Melanie Sykes. Name sound familiar? Flirty Northern bird who used to flog Boddingtons on TV and now presents some daytime television programme? Yep. Well, she likes sex. Really likes it. Especially likes having sex with her toy boy boyfriend who has the kind of torso you could use to grate cheese.

Not in any way surprised or interested in that fact? You’re obviously not a Daily Mail reader or one of those Guardian readers who reads the Daily Mail to seem superior and make meta-jokes. See, Mel met the flirty boy through Twitter and has, by her own account, been riding him like a cock waltzer. Good for her. Slightly unwise of her to put their flirty banter in public messages on Twitter but who really cares? They’re adults in a relationship who like each other. Their dirty talk is no worse than overhearing a couple getting fresh on a packed train. We’d rather they didn’t but they can if they want.

Britain has got a real issue with being frigid and uptight about sex and people saying they enjoy it, particularly women and particularly women over the age of 35. Have a child or be so audacious as to age and suddenly you are not allowed to mention that you like sex and that you’ll seek it out.

Cougar is a particularly crap word. It should be reserved for genre tagging porn and not used by credible news outlets or as the title of terrible TV shows. It belongs in the same category as MILF and its age-discrimination averse aunt GILF.

But it’s not just the papers and news websites that indulge in this kind of easy sexism. In my Twitter feed, I’ve seen prominent female tweeters make snidey comments about Sykes that seem needlessly judgmental. These are writers and performers who would be near the front of the line to crow about sexism and misogyny but are happy to hit minxy Mel with the judgmental stick.

Some wonder if Melanie Sykes was indulging in a little bit of tabloid baiting. Perhaps she was but it says a lot about the newspaper culture and the general culture of British society that such a stunt would work.

In most European countries, older woman likes sleeping with hot younger lover would not even make the news list. The puritan judgement does us all no favours. Sex is fun and people who enjoy it shouldn’t be stigmatised if they occasionally express their liking for it a bit too publicly. I’m sure Sykes is mortified now but she’s no need to be.

Apple isn’t the Kremlin. Tim Cook is not Khrushchev. Soak up those seemingly unneccesary statements for a moment because actually they’re something most tech pundits need to get into their thick i-skulls.

A genuine headline I read this morning:

“Apple job posting points to new dock connector.”

I call on the ghost of Steve Jobs to descend and smite the idiots with the fiercest fire from the great firewire connector in the sky. They are dragging analysis into a dirty water-filled gutter where rats roll their eyes at the foolishness.

Apple puts out products. It does this on a regular basis. Most of those products sell extremely well and are loved by those that purchase them.

That obsessional love is what fuels the entire Apple rumour-mill. It splutters and coughs constantly, turns its nose to the east desperately trying to detect some emanation from the smokey factories of Foxconn.

Tim Cook speaking to the D: All Things D conference has set the Kremlinologists of the Apple rumour jerk pile into a frenzy of twitching and premature ejaculations. The Apple TV! You know the REAL ONE! A new iPad made with liquid metal! A robot containing the downloaded soul of Steve Jobs!

I used to have to write stories based on the stream of utter bull coming from sites such as Cult Of Mac, MacRumours and Apple Insider. These sites in turn feed off bottom feeders like DigiTimes.

The eco-system of Apple rumour sites is a conspiracy of complete rubbish continuing for the unquestionable bump in hits making claims about Apple brings. Apple isn’t the Kremlin but those boys and girls are Pravda and just as badly informed.

UPDATE 31.05.12 10.39am: Alan Rusbridger did respond to this post via…Twitter. So I stand corrected on that point. His tweet embedded below 

@brokenbottleboy @GoldenGatsby won’t try to debate over twitter (tho see @acarvin for covering wars). Leveson. But happy to have cup of tea

— alan rusbridger (@arusbridger) May 31, 2012

There are many ‘open’ things about Alan Rusbridger but not on Twitter. Don’t expect the stream of links and tweets trumpeting The Guardian’s triumphs to be broken by engagement with critics. Openess only stretches so far. Still, it was good to see the benevolent dictator of King’s Place putting his views out there in an interview with the Nieman Journalism Lab. The piece, which you can read here, further reveals just how boggle-eyed and deluded the cheerleader of ‘open’ really is.

