So we’re seeing some great journalism at the moment, aren’t we? If the gay community aren’t defending their ’sleazy’ lifestyle in light of this widely read national column, then we have this smunt poncing around staring death in the face and egging on his readership to ‘froth at the mouth’ and wet themselves. But hey, both are examples of particularly poorly presented opinion, and if you were lucky enough to be born into favourable circumstance then you too could have a national platform from which to air your homophobic views and/or penchant for shooting animals in the lung.

This stunning example of McJournalism, however, is not opinion, it’s a ‘news’ piece. The very same Brain Centre that published Moir’s bigoted soap box whinge, The Daily Mail, is now suggesting that, you know what? Date rape isn’t really that big a deal and cases of drinks spiking are essentially unheard of. And that headline? Perfect. Just the right about of twattish patronising disregard for such a serious issue.

Granted, these ‘findings’ have come from two doctors from the University of Kent, so The Daily Mail would say that they are merely reporting on science. A science that suggests that “Date-rape drugs are largely an urban myth used as an excuse by women who booze themselves into a stupor,” and that women would rather claim they’ve been spiked than admit how much they’ve had to drink.

To prove this, The Mail notes that “police have found no evidence that rape victims are commonly drugged with substances such as rohypnol…

“Dr Burgess said: ‘There have hardly been any cases where it has been proved that sedatives such as rohypnol and GHB have been used in a rape incident’.”

Yet it is a well established fact that common date rape drugs leave the body quickly, which can, as this article suggests, “leave no trace of a crime”. Factor in many women’s reluctance to immediately report rape crimes for fear of not being taken seriously  (if they report them at all, given such low conviction rates) – which is, sadly, a widely recognised failing of the British Police Force – and it’s not a tremendous surprise that there are so few cases proven to involve the use of sedatives.

But none of this matters to The Mail, who have specifically chosen to report on this matter in such a way as to suggest that women that are nothing more than lairy piss artists that would rather cry “stranger danger” than ‘fess up to their binge drinking.

Burgess then questions, in a yep-I-think-that’s-pretty-sexist manner, why, despite this ‘evidence’, date rape continues to be such a prolific topic on virtually every TV soap opera:

“Maybe that tells us something about the programmes these women are watching. But it is concerning that women are more concerned about something that is incredibly unlikely ever to happen to them.”

Why is it a concern that women are concerned about being spiked? Why should it be a ‘concern’? All those government campaigns for watching your drinks and investments in anti-spiking devices were just for shits and giggles were they? Ladies! It’ll probably never happen to you, so don’t bother your pretty little heads over it. Just watch your programmes like good dears, eh?

As ‘Gordon’ from the USA points out in the comments section, “A study was done, data was collected, facts were presented. That’s all there is to it.” True, a study was done and its findings have been presented. But that’s not all there is to it, and it’s the absence of the countering facts, as detailed above, that have rendered this article and The Mail once again figures of loathing in the minds of decent journalists everywhere.

So… Question Time on Thursday night. That was a bit of a ‘must see’, wasn’t it? Well, it was for anyone keen on exploring their own political agenda, probably not so much for all the folk who’ve already formed their own fashionable opinions based on the general consensus of the herd. (More on this phenomenon here).

I deliberately didn’t watch it on Thursday night because it was on quite late and I knew I’d end up getting angry. And trying to get a decent 8 hours ahead of deadline day while seething with fury is not a great idea.

And I knew I’d be furious, even though I hadn’t even seen it, even though it hadn’t even happened yet. Why? Because of the sheer volume of unbelievably stupid individuals mouthing off about the BNP.

I don’t subscribe to the ideals of the BNP. However, considering the party got nearly one million votes in the European elections and new reports suggest that 22% of the population would consider voting for them, I’m pretty sure that they had every frickin’ right to appear on the programme. And all the ultra-left idiots that think otherwise clearly have no bloody idea how democracy works; democracy, which underpins the very ethos they’re bleating about in light of the BNP’s policies. To have banned Griffin from appearing on Question Time would be to have exercised ostracisation . And isn’t that the very thing the happy-clappy political correctness sycophants are so staunchly against?

Utter hypocrisy. And it’s because jaw-dropping instances of stupidity like this are so cushioned and pandered to by the current government that so many people voted for the BNP in the first place.

