09/01/2005

Idiots Of The Week: National Rail Enquiries, Celtic 'fans' and more

entry posted by Inquisitor at 18:30 (permalink). edited on: 08/05/2005 19:06.
categories: Idiots , Personal , Politics , Scumbags , TV

Me: I hate National Rail Enquiries.
Ticket seller: Oh, we do too.
--- Verbatim conversation at a ticket office, somewhere in Scotland, yesterday

So I've spent Christmas and New Year with my family, as you do, distributed hauls of R3 copies of Hero, The Bourne Supremacy etc. to my very pleased brothers, and the university term looms. I decide, because of commitments, to stay up north for as long a period as possible and head back on Saturday the 8th, i.e. yesterday.

As the weather's been kinda bad lately, I check up on First ScotRail's site about an hour before the train's meant to come in. This advises me that due to the weather situation, to only travel if necessary (my new term starts tomorrow) and to call 08457 48 49 50 for further information, not mentioning what the line actually is. I call it, and I get back a "Thank you for calling National Rail Enquiries..."

NRE, after keeping me waiting for a fairly long time, tell me (after much kerfuffle) that services on my line are suspended and a replacement bus service is running. They cannot, of course, tell me whether the bus service is even going to stop at my village railway station, and I can't call either the terminus or Glasgow stations directly, so I end up having to get lifted into town very quickly in order to catch said replacement bus service.

Of course, NRE wasn't exactly telling the truth, since the line was open for business and had been for some time. A big oops there. Thankfully, the ticket inspector was understanding when he accepted my ticket, technically invalid for the first part of the journey, after I explained NRE's cockup.

Other railway people were rather understanding, too, as when I asked for an address for which I could complain to them, and the ticket seller at Queen Street could only get me a phone number (0191 269 0305, fact fans...):

Ticket seller: "They're useless."

Which pretty much says it all.

NRE can get away with being absolutely useless because they're the only way, now, that a consumer can get information about the British railway network - the telephone numbers of local stations were made ex-directory some years ago, so all you see in the Phone Book is NRE. This is despite the fact that to man the phone lines at a rural terminus doesn't actually preclude you from doing other jobs at the same time. Of course, you need to have a fairly similar amount of staff employed to update the NRE system whenever, say, something like an extreme weather situation happens, since the people you actually speak to are dumb automatons in a call centre somewhere, but this doesn't figure to the bureaucrats and plutocrats that run the British railway network nowadays. If I had been able to call my local station, I'd have been able to pick up the train at the village station and I wouldn't have forgotten to pick up some of the DVDs I left behind. Grr.

Also see: out-of-hours GP phone numbers redirecting you to NHS Direct (or the Scottish version, NHS 24), a call-centre helpline run by nurses; banks making you call India instead of your local branch; etc. It's all the same thing; idiot cost-cutting that doesn't actually help anyone.

Admittedly, none of this was actually the fault of First ScotRail; they're supposed to refer everyone to NRE, since it's the only Official Source of this information. What wasn't the fault of First ScotRail either was the gang of supposed football 'fans' that got on at the last stop and were really, really loud, although they didn't exactly distinguish themselves by attempting to control the situation either. By really loud, I'm meaning "drowning out the music playing on my in-ear headphones" loud. They were drunk when they got on the train, drank a lot whilst on the train, and made the last fifteen minutes of my journey seem like time spent in the very depths of Hell. What's more, these were 'fans' of the depressingly boorish, pissed, fucked-up, sectarian (pretty sure I heard an IRA reference), and amazingly racist type ("There ain't no black on the Union Jack! Sieg Heil!") that demonises Scottish football - and this was the day before the Old Firm game, let me remind you. I almost wished my Rio Karma had a record function so I could have posted it here - this really was the kind of thing you never, ever wish to see or hear.

I lived in a Rangers area for a long period of time, really really hated the sectarian aspects of it, and not liking football wasn't a way out of it. I ended up holding back for a long time after the train stopped until I was pretty sure the supposed 'fans' had dispersed; this was sensible plan, so I recovered with the aid of a cup of coffee and set off for Edinburgh much more relieved.