Here’s how Rusbridger explains what he means by ‘open journalism’ (even typing the phrase makes me ball my fists Hulk-like):

“The simplest way I explain it is to think of the theater critic. The Guardian’s got a wonderful theater critic who has been doing the job for 40 years, and no editor I can think of in his right mind would get rid of Michael Billington or not have a theater critic.

If you asked the question, ‘What about the 900 other people in the audience next door to Michael?’ — is it conceivable no one else in the audience has an interesting opinion that could add to your understanding?

Editorially, it is generally better to try and harness multiple views. So then, if you accept that, then I think there are only two questions. One is how do you sort interesting people from uninteresting people, and how do you sort people of particular interests from other interests? And that’s something which is not unique to newspapers. Many, many people are trying to crack that nut in an age of overabundance of information.

And then the question is: If that’s true for theater criticism, is that true for other areas a journalist can cover? Is it true of war reporting and reporting on science and fashion? Nearly always, and I would say always in our experience, the answer is yes it is true…”

The jump from theatre critic to war reporting shows just how fundamentalist the ‘open journalist’ push at The Guardian is. The job of war reporting is a brutal, harsh and harrowing thing.

The best war reporters stand between the sides and offer an independent view of what is occuring on the ground. Who are these citizen war reporters that Rusbridger would rely on for free? And why are their words to be exploited for nothing? How can we trust the views of someone not employed by the organisation to take the big risks to get to the big truths?

The big truth about ‘open journalism’ is that it is a big philosophical front for a tawdry reality – the words and opinions of the unpaid crowd are cheaper than the considered work of the professionals. The Guardian wishes to harness the free to furnish itself with content to slap adverts on and ‘monetize’ in many other exciting ways (The Guardian hotel, anyone?!).

I don’t resent the business model as much as the sly way it is being presented to the world as a theological break with established journalistic dogma. Rusbridger is more shyster than iconoclastic visionary.

Praised to the Three Little Pigs ad (see my response to that here), Rusbridger says:

“O think that we’re living in the world at the moment where the moment you press send on your story, the responses start coming in. And so I think journalists have to work out what to do about those responses: How do you incorporate those responses?

And in this world, in which as a news reporter you’re going to — if you go along with open journalism — you’re going to be open to other sources, other than what can be created in your own newsroom, you’re going to incorporate those responses.”

I can’t disagree with him on many of these points. The brilliance of the web is how it can make a story evolve, how the wisdom and knowledge of your readers can strengthen what you have to offer.

But I see the value in the professional voice, their filtering the information thrown in by readers and crediting them for the times they offer something good.

It’s worth noting too that freelancers and staff for The Guardian frequently take to Twitter and Facebook to howl at the awfulness of “going beneath the line”. It looks like Rusbridger, who rarely, if ever, has interacted with the demons and ghouls of CiF, is preaching a hollow message to his fulminating flock.

The stories about young Rusbridger (not quite as exciting a premise as Young Indiana Jones) are quite hair raising. I am told by a former staffer that as the Features Editor of The Guardian, Rusbriger was ruthless in pruning back his team to true believers and that Peter Preston, the paper’s former editor, was heard to say: “I try not to get on Alan’s bad side. I find it is not very wise.” I realise this post might get me on ‘Alan’s bad side’ but then in his world of open journalism, the freelance rates are dropping to a pittance and I must look elsewhere for my daily bread.

At 7.22am, in the outside smoking area of London City Airport, I got my finger caught in my bike chain. That finger is now wrapped in a plaster and throbbing irritably. It is irritating me every third word as I type this piece. Small scale irritations are mosquitos of the mind, they bite and harass constantly. Some people are meditative and in control, eradicating the irritations from their conscious mind. Others, like me, are beset by the little beasts. Irritations today included:

…getting my finger caught in the chain, a van driver who shouted abuse at me, that goddamn chain again when I needed to put it on my bike, my continuing battle with the credit card bastards, a needless argument with my girlfriend (my fault…mainly), my bike lock hitting me on the knee where I already have a bruise, a pushy person getting in my personal space in the local Indian takeaway, someone on the internet telling me I’m an idiot (again) and my clumsy ability to always kick over the bottles waiting to be recycled.

On an irritating day, irritations crowd your mind and leave echoes of themselves on your brain like the heavy-handed penmanship of a person unwillingly signing a cheque. Ultimately, just like allowing someone to hurt your feelings, to break through your defences, it is your choice to let irritations overwhelm you. It’s hard not to sometimes though. On a day when the world seems committed to driving you spare, irritations swarm like enemies in an 80s arcade game.

