Paedo's out (I have been waiting all my life for a pun such as this)

Whoops. I just got a bit carried away with the labels. I have so many as to render them quite useless. Still, an inability to file is a sign of a creative mind. It is.

I did write a thing about the present prisony fiasco with regards that big old paedo, but I don't want to immediately alienate everyone, even if I'm going to alienate some by not writing about it. I might just find someone I agree with and link to them. Oh bugger it, I'll fillet some bits out.

1) Actually it's not actually illegal to just be a paedophile because it's not illegal to fancy children, only to act upon it, which makes you a paedophile who is a sex offender. I wish the media would stop being so lazy on that point. Actually. It's important.

2) Mumble mumble are people who watch nasty child pron actually dangerous in the most literal sense so if we're talking about only the most dangerous criminals that bloke doesn't necessarily qualify does he mumble murfle I think I left a thing over there and have to go now.

3) If they're worried about what nasty crime will be committed next necessitating the lock-up of people for whom there is no room at the inn, I would bet dosh that it's going to be some manner of severe damage to said blokey, who was clever enough to go on all the telly with his face and say that the judge was just doing his job. Get the police guard off Jade's house post haste, they're lining up with leftover fireworks. (I can't watch BB anymore although I suppose I'll watch Shilpa win tomorrow. It's all too ghastly. Whatever those unpleasant women did, their lives are now going to be ruined, and it's rather disproportionate considering they weren't being any more idiotic than most of the idiots you find who aren't on telly.)

Much as I can barely bear the Indie at the moment (it won't stop until we are all hanging our heads in shame so hard we get whiplash), I had to make a knowing face and say 'uh huh' at its front page today. Scroll down for list of people who've been banged up recently, including the naked rambler and people who've refused to pay taxes or fines for political reasons.

Oh and I was also interested to read this, or attempt to read it. I got through a paragraph and a half and then my entire head started to spontaneously warm and sweat reservoired in my ears. For the love of all that is holy, what is that woman taking? I mean, I thought my prose was a bit florid and hectic and such, but compared to her I am Emily goddam Dickinson.

Fave new world

Blast. I seem to have been gently forced to upgrade. I don't care if it's better, change blows. But really, couldn't they just let me use their old machinery for as long as I liked? It's not like there are health and safety issues. Grump.

The trivialities of the day!

- Dog stole my remaining pain au chocolat from where it nestled on the kitchen worktop, wrapped snugly in plasticy stuff. That beast. He is becoming roly. He is sleek enough to look at, and that narrow collie waist looks almost worrying next to the booming Nottweiler ribs, but when he sits down you can see all his fur sort of ruck up like a carpet. If you had the strength, you could probably lift him by grasping a handful of dogflesh almost anywhere on him. His actual surface area must be vast. Still, it's just a bit of not-unhealthy flab. He has an extraordinarily boring and frugal dry diet, which is why he puts his head in the bin and steals patisserie fare when he can. Ah well. As long as he's not anywhere near Rusty standard (how did those ruminants ever get him back? They will only feed him pies! Stupid country).

- Did I mention that my non-Pod has niftily merged Bjork's 'Greatest' with Take That's 'Greatest'? Well, it has, and it is still amusing.

- What, oh what is the use of Bloc Party? Their music is ugly.

- Why do Bowling For Soup still have a career? Their music is uglier, but at least it knows and sort of acknowledges it's ugly, whereas Bloc Party's music thinks it is beautiful. This, as superbly explained by Stephen Fry, is the worst kind of ugly.

- I was going to put in a link to Fry's brilliantly brilliant 'Room 101' performance featuring the above explanation, but ten minutes of searching through a MOUNTAIN of SHITE on YouTube has yielded nothing. Why do they not make YouTube search better? Why must I wade through a thousand bits of cobbled-together, crappy-stills-set-to-cringey-music-to-no-end-whatsoever bilge before still not finding what I want? Warum?

I would put YouTube into Room 101. I don't care if it enables me to see hilarious things. (I'm not putting links to any hilarious things either. Grump grump grump.)

