Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

I went to see the Banksy film ‘Exit Through The Gift Shop’ last Thursday, in one of the most random locations (OK, the most) that I’ve ever watched a film in. It was in the tunnels underneath Waterloo station, halfway along a longer tunnel that was utterly covered in graffiti and through a non-descript door. Handily, a red carpet was painted onto the floor to guide you in…

There were a couple of pieces of art in the foyer bit, as well as a distorted ice-cream van selling the drinks and snacks. One bottle of red wine for two, cheers!

The cinema section was in one of the tunnels, with some raised seating, I guess for a total of about 130 people for each screening. It reminded me so much of some of the venues I went to over the last two summers in Edinburgh, where they convert just about every single space into a theatre or performance area.

It was a bit more professional that that, with banked (comfortable) seating, but every few minutes you could hear the rumble of trains overhead. It probably didn’t help that we were towards the back and thus close to the roof.

The venue was like this because it was a special preview event ahead of an eventual wider release in normal cinemas. As such, it seemed to be pretty dedicated Banksy fans in attendance, and a few journalists, who were making notes around me.

Anyways, the film: I was impressed, but not overwhelmed. The film is definitely in two parts, and the first one is the stronger by a long, long way.

First thing’s first: this film will not tell you who Banksy is. He’s on screen, but you don’t see his face, and his identity isn’t revealed at all. His voice is distorted, although the strong accent comes through. He’s constantly shot in the dark, almost in silhouette, and any other footage of him has his face blurred out.

Hell, I think the talking head/interview parts with him are probably a fake anyway, just Banksy messing with us once more.

Instead of Banksy, the film concentrates on a French guy called Thierry, who lives in Los Angeles, and videos absolutely everything around him. He eventually gets involved with the street art scene, and accompanies loads of different artists as they go out in the dead of night to put their art up on buildings, walls, roads, and whatnot.

Most of this footage is from the early ’00s, when people like Shepard Fairey (he of the Obama poster fame) were big on the scene, and being French he had good access to a guy called Invader, who does those Space Invader mosaics everywhere. But what Thierry really wanted was to get Banksy.

Without spoiling anything, of course he gets to meet him, and eventually gets accepted into Banksy’s inner circle, documenting his preparations and installations. This includes works in London, and then a load more in Los Angeles, culminating in Banksy’s big show there a few years ago.

One amusing aside: Banksy’s utter refusal to pronounce Thierry’s name in anything other than the classically English style of “Terry”. Very funny.

This is all within the first half of the film, and is definitely the most interesting. The artists themselves are engaging, and Thierry is utterly mesmerising, if a little mad. It’s great to hear him talk with such enthusiasm about the artists and their methods, and how he loved to just tag along (ha, “tag”!) with them on their escapades.

You’re not watching Thierry’s documentary (believe me, you don’t want to), but it is a pretty solid overview of the street art scene over the last decade, culminating in its crossover to the mainstream. I was thoroughly impressed.

Where things start to unravel though, is the second half. Cue the:

SPOILER ALERT!!! SPOILER ALERT!!! SPOILER ALERT!!! SPOILER ALERT!!! SPOILER ALERT!!!

I can’t really think of how to say why the second half is weaker without spoiling the plot somewhat. Yes, there is a plot, even though it’s a documentary. Dare I say mockumentary? Anyways, spoilers from here on out.

After making his (frankly terrible) film, and showing it to Banksy, Thierry starts to believe that he can become an artist in his own right, rather than just the documenter of it all. Starting small, with stickersof a stylised icon of himself, in the style of Shepard Fairey, he quickly graduates to much larger posters, and from there it’s onwards and upwards.

But rather than spending years and years on the streets, Thierry wants to jump straight to a huge installation and gallery, just like Banksy’s LA show. The documentary thus moves to following him, rather than vice-versa.

Becoming ever more megalomaniac, and believing in his own hype, somehow Thierry (now calling himself Mr Brainwash) manages to get LA Weekly to cover the opening of his show and build the anticipation.

Whilst still in preparation for the show, art buyers are calling him to pre-purchase, and he just plucks numbers out of the air ($18,000, $30,000) for each piece. Oh, and these pieces are pretty much factory-produced by a relative army of assistants.

What’s amazing about the art, is just how much of a rip-off of all these other street artists it is. Banksy, Fairey, and loads of others all comment on this during the documentary, and it really isn’t even derivative. It’s just the same fucking stuff.

