Boardwalk Empire

Nooky?

One of the good things about being lonely and alone is that you get to watch good TV. For ages it's baffled me how perfectly ordinary, discerning friends of mine watch things which they know are completely awful. I'm talking, of course, about Deal or No Deal, Total Wipeout, Strictly Come Dancing, Big Brother, What's That Thing? and People Dancing On Ice. If I wanted to watch Dominic Cork shuffling awkwardly, unsure of what to do with himself I'd invent a time machine and travel back to Derbyhire County Cricket Ground, circa 1996. Wahey! One for the cricket fans there. What I didn't understand was that people watch these programmes, or at least claim to watch them, in a kind of ironic way. I can sort of understand it. Most of these shows are hyperbolic and drawn out, and regularly have people on them who say hilariously stupid things. Or they fall in the water. But it's not worth it; nothing, no matter how funny, is worth sitting through Noel Edmonds talking bullshit to mawkish contestants who look as if they would dive in front of a bolting horse to save their bearded leader. And then there's The Cube. The Cube is presented by silver marmot Philip Schofield, and involves people throwing balls into a box while standing inside a big cube. There are other events, like the one where the contestant tries to halt a stop-watch on exactly 10 seconds. They fail, you both go 'ohhhh what a prick!', and realise that it's nice not to be alone in the world.

So I watch good stuff. Pure, highgrade, HBO shit. There now follows a list of American series on which my free time has been pissed away. I've watched Deadwood, The Wire, The Sopranos, Generation Kill, The Event, Heroes, Dexter, and two series of Mad Men before getting sick of it. And now, most recently, I've watched Boardwalk Empire (online, like some kind of buccaneering e-pirate).

Boardwalk Empire, if you don't know already, is a new series set in prohibition-era Atlantic City, which is as we all know in the state of New Joyzey. It's exec-prodded by Martin Scorcese (he also directs the pilot), and stars Steve Buscemi as Enoch 'Nooky' Thompson, the county treasurer. It also has Stephen Graham, who plays Combo in This Is England. One of the most fascinating things about the show is that all the main characters are based on real people, who lived during an incredibly turbulent time in American history. Prohibition lead directly to a massive surge in organised crime, and a few of Boardwalk Empires character's did pretty well out of it. Like Al Capone, and Arnold Rothstein who, scholarly readers will rejoice to know, was F. Scott Fitzgerald's inspiration for the character of Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. Y'know, the one with all the 'gonnegtions'. He fixed the World Series, the brute, and became a pariah. Boardwalk Empire, like all the good HBO dramas are, is about how powerful men wield their influence.

The best thing about it though is Steve Buscemi. Although County Treasurer sounds like a fairly innocuous job, it seems to have brought with it the keys to the city, and Thompson treats Atlantic City like his own fiefdom. It's fascinating to watch Buscemi, who looks like he could be beaten up by Mark Owen, because his character says and does some horrible things and yet he manages to also portray a man with a lot of heart. It's absolutely brilliant, and starts on Sky Atlantic at 9pm tonight, a new channel which looks like it's going to be pretty awesome. If you have a subscription it's free until the end of August, so get watching and improve your life.

I've been back home for a couple of days to have another wisdom tooth out. While there I applied for a job at a newspaper in Congleton, which would mean leaving Sheffield if I got it. I don't really want to do this, as I only know a few people back home these days, but I've got a career to be getting on with and needs must. Henderson's Relish do deliveries, right? Because in the land of the oatcake, one needs a superior brewed condiment.

And that's about all I have to say on that. Bye!

Friday

On Friday I did a day's work at The Doncaster Free Press, and gee mom, it was fun. It was unpaid. But that's not the end of the world it's just, I'm told, that the job market is very difficult at the moment. And it is: the newspaper industry isn't in the rudest of health these days, and the newsroom is often the place where cuts are first made, which is daft. But work experience is the only thing that's going to get me a job, so I need as much of it as possible. Plus, I'd never been to Doncaster before, and, as my mother always used to tell me: "Doncaster, Nick, is a magical world, an emerald floating in murky South Yorkshire, where the streets are paved with opportunity and the buildings all made from diamond. My mum sometimes lets her imagination run away with her.