- Isn't it sort of nice that Big Brovaz have another (not terrible) song out when everyone had chalked them up as an example of how evil record companies build up young naive types and then destroy them?

- I have been watching too much of the music television.

- But I am allowed! since I did write 47,121 words. 6,000 or so of them went in a second in a meeting the other day, and I didn't bat an eyelid. That is how mature I am. Naturally I put laxatives in everyone's coffee because the ruthless purge of those innocent words needed to be marked in some way, and it seemed as good a way as any.

All that's left now is some tinkering and filling-in and stuff. I kind of want to do it again. It's sort of hard to let go of. There is still so much to say. And it all needs to be said by me.

- Word of the day is 'jejune'. It's almost onomatopaeic, in that when you say it sounds like a sneer, and thus beautifully true to its meaning in its sound.

- After months of languishing in the kind of hip hoppily baggy jeans I would previously have hesitated to wear while decorating, I have today at last purchased some tight items for my legs which make me feel sort of human again. And they were nine pounds and look like I paid ooh at least 15.99 for them. Yes! And some grey trousery things which look lovely from the rear but like they're crying out for the subtle bulk of male genitalia at the front. But that's what you get on the high street. Obviously they haven't heard about all the oestrogen in the water. Etc.

- I can't go into all the reasons 'Creep' is terrible right now, but I will do at some point, because it needs to be said. It is so very poor. I hate it when people make bad horror films because the genre gets enough grief as it is. And it makes me squirm when I get the feeling that the makers of a bad horror film have made it thinking "yeah, put this and this in and have this happen, that'll be scary", when in fact scaring an audience is an awesomely subtle and meaningful psychological undertaking which requires love and care and intelligence and so shut up with your awful heap of crap that should have got laughed out of the office where they decide what horror films should be allowed to be made.

Note: there are seven films called 'Creep' on IMDB. Not that you can infer anything from that.

- Oh look, now I have to put labels on. I feel vaguely uncomfortable. It seems rather a vain thing to do. (Like blogging isn't. Oh yes, I'll take this family-sized package of vanity, but woah! easy on the tiny toddler dish of vanity there, slick.) I mean, is anyone really going to come here and feverishly look up everything my dog has ever done? I suppose the nice people who come here when I actually write something relatively serious deserve the chance to filter out the rest of the tripe. Guys, this is for you.

Idiots in idiocy shock

But first: 28,004. Rock! Only another 10,000 or so to go I reckon. Tra la la. And some interminable tinkering obviously.

So I stopped watching Big Brother because my telly broke, although I would probably have stopped anyway as it was becoming painful. I don't find people being horrible and humiliating each other or themselves entertaining even when it's fiction, let alone reality. Now telly has been cleverly reset in a way only someone who's not a techno-arse can manage (thank you), and I'm going to be drawn back to it just to see, just to seeee if those awful women are as bad as the massive furore suggests. It's hopeless.

It's difficult to pin down whether or not the fairly obvious bullying of Shilpa Shetty is specifically racist or not, but oh the issues, the issues it raises. 21 MPs have signed a Commons motion condemning it, and Channel 4 have refused to make any proper comment beyond a generic one. The former probably haven't seen the programme, and the latter are going to milk the controversy beyond the point at which it's acceptable for a show which is always going to seek controversy. Both stink. You do have to jump on racism very hard as soon as it raises its head, but you've got to establish that it is racism first, otherwise you are making matters worse in much the same way as women who cry rape do. Channel 4 are going the other way, and getting very close to being irresponsible.

Part of my problem is that all the howling about racism rather excuses the fact that she's been called a cunt by that nothing-boy Jade Goody is porking - so sexism's OK - and undermines the fact of the bullying itself, which isn't acceptable behaviour either (although it might be inevitable in the BB house; they did do it to that poor fucked-up bloke last year... oh... and he was Pakistani. But that's probably a coincidence. He was dreadful. But still).

