love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

cheese in Canada is fucking shit - and expensive - and dear old Blighty seems like cheestopia in comparison

itt some verY Fenni cheese humour

hey, what cheese is aduog backwards?

no wait, that's not it

Pleased to see only cheese knives being brandished itt today.

Posting caerphilly, me

port wine derby

Not entirely British, this (tho to be fair UK imperialism did really get the trade going, can't fault ye for that).

epoisses is gods own cheese

Apologies for that bit of ignorant assumption of me there Daniel. Cultural imperialism is a hell of a drug!

I don't generally bother with celeb nonsense but was pleased to notice Christopher Eccleston has referred to the Queen as "parasite in chief in her idiot hat" on social media.

haha no worries calz, I was being a pedant tbh; I mean there's Glennmorangie gets aged in port wine casks too and I don't think I could claim it for that

I wouldn’t be finding this as funny as I do if I wasn’t a bit heat-deranged, but I am and I do.

Couldn’t resist checking out @demarionunn’s theory... and he’ s right. Why i spent ten minutes of my life looking through stock photos of men with there thumbs up isnother matter! https://t.co/fTmmFAbSnI pic.twitter.com/NbGK7yO4uj

— Kristian Purcell (@kristianpurcell) August 12, 2020

cheese in Canada is fucking shit

Some of the Québécois stuff is pretty good, but it usually pales next to its French inspirations.

Rishi has unblemished petite smooth hands that have never done hard labour, not that there is anything wrong with that but I could imagine him wearing silk gloves to do light gardening. Whereas that hand looks like the hand of a hgv driver or a plumber, they probably looked at that pic where he is giving a thumbs up to a toaster and decided not only does he look like a total dick but he's got very small hands as well (which I'm intending to shame here, just shaming the game!)

*not* intending to shame

Needed a more trustworthy thumb, a People's thumb, is what I'm hearing

_cheese in Canada is fucking shit_


Some of the Québécois stuff is pretty good,.

To which statement?

This show has always been extremely bad not good but fuck this

As the UK goes into recession for the first time in 11 years, many express shock that five months of Rishi Sunak paying for everything has had a negative impact on the economy.

— Have I Got News For You (@haveigotnews) August 12, 2020

Nice to see the Beeb continuing to subsidise that Geoff Tory bloke's career

Oh yeah, shiny Geoff who’s persecuted for being s Tory except he earns more off the BBC than Laura K

the truth is Geoff is more like the mainstream of BBC comedy than he seems to appreciate, the only difference is that he's come out as a conservative reactionary and in quite tedious style and made that his shtick. Other than on the brexit issue the melt "PC snowflake" comedians he has set himself up as the antidote to have much more in common with him than any lefty comedians, of which you could probably count on one hand in bbc comedyland.

makes me realise even though I'm not a fan of bbc comedy, it became much worse when jeremy hardy died.

Julie Burchill’s next book is called Welcome To The Woke Trials

another unfunny conservative reactionary comedian who will no doubt get lots of opportunities to plug her book on the bbc

I thought time had cancelled Julie B

the only memorable bit of writing of Burchill writing for me was when she was quite angrily ridiculing her old pal Toby Young for being an ugly hypocrite, and a shallow and vacuous creep who worshipped celebs and went kerb crawling on a regular basis. I can't remember where I read it but it was p good and stuck in my memory.

xp what is already cancelled can never be cancelled

I have a guilty soft spot for her tbh

I mean she makes me laugh sometimes, not a crush

She has always been bad afaict but as with hignfy it’s not like I’ve bothered investigating the stuff from when I was like two years old

full disclosure: I used to regularly read her Culture section of the Times movie reviews in the 90's !

Burchill literally advocated shooting "prostitutes" for their "terrible betrayal of all women" back in the 80s. she was never good

I don't think anyone is making any arguments for her rehabilitation as an acceptable member of the commentariat, it's more like nervously approaching the confession booth because telling the truth can be cleansing!