Irritations can also be fuel. Irritations can grow into ire about injustice. Irritations that have a pattern can reveal a wholesale discrimination or incompetence in an organisation. Learning to turn irritations into little pinches that push you towards taking action, that make you try to change things is the most positive thing you can do when you feel irritated. But just like the Dali Lama banging on about peace with a retinue of servants and an endless supply of orange robes, advice to ignore or harness your irritation is easier said than done. In fact, it’s irritating.

Remember Gizmodo? That cheeky bunch that tried to parlay a stolen iPhone into the WORLD’S BIGGEST SCOOP and an example of PRESS FREEDOM, YEAH?!. Well they’re still going, out in the wilderness, the douchiest douches in douchedom, just pumping out bad analysis and idiotic articles alongside some cool pictures and the odd quirky story filched from elsewhere.

I only read Gizmodo when intriguing links pop up on Twitter or are highlighted by others. The Curious Rat blog pointed readers in the direction of one particularly egregious lump of steaming ordure by Jesus Diaz – 10 Changes That Must Have Steve Jobs Rolling In His Grave. Point one: classy! Let’s keep raking over the memory of a still recently dead icon and, for a bonus, suggest we can guess what he would have thought.

Now, using Diaz’s dreadful top 10, let’s take a look at all that is unholy and wrong with dying tech blogs like Gizmodo.

The Intro

“I miss Steve Jobs. The tech world is so boring. So beige. Things haven’t been the same without his show-and-tells, him slamming people left and right or his email replies in the middle of the night.”

The tech world has long been beige and boring, even when Steve Jobs walked among us. The reason Apple stood out and continues to stand out is that it dared to “think different” and forced other companies to run along behind it trying to mimic its moves.

As for Steve “slamming people left and right”, Jobs in his latter years made quite strategic attacks on competitors or technologies he didn’t like. Direct slams or big drama? I don’t recall that and suspect it’s really just Diaz dreaming up a script for a Steve Jobs biopic where the great man punches the head off a zombie Samsung executive.

Continuing with the intro: “Apple hasn’t been the same either…” Oh good golly, Miss Molly staring in disbelief at Gizmodo’s idiotic article on her new iPad’s retina display. Since Steve passed there have been two major Apple product launches: the iPhone 4S and the new iPad. Both have been massively successful and Apple’s profits have continuing their upward swing.

And now Jesus Diaz’s ten dumbest comments about Apple:

Siri

“According to his authorised biography, Jobs really never tried Siri. He was handed the iPhone 4S at the last board meeting he attended, just before he resigned. According to Walter Isaacson, he appeared puzzled and less than impressed after playing with it briefly…”

Diaz says that’s because Siri is in beta and blah blah blah. I say that’s because Jobs knew he was dying from terminal cancer and that, guess what, even he, the consummate product guy, really didn’t care about a voice assistant as much as his imminent death.

16:9 4in iPhone screen

“If this rumour is true, the ghost of Jobs wouldn’t be happy…”

Two things and I’ll make it quick: 1) “If this rumour is true…” Here Diaz is speculating about how a man he didn’t know personally would respond to something that is speculation. 2) “…the ghost of Jobs wouldn’t be happy…” That’s just bad writing. If Diaz is setting up the premise that Jobs’s ghost is watching, he means to say: “…the ghost of Jobs won’t be happy…”

Supply chain execs and managers in engineering meetings

“According to Apple engineers, things are changing inside the company: there is a ‘growing presence of project manager and supply chain execs’ within the company. They are present in every important meeting, which didn’t happen when Jobs was at the helm…”

Jesus Diaz is not Tim Cook. Jesus Diaz is not on the Apple board. Jesus Diaz, like me, is just a dickhead with a MacBook Air and some ideas about what Apple should do. He further undermines his point here by linking to a Gizmodo story about a Fortune report (see, lots of originality there) which says Apple is doing well under Tim Cook. So Cook runs Apple slightly differently to Jobs, he is not the same person and shouldn’t ape Steve slavishly due to some kind of misplaced desire to ‘respect his wishes’.

Negotiating with Google-puppet Samsung

“Jobs vowed to stop Android no matter what. For him there was no room to negotiate…”

Diaz loves that because he exists in the world of petty blog fights and point scoring. The willingness to have a knife fight with rivals (who also happen to Apple suppliers) was not a positive quality of Steve Jobs approach to business. Tim Cook is a more diplomatic leader and a supply chain genius. I’m going to suggest he knows what he is doing and that the ‘negotiations’, about which we know very little, will turn out very positively for Apple.