So I agree with maybe 20% of Germaine's argument - the rest of it is the usual naive crap that gives people credit for the kind of Machievellian plotability that only a sociopath could sustain. I really don't believe she's at all manipulative - she's got no need to get the British public on her side to further her career, she doesn't care if she wins or loses, and she didn't know anything about the show before she went on it. I've rarely seen anyone appear to be so genuine on there, celebrity or otherwise. Thus, Germaine, I need to say my love is eternal but do shut up, you intermittently horrendously erroneous windbag.

I think the racism's there, but it's the fat end of the wedge. It's just oozed out of the general nasty garbage bag (yes, I hate Americanisms too, but 'rubbish' just doesn't convey the kind of rancid goo I need here) of hatred that the other idiots have for the woman. If you're a moron and you find someone objectionable for something specific and fleeting, then you find larger, permanent, personal things about them to hang your objections on - a pair of specs, a big arse, a funny accent. It's because you can't quite articulate your objections in and of themselves - they have to be attached to something. Specific objections are subtle and fiddly and require a bit of analysis - vulnerable personal attributes are like big child-sized building blocks you can grab onto and throw about. Plus, morons think hate is fun. It's like bingo. This is why they don't do it alone. It's a communal, bonding activity, and a bind against the dark suspicion somewhere in the echoing cellar of their brain that the world might find them pointless.

Shilpa is very un-pointless - she seems to be a great example of humanity. She's immensely successful, poised and cultured and well-mannered and beautiful and a lot nicer than you'd expect. The others have had varying degrees of success on the basis on not much talent or beauty and must know how limited it is. They might have some subconscious sense of how 'totally and utterly ordinary' they are by comparison, and how beastly and base they are. Maybe they suspect Shilpa knows it, and so they're just childishly going all out to prove how very horrid they are to her, in that sheep-as-a-lamb sort of way. Or they might just be galloping gormless oafs with no idea of how to treat people.

I don't think they can justify their behaviour on the basis of Shilpa's behaviour, as I think they are doing to themselves, even if Shilpa has been annoying. They're reverting to the lowest possible insults in the face of someone who outclasses them so comprehensively that they can't digest it. But I had to laugh when I saw a clip in which Danielle Lloyd, a dead-eyed Scouse twit who never puts a 'T' on the end of anything when a simple Gordon Brown-esque unhinging of the chin after a vowel will suffice, slobbered "She carn even speak English proplee!"

I suppose I should feel sorry for her, as her flimsy career will be in ruins and she'll probably need to pay for her own protection, which she will need because a lot of other ignorant bastards will want to beat her up. A most mature response, especially when most of them will be the kind who regularly spout much worse in the pub. But for the time being, I'm just finding her a nasty little girl.

The trouble is that the wilfully ignorant often seem to claim a sort of psuedo-racial immunity from criticism. When Jackiey Goody had that scrap with Shilpa over mispronouncing her name, she bellowed "If I can't pronounce your name it's not my fault". Why isn't it? Because no one should ever expect you to make a tiny bit of effort to get someone's name right, so you can show them that most basic level of respect? Well, not if they're foreign and have a silly name. It's their fault for having a silly name, and you don't need to apologise for not being able to get your flapping gob around it. Or it's just the fault of the universe in general. The universe in general cops for a lot of shit from the stupid.

Nothing is ever an idiot's fault. It's just this automatic failsafe against criticism and means nothing, beyond "you are not allowed to criticise me because I am a poor bear of very little brain". This can be augmented by insistences of shit childhoods, drug problems, other problems, other nasty people, etc, but it usually stands up on its own as this impenetrable wall of ignorance. But you can always make an effort, however intellectually challenged you are - you can always try. That elevates you, that you're aware of your shortcomings and refuse to offload them onto others - if you can't pronounce a name, you are contrite about it, not hostile. Why would you be hostile? How can you justify it? You don't need to - it's not your fault, so fuck them. It's just always easier to be permanently on the edge of defensive hostility, and to absolve yourself of responsibility for that and everything else, with the get-out-of-jail-free card of your idiocy.