There’s been a rash of new You Can’t Say That sites eg. Uncancelled where mediocre journalists TERF out for free. Spiked doesn’t pay its contributors either.

Nick Cave: 'cancel culture is bad religion run amuck' https://t.co/Y0X6PavdMg

— The Guardian (@guardian) August 12, 2020

I can't believe a public school doctor's son who has had a way too fucking long + overrated career as a turgid goth balladeer would turn out to be such an enemy of the people!

does he unbutton his shirt and ruffle it up in the same manner boris makes his hair look dishevelled whenever doing a photo/tv op? What a fucking jerkoff.

I have never liked Nick Cave, and if my impeccable source is correct, he isn’t worthy of anyone’s appreciation for ‘if someone tells you who they are, believe them’ reasons.

he's a pretentious, laughably overrated ageing goth arsehole, would love to give him a good shoeing - but no blades!

My partner who is 5 foot tall and spare change at best, went up to him and called him a fucking prick at a Palace Brothers show in London in the 90's. He was being an arrogant prick in a queue or something. I thought we were going to get thrown out but instead there were people coming up to congratulate her!

Still staring at this. https://t.co/nfUkkkrEKt

— Sarah Phelps (@PhelpsieSarah) August 13, 2020

In fairness one of the prerequisites for being Gavin Williamson is not knowing that you're Gavin Williamson.

It's such an unbelievably bone-headed way to defend what's ultimately a defensible system. The problem is not fairness to the class of 2019 or 2021, it's fairness within the class of 2020. If grade inflation were to stand, the more accurate a teacher is in their judgement, the bigger the disadvantage to the learner. Just say that ffs!

You've now got a system where kids have been told they can use their mock exam grades instead of the calculated ones - but OFQUAL and exam boards haven't been told how this should work or what evidence will be required and where it's been heavily implied, probably incorrectly, via the "triple-lock" messaging that if they get a lower grade in their real A-Level, should they choose to take one in October, they can stick with their mock or calculated one. He's been pressured into making a bad situation substantially worse.

The shit that is actually genuinely documented about Kick Knave is enough to cancel him forever, Suzy's impeccable source only reveals that he is still on bullshit that he has been on for 40+ years. I do not understand why this guy gets such a free pass when he has been telling people who he is for his _entire career_.

Of course he sees a wave sweeping through his industry getting ever nearer to his arse and starts bemoaning ~cancel culture~ as a pre-emptive move. Of *course* he does.

I don't know what is worse : a repeat offender trying to dress up getting your defence in before the shit hits the fan as some kind of high minded principled stance or all the idiots commenting oooh he's nailed it there.

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/12/uk-gdp-tradeoff-lives-growth-dire-covid-strategy

This is really good on yesterday's GDP figures.

Gavin Williamson on inflating A-level grades: “The danger is that pupils will be over-promoted into jobs that are beyond their competence"

...

everybody's enjoying the irony of that one and it's very lol, but putting that to one side it's an amazingly thick-headed and wrong thing to say, it's like Williamson has no idea how the world works

All those people who move from doing A-Levels straight into surgery or bomb disposal?

not even sure what an A-level entry job would look like in 2020 but i am pretty sure that no interview panel comes to a decision primarily based on some exam results, even when there isn't a massive surplus of applicants for every job going

Also if you turn up to do a job at the age of 18-22 and turn out not to be able to do it then you get fired or moved into something else, unless you're benefiting from nepotism or entrenched social biases, both of which the Tories appear quite fond of.

I've seen highly educated people absolutely fuck up entry level work and I've seen people with significantly fewer qualifications do much better at the same job. But no one is making that call on the basis of A-Level results.

Williamson not understanding how life beyond nepotism works was my main thought

Also assuming most of these kids bother to go to university they'll be graduating into either a post-covid boom or a post-Brexit depression, and in either case whether you've had an A-Level nudged up one level is going to be neither here nor there. (Also it's irrelevant because once you've got a degree no one gives a toss what A-Levels you got).