Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

hot dog, jumping frog, alba's quirky

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N-Dubz's Dappy kicked in face by horse

and thank you horse

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/dec/08/middle-aged-drink-drug-abusers-nhs-hospital-admissions

More than half a million people have been hospitalised in the past three years because of drink or drugs, with those in their 40s behind a surge in cases that is putting a strain on the NHS, official figures reveal. A total of 533,302 people in England have been admitted to hospital as an emergency since 2010 with serious health problems related to their consumption of alcohol or illicit substances. The vast majority were admissions for conditions specifically related to alcohol abuse, such as liver problems. Of those, 60,738 were aged 40 to 44 and another 60,083 were 45 to 49 – together, more than a fifth of the total. Some were admitted a number of times between 2010 and 2013....There is no comparative data, as this is the first time the figures have been compiled in this way...

jay rayners column in the print edition of todays observer namechecks john paul sartre

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/dec/08/middle-aged-drink-drug-abusers-nhs-hospital-admissions

More than half a million people have been hospitalised in the past three years because of drink or drugs, with those in their 40s behind a surge in cases that is putting a strain on the NHS, official figures reveal. A total of 533,302 people in England have been admitted to hospital as an emergency since 2010 with serious health problems related to their consumption of alcohol or illicit substances. The vast majority were admissions for conditions specifically related to alcohol abuse, such as liver problems. Of those, 60,738 were aged 40 to 44 and another 60,083 were 45 to 49 – together, more than a fifth of the total. Some were admitted a number of times between 2010 and 2013....There is no comparative data, as this is the first time the figures have been compiled in this way...

I read the "There is no comparative data, as this is the first time the figures have been compiled in this way..." as referring to the section before it, which you haven't quoted, about drinking broken down by socioeconomic group. There shouldn't have been a paragraph break, though.

Even if that's the case, they're saying >80% of these people are not in their 40s which hardly supports they opening sentence.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/10/david-moyes-john-major-sport-politics-fail-manchester-united

For those who turn rarely to the back pages, Moyes is in his first season as the manager of Manchester United. He inherited a team that had just won yet another title as Premier League champions, but under him they are struggling...

For those who turn rarely to the back pages....
- it's 2013 and you can read articles online
- why would you be reading this?

It's 2013 and people still talk about the silver screen, records and all manner of other things which have become or are becoming something else.

did you know that software uses a floppy-disk-looking save icon when it's 2013 and like no-one uses floppy disks anymore???

Journos still refer to fans 'on the terraces' of premier league clubs

And the green ink brigade scribbles online.

i seen a crow fly

and i seen a house fly

i just wanna know the quantity of people reading an article about the most famous football club in the world but don't know anything about their last 6 months

i think they have analytics for that these days, you should put in an FOI request

Give it a fucking rest with Edward Snowden will ya? Front-page as predictable as a Daily Express wonderdrug/weather/diana story.

xxp wanna correlate that with the number of people claiming to support the most famous football club in the world but don't know anything about their last 6 months

What's more, Moyes has broken a few awkward records. Under him, the team have lost at home to Everton (his old club) for the first time in 21 years and on Saturday lost to Newcastle at Old Trafford for the first time since 1972.

Those aren't actually records, just the end of a sequence.

yeah and those kinds of sequences always seem pretty meaningless to me, as if the same teams had actually been playing for 20 or 30 years rather than a new set of players meeting most seasons

think there are certain stats that arguably cast a psychological shadow over proceedings, Spurs' record at OT and Arsenal's grounds coming to mind, but yeah not convinced that Man U v Newcastle is one of them

Yeah, there are two things here: the first, as you say, is that while a team not winning a local derby for ten years is obviously going to be a big deal to both sets of supporters, you keep hearing irrelevant stats trotted out like "and Preston haven't won at Villa Park since 1953" when this is of no interest to anyone and there will have been lengthy stretches where the teams didn't play each other anyway. The second (as I said) is that when that sequence ends no record has been broken. In fact possibly the opposite: if they'd continued to avoid defeat it might have set a new record for the longest unbeaten run at home against Newcastle / Everton.

http://www.andrewrilstone.com/2013/11/todays-guardian-essay-about-c.html

^ That strikes me as very representative of the Guardian's literature 'n' culture part – a lot of writers queuing up to have a go at C.S. Lewis, without realising that they're more or less the only people who care about him now.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/20/hipster-sexists-pornographic-filth-loo-flesh-buns

this is horrendously written.

I want to know why Wednesday’s parliamentary ruckus about food banks was all over the Independent and Mirror yesterday and not mentioned at all in the Guardian (there was an incomplete parliamentary “sketch”). Online they only have Jack Monroe saying “Let’s have a debate about food banks.” Too late for debates; the government has made it perfectly clear what it thinks of “debates.”

amazingly, that's not even the worst vagenda piece in the last 24 hours

xp Yeah, it's terrible writing, but something awful has obviously happened to it in the editing as well, e.g.:

Because these cartoon sex dolls look pre-pubescent but for their humungous .

Girls squeezing their so hard it makes you wince.

And you can call me humourless or Victorian or , but I don't care.

I want my hypothetical daughters to be able to peeeat out and shop and live in peace.