That shitty Apple TV user interface

“Jobs hated the current Apple TV user interface. According to an Apple engineer, he rejected it five years ago…”

Operative word there ‘former Apple engineer”. So what. That’s one man’s opinion. I actually like the Apple TV interface. And who knows if the design really is the one Jobs allegedly rejected.

Making products with worse specs

“That new iPad’s thickness is 0.37in and weighs 1.44 pounds compared to 0.34in and 1.34 pounds of the iPad 2. All the while the battery life has decreased to 9 hours vs 10 hours…”

That is the sound of Diaz’s tank spluttering out. He’s running on vapour here. The new iPad is a stellar product that brought Siri dictation, the Retina screen and vastly improved performance. That it is marginally thicker and marginally heavier with a slightly lower battery life is not ‘making products with worse specs’. Point me to the Android tablet that’s better? You can’t without smoking crack.

Supporting charities

Shut up, Diaz. This one doesn’t even need explanation.

Giving stock dividends

“This was another no-no for Steve Jobs…”

Yawn. Another point made by Diaz based on supposition and assumption. We do not know that Steve was not already aware that Apple had future plans to pay dividends.

Company leaks like the ones with Apple TV and Foxconn

“Nobody would have dared talk about a future product when Jobs was alive…”

Rubbish. It happened plenty during Jobs’s time at the helm and citing the ‘leak’ by the Foxconn chief of details of the as yet unseen and unannounced Apple TV is industrially stupid.

User interface details

“The skeuomorphism thing is getting out of control. And there are thousand little details that Apple is now fucking up in their user interfaces. Something that Jobs would have never allowed…”

This is a classic example of creating Saint Steve now the real-life Steve Jobs has gone. Jobs made mistakes and allowed products to be released that weren’t crazy awesome. Remember Ping? Diaz is talking utter rubbish once again. The entire list of 10 is terrible from beginning to end.

The article is just one stone in an avalanche of awfulness pouring out of sites such as Engadget, Gizmodo and Techcrunch on a daily basis. The old class of tech blogs is being made to look slow, cheap and crass by new players such as The Verge, niche sites and better mainstream tech reporting.

The problem with keyboard punches like Jesus Diaz is that they pretend to have tremendous insight into the minds of individuals such as Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin and to have real vision on what Apple or Google should do next. They have never worked in business and they don’t do real research. These pieces are just empty link bait base on vague feelings rather than considered theories or even, you know, facts.

Power lists are interesting things. Magazines love to create them. Partially it’s about giving the mag a sense of authority: “We know important people and here are the most important.” But there’s also a big sense of butt-kissing.

I like to pretend I’m not interested in ever being on such a list. I splutter on about Groucho Marx and not wanting to join any club that wants me but frankly that’s horseshit. We ALL want to be validated. We all want the Blue Peter badge and the big rosette marked number 1.

Life IS a competition and power lists offer us a seemingly concrete measure of who is awesome…according to a bunch of editors and their mates. And so this brings me to the Wired 100, Wired’s list of the “innovators and influencers shaping the Wired world.”

Jony Ive is in at number 1 and it’s a hard choice to quibble with. Apple dominates the technology sector even for those who steadfastly stick to Android phones and PC laptops. Apple leads and the pack rushes after it.

Sir Jonathan Ive of Brushed Aluminiumshire is a major factor in that dominance. He gives Apple’s dreams physical manifestation. He is at the heart of Oz and rarely emerges from behind the curtain. So that’s a motivation for Wired too. Make Ive number 1 and they have the interview. Few people are immune to full-on flattery.

Delve deeper into the Wired 100 and you find oddities, eccentricities and inacurracies. That’s the nature of this kind of list. It is pushed through the prism of Wired’s world view and of the interests and obsessions of its staff, editors and contributors. There are areas it will never alight on because it does not have eyes trained on them.

Consider Pete Cashmore, the rhombus-faced Brad Pittstain of tech blogging. Where Mashable was once an interesting site, it is now a monster of content aggregation and listicle creation. It is a parasite on the festering buttock of the web. Yet Cashmore is highly visible, the wunderkind of turning crap into gold, so he rises from 80th to a staggering 12th in this curious power list.

