Sexist sports, South Park’s apology and free speech

2 August 2025

My sport-free existence was this invaded by the news that the England Women’s National Football Team beat Spain on a penalty shoot-out to win the UEFA Women’s European Championship trophy and their manager Sarina Wiegman took a lot of the credit. 

I accidentally watched part of one game and was surprised how by skilful both the teams were but it was clear they’d never watched proper men’s football because nobody seemed to fall over in agony, screaming for the ref, then getting up and carrying on as if nothing had happened when they realised nobody had seen them.

Nevertheless, I was interested to see that good old English class distinctions still prevail in sport:  female footballers are ‘women’ while female tennis players are ‘ladies’.  I wonder if this might be linked to the football trophy’s resemblance to an oversize and somewhat kinky dildo whose owner had accidently sneezed while experimenting with it while the Wimbledon trophy just looks like a plate whose user would need bread to mop the last traces of gravy out of the engraved surface.

This week also saw Keir Starmer give a somewhat lacklustre performance at his meeting with Donald Trump on Monday but I wondered whether he’d done this on purpose to allow Trump to look his usual stupid self, without needing somebody to feed him ammunition, because Starmer announced the following day that the UK would be following in France’s footsteps and would recognise the state of Palestine in September.

Trump had naturally been taking his presidential duties seriously and had played two rounds of golf at his Turnberry golf course.  A cousin of mine passed the entrance to Turnberry at about the same time and said there was “a sweet old lady”, who he thinks spends much of her time there, holding up a sign saying “Trump is a C*nt” except she doesn’t use an asterisk.  He said he would have joined her but he still had a long way to drive that day and didn’t want to get embrangled.

Trump’s latest revelation is that he doesn’t employ staff, he owns them.  He admitted this by claiming Jeffrey Epstein had “stolen” staff from his Florida club.  The word ‘poached’ is more commonly used in such situations but it reveals how Trump thinks and, to be fair, he’d probably have said anything that might distract people from demanding the release of “the Epstein files”.  Back in 2002, Trump told New York magazine “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy.  He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Another of his former BFFs …

Those of us who are less than charitable hope it’s only a matter of time before the files are released and he is suitably embarrassed by the addition of more crimes to his charge sheet.

A couple of weeks ago, he was parodied in the American animated series South Park which showed a picture of his head on an animated, explicitly naked body climbing into bed with Satan.  They also showed a hyper-realistic, deepfake video of Trump stripping off in a desert with a suggestion that Trump’s genitalia are small.

It is of course gratuitously offensive so, if you’re of a sensitive disposition, don’t click on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afetnw70S04 and watch it.  Can you think of another American president in recent times who has been so widely ridiculed?

By the way, the penis was given eyes so it became a character in its own right because the producers had threatened to blur the image if it was just a penis.  To make everything clear, the clip is marked “Altered or synthetic content.  Sound or visuals were significantly edited or digitally generated.” (just in case people thought it was real) and the makers prefaced the show with an explanation that “All characters and events in this show – even those based on real people – are entirely fictional. All celebrity voices are impersonated … poorly. The following program contains coarse language and due to its content it should not be viewed by anyone.”

In response to an angry complaint from the White house, South Park co-creator Trey Parker said “We’re terribly sorry”, followed by a long, deadpan-comic stare.

Wouldn’t the world be a better place if there were more South Parks and fewer Trumps.

Which is but a short step to the most recent demonstration of the far right’s hero Tommy Robinson’s stupidity.  A video posted online last week shows him standing by a prone, apparently unconscious figure in a London station saying “He come at me bruv.”  So, as a tru-Brit, he naturally went with the police and explained it was self-defence.  Not.  What he actually did was flee the country and he’s now believed to be in Tenerife.

He’s used various other names in the past, one of which was Wayne King.  Isn’t that brilliant!  Perhaps he used to have a dirty raincoat and frequent public telephone boxes.

But, putting aside violence and mickey-taking, I’m glad I live in a country where we are free to say what we think, however stupid other people may think we are, and I was glad to see that a high court judge has just reaffirmed our right to do this.

Huda Ammori, co-founder of Palestine Action, had challenged the legality of the Home Secretary’s decision to use anti-terrorism laws to ban the group and a high court judge has ruled that the ban risks doing “considerable harm to the public interest”.

In his ruling, Sir Martin Chamberlain KC referred to a demonstrator, Laura Murton, who had been threatened with arrest for holding a Palestinian flag and a sign saying ‘Free Gaza’, and said he thought this could infringe the human rights of people “wishing to express legitimate political views”. 

Perhaps some over-zealous police should visit Turnberry.

IgNobel contender, Stonehenge, Shetland’s big bang and English class boundaries

31 August 2024

Scientists have been researching the learning experiences to be gained from licking an ice lolly / popsicle and have called for this to be included in the national curriculum for primary schoolchildren because it introduces them to the concepts of heating and cooling on a personal level.  Surely this must be at least long-listed for an IgNobel prize this year.

