The Weekly Hat – Number Sixteen
Morning, all. Well, it’s a big time-shift, as I’m reporting back from Friday night, which I spent at my computer, trying to arrange my holiday, set up a week of pre-timed Behatted/Weekly Hat content and write another article as well. But I hope you had fun, and I hope I look back on it pleasantly as well.
And, as a pleasant notice, next week’s Weekly Hat will almost certainly not be published as early on Sunday as usual. In fact, it may not happen at all, but I’ll certainly have a go. I get back from holiday on Saturday night, it depends if anything interesting happens and I have the energy to write about it.
And now, this week’s contents…
- How the Messiah grows up: President Obama rumbles on through hatred, bile and other things. But how’s he doing?
- Anatomy of a post strike: Postmen, it seems, are the new tube drivers, at least in terms of industrial action.
- Media and stuff: Muse! Assorted new TV! Kanye West is a jackass! (The President says so!)
- Behatted Photo Of The Week: The most powerful man in the world gets a hat visited upon him.
How the Messiah grows up
We’ve been seeing a little more of President Obama in the news recently, or I have at least. Anyone reading this in the United States might have a bit more exposure to the man, but over here in the even-more-United Kingdom, we only get an appearance when something important happens. And few things topped the moment, this week, when he weighed in on the great Kanye West VMA saga (more on that later) to call West a “jackass”.
The level of controversy over this has been… pleasingly minimal. It appears that everyone, regardless of their political affiliation and the occasionally venomous exchanges between the two sides, can unite behind the statement that, yes, Kanye West is a jackass. This comes as a pleasant surprise to me, as I was very much expecting Obama’s political opponents (Fox News and the people who watch it) to accuse him of being an unpresidential disgrace to their great nation.
In fairness to me, the only reason I’ve been beaten into expecting such negativity is because that’s more or less what happens every single time Obama does… well, anything. Witness this video, where people criticise any Obama-related thing they can think of, regardless of research, fact or reality.
I’m well aware that the people in that video are not typical American voters, but there do seem to be a disconcertingly large amount of them. And, whether it’s because Obama is black or just because he’s not a Republican, they all hate him, more or less on principle.
Obviously, there was the NHS flap a few weeks back, and suddenly people were decrying Obama’s evil plan to “create NHS in the United States”, which is just too grammatically wrong for me to take even a little seriously. And what bemused people in lovely England, I think, was that for a moment, we were yanked into the crazy world of American politics, where emotional reactions start to enter into a field which, we think, should be governed by rational debate.
“But why is the NHS bad?”, said we. “Because it’s un-American!”, said they. Anyone who said that sort of thing in a British political debate would be rightfully laughed out of the room.
On the other hand, perhaps to try and appease people who think he’s a pansy, Obama did step in to criticise Scotland for releasing that Lockerbie bomber suspect. Nothing really happened as a result, but at least he stepped in and said something. Yeah! Slap them Brits down!
Also, I saw a picture of him fencing with a light saber on the White House lawn earlier today, that was fairly awesome. So all in all (based entirely on this paragraph), I imagine he’s probably the best President ever. More important, and despite the mutterings about destruction in that video I linked to earlier, the USA still stands. The threatened Change may not have come yet, but give the man time. And, you know, if you really want to see it, maybe stop standing in the way?
Anatomy of a post strike
The postmen are striking! Yes, Postman Pat and his chums are joining the growing list of industries who are trying to stick it to their bosses by inconveniencing the man on the street. I have a slight bias here, as I spent much of last week moaning due to the delay in my Brendan Benson album arriving from Amazon. This, in turn, was caused by a postal strike.
So this is a bit of a raw topic for me. I already did a reasonably odd piece about tube strikes back in the early days of the Weekly Hat. But postmen… do I have any real sympathy for postmen?
Well, more than I do for tube drivers, as they haven’t over-played the strike hand to the same ridiculous scale, nor do they have as irritating a spokesman to drive me to annoyed distraction. But I can’t say I’m on board with the “No job cuts are acceptable!” view. There’s a recession on. People are losing their jobs all over the shop. Unions declaring that their members should be immunised from being effected, because they’re so bloody special, does rub me up the wrong way.
