Palin crank call

With only days to go Sarah 'pitbull with lipstick (very expensive lipstick) Palin has been fooled by Canadian comedian Marc Antoine Audette into thinking she was on a phone call with French president Nicolas Sarkozy, which went out on a Montreal radio station. The whole Palin thing - utter lack of a grasp of geopolitics, foreign relations, her dubious record (the library interference when she was a humble mayor, possible misuse of family connections in jobs, trying to avoid freedom of information requests on her work by using personal email accounts rather than official government ones), her hideously intolerant right wing stance, her love of shooting animals for leisure, the pretence at being an ordinary working mom while spending more on clothes and hairstyling than many families bring home in a year, her apparent lack of knowledge of what the duties of the VP actually are - would be funny, except even after all this there are still a lot of Americans who not only would vote for her, they are talking about how she should run for president in 4 or 8 years...

was declaring to the reporter he wouldn't vote for Obama not on political grounds but because 'he was a Muslim'.I can't help but wonder at the sheer stupidity of some people, but then again a lot of those numpties are the ones who voted for a retarded chimp to let in Dubyah (well, second time, first time his brother and dad's friends in the Supreme Court handed the election to him) and before that voted a dreadful B movie elderly actor who delighted on ratting out his fellows during the McCarthy era into the top job. Watching one news programme some ignorant redneck woman When the reporter pointed out he had been a regular church-goer for many years she said that didn't count. No, she wasn't a bigoted, racist cow at all... Although being someone who dislikes organised religions of all types I always find it quite disturbing how much relgion plays into American politics to begin with anyway, especially in a country which likes to boast how state and church are seperated by the Constitution.

Thankfully, despite idiots like Cardinal Winning constantly sticking his oar into Scottish politics (you have your own opinion, but stop trying to tell groups how they should be thinking and voting) its not the same here; in fact when Tony Blair started talking about his mate God we all got rather uncomfortable because its a private matter. And because we think a politician is meant to be answerable to the citizen, not some mythic deity.

Happy fourth birthday, Woolamaloo!

Yes, friends, today marks the fourth anniversary of the Woolamaloo Gazette, the blog they couldn't hang, a blog with a mouth too big to shut (a mouth so big it still spews out words even when having its own foot in said mouth, which happens on occassion). Well, the fourth anniversary of this incarnation, for although the 7th of April 2003 saw the commencement of the Woolamaloo blog, the Gazette goes back to the early 90s, the name a homage to the University of Woolamaloo from Monty Python (also a track by Jean Michel Jarre and a real place in Australia). I've always been outspoken and an opinionated bugger (commenting on my firing a couple of years back Neil Gaiman commented he thought I was opinionated, but in the good way, which I took as a huge compliment and a real morale boost when I really needed it), right back to school where I spent years on the Academy's debating team (nope, didn't win them all, but I won a lot more than I lost) and when I was introduced to email in the 90s at college the opinionated bugger met Communications Technology and saw that It Was Good.

In '91 only a few faculties had email and the web didn't exist - it was the internet, mostly text, lots of discussion forums which I signed up for, mostly chatting to folks in other universities round the globe, debating, discussing, chatting, swapping jokes. Very soon I was sending out emails of spoof newspaper articles to friends, lampooning public figures, trends and satirising the hell out of stories in the news that were bugging me. To my surprise people liked them; in fact some folks who weren't receiving them asked to be added to the list, others already on the list were forwarding it to their friends - my first taste of the interconnected nature of the net came when a friend told me she had forwarded it to her friend, who forwarded it to her husband in the US Air Force (there is nowhere the subversive Woolamaloo cannot go!) who forwarded it to a bunch of friends on more bases round the world.

