you do worry that one of Michael Gove’s history lessons got lodged in Mr Cameron’s brain. He might need an operation to get that removed — and quick before the National Health Service disappears. If the Scots go their own way and Cameron gets his own way on health in England, he may need to go to Scotland for that operation because one suspects the Scottish will nurture their NHS while Cameron is breaking ours up for scrap.

Invoking the Enlightenment is very poignant. There is no historical reason for thinking that Britain launched it. It was very much a collective effort (and notice how often France and French thinkers come up in that history — just saying!) and it’s clear that the reason unleashed by the Enlightenment has left the Conservatives largely untouched.

Yes, there are a couple of small problems with Cameron’s appeal to national greatness in persuading people to vote no tomorrow.

The first is, that it’s complete and utter bollocks. Not one of his claims is true. Not even a little bit.

The second problem is that none of this stuff, even if true, would amount to an argument for preserving the union. What does the second world war have to do with a decision now, about the future, by Scottish voters?

Britain did not abolish slavery anywhere but in Britain. This country may have eventually abolished it for itself but slaving went on around the world and certainly has not disappeared today. I can only think that by dragging abolition into the argument Cameron is trying to reassure Scottish people that they will not be clapped in leg irons and forced to work in cotton fields if they vote no.

Invoking, as Cameron does, racial and economic inclusiveness, when in the last 30 years his kind have practically made being poor or foreign criminal offences, is not just irrelevant, it’s downright offensive.

Cameron’s appeal for unity is not just bollocks, it’s jingoistic, insincere, lying, slimy bollocks.

‘I desperately want our family of nations to stay together.’ This is not the English that normal people speak. Does Mr Cameron really think that men and women up and down England are stopping each other on the street and saying ‘I desperately want our family of nations to stay together’. Are they supping pints in the pub and saying tearfully — perhaps while fondling a ferret — ‘I simply cannot bear to see our country, the greatest country on earth, ending forever on Friday’?

‘Yes, I really feel that in Britain and only in Britain, my life has dignity and worth.’

‘Well, this is the greatest democracy the world has ever known, you know. ’Nother pint, Nobby?’

‘Surely, those Scottish people will feel our pain and vote no, then, innit.’

Not for the first time in my life, I am struck by how easily, how glibly people like David Cameron and the political class, can come out with such obvious, patronising, insulting, illogical, blatantly untrue bullshit.

Possibly, they think we are stupid. That makes sense. But it doesn’t feel like the whole story.

Clearly their language is full of empty words, corrupted reason, and vain postures because they themselves are. A person who can say ‘I desperately want our family of nations to stay together’ can only do so because they’ve never had a normal emotion, a normal thought, in their life. ‘[The people of Britain] could not bear to see our country, the greatest country on earth, ending forever on Friday,’ can only be uttered with a straight face by a skilled deadpan satirist or by a member of a privileged, cocooned clique from cuckooland.

Cameron himself has never in his life had a real job outside politics. Bit of a giveaway, that is. His entire adult existence has been the slime and mirrors of populist politics, the only place where such intellectual diarrhoea can even pretend to have real meaning.

It follows then that the policies of his government are to be made of the same acid vapours as his language. No wonder this country is falling apart.

David Cameron phones home rule

I got an email from David Cameron today.

The email asked me to phone random strangers in Scotland to ask them to vote to stay in the union.

Phoning in dependence

The message is couched in urgent and passionate terms.

‘I desperately want our family of nations to stay together – and if you do too, please do everything you can to help save our great country,’ he says.

So pick up the phone and ask Scotland to stay. That was his message.

No, really, that was the message.

In other words, plead.

Pleading always works when a relationship is on the verge of breaking up.

The Conservatives have apparently arranged some kind of phone bank to put you in touch with your own random Scottish person. You just have to log in, sign up, and bell away!

Phoning strangers in Scotland and asking them to stay in the union is an excellent idea if you want Scotland to become independent. It is a very bad idea if you want the union to persist.

The people of Scotland are considering going it alone partly because England, and more specifically the affluent south, has for generations been trying to tell Scotland what to do.

Imagine how perfectly innocent Scottish people are going to react if they suddenly receive calls in the privacy of their own home just when they are settling down to an evening of telly after a hard day’s work and suddenly on the phone they’ve got the cream of the shires pleading with them to vote no on Thursday.

‘Hello, may I speak to a random Scottish person, please?’

‘That’ll be me.’

‘I’m calling from the affluent home counties to plead with you to stay part of the union. David Cameron asked me and he said in an email he sent this very morning that he desperately wants our family of nations to stay together.’

‘David Cameron, you say? That privileged, cosseted, Tory numpty? That representative of the class of Tory numpties that has been trying to rule Scotland by remote control since the Union of the Crowns in 1603?’

‘Yes, that’s the chap. Do you know him? Terribly nice fellow and very dismissive of anyone who isn’t rich and English. So, are you going to vote no, then?’

People with an actual memory might like to recall The Guardian’s 2004 campaign to persuade the undecided voters of Clark County, Ohio, not to vote for President Bush. The result was a swing to Bush and a near invasion of Britain.

The result of Cameron’s call-a-random-Scot campaign will be queues of voters camping outside the voting centres from this very minute so they can be the first to vote yes on Thursday.

Good luck with that, Mr Cameron, and will that be the high road or the low road you’ll be taking out of Scotland then?

@grantshapps Thanks for the follow :-)

For a change some good news. Imagine my delight when I woke this morning and found that overnight Grant Shapps, chairman of the Conservative Party had followed me on Twitter.

(I deeply regret, Mr Shapps, that I have not returned the follow for the simple reason that I have reached my following limit.)

Yes, delighted indeed, because now I have the attention of the honourable gentleman, I can point out that the tacit support of this government to the ongoing massacre of Palestinians in Gaza by the Isreali armed forces brings shame on this country, and that I cannot possibly consider voting for any party that does not speak out against this crime and break all links with the government of the child killer Benjamin Netanyahu. I can also tell Mr Shapps that I am with George Monbiot in supporting a wealth tax — yes, a tax on Britain’s richest people.

This tax is a proposal of the Green Party, of which I am a proud member.

I am also able to tell Mr Shapps that the TTIP trade agreement between the EU and the US is one of the most vile and undemocratic piecss of legislation yet devised. It will, if enacted, be a direct kick in the balls of democracy, removing the right of ordinary people to live free of, for example, GM food, cigarettes and generally make informed decisions about how their government spends the money of taxpayers.

I can also let Mr Shapps know that health and wellbeing are not commodities and that he can keep his hands of the NHS.

I have many, many things to share, and those are only the ones that are top of my mind.

I look forward to a good Twitter chat with the good gentleman. @psipookian