Others have deservedly gone higher. Michael Acton Smith, the creative powerhouse behind Firebox and now Mind Candy, is the closest the UK has got to a business visionary in the past 20 years. That he is not yet a household name can only be a matter of choice.

With Moshi Monsters, Mind Candy is building a Disney for the 21st century. But the conclusion to Wired’s comment on him is wrong: “He has a crack at an ultra-high-value exit.” He might but that is not what he appears to be going for. Not everyone is building businesses to sell them.

Loic Le Meur is a new entry for bringing Le Web to London and Paddy Cosgrave of the Dublin Web Summit and F.ounders is wisely bumped up from 67th to a far more respectable 26th.

The inclusion of Adele at 44th makes some sense but also smacks of an attempt to lure the mainstream press into writing about the Wired list. Fair little tactic no question but how smart is Adele really? The people who should be on the list are her label XL.

Similarly putting Tom Watson in as a new entry at 78 is a press-pleasing inclusion. Watson is more digitally savvy than most MPs but his elevation to saint status may not last all that long.

The entry that interests me most though is one that I have some slight personal connection to. Milo Yiannopoulos, my erstwhile editor at The Kernel, has dropped from 84th to 98th and the copy that accompanies his entry reeks of a negative agenda:

“Tech’s gadfly continues to provoke and irritate, often for its own sake. His influence has waned since he lost his Telegraph column, but his latest venute The Kernel, has given him new power to torment. It’s a low-budget project, but its weekly Nutshell, a gossipy, legally uncautious newsletter, picks publicly on targets such as the government’s Tech City initiative. Unlikely to be a sustainable model but he’s much talked about.”

There are so many problems with that paragraph that I’ll have to unpack them slowly:

First: Milo says he did not lose his Telegraph column but instead stopped doing it to focus on other projects.

Second: I do not know the details of The Kernel’s investment round but understand that it is substantial so “low-budget” is just a burn from the Conde Nasties.

Third: the Nutshell is not “legally uncautious”. Though caustic it is written with full awareness of UK libel laws.

Fourth: Wired, which I have written for and respect, should be careful about calling other businesses “unlikely to be a sustainable model”.

I came on board as a contributing editor at The Kernel because I believe in the work it is doing and know Milo to be far deeper and more interesting than the online charicature might suggest.

The recruitment report I am currently finishing up is a solid and significant bit of investigative reporting which Milo has fully supported me in producing providing wise editorial counsel.

To suggest The Kernel is a vanity project for Milo’s mischievious side to run wild is merely professional discourtesy from a Wired team who really should and do know better.

Power lists are interesting things. Magazines love to create them. Partially it’s about giving the mag a sense of authority: “We know important people and here is who we think are the most important.” But there’s also a big sense of butt-kissing. 

Magazines need access and advertisers. Lists are great for that. Get the great, the good and the rich enough to masquerade as either of the previous two and they will scrabble around like foxes in burger wrappers desperate to be higher on the list. 

I like to pretend I’m not interested in ever being on such a list. I splutter on about Groucho Marx and not wanting to join any club that wants me but frankly that’s horseshit. We ALL want to be validated. We all want the Blue Peter badge and the big rosette marked number 1. 

Life is a scrappy competition and power lists offer us a seemingly concrete measure of who is awesome…according to a bunch of editors and their mates. And so this brings me to the Wired 100, Wired’s list of the “innovators and influencers shaping the Wired world.” 

Jony Ive is in at number 1 and it’s a hard choice to quibble with. Apple dominates the technology sector even for those who steadfastly stick to Android phones and PC laptops. 

Apple leads and the pack rushes after it. Sir Jonathan Ive of Brushed Aluminiumshire is a major factor in that dominance. He gives Apple’s dreams physical manifestation. He is at the heart of Oz and rarely emerges from behind the curtain. 

So that’s a motivation for Wired too. Make Ive number 1 and they have the interview. Few people are immune to full-on flattery. 

Delve deeper into the Wired 100 and you find oddities, eccentricities and inacurracies. That’s the nature of this kind of list. It is pushed through the prism of Wired’s world view and of the interests and obsessions of its staff, editors and contributors. There are areas it will never alight on because it does not have eyes trained on them. 

Consider Pete Cashmore, the rhombus-faced Brad Pittstain of tech blogging. Where Mashable was once an interesting site, it is now a monster of content aggregation and listicle creation. It is a parasite on the festering buttock of the web. Yet Cashmore is highly visible and an IT-kids, the wunderkind of turning bullshit into gold so he rises from 80th to a staggering 12th in this curious power list. 