Anyways, the hype machine rolls on, and soon there are huge queues ahead of the show’s opening. We then see loads of mini-interviews with attendees, saying that Mr Brainwash is amazing, the next best thing in art, and ya’know like totally original in what he’s saying about he world around us.

The film closes with Banksy bemoaning the fact that he’s created a monster, amazed at how Mr Brainwash can be so feted without any talent at all. He says that this caused him to make this film, from Thierry’s footage.

What I was left with, however, was the distinct sensation that it’s all one big joke, Mr Brainwash. Thierry only starts making art after he’s come into contact with Banksy, and got into his inner circle.

I left the cinema thinking that Mr Brainwash was a long-term project by Banksy, acting through the proxy of Thierry to show how the art world can be utterly vapid and a slave to publicity. This makes the whole second half of the film a mockumentary of sorts, as I mentioned above.

You can see how he’s picked out the gallery attendees who have said the most nonsensical things to camera, and have utterly bought into the hype. Banksy is mocking these people, is mocking the art establishment for paying such ridiculous sums for art, whoever it is by.

I appreciate what he’s trying to do, but it just didn’t grab me as much as the first half, the true documentary, did. That was genuinely interesting, with great characters and settings. The second half left a bad taste in the mouth regarding Thierry’s change in personality. Originally, he was a bumbling, clumsy, excitable, idiot, but by the end of the film he was just another art twat.

It wasn’t a journey that I particularly enjoyed.

END OF SPOILERS. END OF SPOILERS. END OF SPOILERS.

Overall, the film was worth seeing, if only for the first half and all of the behind-the-scenes looks at the street art field. The methods these artists employ to get their pieces out there, and some of the daring-do to get up on roofs and out of windows, are a joy to behold, as is Thierry’s incessant use of the question “Why?”.

If you subscribe to the idea of the art world being a bit pretentious and pointless, you’ll like the sentiment behind the second half of the film too. I do agree with it, but can’t help but feel that it could’ve been done better.

Go see it, it’s a solid film and a bit of a different documentary from the norm. Is it stunning? No, but it is good.

Just be glad this wasn’t Thierry’s original film, is all I’ll say.

The Observer newspaper relaunched itself yesterday, with a new design, and apparently a new mentality. Its TV ads spell out its intention to take a wider, deeper look at the week’s news, seeing as we now live in a headline-driven 24/7 media world that often fails to do anything more than scratch the surface.

I’ve been an Observer reader for many years, and buy it probably twice a month, on average. I’m a big fan of its reporting, and it had a simply fantastic sport section in its old guise. I also read its weekday sister, The Guardian, when I pick up a physical newspaper, although more often I’m a website reader instead. It’s with that in mind that I want to make a few points on the re-design and the new direction.

The paper wants to give the reader an opportunity to really get into a story that they’ve probably heard a little about already over the course of the week, without having had a chance to “Pause. Review. Reflect”, as the tagline has it. And how does it do this?

To put it in simple terms, it does this by carrying barely any news whatsoever. Seriously. In the 60-page main paper, I count about 7 pages of news, and that’s being a bit generous to the science and arts news pages. The other 53 pages could’ve been written a week ago (and in this case probably were, given that it’s a full re-launch) and not have been altered by the week’s subsequent events.

I know that Saturday is a pretty slow news day, but stuff does happen. Christ, Monday’s newspapers are usually pretty full of news. The old Observer had easily twice as much actual news in a reduced page-count, and was very clear in its split between British and international news. This new Observer is a bit of a mish-mash on that front, with domestic NIBs (News In Brief) coming five pages after the pair of pages on bigger domestic stories.

I can see what the Observer is trying to do, I really can: longer-form journalism, more reflective and insightful. But still, some sense of organisation in the actual news pages would be nice.

One particular highlight is the Dispatches report on page 2, which is usually where crappy non-stories are buried. The big picture and some great writing, detailing the drug trade in Argentinian slums, was a fantastic introduction, and I hope it holds its place in coming weeks.

The re-launch was given some oomph with exclusive extracts from Observer columnist Andrew Rawnsley’s new book, detailing the fall and fall of the Brown government in recent years. The front-page story, concerning accusations of bullying within 10 Downing Street, did lead the news agenda yesterday and today, so kudos on that.

But to fill eight (count ‘em!) pages with extracts, as well as the front-page story and follow-up inside? That’s a sixth of the entire newspaper! Apparently next week has a similar number of pages devoted to extracts, and I wonder whether the page-count will dip a little in coming weeks when there’s not so many easy column inches to be had.

