Today the Daily Mail has a sad story in which the ex-wife of Christian Voice front man, Stephen Green, explains how he mentally and physically abused his family for many years.

Stephen Green came to fame when the BBC announced they would air Stewart Lee’s Jerry Springer: The Opera. Considered by Green to be blasphemous (and by Christians who can think to be satirical), he vociferously campaigned against the broadcast, and then against the stage show itself, and succeeded in bankrupting the previously successful production. But his real victory was a strong media presence, his name being put at the top of most media outlets’ contact books for matters of Christian controversy. Despite it being abundantly clear that he was an extremist, and despite his organisation repeatedly having been demonstrated to be pretty much just Stephen Green in a mobile home, everyone from the BBC to the tabloid press would seek a quote from him if they wanted to spin a story as conflicting with an imagined version of Christian values. He was guaranteed to deliver, saying something printably outrageous. His ludicrous views would be countered by those affected by the story, and in the publication’s mind some manner of editorial balance had been achieved.

But most interesting is the Mail’s relationship with the man. Their latest story describes Green as a “monster”, a “fundamentalist.” The article goes on to note,

“Stephen was immersed in Christian Voice, which allowed him the autonomy and freedom to express his increasingly bizarre views unchallenged. As its founder and director, he was answerable to no one.”

And just who was it who was letting Green’s views go unchallenged?

Well, take for example this article about student stunt marriages that appeared in a newspaper just fifteen days ago:

“The students’ wedding was condemned by Stephen Green, national director of Christian Voice, an organisation that represents Christians.”

The story then goes on to quote Green at length, without editorial comment. And which paper is it who let this extremist monster go unchallenged? That would be the Daily Mail.

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City Link, the UK parcel delivery company, is abysmal. It’s predictably abysmal. A typical conversation with friends:

“My parcel’s not arrived.”

“City Link?”

“Yeah.”

Everyone knows they’re hideous. Everyone you ask has a City Link horror story. Searching the internet and you’ll find so many tales. Many people I know, including me, have been unambiguously lied to by City Link. “We put a card through your door when there was no response,” they say, when they’ve been nowhere near the house and certainly not put through a card.

And yet so many major companies still use them despite there being so many far better, far more reliable companies offering the same service. Including, terribly, Amazon.

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As I graduate from a flu so strong that I needed help to sit up, to a cold where my lungs and throat are in more pain than I know what to do with, leaning on my desk to stay upright simply because I’ll overdose myself on the pharmacy of drugs surrounding my bed if I have to lie down any longer, it’s comforting to know that I can still get furious about the mind-numbing incompetence of weather forecasting.

Sure, I’ve gone on about this a lot, and certainly I appear to be among very few who care, but in a world where people are increasingly calling bullshit on the various woo remedies and snake oils, it infuriates me that weather soothsaying escapes any scrutiny.

I think the only way to communicate the level to which it is palpable nonsense is to show not how the weather is incorrectly predicted, but how the predictions don’t even agree with themselves from the same source. So for today’s example, here’s the BBC’s current predictions for the weather for Bath tomorrow, Monday 20th December. First of all, the day’s breakdown:

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And I was nearly on my way to bed before 1am before I saw this link. Yesterday, the BBC reporter Ben Brown took on his toughest target yet, the man with cerebral palsy dragged from his wheelchair by police during the student protests last Thursday. And although that sounds like sarcasm, it turns out to be true. While it doesn’t take a great deal of effort to make a man like Brown look like an idiot, Jody McIntyre does it with grace and intelligence completely undeserved by the moronic anchor.

Here’s the full interview, which unfortunately contains quite a few skips:

So in the footage we see a man sitting in his wheelchair, barely moving, being attacked by four police officers. Two in full riot gear, because you can never be too careful with those CP types. One drags him across the road by his arms, dropping him on the tarmac. This is the second time that evening that McIntyre has been dragged from his wheelchair, the first time also hit with a truncheon. But this was the time it was filmed.

Perhaps I’m mad from keyboard fumes, but this strikes me as a story about police brutality. But that’s not how crack journalist Ben Brown saw it. This was his chance to get a confession out of one of the most dangerous rioters of them all.

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Here is the letter I wrote to Don Foster tonight, after he voted in favour of tripling tuition fees, cutting arts and humanities funding by 100%, and unashamedly doing the precise opposite of his solemn pre-election promise:

Dear Don Foster,

I have one question for which I would appreciate an answer. If – before the Coalition was formed – you heard of an MP who made a solemn promise, signed a pledge and held this up for cameras, and was widely supported and elected based on this promise, and then voted against it, what would you think of him?

In the face of the clear will of your electorate, and the clear promises you made, that you would vote for the raise in tuition fees – no matter how you may have rationalised this for yourself – is a terrible act of deceit.

I ask that you resign, because your flagrant lying and vulgar contempt for your electorate demonstrates that you are obviously unfit for the role into which you were elected. I am quite certain that the Don Foster of March 2010 would entirely agree with me.

I’m so upset with and ashamed of you.

Yours sincerely,

John Walker
Former Lib Dem voter

Well, why not. Here’s me on ITV News, looking like an angry garden gnome, saying “Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” for a really long time. Huge thanks to Andrew for helping me with the clip.