I can't wait to hear the justification Jade and Danielle and Jo will have for this. I suspect Jo will be horrified and will repent enormously in an ohmigod-what-have-I-become sort of way - she'll wring her hands over ever going into the house in the first place and apologise profusely, having realised she does still want to be famous and liked after all. Danielle will just dig herself in deeper with more twittery, and try and justify it, and flutter her lashes, and then Teddy Sheringham will dump her, or defend her, or defend her and then dump her. Jade will just shout that her dad was black, and then go into hiding, then make a kind of mockery of a Kate Moss-style comeback, possibly by being photographed snorting coke. Shilpa will just go back to her great life in India where she is adored and venerated by all, and hypocritical self-loathing newspapers will call us all cunts.

Then stupid people will continue to be rewarded by society for staying stupid, remaining infants, and causing any amount of damage for which we don't hold them to account. Maybe this is a good start on that score. I try to believe in freedom for everyone to be what they want to be, but I find it so hard not to be militant about idiots. I think they're the biggest problem in the world, and idiocy knows no boundaries of race or nationality. It's only lucky for us that they're too stupid to unite, otherwise we'd be fucked. It's bad enough as it is. (It would be totally inappropriate of me to mention for example suicide bombers at this point, and to speculate that the most significant thing about them is not their race or nationality or religion but their rampant and self-justifying and dangerously energising and self-perpetuating and contagious idiocy. So I won't.)

I might write a book. And then go into hiding.

Links! that I am too rubbish to work into the post properly (I'm not very good at this blogging lark - I should make an effort and elevate myself, or something)

Uniquely British 'not-quite-racism'

Good point, really

Ha ha. Yahoo news is no better than Jackiey "Shoopa... Shuffpa" Goody

It's only words and

words are all I need to give you a really nasty glutinous earworm for the day. Buahahaha.

It is raining maliciously, a great day to get an email saying 'Greetings from sunny Goa'. It did contain some useful friendly advice about how to get one's money out of some bastards who are ignoring one's requests to pay one. I small claimed their collective ass in November, slapped warrant on yesterday. So far it has cost me £135 and I've heard nothing. Obviously they are all dead. Or if not now, then soon. Soon.

So, I'm embroiled in writing half a book (the lower half). It's only two chapters, but one of those is such an enormous beast that it takes up that much more of the word count, and is likely to be broken up and scattered throughout the finished book so no one has to sit through all of it in one go. I'm not really thinking too much about the word count - waffly as I am, there will certainly be more than enough of the little blighters, although whether any of them will be the right ones is another matter. Deadline is roughly analagous to Paul's, but unlike him I am so far doing it clean. No caffeine or nothing. Just sheer low-level mania and dog cuddles.

Mr Carr lovingly blogged about his every day, a feat which makes me blink, because, well, it's like writing even more on top of the huge amount of writing you're doing. I just don't have the stomach for it myself, or to put it another way, I am in no way sufficiently organised to fit in blogging as well as sleeping and occasionally eating. Or to put it yet another way, I can't think of anything to say other than 'It'll get done and probably won't be complete arse'.

I was until the day before yesterday happily breaking up the evening with The Simpsons at 6 and Big Brother at 9, oh it pains me to say it, but I think the low viewing figures for this series vindicate me. Then yesterday the telly died, or rather the Sky box did. Me telly faltered before Christmas, so I swopped it with the one my mate left behind months ago, and then that was even worse, and so I got a new one with a DVD player in it which is awfully cute and space-savey so that's fine but now the Sky box has died which is exactly what happened to another bloody Sky box about three months ago and I'm really quite fucked off about it especially as you can't get More4 or E4 for free on Sky despite the fact that they are FREE FUCKING CHANNELS, MURDOCH.

Isn't blogging great? You might never have known that.

I suppose it's a good thing I am telly-less, but you need to take breaks and switch off, and I hate not being able to get the depressing news about imminent dog amnesty in which hundreds of perfectly healthy and non-aggressive dogs are going to get snuffed. I'm probably too full of telly, though, need to learn how to (shudder) entertain myself. If I can't get it sorted by next week though I'll be forced to go round someone's house to watch 'The Trial of Tony Blair'. It'll be like the olden days, when people went round each other's houses.