I had to be there for 9 O'clock on Friday morning. The train left at about a quarter to eight, which meant waking up at quarter to seven. This was going to be a bit of a problem because I'm not very good at getting up very early when it's not part of a routine, and I wasn't in much of a routine. In the end, I had a bit of a mare and got about an hour's sleep, which wasn't the best preparation. A lot of the fault for my shitty night's sleep should be laid at the tiny feet of next door's baby, who cried loudly once an hour 'til 5am, the little arsehole. But also I find it very hard to get to sleep whatever the situation, so it's not all the baby's fault. I do still, though, bear it a strong grudge that will be hard to shake. But anyway, sleeping. Sleeping has never been my forté. It runs in the family; and often on occasions where I'm with my mum and brother, we all talk about how hard we find it to get to sleep, how it's such a massive pain in the arse, and swap techniques on how to conquer our nightly foe. These include tried and tested classics, such as doing "A to Zs". "A to Zs" are mum's favourite, and involve going through the alphabet thinking of one of a 'thing' for each letter. You pick a topic, like English footballers or something, and begin. It's like a really long, slow, tedious game of Scattergories.

The intention of the "A to Z" is I think to bore yourself to sleep, in the hope that the monotony of the activity will eventually send you off the land of nod without you noticing. But I really like trivia, in all in many wondrous forms, so this technique often just feels like revision, and I end up agonising over it for ages, stuck on thinking of a British sitcom character beginning with G. Up to that point [Arnold Rimmer, Blackadder, Cybil Fawlty, Dave Lister ( 2 red Dwarf characters, naughty naughty), Edward Elizabeth Hitler, Frank Spencer] has been easy. But then I got stuck on G, which often happens. I leant over and had a drink of water, turned over the pillow so my head was on the cold bit, and lay there, thinking. This is the part where you're meant to fall asleep. But I never fall asleep at this point. Instead, I lie there repeating names beginning with G in an internal monologue, which, were to it to be written down, would sound absolutely fucking mental. And look like this.

"Graham Graham Graham Graham...Glenn Glenn Glenn Glenn Glenn...Glenn Parsons? There's definitely not a sitcom character called Glenn Parsons. Geoff, Geoff, Geoff from Byker Grove? Not allowed, don't know his surname. And he's from Byker Grove. Gary..? Gary. Gary! Gary Sparrow!

And then I think about Nicholas Lyndhurst in all his many, hilarious guises, for what seems like half an hour, before suddenly snapping back into the room. How long have I just been thinking about Nicholas Lyndhurst for? For fuck's sake! Right, sitcom characters beginning with H...

It continued like that until about 5am, having originally got into bed at about midnight. It had got to the stage where I was almost resigned to getting no sleep whatsoever. If I fell asleep now, I wouldn't be happy at being woken up again an hour and a half later. At best, I'd be very grouchy. After a while though, after my sub-conscious had finally decided to shut up, I nodded off. An hour and a half later, very grouchily I woke up to the foul-mouthed Scottish voice of James Naughtie, managing not to call anyone a cunt as he read the news.

I got Doncaster at 8.20 and decided to have a little wander around. The night before, harnessing the magical wizzardry of Google Maps, I'd sat and sorted out the route, and drawn a little map in my notebook. In possession of a terrible sense of direction, hunches and imagined shortcuts frequently lead to disaster. So I wandered around. And Doncaster's nice, like a bigger, more prosperous Rotherham. After walking through the town centre for half an hour, I didn't see one boarded up shop, or fight, and the streets had a pleasant busyness.

After being let into the newspaper office, and shown around a bit, I got introduced to around a dozen of the staff, whose names I forgot almost straight away. This made getting their attention difficult later on in the day, as I had nothing to call to them which wouldn't sound rude. I hardly ever call anyone mate; it just feels forced when I do. Taxi drivers, shop keepers, and youths on the street sometimes, but not always. Anyway, it didn't matter, as I had some work to do. I interviewed seven new recruits to the army who'd just signed up to the local regiment, and wrote an article about it, before doing two 'nibs' about a charity thing and an MP visiting a pharmacy. I enjoyed every minute of it, despite being knackered, and after all the temp jobs, it felt good to be being asked to do jobs that play to my limited strengths. I have a personality that makes me feel constantly out of my depth, like an imposter, and I need to learn to ignore it.