So, I’ve managed to clock up a respectable 6 weeks since my last blog post. Tremendous. I recall making a similar statement when I started my previous job all those moons ago, but the fact remains that unless you have one of those new-fangled multi-meeja jobs that everyone keeps going on about, you’re just not going to have the opportunity to blog as regularly as you’d like. As such, the most amount of action this blog has seen was during my spate of unemployment when all the posts consisted of furious ranting about the injustice of it all, peppered with anecdotal tales of rural living and my parents’ dog.

Anyway, let’s just forget about all that and focus on things in the news lately which have angered and dumbfounded me. Of which of course there are lots. But here are three which jumped out.

Elle Magazine offers homeless girl internship

Now, I don’t think I’m alone in my belief that the journalism industry, both here and abroad, is going down the pan. As such, jobs are literally like gold dust and accounts of 1000+ applicants per role are not unheard of. I graduated from the (fairly standard) PGdip course in 2008, and luckily the majority of my classmates were able to get jobs. Some, however, were not, and I can’t even imagine the ‘What Are You Doing Now?’ returns from this year’s lot. Such is the demand for jobs and work experience that publishing companies are able to dangle some really crappy scraps in the faces of new journalists and have them gobbled up gratefully; a friend of mine, for example, is doing 3 full days a week in the capacity of editorial assistant for reimbursements of £100 a MONTH.

Journalists, then – especially new ones – are being exploited, and the fact that Elle has so kindly bestowed a 1 hour a day telecommuting internship upon a homeless girl really isn’t cause for the media flurry that ensued. This girl, Bri, is still living in a beat up RV on a dust track. Her storage costs are still increasing $80 a day. And now she is the proud winner of “the most hideously humdrum internship in America.”

In the words of E. Jean, the woman who bestowed this opportunity to Bri:

“You’ll be stuck with the tedious job of organizing research for my book, transcribing interviews, and analyzing data from 1,800,000 pages (not a misprint) of a college sex survey I did on Facebook”.

And all for free! Jean goes on to say:

“At the end of the four months, if you don’t have a job and an awesome place to live, I will become your intern.”

Really? Do you think she means that or is it, perchance, a little bit of added razzle dazzle to give the whole story an even greater heart-warming slant? Look! Even though it’s all gone to shit we’re still altruistically helping the journalists of the future! I also wonder if this woman has any real concept of the merits of a journalism internship, since I’m pretty sure that all those kids I know that have slogged their arses off for sod-all in return aren’t automatically employed, nor suddenly have an ‘awesome place to live’. And they don’t  have the added disadvantage of being homeless.

Nonetheless, good on Bri for her determination and drive. I hope that she manages to manipulate the situation so that she gets as much out of it as Elle have.

O2 Broadband Routers Vulnerable to Attack

Obviously this is big news and it’s imperative that it’s bought to the public’s attention, lest they (and icky, here) find themselves the subject of a sinister hacker, but did anyone else think, as soon as the story broke, ‘Well, I’ll be buggered if every hacker in the entire world isn’t rubbing their hands with glee now’? Especially since so many sites gave pretty explicit details as to the issues involved and just how ‘potential’ hackers could go about ruining your day. Perhaps this could’ve just been kept quiet until O2 had sorted out a patch? No? It’s gotta be reported now to the detriment of every O2 user in the county? OKAY THEN.

NHS Staff Suspended Over ‘Lying Down Game’ Pictures

The best part of this whole affair was a radio interview I heard the other morning. I forget the exact details (it was Radio 1, during the Chris Moyles Show), but this nasal sounding jobsworth came on with a speech akin to the following:

“Can you imagine if you came into the hospital with a sick child or injured relative and they needed URGENT medical attention and a nurse came out and said ‘I’m very sorry but none of the doctors can be found’ and there was no-one there to help you because they were all lying face down on a heli-pad having their pictures taken?”

Possibly one of the funniest sentences I’ve ever heard on the radio. Still, Nasal McBleaty does have a point. Imagine if ALL the doctors were lying face down on a heli-pad when your sick and/or injured child and/or relative required attention. IMAGINE. Unlikely to happen though, is it? And to be honest if I found myself in a hospital with a doctor I would hope they might have spent an earlier portion of the day lying face down on a heli-pad because it might mean they’ve had a bit of a laugh and are a bit less stressed about working in such shit conditions and are therefore less likely to leave a scalpel inside my child or give MRSA to my elderly Aunt.

