D'oh

Alan Hansen, prior to racially complimenting

the coloureds yesterday...or something!?

Classic £40,000 a show Alan Hansen last night on Match of the Day condemning racism in football by using racist language, after orange tinted, fake tanned Gary Lineker asked him whether racism was rife in the modern game and red faced Lee Dixon looked on in horror.

He finished by conceding without a hint of irony that, "there's room for improvement." Not as far as ironic comedy on Match of the Day is concerned though...that was fucking genius.

"No it's not. If you played twenty-five … I think it's better, not only with the players but with the supporters. I think there's a lot of coloured players in all the teams, all the major teams, and there's a lot of coloured players that are probably the best in the Premier League and, as I say, if you look twenty-five, thirty years ago, it was probably in a bad way, not as bad as some of the nations in the Continent, but certainly there's always, always room for improvement." -- Alan Hansen

Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

"Here’s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it." -- Peter Hitchens

There's a kind of impertinence in mourning someone else's loss. Fannying about on the internet explaining to everyone how saddened you are by the passing of someone you never met or had a conversation with, is a peculiar almost self-indulgent thing. So I hope his family will forgive me if they read my blog, which I'm sure they do else wise where will they learn about sandwiches?, for hi-jacking their loss.

Marco Simmoncelli's death earlier this year genuinely upset me. Very different people, but for the same reasons, Christopher Hitchens' death has also. There are so few people left in this world who are able to think for themselves let alone force other people to think too. Perhaps that's why we describe them as being larger than life, because they lift us above the foggy sluggish tedium of it.

Both men did this in vastly different ways. It is something I admire in people more than anything. Of all the people eulogising over him today I bet I'm the only one comparing him to Marco Simmoncelli.

The adventures of Huckleberry Finn 2011

So now, the new editions of Huckleberry Finn are to be censored. They're replacing the word "nigger" with "slave." This is of course wrong on many many levels.

Quite aside from the fact the central purpose of the book is to highlight racism, you can't just retrospectively write the zeitgeist of a period out of books because according to contemporary values it has become offensive. It's the very reason historical novels should be preserved in their original forms.

This is how we make progress. We learn from our mistakes, we don't pretend they never happen. You can't learn from mistakes if they're erased from memory. When you do this you are just destined to repeat them.

It's also interesting that "slave" is the word they've chosen as the gentler noun to describe poor Jim. Mark Twain would not be happy with this.

What's a more abhorrent reflection on society, racial slurs or slavery? If you want people to forget an unpleasant chapter from your nation's past I would have thought slavery would come higher up on the list than verbal racist abuse?

Surely slavery is the ultimate demonstration of racial discrimination? I mean I can't of course speak for the African-Mercan community, but I'm quite sure they'd rather be called a nigger and be free than be addressed as Mister but forced into slavery.

If they're going to censor the book in order to spare the nations historical blushes, they'd be better served omitting any references to the enslaving of an entire race of people than the pervasive use of racial slurs. If you're going to lie make it a big one that's what I always say.

Dog tired

Lord ha' mercy I'm tired people. These IV antibiotics really mess up my sleeping pattern, which was all over the shop anyway. Usually I have no idea what time it is, but as we speak I'm not 100% on what day it is. I think I've got two more days to go. Or sixty five sleeps in real terms.

When I'm tired like this I can't think at all. Even basic tasks have me scratching my head like an Ape who's just been rooting around in the satchel of some nosy biologist he's just viciously torn to pieces looking for sandwiches and found his iPod.

I made the mistake just now of trying to fully appreciate the genius of Patrick Hughes' reverse perspective art shown in this wee video. I just couldn't grasp it and became angry and started roaring like our Ape friend in the previous paragraph and busted up my living room.

This sort of thing makes me almost believe maybe the human race will have a chance of not de-evolving itself into extinction after all and that in a couple thousand years we won't be the ones in the forests staring bewilderingly at an iPod owned by a Chinese biologist.

While many many Totterington fans are already spawning off-spring without opposable thumbs, fortunately there are still people like Patrick Hughes on this Earth with IQ's large enough to keep our gene pool rich and diverse enough to continue the evolution of the species and compensate for the underclasses from N17 who know only what they read in the Daily Star.