Thursday 28th March 2024

[refitman]

Morning all.

[refitman]

Don't worry, the NHS is safe in Labour hands

[AnatolyKasparov]

Good morefternoon, all.

Don't forget that tomorrow starts a four day weekend (in effect)

[gilsey]

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Went to check out the QT panel for this evening and of course it's not on because of the Easter recess. It's not back until the 18'th of April apparently. Did anyone watch it last week?

I see the absolute shambles that is the life of Lawrence Fox continues to provide amusement.

Laurence Fox’s London mayor hopes end after errors filling in forms

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/202 ... nomination

The former actor Laurence Fox will not be a candidate at the London mayoral elections after failing to fill in the nomination forms correctly.

London Elects, which administers the mayoral and London Assembly elections, said the Reclaim party leader had submitted the papers shortly before the deadline on Wednesday, which were subsequently found to contain errors.

I see he's deleted his tweets accusing London Elects officials of corruption after they explained to him that not only had he failed to provide the required number of supporting subscribers, but even some of those he had provided couldn't be found on the electoral register.

[AnatolyKasparov]

Its always someone else's fault with the far right. Always.

[refitman]

Hahahaha

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Even more hahahaha. He's having a really bad day.

[frog222]

Ah Well, he saved ten grand deposit on his mayoral bid

[gilsey]

Went to check out the QT panel for this evening and of course it's not on because of the Easter recess. It's not back until the 18'th of April apparently. Did anyone watch it last week?

Watched a bit of it, only because it was from Middlesbrough. Apparently Rod Liddle is from Teesside, which presumably explains why he was on, can't think of any other valid excuse.

Rod Liddle: eeewww

Phillipa Gregory: reasonably sound

Sarah Jones: Starmerite word salad

Rachel Maclean was the day's tory sacrifice, much the same as all the others.

Tim Farron: can't remember a word he said.

The controversy of the evening was of course around Ben Houchen. The woman in pink is the wife of the Airport Director, who's also there. The woman sitting next to her, shaking her head, was more in tune with the general feeling of the audience.
Another man was allowed to speak the truth, ie Houchen is an expensive waste of space, but I haven't seen a clip of him.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

The Zone of Interest

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7160372/

You've probably heard more about Jonathan Glazer's speech at the Oscars than the film he was accepting the Oscars for. Controversially I'm going to say that's for a good reason, the speech was better than the film.

It'll be difficult to give any spoilers away here because the film essentially has no plot. The commandant of Auschwitz lives with his wife and kids in their dream home while on the other side of their garden wall Jews are being gassed and burned en masse. That's it. That's the film. The juxtaposition between their life of luxury, their petty ambitions, their inhuman callousness, and what's going on next door.

The problem is though you never get to witness what's going on next door, you just hear it, so the focus is mainly on the commandant's ambitious, social climbing wife, who I'm sorry to say I found unintentionally hilarious which probably isn't good.

It was an hour and a half long sermon on the banality of evil with banal doing most of the work, and while I fully understood the point it was making it's a point that's been made many times before by much better films. Compared to something like 'Come and See' it was like watching Merchant Ivory do the Nazis.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091251/

[Sky'sGoneOut]

The controversy of the evening was of course around Ben Houchen. The woman in pink is the wife of the Airport Director, who's also there. The woman sitting next to her, shaking her head, was more in tune with the general feeling of the audience.
Another man was allowed to speak the truth, ie Houchen is an expensive waste of space, but I haven't seen a clip of him.

Thanks Gilsey.

'He's a man of our time, he's a man of our town' is such a normal thing to say isn't it? Just trips off the tongue. I was quite relieved when the smattering of applause she received was drowned out by the eventual widespread guffawing.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Ok so I've just watched a clip from last weeks QT where Rod Liddle gets schooled by a school counsellor when he tries to claim mental health problems aren't caused by poverty because poor people in poorer countries are much happier than we are.

I read the same study he was referring to and he's factually right, it's true some of the poorest people are the happiest, what he doesn't say is who they are and why.

The happiest people according to that study were a tribe in the Brazilian Amazon. Is Rod suggesting it would be better if we all hunted monkeys with blow darts instead of the 9 to 5 grind? Should we hollow out logs and paddle ourselves to work in crude canoes rather than relying on rubbish expensive trains?

What that study showed was an increase in perceived happiness the further you got from the modern world.

Something you would have thought a racist woman beater would be down with.