Mark Steel er búinn að vera í fantaformi upp á síðkastið.
Hér er pistill um ÓL í Kína og hvernig Bretar munu standa sig eftir fjögur ár: Whoever’s in charge will announce that, to save money, we won’t bother with fireworks, but: „We can have just as much fun with a Dalek from Woolworths that glows in the dark if I can remember to buy the right size batteries, and we’ve bought plenty of trifle from the Co-op so everyone should get some,“ but they’ll run out before the end so Yemen and Zambia will have to lick the bowl. The poor Albanians will be jostled all afternoon by countries who arrive late because of signal failure at London Bridge, and have to barge past them to get to their place. And nothing will be ready. The swimming pool will have no water in it and the competitors will be told to run backwards and forwards along the bottom.
Annar fjallar um Soltsínetsín: There’s an added confusion in the response to his death, which is that the most militaristic Bush-supporting faction of Western society leap on him as their hero. At one level, this is easy to understand. They probably read his stuff and think, „These prisons he’s describing are abominable. Add in orange hoods and waterboarding and they’ll be perfect.“ And the person who had to write the eulogy for some papers will have been especially perplexed, as their first draft must have been, „Once again us mugs in the West had to bail out a so-called refugee who’d suffered ‘torture’ in his own country, but came here to exploit our superior health system to tend to his frostbite.“ Until the editor explained, „No – we wanted this one here.“
Og að lokum einn góður um bresku verkalýðshreyfinguna og Gordon Brown: What did it do for Gordon Brown’s ego, to spend a morning with Barack Obama? There’s his guest attracting cheering crowds of tens of thousands in every city, while Gordon must consider it a good day if he completes a speech without making a puddle.
Instead of Obama, Brown’s people should get him to meet people less popular to make him feel better, so his schedule goes: „7.45am – Discussion on EU expansion with Radovan Karadzic; 8.30am – Breakfast meeting on trade regulations with bloke who pretended to disappear in a canoe.“