Sweet Nothings

This is a very self-indulgent post about stuff in today's Guardian . Best you don't read it, really. Marina Hyde is reassuringly sanctimonious as ever about the Anton Du Beke racism row (her final paragraph is very good, mind), but oh no, not Lucy Mangan too! I love Lucy, it's fair to say. She is very probably my ideal woman and future life partner, she just doesn't know it yet. Sadly, today has seen our first fight. I don't think Anton should have been sacked. Leaving aside the rabid attempts in some quarters (Charlie Brooker today calls them "repugnant vested-interest newspaper scumbags") to denigrate and slur the Beeb, this all boils down to whether you should condemn a person utterly, and thereby cost them their job, on the basis of one single mistake. Ok, two mistakes - he also mentioned something about Leila possibly being a "terrorist" at one point. But he did apologise. If you believe the scurrilous rumours then Marina Hyde once shagged...

I slagged off the Mail in my last post and with very good reason, but just to show that I'm not a complete limp-wristed wet liberal, I'm going to have a go at Simon Hoggart and his diary piece in today's Grauniad. I quote [comments added in square brackets]: In fact, the market for recycled paper has collapsed, so there's no point in sorting that [okay...], and that glass is mainly used for road beds, since it is hard but permeable. No point in recycling that anyway: there is no world shortage of sand. [Good grief, where do you start with this? No, there is lots of sand. There is also lots of glass that gets buried in landfill when it could quite easily be recycled, thus reducing the need for more landfill space.] Most household rubbish around the country still goes into landfill anyway. [True, but that doesn't mean you have to add to it.] Like so much associated with the green movement, this procedure has a religious quality. It even takes as long as the average ch...