Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

yeah but sometimes they also blow, did you think of that

From the Guardian obit of Captain Beefheart by Sean O'Hagan (not that one):

A short stint as a vacuum cleaner salesman followed in which he toted his wares around the desert communities of southern California. Once, legend has it, he knocked on the door of a mobile home and none other than Aldous Huxley answered. Beefheart pointed at a vacuum cleaner and shouted, "I assure you sir, this thing sucks." He made his sale.

yeah but sometimes they also blow, did you think of that

lol i knew i'd made an hilarious tweet adverting to the beefheart story so i search *dubdobdee huxley* and discovered various dangers chortling abt the anecdote (back in 2012 so i cant be cancelled, no really i cant)

anyway this was the (2018) tweet actually i had in mind (which naturally got no such engagement): "hilarious sitcom feat.harrison ford, philip glass, don van vliet, joan didion, robert hughes and aldous huxley, plus some decking, a washing machine and a vacuum cleaner"

give me marina hyde's job u fvcks, no one will ever think my posts are funny clichéd

Has anyone ever actually used a vacuum cleaner on the 'blow' setting, assuming such a thing exists? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen - not unlike Liz Truss/B. Johnson/Brexit/etc! (that'll be 2 grand please or however much she gets paid for this tripe)

The blow part refers to hand dryers tbf

and the fans / heaters they do

old fashioned vacuum cleaners would suck the one end and blow the other (the holes in the bag being small enough to catch the dust and big enough to let the air out). the hoover Constellation cleaners that we had would divert this air down so that the hoover glided like a hovercraft.

I only ever buy 2nd hand Dyson vacs and none of them have had blow option. Maybe I should reverse the polarity at a socket and see if that makes the motor run backwards so I can blow dog hairs everywhere rather than vac 'em up!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIsdxPY_8H0

Shop vacs have a blow option.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/16/carlisle-council-turkish-baths-closing

And the hair dryers.

(Public baths are featured in The Grand Budapest Hotel by Wes Anderson and The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson and Happy Hour by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi. I did not know they (once) existed in the UK!)

There's a notorious bath house scene in Cronenberg's 'Eastern Promises'. Once seen never forgotten.

I think they existed in many countries before home plumbing was widespread! Where else could one bathe of a weekend?

There was a lovely Islington Council-run Turkish bath near Old Street that I used to go to about once every two weeks but like the writer says, it became a Spa Experience by Better a decade ago and unaffordable for just about every service user - the concessionary rate used to be £6 with no time limit.

Although when I looked it up now to share the link, I see it closed quite suddenly at the start of the year.

That CIF piece was a follow up to this article:

https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/oct/02/campaigners-fight-save-carlisle-turkish-baths

I hated what Better did to Ironmonger Row - they should’ve leaned into the Spartan aesthetic of the place and kept the lovely older women who’d make you a cuppa and a cheese and pickle sandwich for £1.50 while you reclined on a lounger in the recovery room. Does anyone truly feel relaxed by faux flower arrangements and those clichéd pan pipe instrumental CDs that are meant to telegraph SPA to morons?

gnnnnnGGGggHHhAAAaaaAaAAAAAAARGGGHHHHH

Feel genuinely sad at the terribleness of take pic.twitter.com/yJL6tobk7s

— Hannah Rose Woods (@hannahrosewoods) October 17, 2022

columns vmic

Seeing that headline I thought it would be merely a joke, but now I see the text I see that it is genuinely extremely bad.

It is a "joke" in that if pushed Mitchell would say he doesn't actually favour an absolutist monarchy.

It is also serious in that he sincerely believes Charles to be a decent human being and inspirational figure.

The second part is alas way funnier than the first.

'extreme socialist' go fuck yourself you smug twat

Yes that was the extremely bad part.

I thought the whole thing was the extremely bad part.

The Guardian sits on its hands while the Mirror and Independent petition for a GE.

In that respect at least, it is worse than the other two papers.

i don't see much to gain from a GE that the Tories are in no way obliged to call tbh?

Only in that it'll make Labour swill in the shitpit they've created while they can carp from the sidelines. All a bit 5D chess though. Guardian have been vaguely mumbling about a GE but don't seem like they want to commit, wouldn't want to scare anyone now.

i must admit i do have an urge to move to the Sevco Labour showing what they are phase of the timeline but the melts squeaking about "GTTO and then we can pressure Labour to be good" will never, ever admit that they're wrong and they'll blindly support whatever scraps from the table get thrown to the poor people they patronise

no party on earth would go for a GE with this kind of polling. and everyone knows it.

it just makes Labour's calls for it look performative and self-serving imo. talk about the issues

People need this fixed now tho. We can't wait until January 2025. If the petition is ignored then we riot like we did for the Poll Tax.

“We”

i agree we can't wait but maybe we should have thought of that in 2019 when we elected the tories to an 80-seat majority.

last time people rioted in London they got years in jail for stealing crisps and bottles of water, who was the DPP then?

the melts squeaking about "GTTO and then we can pressure Labour to be good" will never, ever admit that they're wrong

the people who oppose the "squeaking" - a highly patronising term - are extremely bad (like, ludicrously so) at articulating at why they think this view is incorrect.

maybe we should have thought of that in 2019 when we elected the tories to an 80-seat majority.

maybe the political parties who weren't the Tories should have thought of that when they refused to stop splitting the vote by standing aside in the seats they had no hope of winning? People's refusal to leverage FPTP to the country's advantage is almost as frustrating as the inequities of the system itself.

Lol @ British ppl rioting for a fucking election.

what do you suggest?

"People's refusal to leverage FPTP to the country's advantage"

What advantages?

I suggest you keep posting GG.

Yeah, I can't imagine riots coming from this. A nice day out for people carrying signs going "YOU ARE A BAD MAN MISTER BORIS" and some video art from Led By Donkeys, sure.

The spycops bill was a considerably more legit reason to riot and we had nothing.

i reckon there will be marches over the cuts, when the cuts come down, as it seems certain they will

Just a nice stroll to Trafalgar on a Sat afternoon..xp

Did the melts riot when the tories essentially outlawed protests, were they expecting to outsource it to other people again? Someone remind me

_maybe we should have thought of that in 2019 when we elected the tories to an 80-seat majority._

maybe the political parties who weren't the Tories should have thought of that when they refused to stop splitting the vote by standing aside in the seats they had no hope of winning? People's refusal to leverage FPTP to the country's advantage is almost as frustrating as the inequities of the system itself.

i absolutely think that marches and also riots are not far off, but they're not going to be about the procedural minutiae of the system we're watching fail in real-time lol

insofar as there's currently a mainstream political mainstream *against* the tories it is very committed to shutting most people out of politics: and that's where the fracture will happen

"If you don't wan't to call for a General Election what do you want then? A massive strike wave in nearly major industry, mass bill non-payment campaign, wildcats in Amazon warehouses and people shutting down Dartford crossing? Can't you be realistic for once?"

— libcom.org (@libcomorg) October 21, 2022

Marches never left! It is notable though how little media coverage they get here when compared to equal numbers marching in France or Portugal tho.

meaning how much media coverage they get in those countries, not that the UK media prioritizes foreign protests lol