So instead of suspending these staff, thereby accruing months of paperwork and additional cost and stretching the NHS even further than it already is, just tell them to be a bit more careful with their privacy settings, eh? It’s not like they’re the first people to slack off at work.

A couple of weeks ago, I’d almost resigned myself to the idea of being unemployed forever. Despite the cringingly chipper emails that would ping into my inbox from recruitment companies advising me to ‘Keep on, keeping on’ and to ‘Hang in there’, I couldn’t ignore the fact that unemployment in the journalism industry remains a real and ugly problem, and if folk with ten times the experience I have were finding it tough, what hope was there for me?

Things became particularly frustrating when I noticed posts I’d previously applied for being re-advertised (‘You should have picked meeee!’ I’d scream at my laptop), and on one occasion I received a ‘thanks but no thanks’ email from one company, informing me that they’d already filled the position. And lo…onto Twitter and there it was, being advertised not half an hour after they’d OUTRIGHT LIED TO ME. The worst thing? This was one of the most respected B2B publishing companies in the UK. Safe to say I was deep into the sea of unemployment apathy.

But then, a break in the clouds. An interview. A call back. And then, while stood in the middle of London’s Carnaby Street trying not to die from flu, a phone call – accompanied by a chorus of angels and a beam of golden sunlight from the heavens – to say I’d got the job. I’D GOT THE JOB.

I start on Monday.

Alas, it’s only for maternity cover, but given the current climate – and considering how close I was to lackeying for free just for the sake of my CV – I am literally overjoyed.

So, the strap line of my header (above) will get the boot, and in my next post we can all pretend that this hideous episode never happened.

Maybe.

Let’s see what the situation’s like in nine months time….eep.

Investment bank Morgan Stanley has published a report detailing the media habits of young people, to a “flurry of interest by media executives and investors”, The Guardian reported today.

The reason this report has generated such a buzz is because it was written by 15-year-old intern Matthew Robson. It was published on the front page of The Financial Times, which is going to do his CV the world of good, and I expect his mates who took work experience placements at the local cattery or leisure centre are kicking themselves now.

However, surely I’m not the only one surprised at how much of a tizz all these fund managers and CEOs have gotten themselves into over these ‘revelations’, which proved to be “one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights [they] have seen.” Good grief. Anyone would think that they’d been presented with a map to Atlantis.

The simple fact is, they wanted to know the media habits of kids, so they asked one. Why this episode has proved to be so illuminating is beyond me. Had they not considered asking young people – the people more or less responsible for what’s hot and what’s not in Web 2.0 – for their thoughts before? Apparently, unbelievably, not.

Right, they declared in the boardroom.

The youth of today, they’re the ones in touch with up to the minute developments in technology. They’re the ones utilising all these social media networks that we’ve heard so much about. As the next generation, they will largely shape the future of this company. If only there was some way to find out what they actually like and don’t like.

The focus group leader bangs his fist on the table and mops his aching brow.

Think, think, THINK! How can we find out about the media habits of young people today?

And then Matthew walks past carrying a tray of tea and all these highly paid media analysts look at each other as the penny drops.

Good Lord! They exclaim. We’ve a young person right here! Let’s see if he has any suggestions for getting hold of this information…

Quite an impressive array of awards, have Morgan Stanley. Not so hot on common sense though.

Dun dun duuuuuuun. It’s happened. I’ve signed on for Job Seeker’s Allowance. I am officially on the dole.

Despite all the propaganda depicting smiling, presentable women looking over the shoulders of smart-looking young adults as they fill in simple paperwork while sitting at ergonomically designed beech effect desks, I at best anticipated my first encounter with the Job Centre to be tolerable. And in fairness, it was tolerable. I didn’t storm out effing and blinding like the kid who was fifteen minutes late and subsequently missed his appointment. I didn’t stand in the middle of the room shouting my mouth off about the ’stupidity of it all’ like the fellow whose benefit had been stopped because he hadn’t signed on for two weeks. I didn’t even make a racist slur against the receptionist when she told us they were running late, unlike the young woman sat next to me with two mixed race children. The fact, then, that I emerged from the building without upsetting any of the staff or other ‘customers’ (that’s right, I’m a customer) would suggest something of a passable success.