Archaeologists have gotten excited recently by the discovery that the ‘altar stone’, now mostly covered by two of the fallen sarsen stones, originated in north east Scotland, Orkney or Shetland rather than the Welsh quarry where a lot of the other big stones came from.  Detailed analyses of the chemicals in the old red sandstone of the altar stone are consistent only with the northernmost sandstone in the UK.

While the Welsh rocks only had to travel some 200km from Wales, this stone came from about 750km away and raises the question of how it was transported.  An ‘easy’ suggestion is that it was carried much of the way by a glacier during one of the ice ages, except that it’s thought that the movement of ice sheets in the far north tended to ‘flow’ northwards, rather than south.  It’s therefore thought that it was probably moved south by a bunch of very dedicated (or stupid) people because it’s known that neolithic peoples did transport stone by sea, but very rarely so far and, even with tea breaks in Stonehaven and Skegness, it would have taken a long time.

It could presumably have been floated up a river to get comparatively close to the site of Stonehenge (even in medieval times, the River Cam was navigable as far as Cambridge) but there was a still some distance to drag the thing overland.

The question that fascinates me more is why anybody bothered to do this instead of using stones available closer to home and I have a wonderful vision of extra-terrestrials lifting it from an outcrop in Orkney and dumping it in the middle of Stonehenge, then giggling all the way home about the theories humans would produce some 3-5,000 years later.

There are also some clever (and funny) answers on the Quora website to a question about why it wasn’t built on the continent. 

In Shetland, during a test firing of nine rocket engines by the German company Rocket Factory Augsburg at the SaxaVord Spaceport in Unst on 19 August, at least one of them exploded.  The resulting fire was impressive enough to make the national news but nobody was injured and the launch pad was saved.  RFA said it was due to “an anomaly” and has said it will return to normal operations as soon as possible.  It added ““We develop iteratively with an emphasis on real testing”.

Why don’t these people speak English?  What all this corporate bullshit means is that they don’t know what happened but they’re going to carry on lighting the fuses again and again until they get it right.

To be fair, the accident did follow a successful test three months ago when they fired the engines for 8 whole seconds without mishap.

For those who are thinking of popping up to Unst to watch the next 8-second test, it’s worth remembering that it costs more to fly there from London, hire a car to drive the last 80 miles (over two RORO ferries) and book accommodation than it does to have a 4-day all-inclusive holiday in Turkey, or Spain or North Africa.

The recent references to Keir Starmer’s describing his background as “working class” started a friend wondering how accurate he was being, which then started me wondering what ‘class’ means nowadays. 

Back in the old days, when we still had mines and steam railways and manufacturing industries, I assumed references to ‘blue collar workers’ were to people who did dirty jobs and whose collars were more likely to show the dirt than if they’d worn white collars.  ‘White collar’ workers were therefore those who worked in offices which were cleaner so they could wear their shirts for more than one day.  This in turn was loosely linked to ‘class’:  ‘blue collar’ workers were working class and ‘white collar’ workers were middle class but such distinctions clearly applied only to the hoi polloi and not to the ‘aristocracy’ who often had no attributes except inherited money and didn’t have to work for a living.

The middle class then decided there should be an upper middle class and a lower middle class but it all seemed pretty arbitrary.  I once helped a market researcher friend who was looking for an AB person about my age to answer some questions for a poll and, when I asked, they said I’d automatically be downgraded to E when I retired.

Generally, the language people used and their accents would immediately disclose their class but as national broadcasts became less picky (it was rumoured that, after reading the news, Wilfred Pickles was disciplined by the BBC when he rhymed ‘Newcastle’ with ‘tassel’ instead of ‘parcel’), accents tended towards estuarine English as glottal stops and tortured vowel sounds tended to be played down.

In the mid-50s, Nancy Mitford took the mickey in an essay that differentiated between the vocabularies used by the English who spoke properly, who were U (‘Upper class’), and them as talked proper, who were non-U. 

Jilly Cooper then added to the fun by writing Class in the 1960s and, as computers made communications more anodyne, the distinctions dissolved even though somebody I knew, who was brought up in the Marches, moved away and still spent a long time trying to lose their ‘working class Erryf’d accent’ to acquire the speech and vocabulary of what they saw as ‘middle class’, thereby becoming ‘middle class’. 

Other distinctions arise from slang and the influence of foreign languages and my mother, who lived in Japan till she was 13, always used the word “spai” (if that’s how you’d transliterate it) for that sharp, dessicating feeling you get when biting into a sloe berry, a word I used for decades before realising it isn’t an English word at all.  Which probably just confirms my ‘E’ classification at the bottom of the class hierarchy.