Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

... or is that the sequel?

The cat gets a paint stripe down back. Pepe le Pew falls in love w/it.

Myerson family's ongoing struggle with skunk etc

as a side point.. is kicking your druggy kid onto the street to fend for himself really supposed to be the thing to do and the way to stop him falling into further drugs/crimes/south londonness??

seems counter intuitive to me

oh wait i see that's the whole point of the book?

And it gets worse: Family section Guardian editors have just outed Myerson as author of two-year Living With Teenagers column. Which was written anonymously until the kids cottoned on a year or so ago. Just how much money has she made over her kids'...exploits?

Family section Guardian editors have just outed Myerson as author of two-year Living With Teenagers column

Ho, wow, that makes sense. God, to finally have a focal point for the loathing that column inspired in me is quite bizarre.

Seriously, though, this woman is an unmitigated fucking cock and I intend to spend the rest of my life ignoring her, because she's too absurd to even consider taking seriously.

That's pretty much true.

Surprised anyone has ever read anything in Guardian Family section. I don't have a Family, but don't have time to read it. Does anyone with a Family have time to read it? Then again I don't really like Families.

you are v. strange.

On Myerson, I was surprised but impressed that the Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts, former No. 10 head of policy Matthew Taylor, took time out in his latest blog entry to comment:

(by the way, has anyone yet written the inevitable Goody-Myerson comparison: on the one hand the ignorant untalented, lumpen Goody who is enduring media intrusion in her dying hours in order to provide financial security for her children, on the other, the fragrant, highly intelligent, middle-class Myerson who seems to be encouraging media intrusion into her family in order that she can sell more books, sorry that should read ‘expose the scourge of skunk’).

in an unexpected aside from his thinking on Public Service Reform...

Just what does 'fragrant' mean in this context?

Middle class + also hott.

locus classicus being 'the fragrant mary archer'

lumpen?

as in lumpen-proletariat?

I thought it was a cancer ref

next instalment
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/mar/10/family-julie-myerson

Since the identity of the children in Living With Teenagers
is now known, we have removed the columns from the
Guardian website to protect their privacy.

someone was probably canny enough to archive them yesterday when this was dropping

This blog post is OTMFM:

http://potlatch.typepad.com/weblog/2009/03/julie-myerson-vs-hannah-arendt.html

"She's the literary equivalent of a flasher at a cricket match, and she deserves to get rugby tackled by a steward then evicted."

V good.

Hope that happens IRL.

Must stop abbreviating!

i have read a few things about this but am not getting how it is different from other misery-memoir situations. is it that she's saying her son is an abusive bastard, rather than, as is more usual, her father? idk, people writing about their fucked-up family is not a new thing.

they usually wait until the father is dead, plus parents are reckoned to have more responsibility for their kids than vice versa. maybe unfair, but there it is.

plus schadenfreude

i know someone who is writing a misery memoir, parents very much alive, and it is causing grief in her fam. unsure of how her sons -- whom she abandoned at one point -- feel. you gotta pay the rent i guess.

article was such a joke. half the stuff is like they're saying although there's no evidence to prove this, I heard from many friends they're sons are a holy shambles with skunk too.

kid is obviously just a little wanker and there are some family problems or bad communication or something. skunk is not a big enough drug to blame for that, and even if it was, the utter rarity of this kid's situation suggests unusual home/family factors created it.

*their sons of course

Completely off-topic I know, but I noticed they have started running those execrable Wire blogs on the Guardian AGAIN. I am as big a fan of the show as anyone, but they are flogging it to death now. The tendency of the "bloggers" to refer to each other as "hoppies" and talk about episode "re-ups" etc is incredibly aggravating.

Anyway please continue laying the boot into this horrendous Myerson person.

Completely off-topic I know, but I noticed they have started running those execrable Wire blogs on the Guardian AGAIN. I am as big a fan of the show as anyone, but they are flogging it to death now. The tendency of the "bloggers" to refer to each other as "hoppies" and talk about episode "re-ups" etc is incredibly aggravating.

100% otm, wish they would s t f up. no idea what audience they serve. if you watch the show, you don't need someone writing a blog basically summarizing it. if you don't watch the show, despite the embarrassing degree of encouragement laid on by the graun, you will need this service performed even less.

the amount of times I hear "you have to watch the wire" makes me not want to watch it. how can so many people like something without ever being able to make it seem interesting?

linehan, sayle, brooker, ughhhhh

it's a common reaction, and i had it with the sopranos -- didn't get into it till series three. but at least it was still running, and it was on tv so there wasn't that much initial effort.

i really liked the wire when i watched it, which was slightly before the media barrage, but all the hype has made me almost forget what i liked. part of what is good about it is extremely traditional: it is a well-told story.

btw you simply must watch mad men!

xpost

got six seasons of chiklis winging their way to me oh yeah

Those Wire blogs are only getting about five comments each so I don't think they'll last.

I only noticed the other day how many of those episode by episode blogs they have--Generation Kill, American Idol etc.

Honestly I thought the stuff written yesterday by Mr Myerson was just as appalling as anything churned out by the wife. It's all self-indulgent hand-wringing and he was paid at least a grand to write it (basic Graun rate, but rises if you're a 'name' or you've got something they really want). I'm loath to call out the son as a wanker just because he's young and really didn't want to be put in the spotlight. He could have easily gotten an injunction to prevent the publication of the book and when he asked her what redress he had, Myerson lied and told him there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

The problem with skunk is that unlike most cannabis, it's heavy in THC and less so in CBD, the anti-psychotic component of the drug that occurs with more balance in other varieties. Also it makes me laugh whenever middle-class people who wouldn't buy hydroponic/battery-farmed anything else get stuck into it.

yeah I like the weird fusion of "you have to be careful what you put in your body" and "I did grams of ketamine off a toilet" that exists in 2009.

off topic again to nrq, my brother lent me the first series of mad men on dvd but not watched any yet.

Mad Men is great! But not as good as The Wire!

The Guardian have a Mad Men blog too of course.

they shd only let sarah hughes write abt tv

I'm loath to call out the son as a wanker

I'm not, but only because "wanker" is pretty much a job description for a 17 year old.

I use the word wanker pretty lightly.

eg "hi there grandad you old wanker you", "ah mum, you're some wanker all the same"

Yeah, but I really felt I had to go there. He probably is was/an absolute arsehole tbf, but what teenager isn't? Your his mother Myserson, take some fucking responsibility.

I actually think I find her most contemptible for convincing herself that she's providing a great public service by talking about skunk as the scourge of middle-class society. What the fuck kind of evidence does this woman have to demonstrate this other than her own familial fucking anecdotes?

When was the last time she did any writing or research beyond her own dining room ffs? She threw her sun under a bus for the sake of self-aggrandizing and Paxman was bang otm in that interview on Monday.

This "OMG THIS NEW SKUNK IS A MUCH STRONGER VARIATION TEH CANNABIS" really pisses me off.
Yes it is strong and a dangerous drug, but it's the 'NEW' part that bothers me.
As far as my experience with cannabis goes - skunk has been the norm on the street for over 8 years.

New is in relative terms: the people who discuss it as such probably smoked regular grass back in the day.

the press has been calling it new for a long-ish time, to be fair.

paxman really otm, just watching it now

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7934554.stm