Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

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

WHAT I'D GIVE TO TRY SOME REGULAR GRASS

I wonder if Paxman will have her bounced from her Late Review gig.

people were regularly smoking "the kind" when i started college in 1992, which is like what, 17 fucking years ago now

skunk was fairly common when i smoked the reefer, more than eight years ago. or at least i was told it was skunk, whatever. but regular weed can turn you into a useless, boring, potentially paranoid and violent drugtard. i think the liberal press needed an excuse to go against the drugs when the teens of the 70s started having kids. OR SOMETHING.

it's all just conjecture. I can't believe something so highly personal and lacking in substance is even given airtime. She is just waffling on and on about a specific family situation.

I've always found "regular" weed/hash more likely to turn me into a monged out lethargo than mind-bending killer skunk, but that's probably just my violent delusions again.

And yeah skunk was around when I was at school in the lol early 90s.

oh my that paxman interview is quite something

"there is an emergency out there called skunk"

"we bought him clothes, we bought him sandwiches"

"and he sold both for drugzz..."

I'm disappointed that when she says "Oh there's lots of context you don't see" Paxman doesn't challenge her and say "well what a shit book then if you have to explain this on TV"

lol "skunk" good luck britain

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.

wasn't there another article that was saying "upskirt" is some new phenomenon??

Skunk-smoking upskirters terrorising Julie Myerson.

Julie Myerson guilty of upskunking her son I think.

the dossier was skunked up

is this a Good Story

I think you mean A Good Story.

No. In all seriousness, I don't think it is. I'd have thought that to the vast majority of potential readers, it's a whinging middle-class cock-end whinging about middle-class cock-endry. A Good Story has (arguably) universal appeal; it's something about which (arguably) everyone is meant to have an opinion. This? Seriously, does anyone give a flying one?