By the 2000s I was still doing the Woolamaloo emails, but my good mate Ariel, then a fellow bookseller (I think we first got in touch when he was editing the Guide to SF for a certain book supermarket who we don't mention here these days, but this was back when it was still a real bookstore and professional booksellers like us were encouraged to work on literature guides like this). Ariel kept saying I should do them in blog form, especially since the blog would allow me to do other things too as the fancy struck me. Some other friends were blogging by then, so with Ariel's help (thanks, mate) we set up the new blog and a new era in cheeky and opinionated nonsense began in April 2003 with me having a go at the war in Iraq and pastiching the SARs outbreak that was the End Of The World plague in vogue at that time (later I would post that for a laugh I would stand next to Asian tourists in the shop and pretend to sneeze while SARs was going about, just to watch their startled reaction. At my firing they even brought that up and asked, do you think that is funny, what would a customer reading that think? Yes, I did think it was mildly amusing, it was what we advanced beings with A Sense Of Humour call A Joke. They didn't, but since they ended up being publically humiliated for what they did I'd say I came out on top there).

I found I loved the blog form - I did indeed still post pastiches of news stories (or sometimes just a rant I needed to get out), but other things leaked in - unsurprisingly discussing books and authors and movies (at this point I was submitting a ton of reviews to the Alien Online, edited by Ariel), but I was adding in poetry, photographs, life in Edinburgh and, well, just everything really - life, love, cats, chocolate and whisky; the fun stuff and the stuff that hurt like hell. And work. Work got mentioned a few times (relatively few compared to the amount of other stuff and far outweighed by the amount pushing books and authors and reading events) and the worse the job became as the company turned into a Professional Retailer rather than a Bookseller (and struggled with sales and profits and higher staff turnover at the same time - connected?) and they seemed unwilling to listen to the opinions of experienced staff the blog became a place to let off a little steam. Several years later they suddenly pretended to be grossly offended at this and fired me (it would later turn out that senior management had known about it long before this and weren't bothered - in fact they asked me to help set up a brand new branch from scratch. Later they would suddenly 'discover' it - well, I suspect a certain vindictive person did - and it was used against me.)

Of course, by firing me they removed any obligation I had to be relatively quiet on the subject; Cory Doctorow and the Boing Boing guys picked up on it and splattered it all over the web, as did the online journals while Ariel and my fellow reviewers on the Alien Online organised support - the mainstream media picked it up from there and within a couple of days the Guardian and Scotsman had me posing for photographs for an article (right outside the old bookstore, much to the amusement of some of the staff who hadn't been told much of what had happened) and a rapid snowball effect took place that utterly surprised me - four radio spots in one day at one point, asked to do interviews for radio shows in Ireland and New York, enquiries from journalists in France, Norway, Italy, Germany, clippings of the story being sent by folks from as far afield as Chile and Australia, it was simply amazing. I think the fact that a bookstore, which has always professed to stand for freedom of speech (without which there is no booktrade) would try to gag a staff member this way really infuriated a lot of folks. I still get approached by media types from time to time even now.

The amount of emails I had from people all over was a huge morale boost when I was seriously down and a reminder, again, of how connected web users are on a global scale (and again, thanks to everyone who took time to write to me offering support and also emailing their disgust to the Bookstore Which Shall Not Be Named, I really can't tell you just how much the support of so many folks, mostly total stranger, meant to me when I really needed it). That was something my former employers didn't realise, they thought they were the Big Company and they could do what they wanted to One Little Guy; boy did that blow up in their faces (and deservedly so). Amazingly some companies continue to repeat this mistake, still not cottoned on to the interconnected nature of the web.

Another front was opened up when some of the many writers I had worked with over the years also came to my defence, publically damning the former employers for their actions and pointing out just how much work I had done to promote books over the years. Highly embarrassing to be the biggest bookstore in the nation and find some of the bestselling authors in the country decrying you in public (Richard Morgan's incredibly eloquent open letter, Ken MacLeod and Iain Banks and others writing letters to the press, Charlie Stross standing up for me on his blog and more). I've spent years promoting good writers and books and I can't tell you how good it felt to realise that a lot of those authors remembered that support and were willing to step forward to help me when I needed it; so much support from friends and strangers had the oddest effect, it made you feel ten feet tall and at the same time so damned humble that people would do this for you.

