Fuck with this, Taio Cruz, and you will die at my scrawny hands

Man can only suck at the teat of the alternative udder for so long. Soon he tires of discovery and retreats into the familiar. Even Ranulph Fiennes probably has a day when all he really fancies is a cup of tea and a day in front of Sky Sports News.

And so it was that I blew the metaphorical dust off my metaphorically pristine McFly back catalogue. I honestly can’t understand why people dislike McFly so much. Even Girls Aloud have attained a modicum of critical acclaim. McFly, on the other hand, write their own songs, produce their own albums and choose their own musical directions. The next of these is rumoured to be a collaboration with Taio Cruz for their next album.

It’s one of those that could really go either way. But as long as he tinkers at the edges rather than incites insurrection, me and Taio are going to get along fine. Fuck with the classic formula, though, dickwad, and rest assured I will personally break break your heart. With scissors.

These are my ten favourite McFly songs of all time, in reverse order. This isn’t going to be funny, just reverential, so regular readers who don’t like McFly might like to piss off for a bit.

10. Five Colours In Her Hair (2004)

From back when they were still learning their trade. It’s not perfect, but it’s still very, very good. All of a sudden McFly appeared to offer what Busted had promised but failed to be – a British pop band, writing British songs. In taking 1965 rather than 1995 as their musical Year Zero, they were attempting a trick that only Supergrass have ever really pulled off in the last two decades – raiding an unfashionable decade for inspiration. The first and last 20 seconds of ‘Five Colours In Her Hair’ belong in the annals of British pop intro and outro history. If these annals don’t exist, never mind.

Trivia: The song was written in honour of Emily Corrie, who played Sooz in Channel 4 show As If. What became of her, you ask? Well, this.

9. Too Close For Comfort (2005)

A track from the Wonderland album, which is going to feature quite strongly in the forthcoming list. What this song proves is that McFly – and specifically, Tom Fletcher – are at their best when they’re just trying to be nice. I appreciate that every album or so they feel the need to let off some steam with some pathetic Matrix-written punk-rock mumbo-jumbo (see ‘Friday Night’, ‘Corrupted’), but there’s really no need. (Also, as a note to the boys – when you sing the word ’shit’, it just sounds a bit strange.)

It’s a clever, clever song, craftily magpie-ing bits from the modern rock canon. Those opening chords? That’s The Libertines right there. After that? It segues into Jeff Buckley. The chorus? Well, it’s pure McFly. All smoothed into one edifying whole. It says something about McFly’s prolific output at the height of their creative powers that this wasn’t even deemed worthy of a single release. Olly Murs’ people could do a lot worse than dragging this little gem out of the archives.

8. Little Joanna (2006)

Another album track, but where ‘Too Close For Comfort’ was earnest and soul-baring, this is just pleasantly loopy. “Little Joanna’s like a laser beam sky/Gluteus maximus like a firefly” is one memorable rhyming couplet, and you think: these are kids, just out of school, who appear in interviews to be allergic to any word of more than two syllables. How could this possibly come out of their puny, one-track brains? And then it hits you. Drugs. So, more of that, please.

Agh, I’m tired. I’ll add the rest later.

Chris Morris on terrorism

The trailer for Four Lions, Chris Morris’s film about British jihadists. I’ve watched it four times and laughed harder each time.

And while skulking about the YouTubeverse, I happened upon this as well, which I believe is one of the DVD extras on The Day Today.

Pour nos cousins americains

I’m going to have to admit that if you don’t know who Keith Olbermann is, this will probably be lost on you. If you do, you will gain maximum value, sir. (In the interests of full disclosure: I am Keith Olbermann.)

Immaculate Conceptions, nos 2-5

Joseph was getting suspicious.

For some months now he was convinced that Mary had been having an affair, but he had no proof of it. Actually, he had plenty of proof, in the form of the children dotted about his home and who now considerably outnumbered him. It was just that Mary always responded to his delicate, measured line of questioning with the same stock explanation. Thus it was only circumstantial evidence that Joseph possessed, yet the mind can often complete a jigsaw many times faster than reality. And over time Joseph had developed a simple but devastating thesis of how his wife kept getting pregnant without having sex with him.

It wasn’t that Joseph didn’t want kids. He loved kids. The sight of little Jesus romping around the cottage never failed to lift his spirits, although regrettably, he showed little interest in carpentry and the curious glow amid his head was wont to keep the household awake at night. But let there be no doubt about it, Joseph loved kids. It was just that he was rather tired of them not being his.

No alarm bells rang in Joseph’s mind when his wife announced for the second time that she was pregnant. Joseph was a little surprised, to be sure, as the pair had not had sex in almost eight months, a magical night shortly after their return from Bethlehem when the enraptured pair had embraced fiercely and taken it in turns to scream their new child’s name at great volume. This pregnancy, however, was patently the result of a different, more mysterious movement.

It was when it happened for a third time that Joseph’s ears began to prick up. “Another?” he exclaimed in a rare show of incredulity, for the pair had by this time not made love in almost two years. Mary had simply shrugged and answered his question with the words: “What can I say? God’s insatiable.”

