The Swipe Volume 2 Chapter 36
I feel strangely hopeful. Tango Clown has done exactly as expected. He’s filling the most important roles in government with nutcases and incompetants, not realising the slender margins he has in the legislature. There will be chaos in store, but the real harm he could potentially do will be bogged down and choked as the inevitable grandstanding and bloviating turn into internal civil war.
There’s an old Chinese curse—may you gain everything you wish for.
Cheeto Wig is about to reap all he has sown.
Wherever you are, whenever you are, however you are, welcome to The Swipe.
Rob is reading…
This Is Not A Drill by Paul Carter. The memoir of a globe-trotting oil-rig worker, it’s a typical Bloke Book, but told with a lot of verve and humour. I’ll be frank, some of the writing clenched my toes back to my ankles, but the stories and characters pulled me in and kept me reading. Not the deepest read, but perfectly diverting.
Rob is watching…
events through my fingers. And Strictly.
Rob is listening…
Suede. Dog Man Star. The soundtrack to the new age.
Rob is eating…
Rob’s Low-Key Obsession Of The Week…
How the word ‘best’ is pronounced these days, especially in adverts. That odd little emphasis, the push on the B. The posh bloke on TopJaw does it all the time—but then that account is just a stream of listicles anyway. Once you tune in you’ll never be able to unhear it.
Let’s start with a look at the hyper-rich from the only understandable perspective—the people who serve them. As the inequality gap widens into a canyon, it’s useful to understand exactly the type of—I almost hesitate to say person— the 99.9999% of humanity are up against.
Christie Hynde interviews Brian Eno in 1974. High weirdness ensues. This feels like a broadcast from another, freakier plane of existence.
The kitchen at Swipe Towers has had a fresh lick of paint and a good clean but it’s not structurally well-designed. A corridor of a room, the only way to rationalize the layout would involve a tear down of the whole ground floor. That ain’t happening any time soon. But a boy can dream, and the clean efficiency of The Frankfurt Kitchen is something to aspire to.
Reading, delightfully, has a good range of international supermarkets and stores, everything from yer Polski Sklep to Vietnamese, to the mixed media madness of Seoul Plaza. I delight in diving into these places, having a good old browse and a couple of brave purchases. I believe I may be a grocery goblin too.
How to successfully game the Spotify algorithm in one easy lesson.
How could I, a proud and confirmed introvert, not co-sign every word of the following? Especially in the face of a particularly dark winter when all I honestly want to do is roll down the shutters and hibernate for four years?
The Pleasure Of Being Left Alone
I’ll be frank, I have switched off a lot of the usual news feeds over the past last week or so. I’m on the verge of completely deleting Twitter. In the face of so much—noise—can you blame anyone for clapping their hands over their ears and going ‘lalala, I’m not listening’? It’s one way of filtering out the fakery, I suppose. Michael Marshall Smith elaborates.
My favourite cookbooks are the ones with context, with background, with a story. I love Nigel and Nigella for a reason, but new faves like Big Has and Jack Monroe have much more to offer than a simple list of recipes. Food is love, not a process. I bite my thumb at anyone who says otherwise.
We’ll end with a story which, obviously, is not just about terrible ice-cream.
Censorship, done slightly badly, can be incredibly funny. Take Adam Hills’ attempts to bleep out the swears on Amyl And The Sniffer’s incendiary appearance on The Last Leg. Frankly, they’re post-watershed, so there was no need to bleep at all. But it makes the clip for me.
See you in seven, fellow travellers.