I've had a few people saying they read this rambling bollocks, including, I'm informed, at least one Belgian. This is nice, and makes me want to make it good.

It's my dad's 62nd birthday coming up and I need to go and buy him some squash balls, so I think I'll leave it at that.

Wait! One other thing. I need to find a new quiz to go to in Sheffield. If you're in the very narrow Sheffield-based, quiz-going readers, tell me one, because the Lescar Tuesday nighter is becoming increasingly difficult to win.

Got them Short Round Blues.

As I sit, eating peanuts and watching Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom, cursing the evil imagination which came up with Short Round, the wise-cracking little arsehole, I feel it's time for another entry. I don't especially have much to say or anything particularly pressing on my mind, so I don't think it'll be very long. But hey! Good things come in disappointingly inadequate packages. Incidentally, I bloody love Indiana Jones films, they're the genius of Spielberg in full flow. But Temple of Doom is often pretty lame and frequently a wee bit racist. Chilled monkey brains, anyone?

This last week I've been applying for jobs and signing on, increasing the burden on our shitty state. I used to feel nervous and guilty about claiming jobseekers allowance, worried that one of the friendly staff would stand up and  expose my soft, middle class underbelly to the baying scroungers who prowl the Cavendish Court Job Centre. But that was a stupid, exaggerated assumption and one that I've grown out of. Everyone there just wants some help, and Britain's wellfare state is a universally wonderful thing, no matter what the right-wing press say. The guarantee of financial assistance to the unemployed gives people a sense of respect and, more importantly, stops people having to resort to crime for money. The Coalition's cuts policy is going create hundreds of thousands of more unemployed in the next couple of years, who will have to go somewhere. A lot of them will go to Cavendish Court.

This policy, parroted in the Mail, will also make it easier for companies to sack employees - introducing a mandatory fee to bring a case to an employment tribunal, as well as doubling the length of time a person needs to be employed there if they wish to do so. With each new policy this government further injures its own people, under the bullshit auspice of cutting red tape.

On Friday I'm off to Doncaster to work for their newspaper for a day. I have no idea what I'll be doing yet, but I'm really excited about it, if a little worried I'm going to balls it up. I'll let you know how it goes.

Begin and begin again

And so, cowed, eyes to the floor, shuffling back in ungainly novelty Christmas slippers, I blog once more. It's been a while since I last had the urge to commit any thoughts, anywhere at all really, let alone online. I started this blog as an attempt to poke myself into productivity and perhaps to give me a better understanding of my own, deeply unhelpful subconscious. But it didn't quite work like that. Distractions appeared, waving with shiny excitement for me to come and play. Xbox, weed, and arrival of my housemate Anna ensured that there was always something else to do, something more easy to commit to.

Left to its own devices, my brain cannibalises itself with criticism and insults. I look in the mirror and see a fat, unemployable cunt with no future, and stare blankly into eyes that were once happy. I don't think this is a particularly new thing, I've always seen the hurdles rather than the finishing line, giving up at things before I've even got started. But is the answer not to look in the mirror, to ignore your problems and muddle on? Of course not, if I carry on doing that before I know it I'll be 30, bitter and alone. So I'll write, and I'll earn a living, and I'll leave that miserable bastard of a subconscious behind.

One of the reasons I stopped doing this was because I thought no one at all was reading it, that I was just solipsistically whining to an empty space. But then, on new years, a strange chap called Ryan, in his quaintly aggressive way, said he'd been reading my blog in the past and that he was a little disappointed that it had ground to a halt. He's a charming man, and had recently been bitten in the face by a dog. This came as a surprise and an encouragement, and showed me that even if only one person is reading, no matter how foolish and incomprehensible he is, that's more than enough. So thank you Ryan, you may have saved my life. He hasn't, and that's an overly dramatic thing to say about a drunken conversation, but I felt this paragraph was lacking pep and so I decided to take some artistic licence.