Others have deservedly gone higher. Michael Acton Smith, the creative powerhouse behind Firebox and now Mind Candy, is the closest the UK has got to a business visionary in the past 20 years. That he is not yet a household name can only be a matter of choice. 

With Moshi Monsters, Mind Candy is building a Disney for the 21st century. But the conclusion to Wired’s comment on him is wrong: “He has a crack at an ultra-high-value exit.” He might but that is not what he appears to be going for. Not everyone is building businesses to sell them. 

Loic Le Meur is a new entry for bringing Le Web to London and Paddy Cosgrave of the Dublin Web Summit and F.ounders is wisely bumped up from 67th to a far more respectable 26th. 

The inclusion of Adele at 44th makes some sense but also smacks of an attempt to lure the mainstream press into writing about the Wired list. Fair little tactic no question but how smart is Adele really? The people who should be on the list are her label XL. 

Similarly putting Tom Watson in as a new entry at 78 is a press-pleasing inclusion. Watson is more digitally savvy than most MPs but his elevation to saint status may not last all that long. 

The entry that interests me most though is one that I have some slight personal connection to. Milo Yiannopoulos, my erstwhile editor at The Kernel, has dropped from 84th to 98th and the copy that accompanies his entry reeks of agendas: 

“Tech’s gadfly continues to provoke and irritate, often for its own sake. His influence has waned since he lost his Telegraph column, but his latest venute The Kernel, has given him new power to torment. It’s a low-budget project, but its weekly Nutshell, a gossipy, legally uncautious newsletter, picks publicly on targets such as the government’s Tech City initiative. Unlikely to be a sustainable model but he’s much talked about.” 

There are so many problems with that paragraph that I’ll have to unpack them slowly. 

First: Milo says he did not lose his Telegraph column but instead stopped doing it to focus on other projects. 

Second: I do not know the details of The Kernel’s investment round but understand that it is substantial so “low-budget” is just a burn from the Conde Nasties. 

Third: the Nutshell is not “legally uncautious”. Though caustic it is written with full awareness of UK libel laws. 

Fourth: Wired, which I have written for and respect, should be careful about calling other businesses “unlikely to be a sustainable model”. 

I came on board as a contributing editor at The Kernel because I believe in the work it is doing and know Milo to be far deeper and more interesting than the online charicature suggests. 

The recruitment report I am currently finishing up is a solid and significant bit of investigative reporting which Milo has fully supported me in producing providing wise editorial counsel. 

To suggest The Kernel is a vanity project for Milo’s mischievious side to run wild is merely professional discourtesy from a Wired team who really should and do know better. 

There is someone working at The Observer with a vendetta against John Healy. There’s a good chance that you don’t know who John Healy is. For years, his book The Grass Arena, was allowed to languish out of print. It is a searing tale of being alcoholic and homeless in 1960s and 70s London. It is a beautiful, brutal book. It was a disgrace that it was allowed to fall into obscurity and that Healy’s sequel to his autobiography and his historical novel have remained unpublished. 

In 1988, after pulling himself out of the darkness of a truly troubled existence, Healy found himself at the gates to the Elysian Fields. An ex-soldier, ex-boxer, lapsed-alcholic and former prisoner, he is also a chess master and an beautiful, gifted, brilliant writer. Faber & Faber published The Grass Arena and it won the JR Ackerley Prize for autobiography. Harold Pinter was among those raving about the book. Irvine Welsh has subsequently gushed over its excellence. And then: John Healy was cast back into the darkness. 

Why? A flippant comment. A brutal comment. The kind of comment that is par for the course in the underworld that Healy had lived in for years. Ignored, treated like a freak by Faber he lashed out when his editor Robert McCrum didn’t return his calls, told a receptionist that he had an axe and would cut all their heads off. The anger inside him rose high and came spilling out. It was to be a crossroads that turned him back onto the road less travelled. 

Three books remain unpublished. The Grass Arena was pulped despite selling 20,000 copies. Healy was cast out. The elite decided he was “the mad axe man”. The Guardian published a front page story on him and The Observer, spurred on by Robert McCrum, has done him down repeatedly. Healy would have been left in darkness for good if Paul Duane (@punkyscudmonkey on Twitter) had not spent four years producing Barbaric Genius, a documentary that reveals Healy for the genius that he is and throws a light on the blacklisting. 

