After 11 months of dithering, three nights of barely any sleep, and one day of sweating with guilt in a showroom, I finally bought an electric car. Here’s how it’s been:
Public charging, it turns out, is a piece of piss.
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Mainstream representations of the environmentalist movement would have you believe it’s as middle class as The Guardian and white as all fuck. And while it’s true Greenpeace is, for example, as middle class as The Guardian and white as all fuck, they are not the whole of the environmentalism movement…
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In the wide world of general do-goodery there is, at present, an opportunity to right an absolute shit-ton of wrongs and restore a small bit of order and decency to a smaller bit of the universe: Voting Donald Trump the fuck out of office.
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Like most failed bloggers I prefer to think of myself more generally as a failed writer. I’ve failed to finish that novel I was working on, failed to put on that play I was thinking about. I’ve been ignored by the finest literary agents this country has to offer, been knocked back by the most prominent production companies working today and had a sitcom rejected by none other than the British Broadcasting Corporation. I’ve failed completely at the very highest of levels.
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As long-time readers of The Zero will know, I try very hard to be always slightly behind the times, a good few feet from the cutting edge, only vaguely aware of what the French call ‘Le Zeitgeist’. You’ll recall how a few weeks back there was a bit of media interest in the campaign against so-called lads’ mags and the lousy, exploitative, demeaning, sexualised, woman-hating culture they encourage. That interest having more or less died down it’s time for me to get writing like it’s something new.
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Here at The Zero we like a bit of the old feminism. We like a bit of the world view that says woman is the [racial slur] of the world, that men have been running the place and doing it badly, that men as a group have been doing harm to women as a group since the two groups first got together and one beat hell out of the other and told it it couldn’t vote for about the next 100,000 years.
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When last we met I was banging on about stag nights and homophobic banter, the two intertwined more closely than David Cameron’s tongue and the devil’s dirty bumhole. There was a lot of it kicking about and much of it incredibly immature. I never would have believed the word ‘gaylord’ was still in use, or that if it was it would be used so often, or that if it was and was being used often it would be by full-grown adults, or that if it was and they were they’d be using it on a non-ironic basis. But that’s the thing with homophobia: It’s basically everywhere.
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It’s tricky, this male feminism lark. It’s hard, looking like the enemy I’m trying to fight. My latest struggle in this patriarchal madhouse for which I am demographically responsible has been one of the toughest yet: organising a stag do. My oldest and truest friend, my most loyal and loving confidante has, in the absence of a better alternative, asked me to be his best man. What an honour. What a privilege. What a pain in the ass it’s been.
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Not infrequently have I banged on about the potential power of social networking as a force for do-goodery. Not infrequently have I banged on about the tedium of social networking in the hands of most of its users. Conflicted as I am I’m finally a big fan of Twitter, having introduced a blanket ban on friends who might want to tell the world about their old washing machines, their new washing machines or their tedious marriages. Limiting my follows to political types, right ons, social workers and general contrarians, I have a feed of wishy-washy, liberally, pinko-commie news, ideas and arguments.
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My benevolence, all towering and mighty and inspirational and that, is not only limited to my many acts of do-gooding on behalf of the poor, the disenfranchised and the dickheaded. I am also a great patron of the arts, a firm believer in the redemptive and transformational power of the legitimate theatre, the independent feature film, the Bananarama tribute act. On a recent trip to the theatre I happened upon a performance of Glasgow Girls…
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It feels like we’re about due an update on the No More Page 3 campaign. It’s been six weeks since I added my influential signature to the petition to rid The Sun of its tits and yet the quickest of flicks through the paper indicates up to ten nipples a week are still featuring prominently. Indeed, this week marked the beginning of 2012’s Page 3 Idol in which members of the public are invited to display their breasts in the hope of winning a grisly five grand and a shot at a long-term career in tit display. If ever there was any doubt that The Sun encourages its readers to judge women on the quality and condition of their breasts, here we have an competition in which its readers are actually encouraged to judge women on the quality and condition of their breasts.
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A year ago they killed Troy Davis. You’ll recall how he did 20 years on death row, how he was convicted of shooting a policeman in the absence of a murder weapon or much in the way of DNA. You’ll recall how most of the witnesses who testified against him changed their minds about what they saw, how they were only believed when they said he did it. How three times he came within hours of being killed before getting late reprieves, how being dicked around like that must have been more than a little stressful. How they killed him on 21 September last year.
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