What is true and not an exaggeration is that since Christmas I've lost 7 lbs and am tantalisingly close to dipping under the 15 stone barrier for the first time since I was a teenager. And, I've got a shift coming up at the Doncaster Free Press, a proper, actual newspaper read by genuine people with their fingers and hands. Though it is Doncaster so maybe not the usual quota of fingers, but it's a bloody start, right? It's an opportunity I have to grasp, like any good murderer with tell you, with both hands and not let go. Even if it's only a very short opportunity, it's in the profession I've chosen and not as part of some debilitating, mundane temporary assignment from a job agency.

So here's to new starts and positivity, yeah? Yeah!

Undiplomatic Cable

The Daily Telegraph has gone too far with it's latest piece of sparkling undercover journalism, and the editor and reporters concerned should think deeply about where their paper is heading.


If you're not familiar with the story then allow me, dear reader, to fill you in. As it were. So, over several days the Telegraph sent a pair of female reporters to a string of Lib Dem constituency surgeries, posing as single mothers facing difficulties with benefits. Hours of conversations were recorded, and the resulting sting has stung the arses of leading MPs - Deputy Leader of the House David Heath, Business Secretary Vince Cable, and Transport Minister Norman Baker, to name three. The quotes which the reporters eventually managed to glean, presumably after sieving through swathes of uninteresting bullshit, have cost Cable some of his already limited responsibilities; the others were forced into either apologies or denials.


Very good, congratulations Telegraph. This is almost as big as the expenses shitstorm you created, after being handed all the evidence.


I think this is different, though. For two reasons. The first lies in the paper's reaction to the recent Wikileaks disclosure of American War documents and ambassadorial cables. In these articles the paper has wheeled out a pair of its more bizarre looking journalists to call Wikileaks 'delinquent' and undemocratic, as well as snidily referring to Julian Assange as a 'glamorous hero', but only until people get sick of him. Of course, there is a difference between what Wikileaks does and the greasy tactics the Telegraph employed in stinging Vince Cable. The latter is certainly more dishonest. But to carp madly on about Wikileaks being undemocratic, providing mainly conjecture and gossamer-thin, we-knew-all-this-shit-already reasons for the criticism is a nonsense.


Then, in the 11th paragraph, the crux of my beef:


"Private conversations, even when they are not at the level of the diplomatic communiqué, are generally considered to be no-go areas for journalists, because it is recognised that professional life of any kind would be virtually unsustainable without the possibility of confidential communication."


Too bloody right!


The second objection I have concerns the nature of their sting. These undercover reporters were posing as constituents at an MP's surgery, a place where beleaguered Lib Dem MPs would be seeking to regain some popularity from their voters after all the messiness of the Coalition agreements. The headlines they generated - breathtaking incites such as George Osbourne not being in touch with problems of the common man - did nothing but cover up and distract people from the absolute shit-tonne of bad press that should be heading the way of the Conservatives.


Undercover reporting, according to Bob Steele of Poynter Online "can support substantive, compelling journalism that serves citizens and society", but this is not the case with the Telegraph's sting on Vince Cable. The information they recovered, which amounts to little more than bitching, serves no public interest. If the reporters suspected Cable would let slip that the coalition planned to renege on their promise not to raise university tuition fees, or that under new proposals the entire stock of Britain's forest land could be sold to foreign multinationals in a massive landgrab, then there would have been some point to it. 


But this was nothing, it was an insignificant drop in the ocean of contempt already felt for our MPs, and will probably stop them being at all candid in even the safest of circumstances, and that can only be a bad thing. 

09.10.10

It's a shame about Hatem Ben Arfa, the Newcastle player who had his leg broken the other day. He's one of those footballers you know mainly from computer games, who hold a space in your imagination as a result of some glorious, title-winning deeds they performed on Champ Manager. But at the beginning of the season there he was, all real and fleshy, twatting the ball into the net from 25 yards on his debut. He's got skill, which makes it even more of a surprise that he signed for Newcastle. But anyway, they beat Everton 1-0 and fantasy football managers up and down the country signed the crafty Frenchman.

