There's a story doing the rounds at the moment about a Premier League footballer who's had an affair with some classless bint keen to tell everybody about it. Using the legal power of the super injunction (like a normal injunction except it's mild mannered and wears glasses when it isn't called upon), said player has kept his name out of the popular press to avoid his wife cottoning on and the whole bally lot going up like a tinderbox.
There's a small problem however. Some blabbermouth politician used his legal right to mention that Ryan Giggs was the footballer in question. The speaker of the house went up the wall, as it may have been legal, but it was a bit on the snidey side, not least because of the whole super injunction caper. But his chagrin was too late, as the press went into absolute meltdown.
The politician's outburst gave them the loophole they were looking for, as they could now say that Giggs' name had been linked with the scandal, rather than holding their tongue when everybody knew who it was anyway. Thanks to the Scottish Sunday Herald publishing a laughably poor censored photo of Giggs (using the fact they were Scottish to get around the England-only injunction), the rumours which first circulated on Twitter last week took on a whole new level, as people could stop guessing (and finding a player's name to fit into the redacted black boxes on the various tweets) and start passing judgment on the Welsh wonder.
I personally think it's a real shame, as Giggs has been a fine ambassador for the game and good role model for most of the 20 years he's been a player. Yes he had dalliances with the likes of Dani Behr in his youth, but he was a single and much sought-after young man due to the explosion in popularity of top-flight football thanks to the Premier League's inception. Alex Ferguson kept his hand on the tiller with Giggs in a way that no other superstar had been controlled before, drip-feeding him to the press and ensuring his playing career was the only thing in the public eye. And given the fact Giggs just picked up his 12th league medal at the age of 37, you can probably argue that he had a point at the time.
Skip forward and now Giggs has been pursuing some nice-looking if morally misguided piece of crumpet, who couldn't wait to start gobbing off (no pun intended) to the press, although he got to the court in time to shield his name. He probably thought that was the end of it, but the dynamic in news consumption has altered a lot in recent years, and the Twitter feeds caught fire with suggestions who the player might be. As his name appeared more and more frequently, the press starting picking up on it, bringing the story to the attention of the masses without actually mentioning who it was. More and more rumours abounded, with various tweeters making thinly disguised references to him, safe in the knowledge that the law hadn't caught up with social networking yet, so they could say what they liked without fear of reprisal.
So where next? Giggs' arse is in the chopper at the moment, not least with his wife I should imagine, and we might see a Tiger-esque fall from grace in terms of sponsorship deals and general consensus. You probably know my opinion on adultery, so anything which happens to him now serves him right. All this after he had the cheek to parade his kids round Old Trafford during the end-of-season ceremony. The bigger story concerns Twitter though, and how to police it, when nobody appears legally liable for the stuff people put out there. Nobody has been censured or even banned from Twitter for naming names, and Twitter aren't about to carry the can. At this stage it looks like a better bet to approach every single famous person in the world to ask them politely to keep it in their drawers. Either that or shag someone who isn't looking for fame off the back of it. There must be someone like that out there somewhere...
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Thursday, 12 May 2011
Put it this way: I wouldn't stand behind them in a scrap
Just last week, US Navy Seals (like the ones in movies who are retired but still retain all of their rad skills for the unlikely attempt on their life they inevitably suffer in suburbia) stormed a Pakistani house, found our old friend Osama and shot his shit up. In doing so, I don't think it's particularly outlandish to label the Seals as 'brave'.
On an unrelated note, there's a programme (in literally the broadest sense imaginable) called "The only way is Essex" which I am told is a quasi-soap opera, in which real, albeit slightly odd people are recorded in predetermined situations for our amusement. They're not actors (believe me) but are encouraged to work through a particular situation on film for the amusement of them orange lasses who wear furry boots to the shops.
Naturally, the people chosen to be in this programme aren't exactly hanging. Since its inception, several articles and column inches have been dedicated to showing them off in their undercrackers, as if we haven't got anything better to do than perv over top-heavy lovelies on that Internet. In addition, their every waking moment is recorded by the paparazzi and splashed across the red-tops quicker than you can say "I couldn't give a fuck what colour her shoes are, squire".
Now, fast-forward a few months and yet another article has been dreamt up by some braindead arsehat with too much time on their hands, in which said lovelies are shorn of make-up and photographed, under the premise that they are brave for doing so. So in their world, not putting some blusher on is the same as preventing terrorism.
Fuck. Off.
Don't get me wrong, they're not trying to draw that comparison (that I can see), but the meaning of the word 'brave' can only be stretched so far before it becomes a laughing stock, and labelling anyone bored enough to have their photo taken before putting lipstick on ain't brave. Pointless, maybe. Minging, certainly. But brave? No.
I've seen this kind of thing developing in the press for a while now, where we're in a position that our physical appearance has become so important to our worth that certain people really do think that going make-up free is a brave act. If that's the case, I'm Casey fucking Ryback in a polo shirt.
On an unrelated note, there's a programme (in literally the broadest sense imaginable) called "The only way is Essex" which I am told is a quasi-soap opera, in which real, albeit slightly odd people are recorded in predetermined situations for our amusement. They're not actors (believe me) but are encouraged to work through a particular situation on film for the amusement of them orange lasses who wear furry boots to the shops.
