Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Haw haw.

Edinburgh isn’t THAT bad is it tho? Or was your point more just Glasgow > Edinburgh?

I’m just saying can we at least carve out an exception for Leith?

My Glaswegian/Lanarkshire former flatmate tells the story of being buttonholed in Central Station by a person with a clipboard who asked him, as a prelude to a market research interview, ‘do you travel between Glasgow and Edinburgh?’

‘NO!’ said Stevie emphatically, and kept walking.

Edinburgh's a nice wee city, he'd feel more at home there.

He would not. He is a massive Celtic supporter.

Och, they all say that.

Can he be persuaded to move to Edinburgh?

Ah no, we're grand thanks.

Desmond Tutu’s opinion pieces went in hard. We’ve lost a good man today. pic.twitter.com/YkzrTEwcBp

— Paul Duane 🍥 (@paulduanefilm) December 26, 2021

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FHmk5PiXIAY7dIc?format=png&name=240x240

check out this walker

“food: more authentic than you might think”

this further substantiates my theory that the word "radical" lost all meaning years ago and is now mostly used by cunts to mean "thing I like which I am reclaiming from any actual radical political context"

Breathing - Not Just a Middle Class Pursuit

I'm always impressed when the opinion writer knows exactly what their readership previously thought - before they gifted this precious knowledge to them!

500 things you never knew about walking

Solvitur ambulando - this is an old Latin expression that I think means "you don't need to be a wanker to write for the Graun - but it sure helps"

You know who doesn't walk? The sneering metropolitan left, that's who

Jeremy Crowbar yesterday...

https://www.theglasgowstory.com/images/TGSA04809_m.jpg

I genuinely read this hot take on breathing in the Guardian last year

https://i.ibb.co/xC4Ds3Z/20200806-093934.jpg

hah! there was a breathing eggspurt on r4 a few weeks back plugging their breathing book and they said we are conditioned to breath through our noses and mouth-breathing is bad practise - or summat like that!

yes he was on 'start the week' this morning( also happened to be Andrew marr's last time as host, good riddance) as well shilling his new book. tho tbf since I started consciously breathing thru my nose a few years ago I have felt and slept better.

yeah I've started doing the same tbh. Lol I try not to overthink breathing because it might lead to a panic attack and get me thinking about all the times I've been exposed to asbestos, but habitually breathing through the nose more often does seem like a good idea.

I am a bit of a mouthbreather but if I had to breathe through my nose all the time I'd've died in childhood stupid allergies

A friend of mine forwarded me this just a few days ago.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct2yn6

There is an anthropologist who explains how breathing has changed for human beings.

Though some of the interviewees needed to learn breathing techniques to bring down stress levels because of their awful jobs so I'm thinking it's all capitalism's fault. Again.

Laura Barton posts a life update vmic:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/28/moved-coast-better-life-london-capital

"graticule precision"
"sourdough rivalries"
"grocery shops stocked with everything from za’atar to rambutan"
etc

Everywhere hung the air of self-congratulation.

What better place to escape that than the offices of the Guardian newspaper?

The Guardian has obsessively published long articles reporting on the careers of Andrew Marr and Laura Kuenssberg.

Each one is depressing because they end with largely the same bad people circulating and taking each other's jobs.

I don't think it was noted here that yesterday the Guardian published a long interview with Rachel Reeves in which she mainly attacked JC and said that Labour need to be more like the Conservative Party.

Almost goes without saying

I received countless messages in those months from colleagues gleefully announcing they were emailing from their new farmhouse kitchen or in their cottage by the sea

a dose of (one's) own medicine!

Reeves was saying we can prevent big water from pumping raw sewage into waterways and the sea through better regulation not through nationalising them ... inspiring.

obviously Graun are correct about that awful netflix movie, but perhaps 2/5 was being slightly generous.

tbh I've seen a clip of Rylance
and I just wanna watch him

Zoe Williams for some years has been presented as a commentator on the political Left.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/06/starmer-lawyer-johnson-labour-leader-conservatives-prime-minister

Her judgment on KS's vacuous speech:

if you connect those two thoughts – we have workplace rights, and we all have value – it represents a significant break with the last 12 years of economic reality and political discourse.

The transfer of power from the worker to the employer that, with zero-hours contracts and poverty wages, has seemed inexorable, would not survive this meaningful reassertion of workplace rights.

Further:

Starmer’s speech, perhaps for the first time since he became leader, performed a jujitsu move: yes he is a lawyer, and Johnson could have at it. He conveyed this explicitly, his patriotism mediated through his hinterland as the “country’s leading prosecutor”. He also did so implicitly, framing his relationship with voters as a “contract” – about as lawyerly as it comes. And he laid a very simple, yet nevertheless lawyerly trap for Johnson: the prime minister himself is unfit for office, yet the problem is with the entire party, not just one man.

This is like the liberals in, what, April 2020 saying Opposition is coming and KS can chair a meeting.

But it's ZW and it's January 2022 !!

Later the same day, Johnson gave a press conference of his own, in a move that cynics, which is now all of us, read as attempting to draw attention away from Starmer’s speech

this is so preposterous and wouldn't make tactical sense because if there has been one constant with Starmer it is the more people see of him the less they like him. Probably the best strategy would be him repeatedly going into self-isolation and not doing any more tedious policy-free flag-shagging re-launch speeches.

Barney Ronay, perhaps the Marina Hyde of the sportpages, writes with mature weariness that both sides in the Djokovic case are too extreme and we should be less 'polarised'.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jan/14/novak-djokovic-v-australia-is-a-grudge-match-for-our-polarised-age

the pretence of being above culture war talking points from a lousy graun hack, yeah sure!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/23/the-hounding-of-kate-clanchy-has-been-a-witch-hunt-without-mercy

This kicked up quite the little shitstorm, especially when Monbiot decided he should race into the fray and then rapidly backpedaled out. At least he was good enough to admit his fault.

maybe at first he just couldn't believe there would be the racially stereotyping of school-children and the author judging them on how attractive she considered them in an Orwell prize winning book. Anyway Sonia Sodha is definitely not a hill to die on!

Well what was left out of the article was the author denying quotes from her book were legitimate when they were presented to her.

"It is true that Clanchy reacted badly to the criticism, denying the phrases in question were in her book."

Is it bad stereotyping and shallow to take one look at Clanchy's photo in that article and think 'she looks like the biggest terf ever'

Cheers Andrew, I should have read it more closely. There was more in the Twitter thread roping in Rusbridger etc but maybe that’s enough from me for now.

didn't the whole thing in fact start with clanchy complaining on twitter about negative goodreads reviews with "made up" quotes and asking people to flag them lol, that's still leaving out a crucial part of that context

tbf on her she's a class act 👏👏👏

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/26/why-are-some-people-so-comfortable-being-casually-racist-in-front-of-me-is-it-just-because-im-white

A writer so bad, anonymous, dreary, stupid and malicious that she can almost make other Guardian pundits look good - but she excels herself here

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/28/essex-rebrand-vajazzle-money

in saying that only class-obsessed snobs are interested in the Peasants' Revolt.

And I always thought the Peasants' Revolt had something do with lower-class people. Must have been misled by the name.

I think her point is we should be celebrating revolting peasants not peasant revolts

as someone who regularly enjoys holidays to various parts of Essex, I'm with the pinefox here - that article is anti-intellectual, pandering shite

also, visit Colchester

Where does she get the idea that Essex doesn't attract tourists? It's beside the sea, it has resorts?