Why you should get drunk, eat as many mince pies as you can and snog someone at your office party...

I just read reallyquitetired’s post “adventageous” and the worthy sentiment of a Lenten approach to the season of goodwill. He’s right of course, Christians celebrated a good 1500 years of fasting and abstinence before our jolly pre-Christmas Christmas. And even in our judgement-averse culture RQT’s call for justice must strike some harmonic chord.

I WANT MY PINK SHIRT BACK!

Forget the cuts, forget the ridiculous Royal Wedding (TM), forget the fact that Wagner is still in X Factor. Things suddenly got a lot worse.

Mean Girls 2 is coming out.

And it is SO not fetch.




I would post a more scathing critique of this nauseating tosh, but I'm afraid I'll be removed from public ministry by Ramping, who requires me to annually pledge my allegiance to Queen Lohan.

In other news, Joss Whedon is NOT going to direct the new Buffy film; I think I might have to go and have a very long lie down. Wake me up in 2013, won't you?

The Gossip Girl State

I thought up a facebook application the other day called “slept with”. Beneath your friends list: ‘Leonidas Naboombu has 4310 friends’ and your mutual friends list: ‘you and Leonidas Naboombu have 62 friends in common’ you could have a ‘slept with’ list: ‘Leonidas Naboombu has slept with 106 people’ and a 'mutual slept with' list: ‘You and Leonidas Naboombu have 84 sex partners in common’. Not only would this be in perfect keeping with the Facebook raison d’etre of self-promotion, narcissism and stalking, but it would be incredibly useful in terms of tracking the progress of STIs. There could even be facebook-world-traveller equivalent of country tally - ‘you have slept with 4% of the world population... (and have an 84% chance of Chlamydia infection).’

Bad Boys

*Trigger Warning*

So. Charlie Brooker has given up his Guardian column, Screen Burn. The man who called Cilla Black “the result of a unholy union between Ronald McDonald and a blow-dried guinea pig” has had enough of his misanthropic ways and is calling it a day, in terms of skewering TV “personalities”, anyway.

Brooker claims that meeting his victims and discovering they were actually quite nice, and feeling like a “witless bully” has encouraged him to leave the celebrity-bashing alone. But you and I know better. Why has Brooker mellowed? Because, obviously, he married a delightful young woman I like to call Konnie Hug, on account of the fact that she hugs every single person she interviews on The Xtra Factor.

Huq: Good at hugging wannabies.

Her hugs make the contestants glow and smile and think that maybe they might be able to win. I wish she’d hug me. It would make me less of a bitch. And hugging Huq has clearly charmed Charlie down from his bitter perch. Perhaps. Presumably also having a post-Blue-Peter-presenter-partner means he can’t write things like, “it’s a bit like watching a programme in which children queue up to be punched in the face by Father Christmas. Absolutely riveting for all the wrong reasons” about X Factor. (But she is very funny too: witness this segment she did for Screenwipe, where, apparently, they met.)

While I admire Brooker’s new-found love for the human race, I am also hugely disappointed. Which says two things: 1) I am a bitch who likes reading these brutal put-downs, much in need of a Konnie Hug; and 2) I am a complete stereotype of a woman who finds ‘bad boys’, or at least men who are appalling to other people to be funny/ exert their own sense of power, to be quite attractive.

The absolute apotheosis of my love for the Bad Boy comes in my admiration for (obsession with?) another Charles, Gossip Girl’s beautifully dreadful Chuck Bass.

**SPOILER ALERTS BELOW **

Dude, I'm Chuck Bass. Even Europeans must know what that means.

Oh Chuck, with your bowties, your thick frowning brows, your billions of dollars, your little black book and your “I’m Chuck Bass” catchphrase, you make me swoon. Your machiavellian machinations are even more devious than Blair’s, and I can’t stop watching. (In the season 4 evil-off between B. and C., my money’s on C.)

And Chuck is also (temporarily) saved by a beautiful, kind, good woman (who incidentally seems to be a good hugger). He starts believing in the goodness of humanity. He gives money to charity. He realises his chauffeur is a person with a family who has feelings and needs a raise.

And – and this is something I’ve been watching out for since the beginning of season one – Chuck admits to the attempted rape of Jenny Humphrey. GG is a guilty pleasure for me, but even more so given the positioning of Chuck as a constant sexual harasser right from the first episode. It takes over three seasons for anyone to come out and call it rape. He’s shown to be penitent, and a changed man, but when his relationship breaks down (of course his girlfriend-saviour is really a golddigging prostitute), can we be sure he won’t revert completely?