I enjoyed the expanded In Focus section, which used to be just a 2-page spread on one story, and then maybe another half-page on something else. That now covers a much broader range of subjects, and is definitely the centre-piece of the Pause. Reflect. Review mantra. I couldn’t help but feel a little bit that it was telling me things I already knew, though.

On a similar line, a new section (well, competely revamped so as to be unrecognisable as its predecessor with the same name) is Seven Days, which is the newspaper’s “Review of the Week”. It highlights some of the biggest stories of the week, with extracts from various other media to pull the stories together.

Again though, the International Dispatches section within this, erm, section, is surely just news?! Yes, there’s a nice little globe graphic in the middle of the page, but these are just news stories by the Observer’s own journalists. Not really a “review of the week”, for me.

Extracts from non-news media are welcome though: this week we had the New Scientist, New York magazine, El Pais, and the New Yorker. Always nice to see a slightly different take on matters, even if the section reminded me of, well, The Week magazine.

Thankfully, the Observer Profile has survived the re-design, although this week’s was a bit of a hatchet job on Vanessa Redgrave. Equally, I’m glad that Victoria Coren still has a column, and that Peter Preston’s media column hasn’t bitten the dust.

The latter (and the entire Business section) has been brought into the main paper, albeit at the back. It’s still pretty thorough, but this week there was sod-all news, really. I had that recurring feeling of reading something written at any time between Christmas and now. Hopefully that will improve as time passes.

The front page of the business section was a large interview, a trick repeated in the (separate) Sport section. A three-page interview with Alex Ferguson, which is admittedly a bit of a scoop, but only once did it mention the result of the game his team played on Saturday lunchtime. They lost, a fact which could’ve been used a lot more throughout the write-up of the interview. As it was, it seemed a little ass-kissy.

I’ve no complaints about the rest of the sport section, which seems to have come through pretty much unscathed. I still love that for each Premiership and Championship match they get fans to give their opinions on the performance, because fans will be a lot more honest than the typical football player/manager, and will feel safe in saying something other than “it was a team performance”, “just glad to get the three points”, etc.

A couple of minor style issues: I know that the Observer is the sister paper of the Guardian, and that the latter has the bigger online presence, but does every URL to further reading online really need to be guardian.co.uk/thestoryname? The Observer is an important, historical brand and needs to be kept that way.

If you believe all of the media reports, it sounds like the Observer will soon be the Sunday Guardian to all intents and purposes anyway, but they’re doing it a little stealthily for the time being.

I’m just about to delve into the Observer Magazine (please still have Jay Rayner’s restaurant reviews!) and the new New Review arts section, which has swallowed up the TV listings among other things.

A quick word though for those sections that have fallen by the wayside: no longer will we have Sport Monthly, Music Monthly and Woman Monthly, although Food Monthly has somehow survived that cull. I’m going to miss Sport Monthly in particular, because it was great long-form sports journalism that you just don’t see nowadays. Surely that would’ve fitted in nicely to the Pause. Review. Reflect mentality?

Also, goodbye Escape, the travel section. That’s now a poor little half-page at the back of the main paper, which is essentially a series of paragraphs urging people to go read it online (at the Guardian’s site!). Oh, and three pages in the Magazine.

Overall, it’s a good re-design. I like that the business/media section is now in the main paper, and the expansion of the In Focus articles is a good sign. Familiar columnists are retained, as have been the excellent sport team.

And I like where it’s heading, in terms of providing a chance to do that Pause. Review. Reflect they would so love us to do when we’re not absorbing headlines and blogs 24/7 from the Guardian’s website.

I just wonder how they’re going to fill the pages after Rawnsley’s book extracts…

Sometimes, I wonder whether it’s my maths that is failing me, a journalist’s, or if I’m just reading an article entirely incorrectly. A news story in today’s Guardian has brought this up again.

Ignore the party-political crap and attempts to score points off a failing education system. The bit I’m struggling with is the percentage of pupils who achieve 5 A*-C grades at GCSE (our exam for 16 year-olds).

The article states that the national average is 47.8%, with results in local areas ranging from 7% to 92%.

But here’s the confusing part: the percentage of pupils who receive free school meals (i.e. come from a poorer family) achieving 5 A*-C grades is now at 49%, whilst it is 73% for those who do not receive the free meals.

