McBride the snide and the politics of smear

“The emails were ‘inappropriate and juvenile’, while the sending of them is among ‘such actions (that) have no place in public life’. So Gordon Brown grovels, like a wounded Cyclops, goaded out of his No 10 cave by those brave Argonauts, the Tories. Meanwhile, the media is falling over itself to huff and puff – yet I don’t think I’ve ever heard so many commentators and politicians being so surprised by so predictable a happening.

Twitter ye not

The Twitter address http://twitter.com/willself is emphatically not that belonging to the British author Will Self, as should be evident when you read it (even though it now looks as if it has been “recaptured” by the real Will Self – it has not). Will Self’s Twitter address is http://twitter.com/wself

This stylish show should bite the hand that feeds it

“I’ve always known when a TV series is starting to bite with me — I begin consciously organising my life around its scheduling.

“It’s happened with a string of US-made drama series that shame our home-grown television, including The Wire and The Sopranos. So it’s proved with Mad Men, an Emmy-award-winning show, made for cable — or at least, up until the halfway mark of each season.”

To read the rest of Will Self’s Evening Standard column, go here.

Nuclear disarmament starts at home, ‘Bush-lite’ Obama

“Is it only me, or is anyone else getting a weird feeling of ‘Dubya Lite’ coming off the shapely form of Barack Obama as he tools Air Force One around the world, a-meetin’ and a-greetin’?

“It was bad serendipity indeed that bouffant-haired nutter Kim Jong-il chose to launch his duff ICBM on the same day Obama stood up in Prague and committed himself to a world without nuclear weapons, but even so I remain unconvinced that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions really are the biggest threat to peace that we face.