Clearly, I was spoiled for news stories to cover last week. Even this week, and more specifically today, a lot of things I’m interested in have been cropping up.
Trump‘s been in the news a bunch, but I’m not going to spend any time on the details of that. I mean, who’s got the bandwidth to constantly maintain the rage?
Mrs Stroke Bloke and I finished binge-watching the two original seasons of Twin Peaks last night. Don’t worry, I’m not going to get into the minutiae – you know, spoilers. you’ve either seen it or you haven’t. And if you have, the odds are you probably got as far as we did back in the Nineties. i.e., not very far.
Yes, Copenhagen is a good example. But this past weekend, as President Trump stuffed sachets of ketchup into his hand luggage before heading off on his whistle-stop tour of some of the world’s top religious sites, we were at Washington’s Dulles International Airport.
Let’s just ignore the elephant in the room for a moment, shall we? Yes, for someone who has the ability to speak out against racism and misogyny and homophobia (dons Stroke Bloke hat – or ablism) to choose to stay silent on these matters is the same as condoning them. So let’s be clear – I’m against these things here, in my life, and in my art.
That’s right, Leslie Nielsen. The details aren’t important right now. What’s important is that I wasn’t the Consultant. I feel like if you’re doing medicine stuff, it’s best that you be qualified to be doing the medicining.
My love for BBC Radio 4’s PM programme, as hosted by Eddie Mair, is well-documented on this website (1, 2). During #indyref the first, I remember him conducting one of the better interviews I heard with Scotland’s First Minister.
Before being distracted by something shiny last week, I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on with this Donald Trump thing. Why, over the past week, have presidential general election polls continued to see Trump bouncing along at 40%, when he’s indicated that a Trump presidency would look like this?
To be fair, The Daily Mail would take a more celebratory approach
That’s an actual [inside] page from this TheGlobe back in April, described as the front page we hope we never have to print. The accompanying editorial called Trump’s White House run “flippant and reckless” and “profoundly un-American”. But while this would all seem obvious from within The Globe‘s newsroom, or my Twitter feed, Trump easily won the Massachusetts Republican primary, collecting 22 delegates and nearly 50% of the vote. Meanwhile, over 50% of the voters in the recent EU referendum in these islands voted for an Out campaign fronted by Trump-like trolls.