It had a happy ending though - the appeal hearing, ironically held in the new branch I had helped to create (as I gleefully pointed out), turned out in my favour. They still didn't like me mentioning work on the blog but agreed they had rather over-reacted. By this time FPI had read about all of this and I'd been approached by them because they wanted someone to work on their online business who would also be into the books and graphic novels they were selling, rather than just treating it as a job. And in the supreme irony I pitched the idea of a blog for the company to compliment the major webstore and they liked it; now the FPI blog has grown far bigger, gets hits from round the world and I still get to promote good books, graphic novels and authors (thanks, Kenny!) from interviewing big names to helping push the new small press guys (who in turn mention us and so that interconnected thing all still goes round and we all win from it). And I'm still blogging on the Woolamaloo as well; blogging for personal reasons and blogging at work too (god, but that still makes me giggle after all that happened, that part of my job is running a blog) and no intention of stopping (I should probably say thanks to Former Employers because their short-sighted attack turned a little-heard of site into one read by far, far more folks, so well done! I award you the Shot Yourself In The Foot Award!). Another nice spin off is my union, the RBA, a smaller union, got some good publicity (well deserved) from this and picked up a raft of new members on the back of it (actually they told me they go someone in touch the very night I posted links to them on the blog).

I intend to go on being a cheeky and irreverent bugger and the Woolamaloo is an intrinsic part of that; a friend who is heavily into Second Life was asking why I didn't join him there. I pointed out that the blog (and Flog and Flickr) were already a second life for me and I can't imagine not doing it. So yes, I fully intend to go on lampooning hypocritical public figures, pastiching events, talking about good books, quoting poetry when I feel like it and, well, basically talking about whatever the hell I want to, when I want to, because it is my (and every other person's) right to damned well do just that and winning that case makes me feel like doing it all the more. So happy anniversary to my sometimes troubled child, the Woolamaloo Gazette, the blog they couldn't hang.

Indiana Jones and the Lost Tenure

Picked up this Indiana Jones gem via my good chum the Silvereel; perhaps this might be the plot of the almost mythical fourth movie we've been promised for the last umpteen years? Oh well, if it doesn't happen perhaps we can see Tony Robinson and the Time Team gang in a big screen adventure instead?

The new TV season

January is one of the regular times for British broadcasters to start tantalising us with their new wares, but what new shows can we look forward to for the winter quarter? The Gazette's media correspondent has a look:

Who Wants to be Tony Blair? Chris Tarrant hosts a new quiz show where people compete to try and replace our lovely war criminal Prime Minister when he finally succumbs to the inevitable. Questions will be asked and contestants can phone a friend, ask the audience or bribe a businessman with a peerage. Questions will be along the lines of "what will be your policy on Iraq? Is it A) To pull out completely and blame Tony Blair; B) Stay and blame Tony Blair; C) Do whatever the American government tells you and blame Tony Blair or D) Say everything is fine apart from some minor problems which are all the fault of the BBC. Is that your final answer, Gordon?"

Big Bugger. Channel 4 continues to champion the cutting edge of quality reality television as Davina McCall hosts a new live show where a bunch of 'ordinary' people live together in a house and indulge in endless anal sex for the cameras while morons text in at £10 a time to vote for who gets the trick exploding dildo. Still more amusing than Big Brother. Sponsored by the British Council For Butter. (yes, that is a cheap Last Tango reference). The Celebrity version will give some Z-list nonentities the chance to do something with their arses other than talking out of them.

Doctor Flu. A new science fiction adventure show in which a group of travellers in time and space destroy entire alien civilisations by travelling to them and introducing germs they have no defence against.

Jane Air. A major new drama from the BBC where a plucky heroine scientist in a man's world must fight to protect the atmosphere from destruction by pollution from budget airlines while still trying to land the perfect husband but not look to easy in the process.

Easy Money. Jonathan Ross sits and counts the massive fees he gets from the BBC for the cameras while flopping his fringe around in a manner which would be endearingly boyish if he weren't middle-aged.