Like I said, the name should have been a clue. Flesh & Buns, I thought: that's what we are now, still, in 2013. Flesh and buns

Amazing metaphor.

how the FUCK does she keep getting writing work? She's utterly abysmal.

Yeahhhhhhh just what the Guardian needs, Allison Pearson 2.0.

Marcello, in full agreement with you re: food banks but TBF the Graun did liveblog the event itself and the Jack Monroe piece appeared the day before the debate - she was responsible for getting it in front of Parliament in the first place.

this is what annoys me about papers a bit, like, i don't condone stupid sexist images in the toilets of whatever restaurant, but it's like nobody cares about the writing, just the opinion.

That's what makes it so depressing, LG. Like the piece by Holly Baxter yesterday about Dev Hynes' house burning down...that was spiteful, published purely to get some kind of Twitter reaction AND terribly, terribly constructed. Who edits CiF? How do they recruit writers? Can anyone with a few links to email an editor have a go?

I swear to god The Guardian et al only publish Vagenda, Julie Bindel etc. as clickbait to horrify and outrage ~feministtwitter~ or whatever into sharing tweets, thinkpieces etc on the trollumnists. It clearly works or they wouldn't keep doing it.

But it's really disheartening to see ppl whose only exposure to this whole world is through CiF or whatev, think that these trollumnists are actually equivalent to UK Feminism as a thing.

I want to know the goss on how Vagenda did get book deal, column etc. when so many better and more cogent writers have not; suspect it's the same dreary stories of connections or whatev. :(

I want to know why Wednesday’s parliamentary ruckus about food banks was all over the Independent and Mirror yesterday and not mentioned at all in the Guardian (there was an incomplete parliamentary “sketch”).

Politics desk at Guardian dominated by ultra-Blairites who are more sympathetic to the government than to the opposition (and obviously, much more than to the kind of losers that might find themselves needing to use food banks).

Wow, that Holly Baxter piece is so bad it could have been published in the Mail and she wouldn’t have had to change a word.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/21/repossession-by-lionel-shriver

this is hilarious - i kept thinking it was a joke. it's like a 10-year-old's school essay mixed with desperately obvious contemporary chattering classes themes.

kinda mean of shriver to sell the guardian shit that nobody else would publish.

A working class woman rolls into view.

"I don't know how 'brave' I am when they're doing all the work," Helen said, trying to sound friendly to cover for her uncharitable assumptions.

"I mean taking that place on," the woman said. "Has quite the reputation round here, that house."

"Oh?" Helen's tone cooled. She'd hitherto nursed an aggressive lack of interest in her property's history, especially in whatever loser had lived here who was feckless enough to face foreclosure.

"Your last owner, Judith. Determined to go down with the ship, she was!"

"Except the ship," Helen nodded at her front door, "is still afloat."

The woman mistakenly imagined that the new owner was desperate to hear the story. "There's not many what realise it, but Judith weren't all that far from paying off the mortgage free and clear. But her husband had died a way back – something with the kidneys – and Ron'd brung in the bacon. Bus driver, if I recall rightly. Your bereavement payment is a one-off, your bereavement allowance last only a year, and Judith weren't old enough to draw a pension. So money got well tight. Kids were wasters. Which didn't keep her from slipping them two boys the odd tenner when she had it to spare. Only reason they ever called round, if you ask me. Judith was a generous soul. Just had her limits. She'd a long fuse on her, but she did have one fearsome temper once she was riled. All that dosh pitched to the bankers for donkey's, she weren't about to let 'em take that house off her."

"But apparently they did." With every new scrap of superfluous information, Helen's heart had steadily sunk. The last thing you wanted was a next-door neighbour who was a motor-mouth. This woman could make simply getting out the door for the smallest trip to the shops take 40 minutes. But Helen was under the misimpression that keeping her own comments to a minimum would discourage chat, when in truth terseness simply left her neighbour all the more conversational leeway to let fly.

"Not without a fight! Soon as Judith get that summons, she start hammering. A proper racket for me, you can imagine, and I come out to see she's banging up big plywood sheets over the windows, like you do for rough weather – but these boards is on the inside. They say she padlock the doors from the inside as well, top and bottom, front and back. She'd a great towering stack of food and drink in the cellar, the way them religious nutters ready for the end of the world. May not be much to look at to some – no offence intended – but to Judith it were her house, where she spend most of her marriage, where she raise her boys."

Bus driver, if I recall rightly.

the way them religious nutters ready for the end of the world.

Your bereavement payment is a one-off, your bereavement allowance last only a year, and Judith weren't old enough to draw a pension. So money got well tight.

It's seriously dire.

gosh, what an ear for the vernacular she got

Fiction in newspapers is always rub

let's not try to handwave this one away

It's seriously dire.

― Legitimate space tale (LocalGarda), Sunday, December 22, 2013 6:47 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

she is an awful writer, plotter and human surveyor.

can't help but imagine the woman looking like
http://img2-1.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/050321/151820__mrs_l.jpg

Is Shriver's fiction all this bad? I've only ever read her Guardian columns (which hadn't really enthused me to try her books, but then AL Kennedy's Guardian columns were rubbish as well and I love her novels, probably true of numerous other novelists who write for newspapers?)

I've read only one book of hers (We Need To Talk About Kevin) and no, it was not like that.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is her only good book. There's something really tin-eared and flaccid about everything else she's written.