I’m not sure what the ratio is between the two groups, but in any case the average must be higher than 49%, whichever way you look at it. This is higher than the national average stated above.

Having re-read the article a few times, I think I see where the error occurs: the percentages quoted for free/non-free meals groups are for pupils attaining the equivalent of 5 GCSEs at good grades. Nowadays, it is possible to take vocational qualifications at schools which are viewed by the government and education boards as equivalent to GCSEs, despite being non-academic in nature.

I’m therefore assuming that these latter figures are for those grades, whereas the national average is purely based on GCSEs. It’s like comparing apples with apples and oranges, and the article really does fail to make this clear.

As, for that matter, do the Conservatives, who evidently press-released these numbers and planted the story. I’m pretty sure that if they included vocational qualifications, the results in these highlighted areas wouldn’t look so bad.

As they say, you can prove anything with statistics, especially if you get a journalist to write a badly-worded article about it.

So, why Iceland? I wanted to go somewhere cold in early December, so that the rest of the British winter would be an absolute breeze. We barely dip below zero here, save for the odd day, and ever since I lived in Germany a couple of years ago I’ve been a massive fan of cold weather. I would genuinely rather be cold than hot.

We looked at a few places across Europe, but the British pound is absolutely tanking against the Euro at the moment, and it was looking quite expensive. Then I remembered that Iceland’s economy was as equally fucked as ours, if not worse, and that the exchange rate would work out quite favourably.

We found some cheap flights, and picked a hotel pretty much at random in the centre of Reykjavik. As it happens, the hotel was fantastic, and incredible value with the deal we got (3rd night free). Centerhotel Thingholt, for sake of completeness.

As we only had two whole days there, plus the evening of the first day and until around 3pm on the last day, we couldn’t see much point in renting a car, as a friend had recommended me to do. Instead, we booked a few trips with Reykjavik Excursions, one of the bigger operators of various day tours. They also handled the bus from the airport to the hotel, which was unbelievably easy.

I can highly recommend the company, as everything was organised and run perfectly. They picked us up from the hotel each time, and then we usually transferred onto a larger coach to head off into Iceland. Through them, we went whale-watching, to see the Northern Lights, to the Blue Lagoon, and on a tour of the Golden Circle.

The Golden Circle is an area of central Iceland which is famous for its geological significance. It includes a pretty spectacular waterfall, geysers, and the site of the original parliament, which coincidentally sits right on the fault line running through the middle of the island.

That fault line is pretty much the only place on earth where the Mid-Atlantic ridge is above sea level. Iceland is actually growing by about 3cm each year as the American and Eurasian plates move apart, and is highly geologically active.

I’ll write some more about each of the tours as I post some photos and videos later this week, but I was thoroughly impressed with the organisation and the sheer enthusiasm with which they took place. The guides were all incredibly knowledgeable about many different parts of Icelandic culture, not just the tours which we were on at the time.

It’s a fascinating country, and I can’t wait to go back. Summertime is the peak tourist season, when temperatures hit a heady 10 degrees centigrade, but it was gorgeous at this time of year too. The visibility is just ridiculous, with incredible views everywhere you looked.

Most of the island is unforgivingly barren, and it does put you in the mind of a post-apocalyptic landscape. My friend said it reminded her of pictures of the moon, and I can see why. Most of the rocks are from lava fields, and are almost jet black, and they stretch for miles on end. It’s very eerie and otherworldly.

Something you don’t notice until it’s pointed out to you is the complete lack of trees. Owing to the high winds and very poor soil, most plant life is uprooted before it has had chance to fully embed itself, so very rarely is the view broken up by a wood or row of trees. Mostly, it’s just moss on the rocks.

Man, just writing this makes me want to hop on the next plane and get back there. I had an absolutely awesome time, and fell in love with the place. It’s something a bit different, away from the usual European destinations, yet only 3 hours from London.

And Americans, it’s not too far for you either, relatively speaking. 6 hours out of JFK isn’t too bad. Definitely worth it.

There’s something about a good steak that really sets it apart from other foods.

I think it’s the fact that it is purely a piece of meat, with no pretence towards pastry, bun, sauce or anything else that might detract from its meatiness. It’s man (and cutlery) versus meat, nothing in between.

In fact, the only way that a steak could be better would be if it were served on a stick, because we all know that sticks improve food at least tenfold.

This post brought to you by the excellent steak I had last night at The Butcher & Grill in Wimbledon Village.

