Top Gear

Happily in Britain, we've had some of the best journalists covering topics like motoring and sport ever to make it to print, LJK Setright, Denys Watkins-Pitchford, etcetera. Unfortunately this benign circumstance is tainted by the fact we've had pretty much all the worst ones too. Somewhere not too low down the running, you'll find Jeremy Clarkson a bit of a tit but entertaining with his prose; Clarkson, of course, made his name with the original Top Gear. His style was/is suited to the tele, where his shortcomings like his appreciation of technical issues, such as: why muscle cars have a live axles not independent suspension, could be overlooked.

If you want an insight into just how bad the original Top Gear was before Clarkson made his influence felt, take a gander at this clip, it offends in just about every possible way. One of the reasons it's so bad of course, is it's tailored to the brief, that is: do a humorous piece on the Trabant. Integrity flies out the window and hides in the neighbour's coal bunker when journalists do that, things like facts and reality become awkward and suborned to the brief.

The other thing that sticks out, is that the journalist (I can't be bothered to look up his name) really sticks his foot in his mouth early on in the piece. He talks about "lifting off" into a corner and complains about the free wheel facility when he tries this in the Trabant. Right okay--so he doesn't know how to drive safely, a good deal of the cars on the road in 89 were rear wheel drive and lifting off in say, a 3 series BMW sans traction control while going into a corner, is gonna see your tail floating past your ear pretty quick. What's worse, is that this howler makes it to the cut, which means the editor and probably the producer don't know any better than their journo--flip's sake.

Top Gear

So have you sent your CV to the BBC yet? The best job in the country is up for grabs and carpe diem is the appropriate motto for such occasions, so if you haven't already done so, do it now and good luck. However, competition should be fierce and I reckon I've spotted the ideal candidate: Brian Sewell, yep that's right, the art critic. Sewell's a national treasure, even more inclined to let the truth off the lead to chase off hypocrisy and correctness with his candour than Clarkson, he's drawn more than the occasional bought of censorial attention. On one notable occasion, a cadre of the benighted had cause to draft an open letter accusing him of homophobia, er yeah, nice one you miops, what do you do for an encore, tie your own shoelaces? Anyway gotta rush, gotta catch the post with this CV.

Observations from Zog

I suppose it's time I came clean, I'm not writing this like most Blogspot or Wordpress users, sitting at keyboard or on a laptop in a cafe. I'm inputting this on an hyperspatial input station from a secret location on the planet Zog. Let me explain, you've heard of David Icke, you know -- reptilians, shape-shifters? Zog is where they, the Zogthurians, come from, I'm here with the Zogthurian resistance. It turns out that not all Zogthurians are evil and bent on planetary conquest. In fact most Zogthurians are quite congenial, the only real inconvenience, apart from the toilet tissue shortage, is the Zogthurian's habitual practice of conducting internal body cavity probes, it wouldn't be so bad if they at least warmed the end of the probe a little, brrrrrr.

As you might expect communication between Zog and Earth can be a little difficult at times. I'm not sure where Zog is but I know it's some distance from Earth, so we don't get all the news channels that you do at home. In fact there's no television at all and the radio broadcasts only come through occasionally. There is excellent internet access though, the Zogthurians  spent a lot of effort securing the broadband connection between Zog and Earth because they're very keen on the internet. They're particularly interested in downloading something called Japanese AV, apparently it offers a valuable insight into human culture and psychology. There are two main consequences that follow from these circumstances, I get almost almost all my news of home via the internet and the Zogthurian consumption of tissue paper has tripled annually since the introduction of direct broadband from Earth.

So I'm not up to speed on news topics like the X-Factor or Jeremy Clarkson, that seem to preoccupy the newspapers back home. I should mention that we do get newspapers too, the tissue shortage has prompted the Zogthurians to import large quantities of newsprint to supplement the toilet tissue supply. Copies of the Daily Mail and Independent seem to be particularly popular although they do use all of the British tabloids for that purpose and the demise of the News of the World was widely lamented. So it was a certain degree of curiosity that I read headlines regarding the British weather. It seemed as soon as the summer had finished that the papers announced each inclement episode as if it were minor catastrophe. There was also number of ominous predictions emblazoned in bold type such as, "Arctic Freeze Predicted" and "Flood Warning". The latest example of this phenomenon was the announcement  that it was actually snowing in December. I know I've been on Zog for some time but I still do recall that things like this used to happen quite regularly at home we called it -- winter.

Being on the planet Zog you might think that I'd be sympathetic to conspiracy theories, seeing as I know that Mr. Icke's seemingly fantastic claims are all grounded in solid fact. Well you'd be wrong there, as far as I'm concerned, Oswald shot JFK and the twins towers collapsed because some Arabs flew into them with bloody great aeroplanes. It's not that I don't think our politicians are above conspiracy and manipulation, Blair's 45 minute claim is a good example of such. I just don't think they're that good at it, they're as about as good at conspiracy as they are at running the economy. So I'm not a conspiracy buff or a truther as they liked to be called but when I caught sight of some other climate related material from the news, I couldn't quite shake the idea there might be a connection. The material in question was the climate change conference in Durban, that has been going on since November. The media has been heralding the rather prosaic approach of winter since the autumn like it was the first time it had ever occurred, could there be a connection? I wonder...