Everyone’s favourite Muslim cleric, Abu Hamza, has broken the hook that replaces his right hand while awaiting terrorism charges in Belmarsh Prison. He claims to have lost both hands while planting mines in Afghanistan and The Sun is all in all in a tizzy that the new hook will come on the NHS. They’re worried that more upstanding citizens might be left behind in the queue and so, should you be waiting for a hook, you should e-mail talkback@the-sun.co.uk and they’ll get on the case.

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David Starkey’s epic documentary on the monarchy, is itself destined to date rather quickly thanks to its slavish worship of contemporary style; all those reconstructions which amount to a guy in fancy dress turning to camera and saying something mundane.

It coincides with a report on when certain words and phrases came into use, that is itself a little bit of social history: ‘whizzo’ in 1905, ‘okay yah’ in 1985. Starkey will certainly be dated by his use of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (surely good old fashioned genocide is rightly making a come back) and perhaps by ‘market testing’, but it’s too early to say.

Where he comes a cropper is in his use of ‘nation state’. The England he describes begins as a stateless nation, divided between warrior kings, eventually it unites, but not behind a state consisting of a single nation, but a state including at least three: England, Scotland and Wales. His description of a unified Britain as a nation state is simply wrong. There’s no sign that any monarch would have recognised the concept, given that throughout history they’d a habit of claiming dominion over many nations.

The idea of the nation state came to life at the end of World War One, when Woodrow Wilson, an idealistic anti-colonial United States president proposed it as an equitable solution for long term peace. Each nation would have its own state and nobody would claim dominion over anybody else. Of course, it didn’t apply to the United Kingdom, where a single state continues to hold sovereignty over four nations (including part of Ireland) and numerous other bits and bobs around the world.

It might not sound it, but it’s important. We have a contemporary debate on Britain’s role in Europe and the nature of sovereignty and the state. Many anti-European Union campaigners, debate as if nation and state are the same thing and as if a federal Europe would mean the end of the British nations. So Starkey’s poor use of language helps perpetuate myths propagated by those for whom British history begins post-World War One.
Slippery words and the feeble minded……UKIP/BNP myths too quietly exposed……Feudal Creep

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Conservative Democrat, Nick Clooney, is in trouble because, ‘the movies George makes are dirty’. Hollywood connections are bad form in a ‘town where glass fibre replicas of the Ten Commandments tablet stand on front lawns’. Not only is all this Hicksville imagery funny in its own right, it also illustrates a great irony. Had Gore-Lieberman proved a successful ticket in 2000, Hollywood would have faced the most censorial regime since the McCarthy era. But as it is, good old George W probably enjoys the odd blockbuster with his pretzels and, thankfully, doesn’t seem that bothered about it all.

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Good to see Manchester turning to one of its true creative heroes, Peter Saville, to create a marketing campaign Mancunians can get behind. It’s a scary thing. Some of us remember the summer of 1997, when a quango headed up by failed Tory MP Sir David Trippier, came up with the slogan, We’re Up and Going (to hide under a rock, presumably).

Saville’s appointment as the city’s creative director coincided with a major retrospective of his work at Urbis (here’s the archive), the museum of urban culture and the city. He’s distilled Manchester down to two words, ‘original-modern’ and the more you consider them, the more fitting they are. As the place the industrial revolution began, Manchester is the original modern city and it remains the prime example of all the good stuff a city has to offer.

But, as ever with this city, it’s all about looking forward and playing up to innovation and creativity. Physical change is so constant that the Ordnance Survey has difficulty keeping its maps up to date and as Britain’s population ages, Manchester bucks the trend with a decline in older people. Manchester’s size ensures it’s truly cosmopolitan (with opportunities for everyone), but is not so big that new ideas are squeezed out and smothered (as can happen in the capital). All of which contributes to a vibrant creative hotspot with a sense of place that is never fixed, is always positive and is constantly stimulating.

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Boris Johnson is always worth listening to, not because he’s a great font of wisdom, but because he’s a natural comic and political comics are in short supply nowadays. But just as Billy Connolly’s Bigley joke was ill-judged, so was Boris’s attack on Liverpool’s mourning of him.

Arguing that the Sun’s accusing Liverpool supporters of urinating on the 96 dead at Hillsborough, amounted to no more than a ‘hint at the wider causes of the incident’ was not very clever. But Liverpool is a city with a very unique sense of community that is not always healthy. I promoted many of the city’s pubs in the mid-1990s and came across that community spirit; the city is surprisingly close-knit and has an unrivalled sense of identity. Yet I didn’t envy them for that because, perhaps proving that it’s easier to unite in the face of adversity, it was often backward looking and victim centred.

This doesn’t let Boris off the hook though. He’s now admitted his editorial was too trenchant, but worse it was ill-researched (grossly under estimating the number killed at Hillsborough, was unforgivable) and had he taken the time, he’d find that the Liverpool I just described is fading fast into history. The mindset is now catching up with its larger rival and neighbour, Manchester, to become far more positive and forward looking.