Where the book is concerned, I think it's something like 7,000 words so far scattered like a load of bollocks over about five different documents. Part of the problem is that all of it wants to be first. It's like being a primary school teacher on a class trip. I'm relying on cheap gags and even cheaper figuratives to get me through. I've got a week today.

I hate, by the way, that the 'This Life' special had Egg the slightly unconvincing best-selling novelist come out with the quote "Asking a writer about the progress of his novel is like asking a man with cancer about the progress of his disease". It annoyed me. Partly because lovely as the quote is I've heard it a gazillion times. It's a shame how some quotes just succumb to becoming hackneyed without much pressure.

What I love though is Wikipedia vandalism. I happened upon some at about 2 this morning in the course of looking up something obscure which wasn't going to help me get to the end of the paragraph but optimism is always good, and it's still there this afternoon. I'm preserving it here because some dope with nought better to do is bound to excise it sooner or later. And it deserves to be seen.

John Prescott

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John Leslie Prescott MP (born May 31, 1938) is a British Labour Party politician, Deputy Prime Minister, First Secretary of State and Member of Parliament for the constituency of Hull East in the north east of England.

Environment

The UK played a major role in the successful negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and Prescott led for the country during the discussions.^[4][5].

However due to his enormous appetite for baked beans, his own personal contribution to green house gases (his farts) and thus global warming means that this fat man, whatever agreements are made at Kyote, will destroy the world in 32 years.

Trivia

His favourite food item is a sugar and chocolate coated doughnut served with french fries with a side order of pig. He would sell his own mother for a doughnut.

Hellen: a handcart

I'm late with this too but, y'know, illness and all. (Now I think I'm getting another bug on top of the first one, oh ferchrissakes it's not like I actually do dangerous things like going out and mingling with people, give me a break.) The objective has been achieved, but every little helps as those megalomaniacal product-peddlers keep telling us.

I'm happy to do my bit (even if it's only symbolic now... ill, ill...) in helping Girl with a one-track mind propel Nicholas Hellen of the Sunday Times to the top of Google for all the wrong reasons. As she explains, he was one of the disgraces to the profession who tried to bully her into falling in line when she was outed by them last year. The email he sent threatened in the lowest way to expose her - dangling her family in front of her, inferring that if she didn't cooperate they wouldn't pull any punches (after all, she is the kind of infamous whore slut painted strumpet who should consider herself lucky she isn't paraded through town in stocks on the back of a donkey cart of smelly sin). And all in a tone of... what is that a tone of? It's not unctuous. It's not exactly faux-polite. Whatever it is, it is calculating and nasty.


"Dear Miss [my name],

We intend to publish a prominent news story in this weekend's paper, revealing your identity as the author of the book, Girl With a One Track Mind.

We have matched up the dates of films you have worked on - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Batman Begins and Lara Croft Tomb Raider - and it is clear that they correlate to your blog. We have obtained your birth certificate, and details about where you went to school and college.

We propose to publish the fact that you are 33 and live in [my address] -London, and that your mother, [her name], is a [her address] -based [her profession]. The article includes extracts from your book and blog, relevant to your career in the film industry. We also have a picture of you, taken outside your flat.

Unfortunately, the picture is not particularly flattering and might undermine the image that has been built up around your persona as Abby Lee. I think it would be helpful to both sides if you agreed to a photo shoot today so that we can publish a more attractive image.

We are proposing to assign you our senior portrait photographer, Francesco Guidicini, and would arrange everything to your convenience, including a car to pick you up. We would expect you to provide your own clothes and make up. As the story will be on a colour page, we would prefer the outfit to be one of colourful eveningwear.

We did put this proposal to you yesterday, but heard nothing back. Clearly this is now a matter of urgency, and I would appreciate you contacting me as soon as possible. To avoid any doubt we will, of course, publish the story as it is if we do not hear from you.