Robert McCrum does not come out of the documentary well. He looks shifty, especially explaining why he repeated claims about Healy being violent in a piece on his years at Faber and the repeated ‘jokey’ comments about the author in the paper’s Browser column. When I spoke to Paul Duane about his research he told me that The Observer refused to tell him who penned the accusations about the author in Browser. The Observer claims it doesn’t know. I say it’s complicit in the silencing of an authentic voice that threatened it. 

John Healy’s unpublished writings deserve to be read by more than a handful of lucky people. The idea that he might spend his final years being ignored and then be lauded in gushing obits is disgusting. He has written more than one great book, the establishment simply refuses to put those other works in the hands of the people. The establishment that likes to wring its hands about the addicts, the vulnerable and the homeless as long as it doesn’t have to meet them. 

Find out more about Paul Duane’s extremely fine documentary, Barbaric Genius, here. And do feel free to contact The Observer and ask them why they have repeatedly attacked Healy in print, however ‘jokingly’. 

Bob Garfield, co-host of On The Media (a show I really like), flexed his muscles for The Guardian today with a column that essentially declares: AMERICA RAH RAH RAH! BRITAIN BOO BOO BOO! The hypothesis from the giant beard with a head attached is that Britain doesn’t export any decent celebrities anymore and that America, though just as trashy, manages to have megastars still. Woop-di-doo. 

It’s also a false premise. While we’re not pumping out The Beatles, Liz Taylor and Lawrence Olivier these days we’ve still managed Adele, Russell Brand, Mumford & Sons, The Arctic Monkeys, Helen Mirren and Michael Sheen among others in the past few years. 

Garfield predicates his entire column on some cheap cracks about David Beckham (who is practically an living god in the eyes of half of the Far East). Apparently La Becks has to be referred to by name in a Burger King ad because not enough Americans know who he is. So what. America is not the word and the fact is, the sport that Americans so easily dismiss as “soccer” is the biggest sporting pursuit in the world and teams like Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea have global fan bases that baseball teams and ‘football’ franchises would cut their right nuts off for. 

America is adept at cultural imperialism. Hollywood and Madison Avenue work double-time to push the ‘American dream’ to the furthest reaches of the world but Britain has always produced far more interesting, flawed stars than the Land Of The Free can achieve. Just because Bob is ignorant does not mean that we are suddenly culturally bankrupt. Katie Price is no different from Jayne Mansfield or the like. There has always been gimlet-eyed careerists being marketed as meat to men who know no better. 

The final counter-punch to Garfield’s idiotic arguments? 1) he bases his hypothesis on the opinions of Piers Morgan, a man who can only cast himself as a great Briton by keeping well away from our shores 2) he considers Andrew Lloyd-Webber admirable. And spitting scorn at Simon Cowell? Too easy. Cowell conquered America and sold the continent its own formats back to it. 

THE TIREDNESS 

Scene 1. 

Lights up. Three characters in what appear to be hospital pyjamas are sat listlessly on the stage which is sparsely decorated. A circle of chairs. Three beds. A hatch in the wall. 

A: what time is it? 

B: I don’t know. Morning or something. 

A: or something? When did we wake up. 

C: earlier. 

A: I wanted specifics. 

B: I can make something up. 

A: well, what time is it? 

C: no clocks here. Doctor says it’s not relevant. Why do we need time? We’re not going anywhere are we? 

A: but how do you know when to…I don’t know…when to do stuff? 

B: not relevant 

C: yeah, not relevant. 

B: they tell us when to do things. 

A: well what time does the medication arrive? 

B: at the time the medication arrives. 

A: that’s unhelpful. 

B: isn’t. Just factual. 

A: alright, fine. How do you know when to get up? 

B: you just, you know, wait for the buzzers. 

C: buzz. buzz. buzz. 

B: yeah, buzz, buzz. The buzzer goes, we get up. The horn goes, we go to bed. 

A: and if you don’t? 

B: well. Um. well…

C: It’s not good. You just do it. Things happen if you don’t. 

A: like what? 

C: things. I don’t wanna…it’s…I don’t…

B: bad things, OK? It doesn’t do to stir things up. The nurse, she gets angry. 

A: angry? why? What is wrong with asking questions?

C: you might not like the answer. 

A: I want the truth. 

B: this is not A Few Good Men. 