I mean, I’d like the Supreme Being to descend on his cosmic jet ski and hand me a book deal and an enormous pile of money, but we don’t always get what we want. This, I sense, is the crux of my irritation with all recent strikes. I am aware that it isn’t very nice to be made redundant through no fault of your own, and my logic here basically demands it, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Perhaps this is another sign that I’m growing older and becoming less of a whining student, but every time I read an article about one of these strikes, I find myself siding with the employer.
Or it could merely be that I want my bloody letters to come on time. I suppose it must be a sign that the Royal Mail have done a good job when I start viewing the post as one of my fundamental human rights, along with shelter, freedom of speech, wireless broadband and breaking other people’s stuff.
So, when that service is withdrawn, confusion reigns. I suppose with the rise of the internet, we should start outgrowing the post, but I doubt that’ll actually happen until science discovers a way to send objects such as birthday presents and Brendan Benson CDs via internet. So we’re stuck with the posties and their sporadic tantrums. Never mind.
Media and stuff
- Big release of the past week has to be the new Muse album, The Resistance, and thanks as ever to the always-handy Spotify service, I have been able to listen to it in time for a reasonably timely review. Their previous album was a bit of a restrained affair by Muse standards, seeming to represent some kind of an attempt to do ‘normal’ indie-rock and containing a fair few somewhat forgettable tracks alongside classics like Starlight, Invincible and Knights Of Cydonia.
This time, conformity be damned, they’ve just gone nuts. The level of pomp and bombast in these eleven tracks is phenomenal. The Queen comparisons present in many reviews are somewhat justified; in fact, even Queen would’ve been unlikely to attempt a three-track epic under the title ‘Exogenesis Symphony’. The pretentious nature of almost all the music probably makes it hard to recommend universally, but I think it’s a lot of fun. If you don’t mind the ridiculous strutting sillyness of it all (basically, if you don’t find Muse irritating), there’s fun to be had here. - Elsewhere in “the media”, Kanye West executes a celebrity award ceremony faux pas when he storms the stage during an acceptance speech to announce that someone else should have won. This by itself is barely worthy of remark (Haven’t we had worse examples of bad behaviour at the Brit Awards over the years?), but the reaction has been… a tad OTT. So far, the President, the most powerful man in the world, has called him a “jackass” (off the record, but still) and he’s made a tearful declaration that he’s going to take a few years to try and grow as a person or something, implying this is somehow related to his mother’s death. Oh, and he’s been roundly mocked on the internet, but at least that didn’t take it seriously. I imagine we’ll all forget this in the end. If Jade Goody can bounce back from televised racism, Kanye can survive this. Admittedly, she had to get cancer to do so.
- The new TV season is slowly getting underway and there are some good programmes out there. Or so I’m presuming based upon previous years, I haven’t watched any of them yet. The new series of Peep Show is underway, but I haven’t yet seen series 2 -5 of that, so can’t really tune in. Meanwhile, last night, the boy wizard drama Merlin returned. Annoyingly, I went on holiday in the early evening and am writing this on Thursday morning, so haven’t seen that either. (Next week! Maybe!) Also still to come, the BBC’s oddly long-running spyfest Spooks is to return, along with the even cuddlier Doctor Who spin off The Sarah Jane Adventures. And that’s before the American shows get involved. How exciting.
Behatted Photo Of The Week
This Weekly Hat, which had a few more references to the President of the United States than usual, may as well end with a nice big one. Yes, Barack Obama (human/superhuman) is our Behatted individual of the day, accompanied by Len’s Mum (hat).
The Small Print (is a song by Muse): This week’s photo is stolen from seiu on Flickr, and it is covered under this Creative Commons Licence. Word.
September 20th, 2009 at 9:54 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Behatted and Juan Carlos Romero. Juan Carlos Romero said: RT @NickMB: Behatted: The Weekly Hat – Number Sixteen http://bit.ly/XzWYt #notawebcomic [...]