Yours sincerely,
Nicholas Hellen

Acting News Editor
Sunday Times"


This sort of hypocrisy and gruesome treatment of ordinary people may be widespread in the media, but there's no reason why everyone should be tagged with it. There are plenty of staunchly ethical and thoroughly decent journalists, some of whom I've been chuffed to call my mates, and much as they'd like to flag up grubby little swine like him and disassociate him from themselves and their profession, they usually can't. So I hereby linky for them as well as for Ms Lee, who's dealt with the whole nightmare brilliantly and turned it around for herself. Booyah.

Incidentally I think Andre at A Beautiful Revolution put it much more succinctly (and politely) at the time than I ever could have done.

Nu happy woo!

Yes oh yes. Happily I had the original wizard jolly time at Rachel's, came home all skippy mid-morning on the 1st to find the dog (who does not usually get left all night by any means, I hasten to add) had done a cat-like guilt trip by removing a banana skin and teabag from the bin and putting them in the hall to indicate his hysterical desperation for food. Sorry K. Also happily I strolled like a jammy bugger right past the hangover. Unhappily I was then suddenly strucken with some evil winter lurg on the evening of the 2nd, ensuring that my long-anticipated viewing of the 'This Life' special was punctuated by stumbled dashes to the loo down The Corridor. (The Corridor is the defining feature of my flat, which was built by a philanthropist in the 30s like most flats in Walthamstow, and it is so very long that it's not nice when you're ill.)

'This Life +10' was so fist-chewingly insultingly bad that I might have had cause to go a-vomming regardless. I bloody love the original series, it's up there with 'Six Feet Under' for me in terms of wit and nuance and emotional Truth, and of course Anna was a formative influence etc etc no but really, it was great. So it was grotesque to see these sort of reanimated character corpses mouthing lines they would never actually say, in this nasty smug artificial clunky set-up, and although it hasn't ruined it for me I rather wish I'd avoided it. It was such a Comment, or it thought it was - a fly-on-the-wall documentary within a film, and all the look-now-it's-the-noughties-people-have-iPods stuff - and I hate that.

So two fingers to Amy Jenkins even if it was her concoction in the first place and we should be grudgingly grateful. But more importantly a whole set of offensive digits to whatever this malaise is. It's not dissimilar to the bout of whatever it was I had a year ago, which may or may not have been food poisoning. This was too late both for the new year oysters (how did the affluent and properous ever get into those as a stylish sexy thing? They are so messy you need a whole council cleaning squad on standby pointing their high-power hoses at your top) and the subsequent prawns, so it's obviously just the continued wrath of the God in whom I don't believe. This one's evidently pissed off that not everyone thinks He exists, although any decent God wouldn't give a rat's ass because He would have the confidence in Himself, innit. But as Woody Allen once quoth, "How can there be a God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?"

Food is once again my enemy, and me and food usually get on pretty well. Constant nausea, wobbly head, old-lady gait. Bugger. And of course the world hasn't realised that the law is, there shall be no bad news for the whole of January. Most of the bad news, as usual, seems to be stupid news. Naturally my gears are especially ground by the re-emergence of the tabloid anti-darling, the Devil Dog. The mauling to death of a small girl is unquestionably horrific and tragic, just as the mauling to death of a small baby was last year, but they seem to be events that just suck the common sense out of the press and police and public alike, spit it out and run around making Eddie Izzard noises. ("Hello, can I come in? I've got a pig in me trousers. Can my friend come in too? He's got jam for brains.")

I have far too much ire on various angles of this for my poor head to deal with at present, but by way of pretending I'm not sickly let's have a nice LIST (with nowhere near sufficient links but, well, I'm new at this really, and I'm ILL, etc):

1) Did I tumble in surprise from my chair when it was reported that they'd seized £15,000 of cash and (at least according to The Sun) some quantity of heroin and coke from the house where the kid died, the stuff belonging to the dog's owner and kid's uncle 23-year-old Kiel Simpson, a tracksuited skinhead with a stupid face? Niet! I must report that in fact my arse stayed exactly where it was m and barely registered a twitch at this unexpected twist. I was Jack's entire family's complete lack of surprise and that of all his dodgy, responsibility-bypass, tracksuited, scally bastard neighbours.

