[This is an occasional series where I mark items of interest with a short note too brief for a posting of their own. I also use it to reprint comments I make on other websites (mainly for my own ease of reference.)]
It would seem that I’m an Enlightenist then.
Mark Lawson on the DVD box set. He does have some interesting comments. However, I don’t think he really explores what this will mean for TV, as we know it, in the future.
Such is progress?
Another area where I feel let down by New Laborg getting it arse about tit, is what might be called family policy. Polly Toynbee gets it typically wrong, when she sees more meddling by the government as the answer to the current moral panic about ‘out-of-control teenagers’. As ParAvion says in the comments on the piece:
The issue is more to do with neglect. This is not just the active neglect of parents who have concluded that 'my child is out of control, there's nothing I can do'. It's also about the passive neglect of frantic parents who hold down two jobs to cover the bills, passing their children to relatives, childminders or daycare, watching them grow up without participating enough in the process because they have to keep the mortgage paid.
We are already at the gates of the surveillance society. An excellent article by Henry Porter in The Grauniad on just who is watching you and me. Again, there are disturbing echoes of Orwell’s 1984 in this our modern world.
No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones / In 1977:
"They could say, no U2, Jay-Z or Beyoncé in 2007," he [Mick Jones] chuckles, then suddenly looks a bit folorn. "But it's never going to happen, is it? I don't think things mean as much now. It's been so reduced now to the sliver of the end of a boiled sweet.
For me it has got too hard to listen to rock music anymore, for more than a couple of songs, I get too nostalgic for what has been lost there too.
My comment:
Ah, I do like a Madeline Bunting article. It means I don’t have to bother reading it and can go straight on to the comments.
Anyway, the solution to this is simple. There is a way of solving this obesity ‘crisis’ and global warming all rolled into one. I’ll give it to you here and now and for nothing.
First, disconnect every domestic household from the national grid, replacing it with a set of storage batteries.
Secondly, install a human-sized hamster wheel attached to those batteries.
Therefore, if Mr and Miss ordinary folk want to stuff their faces with pies whilst watching TV it will take them an hour or two on the wheel to acquire the necessary juice to run the microwave and the TV.
As a bonus it will also solve youth unemployment as the upper and middle classes can employ the feckless youth – thereby getting rid of the ‘problem teenagers’ problem too – to run their wheels for them.
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