Maybe I’ve talked myself out of my crush. What does it say about us that women are expected, encouraged, nay, assumed to watch Gossip Girl naked while rubbing ourselves with Creme De La Mer and fantasising about Chuck? Oh yes. Rape culture. And before you say, “Blah, blah, blah, humourless feminist,” the intersections of misogyny, racism* and unbridled consumerism are all there – it’s called western capitalist patriarchy in some parts.

And let’s not forget, Charlie B (the other one) has his moments of total sexism (but it’s funny!!! cleverly, he anticipates the reactions of humourless feminists and tells us we’re stupid in advance) and making homophobic slurs. But of course, that’s all in the past. His love of a good, here’s-one-I-made-earlier-let-me-give-you-a-hug woman has changed him.

So I’m back to sex and violence. Nothing wrong with falling in love with a foul-mouthed, preferably handsome man who has a reasonably big ego.

And nothing wrong with drooling over the delicious teenagers, yummy clothes** and sensational martinis in a silly but glamourous TV show.

But careful, readers; while they look like they taste good, these Upper East Side treats might just stick in your throat.

You know you love me... xoxo


* The way Chuck and Blair treat Vanessa is totally indicative of their sense of entitlement and incessant casual racism.

** Two references for clothes this season are GG and Mad Men: obviously MM is a million times cleverer than GG but still at risk of the same glorification of misogyny if watched without attention.

Et tu Brute...

Friends, Romans, Countrymen,
lend me your ears;
I come to bury Secularism, not to praise it.

The pope has had his visit and said what a wicked third world, sorry secular world, we are. (“Kasper, Kasper, shhhhhhh...” It is Fortunate Fr Lombardi was close by to translate “third world” as “a cosmopolitan reality, a melting pot of ordinary humanity and all of its diversity and its problems". Kasper himself was unable to comment being laid out in bed with gout that week, only emerging to attend a dinner in his honour at the German embassy.) ...And Christendom is terribly pleased because the atheists and the National Secular Society all looked a bit silly.

My personal highlight was watching Richard Dawkins lay out all the terrible abuses of the Catholic church, including spluttering that the pope didn’t even recognise Anglicans as having real priests! What a bastard. Hooray for Dawkins, defender of the faith.

Now the Pope didn’t say that atheist were just like Nazis. But there can be no doubt that by first talking about the Nazis as those who “wished to eradicate God from society” and only a breath later warning against “aggressive forms of secularism”, he intended to link the two, and for anyone who’s had anything to do with Radical Orthodoxy this won’t be an entirely surprising move. Even today I was speaking to the Bishop of London who argued the same choice: it’s either Faith or Nihilism.

So the catholics would have it that the good is interred with Christianity’s bones while the evil of secularism is that which lives after it, the festering parasite of Christ’s un-resurrected corpse. And Secularism has become ambitious leading to a ‘truncated vision of man (sic) and of society and a reductive vision of a person and his (sic) destiny’.

Only history tells a different story. For was it not the man who became Pius XII who made a concordat with Hitler establishing freedom of catholic religious practice and education in return for the Vatican insisting upon the withdrawal of all catholics from social and political action? And while, under the Vatican’s pressure, the last remaining democratic party collapsed, was it not Kaas, a Catholic and close personal friend of the pope to be, who agreed to the Enabling Act in exchange for the Reich Concordat?

If ever there was a Faustian moment for the church that was it.

So the noble catholics have told us that Secularism is ambitious, a grievous fault as they claim. But under leave of these honourable catholics, and they are all honourable men - I would like to speak at Secularism’s funeral.

The pope says Secularism is ambitious, and the pope is an honourable man. But hasn't Secularism brought us human rights, which attempt to legislate basic freedoms for all people. Did this in Secularism seem ambitious? And Secularism has brought about equality legislation in the attempt to make society fairer. It has developed a suspicion of power and an interrogation of those who presume entitlement. It has put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble. When the poor have cried in Latin America and Africa, Secularism has wept. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:

Yet the Pope says Secularism was ambitious; and the Pope is an honourable man.

The truth is that Secularism is the younger sister of Christianity. It is a necessary force of Reform which continually calls the church to order. Its foundations are in Christianity and without its care it might fall into the abyss of nihilism, but that is only the more reason to tether this force to its older sibling. It is the natural counterpoint to the elements of authoritarianism and conservatism in the church. It can be fresh, creative, unbounded in its analysis, and at its best uncovers the undisclosed sins of faith and leads the way in societal reform and social justice.

For the church to cut off the secular and retreat back to its bones is to fail the people the church is called to serve. It would be to become isolated, out of date and cultic. Worst of all, it would risk a return to an authoritarianism that would once again put the church on the wrong side of the cross.

O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts and men have lost their reason. Bear with me; my heart is in the coffin there with Secularism, and I must pause till it come back to me.