And then I watched Jerry Springer: The Opera, or as it really is Jerry Springer: The Musical. Which was really funny, by the way: pretty much from the first pseudo-operatic aria ("chick with a dick") onward. It's also not blasphemous at all: the appearance of the diaper-fetishist from previously as Jesus (although not a diaper-fetishist Jesus) occurs simply because the whole 'Jesus vs. Satan' thing is a hallucination created by Springer's mind before he ends up actually dying, and the Virgin Mary herself doesn't sing the 'raped by an angel' line (it's the chorus, shown to be orchestrated by Satan), unlike what some of the media publicity would have had you believe. You can even take the ending to be a Christian redemptive message, if you like. The thing had so many warnings strewed on it - including Kirsty Wark before each act of the play, and BBC2 continuity - that it was almost impossible to miss it.

Oh, and the swearing? All the seven (not 280, that's counting the chorus) 'cunt's in the show are directed at the guy in the Christian religion to whom the term most deserves to be used - i.e., Satan - and in a single song, and the 'fuck' count doesn't even reach that of, say, Goodfellas, Reservoir Dogs or Casino (all shown uncut by Channel Four.) Mediawatch should really employ someone's who's done at least, say, GCSE Maths to see whether their figures are actually right.

All in all, a storm in a teacup, don't you think? And the BBC have got a nice 1.7m viewer total out of it. Now, all we have to do is hope there won't be a Whitehouse v. Gay News repeat (especially since the BBC have more lawyers and money than Gay News did), with the so-called Christian Voice's private prosecution, and things should be well...

Bloggerheads has a nice series of articles on the neat little relationship between Mediawatch and the Daily Mail, and the JS:TO 'controversy' in general, here, here, here, here, and here; Mail Watch has a good piece too, here.

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12/01/2005

I'm doing my part! Are you?

entry posted by Inquisitor at 17:30 (permalink). edited on: 08/05/2005 18:59.
categories: Idiots , Politics , Scumbags

It's been said before, but it needs to be said again: Christian Voice are ignorant bigots.

(This fine Googlebomb originally suggested by Ivory Sky here, and propagated by Manic at Bloggerheads. Please follow in their footsteps.)

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21/01/2005

Idiots Of The Week #2: BBC Reporting Scotland, Luke Mitchell

entry posted by Inquisitor at 20:29 (permalink). edited on: 08/05/2005 19:06.
categories: Idiots , Music , Politics , Scumbags , TV

(Yes, a running series! And why not? Gives me a reason to write.)

Those of you who don't live in Scotland may not be familiar with the Jodie Jones murder case, not having had it hammered into their heads over the last three months, so I'll refresh your memories. A couple of years ago, the said Jodie Jones (a 14-year old teenager from the Easthouses council estate, an area of Edinburgh I know fairly well) ended up missing after going out to meet her boyfriend, a neddish scumbag by the name of Luke Mitchell. Later on, the body ends up being discovered just off her route to Mitchell's house, Mitchell made an absolute ass of himself both at the funeral and on Sky News, and the police process the information.

Of course, as it turns out, she did meet her boyfriend... (at least according to majority verdict.)

The Scottish media have not exactly been forward with their tact - all the newspapers had a shot of somewhat childish glee at revealing that Mitchell was the one charged with the murder pretty much the second he turned 16 - and they're even less likely to gain it now. It has been like this throughout the long, sordid, endless trial - every single night on Reporting Scotland we got a trial update, despite the fact that the evidence was always the bloody same. Just think of what the front pages are going to be like tomorrow...

And bad things are going to happen because of this; in fact, the trailer for Up Next on Reporting Scotland is what triggered me to write this. Because Jodie was one of the supposed subculture who call themselves 'goths' and consider themselves to be 'individual', and Mitchell claimed to be too, the media has found a Blame Target. And it's the same blame target as the US media found after Columbine - Marilyn Manson. As they just said: "Did the music of the rock star Marilyn Manson really influence the killer's actions?"