If she'd accidentally swallowed a load of chinawhite and died that way, the press would at least have rounded unequivocally on the feckless little bastard, but because the dog was the deus ex jobby in this case, they somehow can't bring themselves to really point and shout at the crim scum whose fault the situation was entirely. Well, a couple of people have a bit, but one of them was Simon Heffer, and who listens to that old gasbag? It is not a dog issue, besides the fact that the dog was illegal (under a rather moronic and arbitrary law which doesn't work). It is a crim scum issue.

1b) As for ascribing human moral values to dogs, that's just the other side of the noxious sentimentality that propels people to feed their pets ice cream cones. Totally consistent. It's not just the tabs that do it either - so many people, who should know better, automatically think of dogs as knowing what they're doing in the way we do, having motives in the way we do. They do not. I don't get angry at that sort of idiocy because it gives dogs a bad name - dogs don't care - but because the bad name gets dogs and people killed.

Dogs do not have responsibility. Nothing is their fault. They are done to, acted upon, and everything else is instinct. They don't have morals. If loud fireworks bang make jump, as has been suggested was the case here, maybe go bite. If squeal heard, more bite until no more squeal. That's how they work. High-pitched sounds stimulate dogs to bite. It's nothing to do with any desire to kill people. That's why they love squeaky toys - they mimic the distressed cries of prey animals. K's squeaking of his squeaky is fantastically funny and awfully cute, but it still often occurs to me precisely why he enjoys it.

This dog was a year old. It was a puppy. And already fucked up enough to attack, kept outside and isolated, and given the opportunity to act on its most dangerous instincts by fools. (It's now emerged that the family were discussing getting rid of the dog after it bit one of them a few days before - can't find the link but I'll add it later.)

2) It's amazing how little the media seemed to be arsed to find out about the (actually not very long or taxing) Dangerous Dogs Act. They were content to say that only pure-bred pit bulls were banned, when in fact it clearly says 'pit bull type dogs', which covers a multitude of cross-bred, brick-headed, long-legged, muscle-bound penis-extension canine sins. The morons on the internet were calling for pit bulls to be banned when they already are, you morons, but they're the morons on the internet.

What worries me is that the media are starting to figure there's almost no point in getting the facts completely straight about such an emotive issue, because, well, it's a bit pedantic when children are dying and morons are baying for blood. Oh, and also, faced with the choice of a thousand dog experts champing at the bit to go on telly and explain that it's a more complex issue than it appears and it's not as simple as 'pit bulls bad', or of any number of traumatised victims of dog attacks, who do all the outlets pick? Even the BBC take the juicy option and parade the poor sods on the show. Does anyone do sensible news any more? And what's this thing of handing influence over to people who are (totally understandably) hysterical and usually know nothing about the broader issue? They are not in any position to influence opinion, and they don't even realise the media are exploiting them in their pain. If anyone starts talking about 'Ellie's Law' then I am off.

3) What was 3)? Oh yes. The raids. Well, great, they're busting a dog-fighting ring - needed doing. Except that to begin with, they should have done it a long time ago, and for the sake of the dogs, not because of some binary connection with an attack on a person. This means the dogs are now being treated as dangerous objects to be removed from society, rather than the subjects of abuse that they are.

But more importantly, like the DDA itself, the raids aren't going to make any children any safer whatsoever. This is for a very simple reason that I haven't seen anyone else bring up yet, either because they don't know or because it'd be too unpopular and iffy a point to make. If you're a big old crim and you breed dogs for fighting, then you probably know what you're doing as much as a big old crim with a crack lab. The dogs are used in a sport (legality aside) and in gambling and so they are an investment, just like greyhounds. Of course many of them are mistreated, but the serious people are going to spend money and time building and maintaining athletes - champions. (The ones seized from Merseyside so far were from a couple of lock-ups, both at buildings owned by a local bloke who also owns a gym. Yeah? Minted crim scum.) People have to handle the dogs, take them to and from fights. So they don't want the dogs to be people-aggressive, only dog-aggressive. Dog aggression and people aggression in dogs are not the same thing - there's an overlap, yes, but one does not indicate the presence or even propensity of the other. Any dog-aggressive dog should be watched around people, but, well, it's just not a direct equation at all.