I sent this email to Don Foster today. If you want to write to your MP ahead of the vote on Thursday regarding the tripling of student tuition fees, and the horrendous cuts to university education, you can directly email them from here.

Dear Don Foster,

After attending the protests this morning, I am compelled to write to you regarding Thursday’s vote. I wish to appeal to you, to the man for whom I voted.

I voted for you because of your voting record, and your promises. Not only that, but I encouraged many others to vote for you, those who were apolitical or apathetic. I invested my time and energy into convincing them to vote for you, based on whom you had been. And now I feel humiliated.

I don’t want these people to have been lied to. I don’t want you to make me into a liar. I told them that you were different, that you voted so passionately for decency and humane values. I showed them the form response your office sent me that so eloquently and intelligently explained why you would be voting for libel reform, and against the attacks by corporations on people’s rights to internet access with the Digital Economy Bill. I explained that you represented the only party voting to abolish tuition fees.

You say you have yet to make up your mind about Thursday’s vote. I truly hope you were telling the truth, rather than avoiding giving an answer your voters neither voted for nor wanted to hear. If this is the case, I ask you to remember who you were before the Coalition was formed, and how appalled the Don Foster of April 2010 would feel if he were told what the Don Foster of December 2010 was considering doing.

It is so devastating to hear you giving the Conservative line about this matter, knowingly lying about how various clauses will make it fairer for students (while surrounded by the students who already know that it absolutely will not). To hear you saying “compromise”, as if that’s a reason to abandon your principles, to degrade your party’s former beliefs, and to so unashamedly back out of a promise you made only six months ago.

Lies about not knowing the state of the economy are embarrassing to tell, and insulting to hear. We all know that they are lies, and it’s so sad to hear you and your colleagues saying them without shame or remorse.

You are retiring this parliament, and as such this will be your legacy. You have an opportunity to vote for what you clearly believed in, and for what you solemnly swore you would do. Or you have the choice to become a part of the Conservatives, and deny all you have fought for, and all you continue to espouse outside of areas your whips have not instructed you to change your mind about.

I truly do not believe that you do not feel shame about this. To have signed a pledge, and to have been such a decent man for so long, you must know that abandoning all this would be too sad.

Thank you for taking the time to read this long email. I politely ask that if your response to this would be to send out a form reply stating all the lies and excuses and statements of how important it is to be compromised, then please don’t send it to me. It would make me too sad.

Yours sincerely,

John Walker

The week’s weather at 7.15pm on Monday 29th November:

The week’s weather at 7.55pm on Monday 29th November:

JUST SHUTTING SHUT UP, YOU SHUTS.

Tonight a number of RPS readers have announced that my opinions are no longer worthwhile, and that they shall be ignoring me from now onward. This is because of two crimes in the last week. I wrote about the 1993 adventure “game”, Myst, and Telltale’s new release, Poker Night At The Inventory.

The latter caught me far more by surprise than the former. The game is, beyond a very nice gimmick (four popular game characters playing poker with you), pretty weak. It offers a horrible poker game, made briefly entertaining by some funny comments from the cast. Once they start repeating, which is early on, it becomes about struggling through an awful card game, and clicking through much repeated dialogue, to try to hear a new gag. What really threw me was not that people complained that they enjoyed the game and so I was wrong (a standard response to a negative review), but rather that people were furious – I mean absolutely livid – that I’d reviewed it as a poker game.

Even more so, to do so as someone who knows how to play poker. It’s not for people who know how to play poker, I’ve been repeatedly told. I’m not allowed to play the game because of mistakes I’ve made in the past. That stupid, ignorant mistake of having learned the rules to the game.

This was only compounding my fall, following my piece on Myst written for Eurogamer’s Sunday retrospective slot.

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Oh, Thursday. You and your sick sense of humour. Or perhaps it’s pure malice.

Today was framed to suck from the start. Last night my problematic tooth became intolerably problematic, a root filling seeming to have not done the trick to prevent its misbehaving, and most peculiarly it was gradually changing my bite until I couldn’t bring my front teeth together.

I could have made another emergency appointment with a local NHS dentist, but I’m still feeling stung (literally) from the last time two weeks ago. My regular dentist is two hours’ drive away in Guildford, in the form of my dad. But he was on holiday two weeks back, so I had no choice. Unfortunately, the dentist I got managed to not only fail to remove all the nerve from the tooth in two attempts in two consecutive days (the first attempt made things enormously worse, once the 900 gallons of anaesthetic that had made my nose go numb finally wore off), but worse, she had injected anaesthetic directly into the muscle in my jaw, which apparently caused a blood clot to form around the wound, which is why it still hurts to open and close my mouth.

My dad undid her mess and did a splendid root canal filling, which looked pristine on the x-ray. But a week later the pain was returning. Which is odd, for a tooth from which he’d removed the remaining nerve completely. Since I’m away on holiday on Monday, and away this weekend too, there was no other time than Thursday lunchtime. An uneventful drive down to Guildford got me to the surgery in just over two hours, and quickly my dad was trying to diagnose what was going on.

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