Well, let's see...

A) MM's painting of the Black Dahlia murders, shown on his website, isn't exactly unique to the genre. No-one's even proved to me that Mitchell even visited the website...

B) As the BBC Scotland article I linked to just above admits, but Reporting Scotland doesn't seem to be, Mitchell bought the Golden Age Of Grotesque album-with-free-DVD featuring images vaguely like said murder two days after Jodie was murdered. Oops.

("This DVD may explain how he became...a cold-blooded killer" says the idiot reporter, right now. DO THESE PEOPLE ACTUALLY READ THEIR OWN REPORTS?)

C) As anyone who's actually listened to his music knows, Marilyn Manson is taking the piss. If there is a message in his music, it's "don't trust other people's bullshit", which is an excellent message and one I approve of highly, especially in the case of Reporting Scotland. The trappings around him? It's just theatrics. Look at his appearance in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, for instance - "I wouldn't say anything to them. I'd just listen... because no-one else did." The guy understands. He's just the new Alice Cooper, designed to piss off your parents, so lay off him.

D) There is much, much worse out there than Marilyn Manson - and I suspect Luke Mitchell may in fact known about some of it, or at least read about it. But of course, MM's name is recognisable while most of the really seamy end of the music scale isn't, so that's what gets in the media.

E) It's quite possible that angry music like MM's might actually help people get over their rage against the society they feel mistreats them - the whole 'punch in the air' thing. Radiohead and New Order did it for me, but hey, everybody's different.

So the answer to the question is, of course, no. MM is merely a symptom, as is Mitchell's self-professed 'Satanism'. Mitchell is clearly a screwed-up character; the Satanism crap and attachment to the weird end of the Gothic bandwagon is obviously a cover for real psychological problems, none of which will be solved by sending him to jail forever.

(My own suspicion? Jodie found about about his side girlfriend, and he flipped out on her. Full stop. And as Larkin said, 'they fuck you up, your mum and dad', and Luke Mitchell's amoral, uncaring, truly vile mother definitely fits the bill.)

The big problem is that this will cause a backlash, just like Columbine caused a backlash, against anyone who doesn't fit in. Just when you thought it couldn't get much worse for people who aren't 'normal' in school, something like this happens and you know it's going to. Wear black? Listen to Marilyn Manson? Use the Internet, not just for MSN? Be a bit 'weird'? We'll keep an eye on you! Never mind that you may have no intention of killing or hurting anyone - like most fans, in fact, of Marilyn Manson, all of whom take pride in being a 'rebel against conformity' by buying his albums en masse - you're marked! Even those with problems (and most MM fans are well adjusted members of society) only really need a little understanding; but, by God, we'll give them punishment!

This is, of course, something that will create more problems than it solves - because, of course, if the supposed 'goths' genuinely are persecuted, they may develop complexes like Mitchell's about it and we'll get a Scottish Columbine (with school layouts the way they are, it's very possible - a big enough knife and/or the right bits of the Anarchist's Cookbook and it'll take Armed Response to stop it), the media will blame it on Marilyn Manson and/or the Internet and the entire thing will full circle again. It's a horrifying prospect, and one that could very well be happening, in Britain, right now. Isn't that scary?

[In fact, isn't the possibility of blaming it on the Net why the pigs scoured the Mitchells' computers, discovering as a sideline that Luke's brother was viewing porno at the time of the murder? I suppose when they found that out at least some of the feeling was that of a missed opportunity...]

The best thing I can say is: the case is extremely abnormal, and can be simply explained in two words. We shouldn't make it normal, but our media looks like it's going to keep trying...

[I might as well, also, do this fine Googlebomb for Manic: we're all talking about the White House's empty rhetoric. After all, the ignorant bigots one was successful, so why not give this one a go? It's for a good cause.]

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