Dancing Queen of the Night

If the old adage that any publicity is good publicity is true; then that there Home Secretary is putting herself about a bit. Even the BBC has temporarily scaled back its Farage 24 service in order to make room in the schedule for the daily Theresa May Show. In addition to her spectacular appearances on hourly news bulletins and interviews with senior and completely impartial political correspondents, Mrs May was honoured to share with the public her human side during an episode of Desert Island Discs. Ubiquity is seldom accidental.

Forget about bacon sandwiches and a couple of Labour MPs grumbling in a House of Commons bar prompting media types to bellow “leadership crisis”, ignore the continuing obsession with a single tweet featuring an image of a house and, for the sake of humanity, disregard pouting minor celebrities screeching outrage at the prospect of a mansion tax. If you require evidence of a “leadership crisis”, look instead toward defections, by election defeats, a feral 1922 committee, the omnipotence of the Home Secretary and a popular Twitter hash tag demanding that “Cameron Must Go”.

See Emily Play

If the excitable and somewhat tarnished British media is to be believed, Emily Thornberry has posted the most disgusting, offensive, vile, inhumane and satanic tweet in the short but colourful history of social media. Publishing an image of a house festooned with no less than three, yes three, flags of St George and with a white van parked outside and with the evil, provocative and seditious caption “Rochester”, this Thornberry woman has dragged politics into the gutter by displaying contempt and derision targeted at hard-working, overweight used car dealers.

Cooking the books

Via cam.ac.uk

With the polls about to open for the Rochester and Strood parliamentary by election and the three or four migrant Poles actually living in Rochester being rounded up by the media for their thoughts on transitional deportation, now is good time to categorically state that David Cameron is definitely not the most incompetent Prime Minister in living memory.

Facing electoral defeat in a safe Tory seat by a strange bloke who was recently a Tory but now asks the Kent electorate to vote for change by voting for him as the sitting MP, Cameron said he would throw the kitchen sink at Rochester. Opinion polls, which always must be taken with a pinch of salt, suggest that that the sink missed and Cameron avoided a nasty foot injury by ensuring that both his feet were planted firmly in his mouth as he dropped the Armitage Shanks. The strange Kipper bloke who was recently a Tory and is demanding change really dropped his phone into the urinal by suggesting that even perfectly legal migrants should face deportation. It is an indication of the toxicity of the hate mongering and scare stories spread by the Kippers and others that this outrageous statement will probably increase the strange bloke`s vote.

Blade runner

Via standard.co.uk

Innocently confusing United with Wednesday might spoil a day out in Sheffield but confusing committing an offence and causing offence might just ruin lives. For the sake of clarity and for those unaware of football or Nick Clegg`s steel city constituency, Wednesday are known as the Owls and play in blue shirts and United are known as the Blades and play in red shirts. For the sake of further clarity, rape is a criminal offence punishable by law and wearing a shirt of questionable taste might, in certain circumstances, cause offence. It must be made clear that these two deliberate, premeditated actions are very, very different.

The size of a fridge

Image via sci.esa.int and 300 million miles

There is a lot of fun to be had when filling in the equal opportunities monitoring section of an application form or a questionnaire. Unless required for the official census, details of age, gender and ethnicity are completely irrelevant and a little intrusive. Rather than ensuring diversity in any survey or in recruitment, the pigeon-hole questions are more of a marketing tool to identify a particular demographic.

Being a white, middle-aged English man who is a bit dim, a true and accurate description of my social status might lump me in with the sub-group that displays a disturbing obsession with the Farage creature and the Daily Mail. It is tempting, therefore, to complete this bit of the form erroneously just for a laugh. Pretending to be female wouldn`t really work but the ethnicity tick boxes provide endless equal opportunities for mischief. Ticking “other” and then adding Inuit or Amazonian Yawanawa or Ubangian Baka might just cheer up the poor soul tasked with doing the analysis. These days, however, in an atmosphere of toxic nationalism, I tend to tick “other” and then describe my ethnicity as either “Celtic” or, more often, as “European”. There`s more japes to be had in tick boxes regarding faith.