However, if these fortnightly meetings with my ‘dedicated employment advisor’ continue in the same vein as today’s, I may well become that person standing in the middle of the room, shouting incoherently. Nothing personal against the lady in question; I’m sure she’s spent many years reeling off the same speech to disinterested mouth-breathers and bright, articulate folk alike. However, I did take slight umbrage with the disparaging look she gave me when I mentioned that she’d spelled ‘The Gardien’ incorrectly. And her stand-offishness when I told her I do most – nay, all – my job hunting online. ‘COMPUTER NEEDS A NEWSPAPER’ were her actual words (hence Gardiengate).

Then she gave me a sheet of paper with boxes to fill in every time I ‘do something proactive towards employment’. I told her that I complete, on average, three job applications a day and check all the relevant job sites, on rotation, from the moment I get up, to the hour before I go to bed (even though I know I won’t find anything new then, I just physically can’t stop myself). ‘Well you only need to do three things a week,’ she replied, to which I quipped, ‘If I only did three things a week I’d never get another job.’ Cue more disparaging looks.

Then we had a little chat about the kind of work I’m looking for – assistant editor, editorial assistant, etc. ‘So, sub-editor, then?’ she announced.

‘Um, not really no.’

‘Well, if not editor jobs, then something below it, right? So a sub-editor. I’ll put down sub-editor.’

‘Well actually, that’s a completely different role.’

More disparaging looks.

And finally, just before I left, I was told that if I hadn’t found employment within nine weeks, I would be required to attend a course that would teach me how to ‘effectively search for a job.’ Something in my otherwise stony-faced expression must have twitched then, because I got another disparaging look and was told, ‘We can’t all be sub-editors, you know.’

Scream if you wanna go faster! Throw your hands in the air like you just don’t care! And so on.

Apparently unemployment isn’t all doom and gloom after all. In fact, it’s so not doom and gloom that this report by the LA Times (admittedly a little old now) has branded unemployment ‘FUNemployment’. Yeah!

Says the article, “It may not have entered our daily lexicon yet, but a small army of social media junkies with a sudden overabundance of time is busy Tweeting: ‘Funemployment road trip to Portland.’ ‘Funemployment is great for catching up on reading!’ ‘Averaging 3 rounds of golf a week plus hockey and bball. Who needs work?’

“Buoyed by severance, savings, unemployment checks or their parents, the funemployed do not spend their days poring over job listings. They travel on the cheap for weeks. They head back to school or volunteer at the neighborhood soup kitchen. And at least till the bank account dries up, they’re content living for today.”

Yeah we are! Woooo! Road trip anyone? I’ve got loads of time to kill! Oh, wait…sorry, my mistake. I was, in my deep pit of unemployment (UNemployment) related despair, busy fantasising that I was someone else because this is definitely not the situation I’m in at the moment.

I personally am ‘buoyed’ by neither severance or savings. I have accepted the charitable donation of rent-free accommodation from my parents, but they certainly don’t see me around the golf course three times a week, and tomorrow, for the first time in my life and after nearly three months unemployed, I shall be signing on for JSA. And I suspect, unless I’ve gotten the wrong end of this benefits malarkey, that my weekly payment from Brown et al is not going to support me while I go travelling on the cheap for ‘weeks on end.’

Furthermore, I’m physically unable to spend time away from the computer. Every minute that I’m not vigorously refreshing my email or scouring the web for jobs is time spent in a chronic state of anxiety and twitchiness; job related things could be happening and I’d be too busy flouncing around making margaritas and catching up on my reading to notice.

Perhaps this is indicative of the difference in attitude towards work between us and those crazy yanks, or perhaps that article was written predominantly on the back of interviews with kids whose parents all well off enough to buy them a golf course should their wee hearts desire it.

Perhaps though, Fifel had the right idea all along and the streets of America really are paved with gold. If society can, in the face of foreclosures and bankruptcy and redundancies, kick its feet up and think about hitting the beach instead of looking for a new job, then that’s a society I’d gladly make a pilgrimage to. If I can take my laptop.

Unable to deal with the claustrophobic politics of countryside living for more than four days at a time (See blog post entitled The Claustrophobic Politics of Countryside Living, coming soon), I fled back to Cardiff last weekend with the view to heading to Bristol to see the much acclaimed Banksy exhibition.

Unfortunately, the queues were so long and the weather so bakingly hot that we decided to give it a miss. It’s alright though, because what mine wretched eyes encountered not long before this was no doubt just as memorable. Outside Cardiff Central, dozens – nay, scores – of teenage lads had gathered, all wearing the most stomach churning rainbow of neon and fluoro. Initially I thought they might be part of a travelling theatre group, or possibly French exchange kids (you know how they are), but no.

