Morning music
On this day a year ago
Tweets seen
Just look at that ridiculous monkey!
When does he get the final one?
Elevation of the unworthy
Saw an old (I think) edition of The Chase, actually only the last 10 minutes or so. A “celebrity” edition. Former Conservative Party MP and whip, Gyles Brandreth (the only one I could name on sight); a TV bric a brac bod (Paul Martin) whom I looked up later on Wikipedia but recognized as someone whom I saw on TV a long time ago making completely ignorant remarks about Franco and the Spanish Civil War; some woman called Alex Jones, of whom I had never heard (turns out she is a Welsh TV presenter); and an unpleasantly exhibitionistic gay who, it now appears from Wikipedia, is an actor on Coronation Street called Anthony Cotton.
Suffice to say that, in the final part of the quiz, the bit that I saw, the four were all unbelievably ignorant. Slightly surprised at how poor Brandreth was. Still, that is often the way with “celebrity” quiz shows: most of the time, the said “celebs” (most of whom I do not even recognise), are rock-bottom in terms of knowledge. One exception, seen a while ago, was the foppish interior designer, Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen.
The same has been true of the recent Christmas University Challenge series, featuring famous or at least well-known alumni from various universities including Oxford, Cambridge etc. My wife and I scored better than both teams put together, usually. Again, surprising how poor people such as Sky correspondents and msm scribblers were, unable, for example, to identify fairly easy historical maps such as one showing the 1939-1940 Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland.
Jo Maugham, the prolific Twitter user and barrister, was notable, when he was on the show, both for his over-confidence and his ignorance.
The point is that the said worthies are those who purport to speak or write authoritatively on politics, military affairs, the “panicdemic” etc. I think, though, that people generally are becoming less willing to accept their punditry without question; there is a well-justified suspicion around re. “experts”, and the “panicdemic” has deepened that.
More tweets
Just when I thought that I would never warm to Jo Maugham, the part-Jewish barrister perhaps best-known to the general public for having battered a fox to death…
Interesting.
Late afternoon music
More tweets
…and we even share 60% of our European DNA with a banana!
Now you know why American “democracy” is the way it is…and the UK is going the same way.
Late tweets
There is, of course, more than a grain of truth in the said need to blow apart the Oxbridge old-boy and old-girl networks. The point though, is what replaces it…
Late music
Ian Robert Millard 