The amount of unsent emails I write is bordering on ridiculous levels. I get on my high horse far too quickly and type out some seriously lengthy paragraphs, and then think to myself: “this person doesn’t want to hear this. Why are you writing to them as if you know them?”

And you know why it is? It’s because I think I do know you. I think I’ve read enough of you over the last couple of years to have an opinion on your life and the way you live it. I won’t criticise, never, but I’ll try to help you in any way I can, even if I’m the wrong side of the Atlantic, the country, or even just London.

But I never send these emails.

I don’t even save them as drafts. I just write the few hundred words, bang them out as if I was some kind of motherfucking agony uncle, and then delete them before anyone can read them. It probably helps me more to write them than it ever will for the potential recipient to receive them.

It’s me working out my demons, putting my thoughts into words and sentences. I’ve not yet faced the situations which these people find themselves in, but it’s as if by giving them advice I’m also preparing myself for the same situations at a future stage in life.

And then I don’t give them that advice, sentiment or opinion. I keep it for myself, I hoard it, I bottle it up.

How can I then judge the worthiness, the practicality, and the effectiveness of this advice? I’m operating on a closed-circuit, feedback loop. I think that by considering these situations, I’m prepared to face them.

But yet I’m not. I’ve got no fucking clue how I’d cope with a marriage, a divorce, a child, a death. I’ve dealt with some of these things in my 25 years on this planet, absolutely, but there’s no way I can even begin to scrape the surface of human experience.

Yes, I’ve had to deal with a parent battling with cancer (and ultimately surviving, thankfully). Yes, death has been an ever-present facet of my life since I was around 18, and I’ve been to more funerals than I would have liked to have been to at this stage in my life, but this is nothing. It’s fuck all.

And yet I find myself wanting to write, to opine. It’s cathartic, it really is. I’m trying to help someone else, but it’s really me whom I’m helping. I’m looking to experience the gamut of human emotions without facing them myself. I’m living my life vicariously, for fuck’s sake.

And I wish I had the balls to send these emails, but I figure that people can sort themselves out, given time and space. And they do, generally, from what I read.

And I know that I can sort myself out when I inevitably come to face these situations, because I know that people have dealt with them before, and that they have come out the other side, positively.

Hope springs eternal, as they say.

The 90s really was a great time for music. I know that everyone says that about the years during which they first got interested in music, but the 90s had some cracking songs pretty much the whole way through.

I was browsing through the list on Wikipedia of British Number One Singles during the 90s, and it struck me that there were a number of little sequences when one truly fantastic song followed another at the top of the charts.

Usually, I’d expect to see something brilliant replaced by something mediocre but publicised, and this was often the case. However, there are a few months when the British music-buying public were really at the top of their game.

The decade started with a bang, going from Sinead’s epic tearjerker into a little run of early dance tunes during spring, and then the best ever football song (until 1996’s ‘Three Lions’) to support the England team ahead of that summer’s World Cup.

It’s also interesting to see little juxtapositions, where genres collide at the top of the charts. Who knew that two of the most-requested karaoke songs of recent years actually followed one another to the Number One spot at the tail end of 1990?

Ah, the summer of 1993. I remember this period vividly, as it was when I first started seeing music videos rather than the usual live performances on Top of the Pops (RIP). The Freddie Mercury (of Queen fame) was actually a posthumous hit, and it was a remix that got it to the top. I’m amazed that I can sit here and still know all of the words to all six of these songs, and it’s also mind-blowing to think that Meatloaf’s track is 16 years old. How time flies.

Early 1997 saw the start of what was to become the norm from then on, and which lasted until legal downloads became part of the chart: one-week stays at Number One. If you look at the Wikipedia page, the lists for the latter years of the 90s are so much longer than those at the start, with a much quicker turnover of artists and singles. Manufactured pop groups and singers also became more prominent.

This last sequence shows that until this aggressive marketing at young teens really took hold, it was an eclectic mix of genres that made it to Number One. We go from a full-on house track to a one-hit wonder (incidentally, I love this track, a real mellow dancey number), then my favourite Blur tune. Rap gets a look-in, although if memory serves this was as a result of being tied-in with the Beavis & Butthead film more than any real love for LL. Discotheque came from U2’s experiments with electronica on the eponymous album, and then the British public got their first experience of Gwen Stefani.