Fast forward a month and it's all gone tits up. Ben Arfa became the latest Premier League footballer to have his leg broken, by a 'full-blooded' tackle from Nigel de Jong. Here's a clip. And here's another one, where he broke the leg of USA and Bolton's Stuart Holden in March this year. Neither look particularly violent, and certainly don't look as vicious as the flying kick to the ribs he dished out to Xabi Alonso, in the world cup final. The referee didn't even give a free kick for the Ben Arfa tackle. I can see why, because Nigel did win the ball, with one leg at least. It's just that the other smashed into the Newcastle player's left leg below the knee, and broke it in two places. In both incidences the tackles are completely reckless, idiotic even, but not malicious.

The speed and intensity of the Premier League is, we're told, far above that of any other in Europe. Opta stats show that players run further and faster, and play in a style far more physical than their limp-wristed, olive-munching continental counterparts. Teenagers are pitted against gnarled veterans in a game whose sense of mutual responsibility seems to have diminished, and they usually come off worst. The point is, when two players' legs collide at a flat-out sprint, one of them is likely to break. Bone is stronger than steel, but only from certain angles. And the key to avoiding these grim fractures is to know the difference between a tackle and a lunge, and for the latter to be properly punished. If a player hurls himself into a tackle with no control over his own body, taking away his ability to pull out or divert the force away from his opponent's leg, he should be sent off.

Already in 2010, Aaron Ramsey, Cesc Fabregas, Bobby Zamora, Antonio Valencia, Wolves' Adlene Guedioura and Bolton's Holden have all suffered leg breaks in one form or another, and I'm sure it never used to be this frequent. Growing up watching football in the nineties there were several high profile ones like Dave Busst, Henrik Larsson, and Luc Nilis. Were there lots of other leg fractures in the early days of the Premier League? Perhaps there were, but the lack of cameras and coverage meant they're now forgotten a decade later. The three I mentioned, though, can still be found in 2 seconds of youtube searching. The Ben Arfa incident happened in the 4th minute of the game; before half time a video ripped from Sky Sports had already appeared on the internet.

A broken leg used to seem like much more of a big deal than it does now. Now, players are put on stretchers, given oxygen, and not seen again for six months. Then, repaired by the wizardry of orthopaedic surgeons, they're chucked once again into the fray, a little bit more circumspect.

It could just be rose-tinted spectacles, and this kind of thing could always have gone on. I've been trying to find some statistics on the incidence of these gory incidents, but have so far come up short. Maybe when someone collects the evidence, the game's decision makers will spot a worrying pattern and will be moved to make a few changes. Until then, with a lunge and a snap more players will have their careers put back half a year, and anyone not built like a tank will be hounded off the pitch, sent crashing into advertising boards and back onto operating tables.  

Sunday 26.09.10

Ahhhhhhh Sunday, good old Sunday. Sunday doesn't let you down, except when you have to work the next day. You get that tight feeling in your chest whenever the responsibility of employment crushes down on you. But, woop! I don't have any of that at the moment, so my Sundays are fairly relaxed affairs at the moment.

I spent the day sticking it to The Man by illegally streaming lots of juicy sport. Hahaa! Take that you fuckers! Thanks to the internet, you can find live video of all the sport that's going on. Mostly, though, it's football, and football's what I was after. Stoke City, The Potters, that lot, were playing Newcastle United.

I've always loved football, despite always being completely shit at it. In possession of a powerful right foot and quite remarkable bulk, I had a short and fairly fruitless football career, peaking between the ages of 7 and 10. After that I rather went to seed. I had no natural ability, the touch of a corpse, and no competitive instinct whatsoever. I once scored 4 goals for the B Team, and that was about it. But I didn't mind, it wasn't the end of the world. There were stickers to collect and stupid plastic figures with gigantic heads to collect. It's weird, the aura that surrounds all the tiny sporting children, how they seemed somehow special and glamorous. They had Adidas Predator boots and Kickers shoes, and the could do a bloody Cruyff turn. I wasn't very good, and soon lost interest. But Stoke were playing, and I'm still bothered how they do, so why not.

There's a couple of good websites that host streams of sports matches, and I tottered off to them looking shifty and wearing a cloak, trying not to draw attention to myself in case the feds were watching. The mighty Potters trounced those thieving Magpies 2-1.

This felt good. A worrying proportion of my friends are from the North East.