Category: uk

Never forget

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[Content Warning: Tony Blair]

(sorry)

As Christmas approaches, there will be all sorts of public figures sharing their Christmas cards with us. If you’re a posh Brit (and also if you are a bit of a posh Brit wannabe), your Christmas card won’t be bought from the local Christmas card shop and it won’t feature an image a happy Santa or a drunk reindeer or even a traditional nativity scene. And definitely not all three.

It will feature an image of you and your spouse and your kids. And possibly your dog.

But however hard you try, your effort will never, ever beat the best of the the genre, released in 2014:

[cockney accent]
“Leave it Tony. ‘E ain’t werf it!”
[/cockney accent]

It’s appalling for a range of reasons, not least for the actual people in it, but couldn’t they have found anything better than that threatening look of impending violence?

Now we know what Iraq felt like.

If you’re thinking of doing your Christmas cards like this, this year: don’t.

If you do want to wish people a Happy Christmas/Winterval/Holiday Season, why not do what we do: send it electronically and spend the money you save on beer donate the money you save to a local charity?

This week’s posts summed up

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Busy afternoon and evening ahead, but here’s a nice, concise round up of a couple of my posts from earlier in the week. Namely this one, and this one.

Indeed.

Sadly, the FA seem to have backed down on the One Love armband thing after threats by FIFA, whose corrupt clown boss “felt gay” just a couple of days ago. And that’s brought annoyance from some people in the UK, who have moved really quickly from “the armband thing is a poor show” through “England shouldn’t even be playing” to “Well football is awful and just should be banned anyway”.

If you thought FIFA were tone deaf…*

* you’d be right. my point is that so are these pearl clutchers.
the damage is done. the message has already been sent.
that it will inevitably fall on deaf ears is not England’s (or any other team’s) fault.

1981 photos of Boris Johnson as a teen magazine model

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Yep. Exactly that.

There are some of the images that DALL E:

An artificial intelligence tool that’s stunned people with its ability to render text into realistic images

has come up with. This via the excellent r/weirddalle subreddit. And yes, it looks just like he’s in Just Seventeen (although that only started in 1983, so…) or some such:

or:

But check out the hands here (and in several others of the set here). AI might be able to pull out that 1981 stuff, get the teen model look and nail the fuzzy magazine imagery, but it still can’t do hands!

Or maybe necks in that second picture.

Goodbye MTW

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Friday evening saw the broadcast of the last episode of popular BBC comedy panel show Mock The Week, after 17 glorious years.

I will miss it.

Still, at least they went out with a bang…

Oof.

If you need your Dara O’Briain fix, he’s on the current series of Taskmaster on the UK’s Channel 4, and I’d highly recommend that show to top up your now much-depleted laughter bank.

This was England (and the IOM)

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A lovely little collection of images in The Guardian late last week, promoting an exhibition which includes the work of documentary photographer Chris Killip.

This one is a fog-(on the Tyne)-gy Wallsend, dated on the site as being taken in 1976. But the Tyne Pride – one of the huge ships being built at the Swan Hunter shipyard which was the be-all and end-all for all the families living in that area at that time – was actually launched in late 1975, so I think that might be incorrect. They built BIG SHIPS there back then. Here’s a better view of just how big:

Mark I Raleigh Chopper FTW!

I know Chris Killip’s work from his time on the Isle of Man, mostly documenting Manx farming life in the early 1970s. Not a lot had changed in the previous 100-odd years for many of those communities at that time, and not a lot changed in the 15 or 20 years after that either, so I recognise quite a few of the places and scenes (and maybe even one or two of the people?) from my time over there as a kid.

There are plenty of those images on the Manx Museum ‘iMuseum’ site here.