The fourth was an unremarkable event. Mary had entered the kitchen and made the announcement that she was pregnant for a fourth time. Joseph had realised this moment would probably come and had resolved to appear as unconcerned as possible. “God again?” he asked sardonically, never lifting his eyes from the copy of the Nazareth Bugle.

But inwardly, he had determined to get to the bottom of the matter. And when Mary told him she was pregnant for the fifth time, his plan swung into action.

“Yeah, I think we should probably get rid of this one,” he said without emotion or intonation, chopping the top off his boiled egg with a knife.

Mary’s first reaction was horror, but her second reaction, hot on the heels of the first, was that she had misheard his husband. In a slow voice she asked him to repeat what he had just said. Joseph did so. Mary excused herself, went to the bathroom, and sat down, rapt in thought.

At first she thought of the shotgun in the cabinet. No, she decided, that would be cruel and unnecessary. Eventually, she resolved to do nothing, reasoning that if Joseph had failed to notice the striking similarity of the first four babies to the local butcher, there was no reason why he would not again. Besides, he had bought the yarn that their children’s phosphoric glow was not a corollary of being brought up next door to an alchemist but was, in fact, an ineffable hallmark of their divinity. Mary chuckled to herself as she remembered the tequila-laced party at which that particular line had been dreamt up.

Rush Limbaugh. Haiti. Those two things. Also, Stacy Solomon, a little

I’m not anti-Rush Limbaugh, you understand. I’m not his biggest fan either, but this merely puts him in the same bracket as every human being on Earth who isn’t Stacy Solomon. He exists. That’s OK. I don’t wish him out of existence or anything.

And he says silly things. But we’ve all said silly things. I once greeted a girl at a party with the words: “Ah, you’re the one who did the OVERDOSE! Hello!” so I’m not going to fucking moralise or anything.

All the same. If you listen to the clip above, you will hear Rush Limbaugh talking about the earthquake in Haiti. The fattest larynx in Christendom takes on the most delicate of subjects. It’s like watching one of the Transformers try a roll a cigarette.

0.02 The last person to say the word ‘Haiti’ with this much relish was Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and he’s forgiven because he was naming the country.
0.11 Actually, he’s right, but not for the reason he thinks. Western aid pours in, sturdy new buildings and a new economy rise from the rubble and in two decades Haiti thrives afresh. The greatest feats of human ingenuity have always sprung from moments of crisis. Apart from the latest Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, which appears to have sprung from a profusion of mellow drugs and a series of progressively more sensual sex toys.
0.16 Clearly Rush only knows one synonym for ‘compassionate’. You can hear him scouring his extensive vocabulary, but without success. “Suave? No, that’s not really the same meaning, is it? Supple? No, that’s not really it, either.”
0.29 It’s worth reproducing the exact terminology used here.

“They’ll use this to burnish their, shall we say, credibility with the black community – the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country…”

I have to admit that this concept is a new one to me. Obviously, I’m not from America, so I’m largely insensible to the deep imprint of race relations on a society, coming as I do from a country where the two major social demographics can be summarised as ‘X-Factor viewers’ and ‘X-Factor contestants’. But is this actually true? Are there actually ‘light-skinned’ and ‘dark-skinned’ black communities in America? In other words, are we actually saying that there exists a certain kind of black community that it is possible to be too black to be a part of?
0.31 “Hello? Is that, um, God? Barack here. No, I really enjoyed last night too. Look, I need a quake. Another one, yes… Haiti, please… What’s that? I don’t know, what’s a big number? Seven point three, that’s fine… Um, about a quarter of a million, if that’s OK? Yup. Tomorrow morning will be fine… American Express OK?”

Limbaugh’s point – because he does have one, otherwise he’d just be ranting for the sake of ranting, wouldn’t he? – is that the Haiti disaster relief fund is unworthy of Americans’ hard-shat dollars. “We’ve already donated to Haiti,” he says later. “It’s called the US income tax.”

OK, so it would be fairly easy to paint Rush as a miserly curmudgeon. So he doesn’t believe in charity. Plenty of us don’t. Who can honestly say they haven’t crossed the road, or slipped on a pair of headphones, to avoid a lurking chugger? Or pretended to be deaf? (“I’m orry! I an’t ear ou!”)

But the thing is, Rush clearly does believe in charity. Check this out. It’s the Marine Corps – Law Enforcement Foundation – a charity which our Rush is a director of. It’s ‘Certified as one of America’s Best Charities’ – because that’s the kind of thing worth competing for.

Among the other directors are Robert C McCormack, founder of private equity giants Trident Capital, and Westy Ballard, a vice president of Superior Energy Services, an oil company with operations in six continents. The charity itself provides financial assistance to the families of Marines killed in action, so their children can go to college.

So Rush does believe in charity, as long it adheres to his idea of what charity should be. It’s something that needs to be earned, by giving oneself in a just and noble cause. Like war. Impoverished brown people living in mud slicks fail to make the cut for our Rush.