A: I don’t know what that is. 

B: so young.

C: yes, so young. 

A: don’t patronise me. 

B: we are not. It’s just a fact. 

C: we’ve been here a long time. 

A: how long?

B: long

A: you don’t know? 

C: we don’t have a calendar 

B: we don’t need one. Things just happen. 

Darkness. Scene.  

Twitter limits the number of tweets you can send in an hour/series of hours/day. Those limits are not clearly shown and there is no countdown to tell you how close you are to a limit.

It’s easy to hit a limit: If you tweet a lot. If you have a reasonable number of followers. If you’re just feeling goddamn gobby.

That is ridiculous. You can be in the middle of a discussion and suddenly disapparate. There is no way to avoid this and no easy way of knowing when you can tweet again.

Twitter could easily improve this issue in a number of ways. One would be giving a countdown to show you how close you are to a limit. Another would be to allow users to ask for special dispensation for heavy tweeting periods e.g reporters covering a major event. My third idea would be to allow users to purchase a premium account allowing them to tweet without limits. Spammers could still be curtailed for abusive use of the ‘unlimited’ plan.

The political reporters regularly burble about the “Westminster bubble”. Ironically, that term itself only means something to people within the Westminster bubble. How joyfully recursive. Or relentlessly awful.

Recently, a politics writer at a major national newspaper wrote an entire post about seeing a cabinet minister (alright, alright, it was Jeremy Hunt) hiding behind a tree. That was the entire anecdote spun out to some over-analytical balls about the Leveson Inquiry.

The Thick Of It tells us more about the political process than a hundred million words from lobby hacks ever have. The reason is that they are part of the system. They are a cog in it. To do their jobs they must compromise constantly and pander to both government and opposition.

Political writers focus on minuatiae and produce analysis that bases the public’s reaction on limited polls and the opinions of their own very limited, usually North London, circles. The average political correspondent sees the North of England as a blasted wasteland where Game of Thrones-style clans massacre each other for control of pie factories.

The entire politically reporting genre is bottom-heavy, tilted towards the South of England with occasionally forays to Wales or Scotland for a bit of colour. The race for Mayor Of London is a provincial bunfight over buses but political correspondents reported it as if it were a bellweather for the state of the politics countrywide.

Similarly political correspondents credulously accepted Labour’s contention that a set of local elections with sparse turnout represented a massive thumbs-up for Ed’s leadership. Local elections are LOCAL. The clue is in the title and it does matter – the general election is a long way away. But in recent weeks, the narrative has turned away from Ed as broken puppet to Ed as potential-PM, just as Cameron was turned from husky-loving, hoodie hugging joke to pseudo-statesman.

The current political choice in Britain is between three different public school boys and front benches stuffed with similar white, male, privileged posers. Why does the political reporting class not attack that status quo? Because they are almost universally white, male and privileged. And as another white, male, privileged individual, well, it bores me senseless. Politics in the UK is not about narrative like it is in the US because the characters are too tedious. Sadly, right now, it’s also not about policy. Show me some political reporting with depth. It’s rarer than unicorn shit.

There are few things I would not share online. My concept of privacy is one that is not offended by Facebook. I have very little to hide.

A friend of mine, Rhodri Marsden, once wrote a romantic CV and published it online. It was very funny but it also highlighted something about human relationships: all relationships are at least a two-way thing. So who owns the information and experiences that are a byproduct of relationships?

Are you allowed to share information because you have a half share in it? No. Probably not. Because without the consent of the other person, you could be exposing things they’d rather keep to themselves.

But don’t you have some right to discuss your experiences without fear of censorship from someone else? It’s a challenging little philosophical mousetrap and one that snaps shut on me a lot. I tweet constantly which means that I talk a lot about my life but it is, of course, not my life alone and I feel terrible that sometimes the things I have chosen to share have upset people I care about.

So I’m going to try, once again, to get better at making the right call when it comes to putting things out into the world. A mistimed or misinterpreted tweet can be a really terrible thing as can using the wrong word at the wrong time. I’m guilty of that a lot. I must get better at it. Do no harm is a good creed to aspire to.

I am the brokenbottleboy.  

I cry when my feelings get hurt. 

I fight…a lot. 

I rarely back down. 

I hate my enemies. 

I love my friends. 

Whatever you say about me, that’s what I am. 

I am a rubber, you are glue… 

a byproduct of screwing horses.