And they all just lounged around apathetically, looking – in a ridiculous contrast to their super-cheerful attire – mopey and sullen. Which, of course, isn’t unusual for groups of disaffected youths, but they were just so shockingly bright. And they were wearing diamond earrings and had what looked like fake tans. These thirteen year old boys had fake tans.

Then I noticed one of them had a stereo; I suppose akin to what the older generations might have called a ‘boombox’. Certainly in keeping with the retro fluoro theme they had going on, I thought, until they turned it on and what trickled out of the speakers at such a pathetically low volume was not angry metal or sweary rap, but a happy hardcore remix of The Smurfs theme tune.

And they all just stood there, in their eye wateringly bright hoodies, with their fake tans and huge diamond earrings glinting in the sunshine, listening to The Smurfs and sighing occasionally as they stared at the floor, looking despairingly lost.

Internet culture, methinks, has a lot to answer for.

So I have, like the prodigal son, returneth to my parents’ abode. Given that we’re currently experiencing the hottest weather this year I think that the moving faff yesterday went quite well, all things considered.

However, I’ve been back for just over 24 hours and already I’m considering taking off to London and working in a strip club (probably more money to be had than journalism, chortle chortle). The reasons for this are already vast in number, but lest I regress entirely into my 14 year-old self I shall refrain from describing them in all their infuriating irritating glory. Nonetheless I will say the following: Don’t ever let your mother near your personal possessions, just in case she picks up something *ahem* private, and then you have to sit opposite her at dinner, not meeting her eye but listening to her berate you for having the audacity to smoke outside, when she herself smoked around you until you were 18. Just saying, is all…

The unthinkable is happening. I’m moving back to my parents’ house.

Thanks to a ‘clerical error’ by my housemate, it turns out that we don’t have the contract on our lovely house until the end of August. We, in fact, have to be out of here this weekend. And since I’m still unemployed and still unable to bring myself to start claiming benefits, I can’t afford more deposits and bonds and agency fees. So Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee have found themselves rooms in Cardiff with a friend of a friend, and I’m back to rural Herefordshire where the electricity is generated by windmills and ruddy-faced people look at you funny with their mad starin’ eyes.

As I write this, I’m surrounded by boxes and bags and all that superfluous crap you seem to accumulate without even realising it. The number of pencil sharpeners I’ve collected over the years is startling. The volume of novelty key rings is even worse. But it’s ok; I’m on top of the packing. Having spent less than a year in every house I’ve lived in over the last five years (all nine of them), I’m something of a packing wizard now. And it’s not the inevitable bureaucratic rubbish that I’m stressed about. Having spent a fair chunk of time on the phone to electricity providers, gas suppliers, phone companies and the like, I’ve found that any sense of fear and apprehension I once felt when in contact with them has fast dissipated and given way to continued irritation and indignance. And I do love being indignant. So that’s not the problem.

The problem is, obviously, the fact that I’m moving back to my parents’ house. There’ll be no more staggering in at 4am for drunken Wii battles, mainly because they live 25 miles away from the nearest nightclub (if you could call a room full of amply sized rugby shirt wearing farmers a ‘nightclub’), and public transport in the area leaves an awful lot to be desired. Two buses a day, but only if there’s an R in the month and the moon is in Capricorn. And anyway, I doubt very much Dad is going to be game for a Monkey Ball tournament at that hour. There’ll be no more popping round to friends’ houses for a cup of tea and an afternoon of Miami Ink, because all my friends from Herefordshire have, quite sensibly, moved away, or live in another village and as such ‘popping round’ necessitates a half hour drive. Plus, to watch Miami Ink you need Sky, which requires a satellite dish, which to the rah-rahs would ruin the appearance of their chocolate box period houses and to the serfs cause them to cower in fear of such technological witchcraft. And then there’s the proverbial ‘Where are you going?’ ‘What time will you be back?’ ‘Dinner’s ready NOW’ etc.

So, a complete lifestyle change; a regression into my teenage years coupled with this hideous sense of failure. They’ve only just gotten rid of my younger sister and now their eldest is shuffling home at the grand age of 24, tail between her legs, head down and mumbling apologies.

So until I get a job, blog entries from this point, then, will come from a more rural climate. Provided, of course, I can get my laptop hooked up to the windmill.