I really do love the music that came from the 1990s, and still listen to a ridiculous amount of it. I grew up with it, and it helped to shape the musical landscape that I listen to now. As I said at the very beginning, we’re all a bit rose-tinted when it comes to musical history, but I’m one of the biggest fans of the 1990s.

I went to see Zombieland at the cinema last night, and I’m still grinning from ear to ear as various scenes replay in my head. It’s a genuinely funny zombie film, with some fantastic set pieces and a general atmosphere of hilarity throughout.

It’s drawn the obvious comparisons with British zom-com Shaun of the Dead, but for me it wasn’t quite so similar as people are making out. SOTD is a lot wordier, and quintessentially British in the way in which it deals with the zombie threat (i.e. by going to the pub). Zombieland, however, is louder, brasher and more violent, with liberal use of blood spatters and shotguns.

Its American-ness is typified by the choice of names for the four main characters: locations in the States which each individual is trying to get to, through the zombie apocalypse. There’s also constant references to Twinkies, which couldn’t be more American if they tried…

Woody Harrelson plays Tallahassee, a loud, brash, sweary and violent funnyman who is full of inventive ways to kill zombies. It’s probably the best I’ve seen Harrelson since Kingpin, and he is given some ridiculously good lines. You can also see that he’s having a lot of fun in this film, wise-cracking and shooting his way through the zombie-infested landscape.

Jesse Eisenberg, who seemingly had a clause in his contracts that he will only star in films with -Land in the title and set in a theme park, is Columbus, a scaredy-cat loner who has managed to survive through following 31 little rules regarding zombies. These rules pop up on screen in opportune moments, blending in with both the foreground and the background seamlessly.

Emma Stone and a suddenly tall Abigail Breslin are a pair of scheming sisters, somehow still alive by looking after each other and only each other. Breslin’s a bit wet, but Emma Stone builds on a pretty strong performance in Superbad here. She’s believable as a femme fatale, and kicks some serious zombie ass.

The only other named character is a brilliant cameo by someone that I won’t reveal here. It’s on the IMDB page for the film, if you’re interested, but suffice it to say that they are fantastic. I can’t really say too much else for fear of giving it away, but I loved how they fitted into the plot, and just how silly it all became.

The plot is pretty standard zombie fare: kill to survive, constantly, and head for somewhere which is probably safe. And, as with all zombie films, that location of course turns out to be precisely the opposite. But there’s enough humour in the film to show that it’s not taking itself seriously, and is spoofing these zombie film stereotypes, as SOTD did too.

The blood and gore is nicely done, and the director is evidently a fan of blood splattering onto the camera lens, because that happens a lot. Broken bones, feeding on the dead, there’s a lot of that going on. One little shot I found pretty cool was a zombie snapping someone’s bone and then slurping out of the middle. Nasty.

There’s a nice touch with zombie blood being black, and they really do look undead to boot. The zombies are related to the modern-day Dawn of the Dead / 28 Days Later breed, in that they can move quickly when needs be. No lumbering here.

But it’s a comedy film, after all, and it’s on that level which it needs to succeed.

Thankfully, it delivers. I laughed my ass off throughout, both at the dialogue and the visuals. The on-screen interplay between Harrelson and Eisenberg is a joy, with both absolutely ripping on each other for their various foibles and ticks. It looks like it was a blast to film.

There are touching moments, of course, but the film is able to take the piss out of itself a little (i.e. in the “Zombie Kill of the Week” skit), and never becomes too serious. You’re only ever a few seconds away from another laugh-out-loud moment, or a zombie being shot/stabbed/beheaded/run over, which is dealt with to equal comic effect.

I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed Zombieland, and highly recommend it. Being British, I can’t rate it higher than SOTD, but it comes a very close second in the quickly developing category of zom-coms.

Hmm, when I get pissed off, the words just flow. The media and the law are two subjects very dear to my heart, and I have very strong opinions on them.

Thus it pisses me off when I can see that either one of them is abusing their position. Or, even worse, being abused by those in power.

I ramble on, I know, and it’s boring if you’re not interested, but these are things I genuinely care about. I could write for hours and hours about the topic, no doubt working myself into a frenzy and ending up frothing at the mouth at the sheer fucking incredulity of it all.

If you read these longer pieces, I appreciate it. I tag all my posts, so there’s more on my blog under media and law. Other subjects which get me hot under the collar include hypocrisy in the media and the Daily Mail.

If that’s all a bit too much, try the funny stuff instead.