Stop the World, I Want to Get Off

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off 1

Poster Boy for Post-lexia








A guy who thinks Shakespeare is "the geezer who directed that Romeo & Juliet movie with Leo DiCaprio in it" wins Big Brother. Imbecility is a vote-winner. Brian is the perfect poster boy for our media-corrupted, post-lexic society.

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off 2

McCann Mania

The McCanns guilt, like the Portuguese police's competence, is still to be established. It should be transparently obvious, as its the axiomatic principle that our (and the Portuguese) legal system is based upon, that they're innocent until proven guilty, but the burden of proof, in the popular mindset at least, seems to have switched to the McCanns to prove their innocence.

The media-led lynch mob mentality metastasises exponentially. Trial by media, innuendo and, with the advent of the blogosphere, global gossip, is now commonplace. The media pendulum inevitably swings from hype to backlash. Rumour, conjecture, speculation and misinformation served up as truth, devoured by a voracious public's seemingly insatiable appetite for schadenfreude.

The Portuguese police don't seem to have much of a case, and appear to think that using their lackeys in the Portuguese press to spread vicious innuendos about the McCanns is a dignified way to discharge their duties. This is a tragic situation with far too many people rushing to judgement. The McCanns were, certainly, guilty of a terrible error of judgement in leaving their kids alone in that apartment, but some of the conspiracy theories, rumours and conjecture that are emanating from the press, both British and Portuguese, are patently absurd, not to mention libelous. The media, collectively, seem to be convulsing in pernicious paroxysms of hallucinatory hysteria.

I'll warrant the Keystone Cops could have conducted a more thorough investigation than the PJ and the misinformation being leaked to the press by "sources close to the investigation" is scandalous. If they devoted as much time to looking for Madeleine (or her body), securing crime scenes and handling such evidence as does exist more responsibly (than they seem to spend leaking salacious "information" to the Portuguese media) then they might have cracked the case long before now.

Once upon a time there was a maxim, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." In today's "idiocracy", every yob with a keyboard thinks they have a right to lob verbal boulders at whoever they please.

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off 3

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Concerned investors queue round the block to withdraw their funds from "impecunious" Northern Rock. Material Girl Madonna needs to get hip to the postmodern zeitgeist: "We're living in a media-led miasma."