What am I going to do with my life?

There's this thing I used to do.  It's the sort of creative thing you can do as a career, but you  have to work your way into.  I went quite a distance, and people thought I was good at it.  People doing it as a career thought I'd be good enough to join them with a bit more practice, and people at the same level I was at then are successful now.  The future was looking pretty bright.

But I stopped.

Never mind the earthquake, feel the voodoo

It's so common in comedy shows that it's a cliche - major disaster happens in foreign country, UK news agencies only take notice if British people are involved. Submit a script with that situation in and someone's bound to say, "Do we need to include that tired joke? It's been done about eight-million times before."

But it seems that tired old cliche is still actually relevant. As TabloidWatch pointed out yesterday, every daily newspaper on Thursday ran with news of the terrible earthquake in Haiti on the front page somewhere. Well, every daily except the Mail, which considered news about Gary McKinnon, the McCanns and a free Poirot DVD more important than a disaster that claimed thousands of lives. The earthquake was relegated eight or twelve pages in, depending on the edition apparently.

Shameless, unrepentant and still lying

'SHAMELESS, UNREPENTANT AND STILL LYING' shouted yesterday's front page headline in the Daily Mail.  It was shouting about a man who had made sure information was misrepresented to the public to make things seem much more definite than they were, and far more threatening than reality.

You know what's coming now, right?  You just need to guess what articles I'm going to use as examples.  Seriously, I might as well just fling random pages up in the air and pick the ones that land face up.

Because occasionally even the Mail can be right

That's all from me.  Septicisle and Anton Vowl have good words about this, and you can discuss the front page at MailWatch.

Stop singing Journey

My wife finally snapped.  It happened the other night, when we were watching Bones or something, and the adverts came on.  Up popped a trailer for Glee and she suddenly said, "For god's sake stop shouting 'STOP SINGING JOURNEY!' whenever that advert comes on."  Because I had.  Again.  And my face was still red from the effort. 

Seriously dude, why 70 million?

Before Christmas, I asked 'Why 70 million anyway?' in response to the tabloids' constant hammering of the number as an unacceptable level for the UK population.  I keep seeing the figure, but no reason why it should be so scary.

"I risk looking like a total fool if it turns out that everyone knows if the population hits 70 million, the demons start emerging from the mirrors or something, but sod it, I'm confused.  Why have we settled on that number as the one that must not be crossed, ever?"

I said.

Winterval: The beast that wouldn't die!

Winterval.  It's probably one of the most famous PC Gone Mad myths there is.  Just like every teacher told the story of someone at their last school who leant on the back legs of their chair and broke their back to scare us into sitting properly, the papers have used Winterval alongside classics like Baa Baa Green Sheep to scare us into not thinking about things like inclusiveness or bothering to be polite to people if they're not white, male, British, straight or able-bodied for over a decade.