Awkward issues: why Kenneth Bigley’s alive

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I like to keep an eye my Museum of Spam’s press coverage with Google news alerts, but the poor old Googlebot often confuses it with the Spam Museum that opened for the love of the tinned meat in 2001. Anyway. I was intrigued by the Oskaloosa Herald’s story of a baseball team’s visit to that place which included a 14 year-old banjo player (‘this kid has a future’) and a mystery dinner. The thing is the writer, Burdell Hensley, is too busy fuming over the biased American media to provide an answer to the mystery… so of what might a mystery dinner at a spam museum consist?

I don’t do this often, but here’s a shout to Agi over at Digital Silence, because he asked for it. (You should not regard this link as evidence that Agi was bribed to report on my Museum of Spam; he reported the story solely on the basis of its news value.)

And thanks to everyone else who links to the Museum of Spam:

Thanks very much if you link to the Museum of Spam. If you place the URL of the page containing the link in the comments here, I’ll add you to this list.
Update: This list is now maintained over here.
Stephen Newton’s Museum of Spam……Fox News: why so anti-American?……Poor old spammed out Buddy

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While I get annoyed at the BBC’s embedding soft journalists with hunt groups and would like to see more corpses on TV, to show how bad Saddam Hussein was, I’ve never taken bias in the media particularly seriously. But some do and what a weird lot they are. In response to alleged liberal bias in traditional media, the angry white men of the American right asked a kindly Australian outfit to establish Fox News, to bring in some balance. The thing is, the new station’s turned out to be anything but a bastion of traditional values.

When other stations are accused of lying you can expect a denial, an investigation or an apology and promise to reform. Not with Fox. They went to court to prove lying is legal. But, thankfully, only in America. In the UK broadcasters have to abide by a code that demands ‘respect for truth’, which Fox failed to meet when it called the BBC anti-American. Challenged to prove the point, Fox explained its very best investigative reporters had Googled ‘bbc anti-american’ and on seeing many thousands of results (47,200 then, 48,900 right now) the case was proved. Unimpressed, the regulator told them to tell anchor John Gibson to respect the truth or get off the air. They chose to take him off in Europe.

Funnily enough ‘fox news anti-american’ produces 54,400 results, so by their own reckoning, Fox News is more anti-American than the BBC. Perhaps we should trust them on this one.

Anyway. Now it turns out that its sister entertainment channel, plain old Fox, has been fined $1.2m for indecency, while another Fox News anchor, Bill O’Reilly, is up on sex charges. So not the kind of people right thinking Britons would like to see on TV.

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In the wrong hands, there’s nothing more destructive than positive thinking and nobody illustrates this better than Nasir Jones (Nas to his friends). He first wound me up with his terribly annoying I Can, which features kiddies chanting the mantra, ‘I know I can (I know I can) / Be what I wanna be (be what I wanna be) / If I work hard at it (If I work hard at it) / I’ll be where I wanna be (I’ll be where I wanna be)’.

Positive thinkers will think this is wonderful. But the problem is, to quote Limp Bizkit, Nas’s ‘mouth’s writing cheques his ass can’t cash’. There he is promising Oprah Winfrey shows to every little girl who fancies it. It can only end in tears.

Anyway. Now we have Bridging the Gap, a collaboration with his father Olu Dara (listen here), that’s actually pretty good. More relevantly, it explains Nas’s eternal optimism as Olu admits promising his son over and over, ‘He’ll be the greatest man alive, the greatest man alive’. So Nas seems to prove the power of a positive upbringing.

Yet for every person like Nas there are many more who, throughout her childhoods, never had any reason to believe they would – or even could – fail. I once attended an Institute of Public Relations awards lunch to which some students had been invited and all had classic symptoms of positive upbringing. They chatted excitedly about joining a big name London consultancy. But those firms would take on maybe a couple of dozen graduates, while thousands would apply. No matter how positive you are, the numbers simply don’t add up and most of these kids were destined to fall hard.

Morris on happiness: how depressing

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The lack of an imminent threat from Iraq, will lead many to argue that the war was simply wrong. But this is a very short term and blinkered view, that implies the most significant barrier (after the Israel-Palestine conflict) to Middle Eastern peace should have been left to fester, with the gravest of outcomes.

Such tolerance would see the continuation of sanctions against Iraq in a modern day siege that would ensure the continuation of grotesque levels of poverty within that country, alongside abuses of human rights, far worse than the disgusting images from Abu Ghraib. To end sanctions with the dictator in power, would almost certainly have allowed Saddam to redevelop the weapons of mass destruction he had used to murder many thousands of people in the past. For all the mess that has arisen from the Bush administration’s naïve belief that US troops would be welcomed as liberators by a population desperate for democracy, Iraqis are still better placed to benefit from a peaceful more prosperous future.

(BTW: Where’s all that nuclear material gone?)

Not a war for idealists……Those other Iraq pictures……Getting some focus on Iraq war aims

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Despite the cringeworthy title, Inside I’m dancing is a well made feel good comedy, with a strong character arc. Through rebellious Rory (himself doomed to muscular dystrophy) Michael learns just how empty his safe institutionalised life is and to look beyond his cerebral palsy. All without a second of worthy realism.
A solid 8 out of 10
Collateral……Ae Fond Kiss
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