Never go to Ventura, California

Over here, my friends use Pringles tubes to make novelty Melanie Philips Magazine Racks. 


Over in Ventura (which looks innocently pleasant), judging by the Google search which led one confused (and presumably disappointed) cybernaut to Plashing Vole, they make "Pringles Tube Sex Toys". 


Feel free to use the comments section to speculate on how possible or desirable this may be. Perhaps this benighted individual is an ex-pat Brit whose sexuality was formed watching Blue Peter transform cardboard and washing-up bottles into art, or perhaps the recession is really biting over there. 

So what was the Pringles tube for?

I asked, and you provided many and varied responses. None of them were correct.

Neal utilised the tube to make me………………………… The Melanie Philips Newspaper Rack© (quotes below are from the hilarious interview linked to by her name). In case you don't know her, she's the shrillest, least informed, most opinionated, most often wrong, most reactionary and most unpleasant journalist in the country - more so even than Jan Moir, because Philips is more intelligent. She has turned her talent towards evil. For instance, she believes that climate change just isn't happening and is a big communist plot (qualifications - zero), putting her in the company of this charming fellow and this one, and she calls London Londonistan which apparently isn't racist, whereas having even the slightest scintilla of doubt about anything Israel does is anti-semitic and you may as well wear an SS uniform and burn Jews every weekend because you are a Holocaust denier. Obama, to her, is 'in the Islamists' camp' and became a Christian as an electoral tactic… And she thinks the MMR vaccine causes autism, which is a sure sign of an uninformed fruitcake.

Multiculturalism, she writes, "has become the driving force of British life, ruthlessly policed by a state-financed army of local and national bureaucrats enforcing a doctrine of state-mandated virtue to promote racial, ethnic and cultural difference and stamp out majority values". British nationhood is being disembowelled by "mass immigration, multiculturalism and the onslaught mounted by secular nihilists against the country's Judeo-Christian values."

The key to her analysis is her belief in a general collapse of values or, in her words, "the creation of a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets". This is combined, she believes, with a profound anti-semitism among people who do not realise that "the fight against Israel is not fundamentally about land. It is about hatred of the Jews".

"The capture of all society's institutions, such as schools, universities, churches, the media, the legal profession, the police and voluntary groups. This intellectual elite was persuaded to sing from the same subversive hymn sheet so that the moral beliefs of the majority would be replaced by those on the margins of society, the perfect ambience in which the Muslim grievance culture could be fanned into the flames of extremism."

She writes, of course, for the Daily Mail.

The newspaper rack is perfectly designed, as you can see, to shut her up by cramming her mouth with The Guardian, which is her nemesis. The speech bubble is wipe-clean, enabling me to replace her old lunacies with fresh ones.

Melanie Philips: proof that you can be intelligent and stupid, or cynical ranter for money? Whatever the case, she makes me angrier than anyone else on the planet. This includes Michael Portillo. He was the son of Spanish Republican refugees who betrayed them by becoming one of the most rightwing Conservative government ministers in recent history. He made me shout extremely rude words at the television this morning. It was a repeat of one of his post-politics travel shows, in which he extolled the beauty and efficiency of the Spanish hyper-fast railway network.

Why did this make me angry, you may ask. After all, you love trains and foreigners, Vole. (Yes, Melanie, I do.) Well children, it made me angry because Portillo was one of the Conservative minister who privatised Britain's railway network. They broke it up into stupid little parcels and sold the scraps at a knockdown price to their flaky, dodgy, asset-stripping financier friends, who turned a tired but functional service into a shiny, awful, unreliable service which is Europe's most expensive. So for him to spend licence-payers' money grinning smugly from the seat of a fast, luxurious train we'll never have because he stole the network from us is UTTERLY UNCONSCIONABLE. The total, total bastard. How DARE he?

And yet, Melanie Philips is worse. Portillo's a well-fed smug turncoat. Philips is actually, deliberately evil because she refuses to think past her prejudices, despite having the intelligence to do so.

Any sign of white smoke?

Every other blogger in the world is endorsing a candidate for speaker, so I thought I should too. Surprisingly, it finds me in agreement not only with the Daily Wail, but with Britain's most evil, ill-informed, stupid, reactionary journalist, Melanie Phillips. (Don't follow that link - it leads you into a weird world in which everybody you know is a degenerate, evil, terrorist-loving, immoral, hate-filled scumbag, in her eyes. She doesn't know anything about science either, which doesn't stop her writing about it at length to the detriment of public health and understanding).

Yes, we both support Ann Widdecombe, Phillips' favourite Tory MP and Mail colleague. Not, however, for the same reasons. Phillips wants a vicious, evil troll in the Speaker's chair because she agrees with her views (AW doesn't accept climate change, instituted the manacling of prisoners who were giving birth, but does oppose hunting). I want her to become Speaker because they aren't allowed to utter a batsqueak about their own views and preferences. They put on a wig and do a lot of ceremonial nonsense. So by electing Widdecombe Speaker (ironically), MPs could achieve blissful silence from that ranting, intolerant corner. The world would be a better place.

Alternatively, there are two Sir Alan's standing (Lord and Haslehurst).