Naturally, the people chosen to be in this programme aren't exactly hanging. Since its inception, several articles and column inches have been dedicated to showing them off in their undercrackers, as if we haven't got anything better to do than perv over top-heavy lovelies on that Internet. In addition, their every waking moment is recorded by the paparazzi and splashed across the red-tops quicker than you can say "I couldn't give a fuck what colour her shoes are, squire".
Now, fast-forward a few months and yet another article has been dreamt up by some braindead arsehat with too much time on their hands, in which said lovelies are shorn of make-up and photographed, under the premise that they are brave for doing so. So in their world, not putting some blusher on is the same as preventing terrorism.
Fuck. Off.
Don't get me wrong, they're not trying to draw that comparison (that I can see), but the meaning of the word 'brave' can only be stretched so far before it becomes a laughing stock, and labelling anyone bored enough to have their photo taken before putting lipstick on ain't brave. Pointless, maybe. Minging, certainly. But brave? No.
I've seen this kind of thing developing in the press for a while now, where we're in a position that our physical appearance has become so important to our worth that certain people really do think that going make-up free is a brave act. If that's the case, I'm Casey fucking Ryback in a polo shirt.
Splashing: Erotic
There are many things used by movie moguls and executives to make their latest blockbuster a right old hoot. For example, creating a scenario where the key protagonist is put in difficult or unusual situations for our amusement. Dropping a 3-dimensional black trapezoid bearing the logo '10 tonnes' onto some poor sap's head is also a favourite. Employing Jonah Hill to be fat and socially awkward isn't without it's charms either.
However, chief among all of these is that great bastion of hilarity, cross-dressing. Get an actor (nearly always a bloke), stick him in a dress and ill-fitting syrup and that, my friends, is money in the bank. Never mind that it's been done before, and that it's actually slightly unpleasant and creepy; Man + Dress = Cha-ching!
However, when the more eccentric of our great nation's inhabitants decide to follow suit and re-enact their favourite scene from Tootsie of Big Momma's House 2, they're arrested before you can say "These heels are killing me, brother". That's a bit unfair, isn't it? We're always being told that the media influences today's youth into copycat acts, so how come it isn't those fat cats chewing on cigars in the film equivalent of City Hall being put in front of the beak? It's yet another example of one rule for one and one for another.
It was reported in the press recently that a young masters student was apprehended and stuck on the sex offender's register because he put on a rubber mask of a female face, topped it off with a jet-black wig, and wandered into the ladies bogs at Birmingham University and The Bullring to record audio of them having a wee. As you do.
It turned out that he'd been at it for ages, and it was only when a women reported a strange mannequin-like figure in the loo that the blag went tits up. There he was, bold as brass, listening to women shaking the lettuce and recording it for posterity. What gets me is that the mask and wig combo makes you look at best an understudy in a low-budget horror movie, and at worst a fucking freak, so how he'd got away with it for so long is a mystery. He was credited as being intelligent in court by the judge, but unless his degree is the study of urinal acoustics, I doubt he's anything of the sort.
I'm not condoning such acts, but he wasn't hurting anyone, so putting him on the register is a bit harsh I think. If he started touching himself or other folk, by all means chuck away the key, but surely he could be put on some kind of programme where he wears a blindfold and someone pours water into a bucket to desensitise him to the extremely unerotic act of having a piss? If it turns up on ITV1 on a Saturday evening, shoehorned into some kind of game show, don't say I didn't warn you.
However, chief among all of these is that great bastion of hilarity, cross-dressing. Get an actor (nearly always a bloke), stick him in a dress and ill-fitting syrup and that, my friends, is money in the bank. Never mind that it's been done before, and that it's actually slightly unpleasant and creepy; Man + Dress = Cha-ching!
However, when the more eccentric of our great nation's inhabitants decide to follow suit and re-enact their favourite scene from Tootsie of Big Momma's House 2, they're arrested before you can say "These heels are killing me, brother". That's a bit unfair, isn't it? We're always being told that the media influences today's youth into copycat acts, so how come it isn't those fat cats chewing on cigars in the film equivalent of City Hall being put in front of the beak? It's yet another example of one rule for one and one for another.
It was reported in the press recently that a young masters student was apprehended and stuck on the sex offender's register because he put on a rubber mask of a female face, topped it off with a jet-black wig, and wandered into the ladies bogs at Birmingham University and The Bullring to record audio of them having a wee. As you do.
It turned out that he'd been at it for ages, and it was only when a women reported a strange mannequin-like figure in the loo that the blag went tits up. There he was, bold as brass, listening to women shaking the lettuce and recording it for posterity. What gets me is that the mask and wig combo makes you look at best an understudy in a low-budget horror movie, and at worst a fucking freak, so how he'd got away with it for so long is a mystery. He was credited as being intelligent in court by the judge, but unless his degree is the study of urinal acoustics, I doubt he's anything of the sort.
I'm not condoning such acts, but he wasn't hurting anyone, so putting him on the register is a bit harsh I think. If he started touching himself or other folk, by all means chuck away the key, but surely he could be put on some kind of programme where he wears a blindfold and someone pours water into a bucket to desensitise him to the extremely unerotic act of having a piss? If it turns up on ITV1 on a Saturday evening, shoehorned into some kind of game show, don't say I didn't warn you.
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