So, pit dogs are bred and trained (as far as you can stretch the definition) to want to fight other dogs. If they show signs of wanting to fight people, they are no good. In that context, they are Bad Dogs. They're frowned upon. They're no more suitable as champion fighters than a greyhound with a gammy leg. What worries me is that these are maybe the dogs that the serious dog-fighters offload onto molluscs like Simpson. Although of course his dog Reuben was only a year old, so Simpson probably bought him as a too-small puppy for £400 from one of his dodgy crim mates. Or a bloke at the side of a road. Whatever.

The point is, the likelihood of these lock-up raids bringing in any actual potential child-killing dogs is pretty negligible. (Obviously any dog larger than a baby is a potential child-killer, a point that I wish more people were making till blue in face and cliche-sick, but statistically... it's just not likely.) They need to worry about individual dogs, pit bull or otherwise, owned by individual idiots. Same as before. Same as in 1991 when the DDA was hurried through the House like an illicit lover out of a window. That's not going to change, but as is usual with difficult problems the solution is too tricksy and long-term to be seriously contemplated by a government that wants to stay popular. The public want results, and now they're getting them, even though they're the results of something else entirely.

An amnesty isn't going to help either - all it'll do is shut a few people up until the next attack (I'm betting it'll be, ooh, maybe a Neapolitan mastiff, to shake things up a bit). In the meantime, slightly more well-meaning but still moronic morons are beseiging animal shelters and such with desperate enquiries about their perfectly docile, amiable bull breed slobberer that they now believe is a ticking time bomb, while others are just abandoning them in a panic. (This happened with Rottweilers last year too, only it wasn't reported. The media's angle this time is slightly, fascinatingly different - all because of the legal issue with the dogs, which gives a certain sense of calm and your-government-is-in-control to it. There's room for a mote of sympathetic stuff about the dogs and responsible-ish owners. With the Rotts, it was just scary anarchy time, and the abandonment issue just wasn't relevant somehow. Hmm.)

Oh, and others are having themselves what would appear to be slight little overreactions. The rotten bastards.

The ignorance! I can hardly stand it. (Ha! And now Posh is setting a great example. Sigh.)

Speaking of which, I'm afraid I'm hopelessly hooked on Celebrity Big Brother this time. I know, I know, but it's so succulent for the amateur psychologist. But crucially, it is full of what seem to be genuinely nice people. I really, really like nice people.

I think celebrities in general get a fucking hard time, and of course some of them deserve it because they're horrid or stupid people who were always going to be horrid or stupid one way or another. In Big Brother terms, though, the celebrities are always going to be better value than the nobodies. This is partly because they are used to being watched and analysed, which makes it less of a morally-suspect exercise, and partly because many celebrities become famous due to their natural charisma, personality and yes, intelligence, or the effects thereof.

And, and, if people deal with the pressure of fame for years on end, they either become partially destroyed by it or they achieve this sort of aura of placid contentment and Knowledge. They know themselves. They might not have anything left to prove. That's certainly the defining mark of most of the lot this time. They are lovely. The disgraced former Miss Great Britain and sort-of WAG is an irritating little empty-headed twit, and the two ex-popstars are boring, and Leo Sayer is a needy blabbergob, but the others are just lovely. Especially the lovely Shilpa, who I expected to be rather precious as a massive Bollywood star, but is actually totally humble and sweet and just lovely lovely lovely and trying ever so hard.

The Goody family on the other hand are a repugnant shower of deeply unlikeable sub-humans. Jade is just a genuine idiot who's learnt to flaunt her ignorance for a lot of money, her boyfriend is some sort of half-smiling, vacant-eyed shadow, but the mother... Put me in a house with that woman, that aggressive, childish, beastly, bellowing, thick-as-two-short-pigshits woman, and it'd be like that episode of 'The Shield' where Vic puts two rappers in one of those shipping crates and tells them to sort it out and then in the morning only one of them walks out and says he wants breakfast. I am telling you.