(T)rough Justice

The Legg and Kennedy reports on MPs expenses are out today and live here. It's not great news: 390 out of 650-odd MPs are being asked to pay some money back.

Even worse - these two reports disagree with each other. Mr Legg decided to rewrite the rules for claims had already been accepted as valid rather than set new rules from a particular date, which seems very odd. Mr. Kennedy thinks this is wrong, and I tend to agree.

However, this is a blog, and so we don't do nuance or fairness. Instead, we poke fun at the minutiae. Luckily, this is always fascinating. How about Tory Sir Anthony Steen, who charged us for 'a flagpole rope and binding' as well as 500 trees and described criticism as 'Jealousy… because I have a large house that looks like Balmoral'. It's overwhelmingly Tories who've been ripping us off, with the notable exception of unpleasant plutocrat Barbara Follett, who spent the 90s ordering Labour MPs to get hairstyles if they ever wanted to govern. She seemed to think that we should pay for (totally unnecessary) bodyguards and fine art insurance… in case you can't place her, she appeared on Brass Eye explaining that internet paedophiles can fondle children if the child presses its face to the computer screen.

Update: Mike Gapes MP has finally come clean and settled his case. He's finally had the decency to pay back that 40p he overclaimed from the trusting taxpayers. The Augean Stables are that little bit cleaner.

Chris Morris: Bow Down, Mortals

As sophisticated media-savvy types, you'll know all about Chris Morris: The Day Today, On The Hour, Brass Eye, Nathan Barley - the scourge of the vacuity of modern media, politics and culture.

I thought I'd share with you an extract from Blue Jam, his hypnotic, disorienting, freakish and sometimes nightmarish mid-period radio monologues, from the days when Radio 1 actually had a brain. These were on late at night, always soundtracked with this vaguely ambient stuff, so that I would doze off and the monologues would leak into my already disturbing dreams. It's a very unpleasant experience.

I'm doomed…

Over on Bad Science and on Newsnight, Ben Goldacre is ripping Susan Greenfield and another 'researcher' to shreds for the ludicrous claim, as the Daily Mail puts it, that 'Facebook = Cancer'. She says 'there's no evidence for this but…' - which echoes the infamous Chris Morris paedophilia episode in which Dr Fox makes the same claim about crabs and paedophiles sharing genes (can't embed this one, but it's at 1.15).

The basic idea behind this ludicrous story is that use of Facebook etc. = loneliness = susceptibility to disease. Fair enough. In that case, holding tutorials yesterday made me very susceptible, and my daily routine (read books, teach, read books) means that I'm a high-priority case. I demand screening! Compensation! That bastard Gutenberg and his pushers Waterstones, Bangor University, Wolverhampton University, Amazon, ABE and all the other backstreet book dealers should be strung up for this. My entire life has been predicated on George Eliot's maxim: 'the world outside books is not a happy one' - and now I discover that hiding myself away with one will kill me.