What A Week With(out) John Kerrison #8

Hi, I’m not John Kerrison. He’s away this week. I’m JJ Dunning. I should take this opportunity to tell you that John once failed to have sex with a girl because, with cruel timing, the tape deck in his room started playing a Lord Of The Rings audiobook at the moment where the Hobbits are about to enter Mordor.

Just so you can bear it in mind next time you see him.

So, unnecessary slander aside, let’s crack on with this What A Week round-up, which features convicted sex offenders making music, a convicted sex offender who used to make music joining Twitter, and a former child star who has reinvented himself as a lesbian. What-ho.

Easiest Headline Of The Week: Jailhouse Rock

One of the important things to remember about the Olympics is that it’s “inclusive”. The important thing to remember about “inclusive” things is that they make everything even. So, whether you’re a journeyman musician who’s never quite had the luck to break through to a mainstream audience, or just a violent sex offender with a kazoo, everybody’s equal.

Click here to watch the video.

The BBC reports this week that composer (and Elvis Costello-a-like) Mark-Anthony Turnage has been hard at work at a high security prison in Nottinghamshire, working with the inmates on a song for the Cultural Olympiad. I am not entirely sure what a Cultural Olympiad is, but apparently it is having 20 songs written for it by all sorts of people. According to a rumour I’ve just made up in a hurry, one of the other songs is alleged to feature Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall strangling a carefully arranged orchestra of goats – thin ones for high notes, fat ones for low notes – in an aggressive and visceral display of musical slaughter that will result in a pitch-perfect rendition of the 1812 Overture.

Meanwhile, back in the video, the prison band’s bassist, BARRY, (“He was doing time, now he’s trying to *keep* time” slavers the voice-over, scenting fecund punning terrain) is delighted to be a part of this lawless troupe.

“It’s a shame to have to come to prison to work with Mark Turnage,” gushes BARRY, mixing self-effacing remorse with a completely implausible ruse that he’d actually heard of the guy before he got slung in porridge. You don’t fool me, mate.

More worringly, the whole thing seems to be an inversion of an old Brass Eye sketch.

pulp – brasseye spoof – blouse

Micheal Jane | Myspace Video

P.S. The BBC’s Colin Paterson is a ledge but he does look a bit like the Brain from Pinky and the Brain (see below).

Sorry if that’s dredged up any expensively-therapied-out childhood memories, Col.

Glitter Joins Twitter

Flamboyantly-dressed 70s singer Gary Glitter has joined Twitter. The FASTIDIOUS GROOMER (sorry, problem with my keyboard) immediately accrued 10,000 followers and started arguing with Joey Barton, bagging himself some free publicity in the process.

(Say what you like about Gary – seriously, say whatever you like! -  but he’s got the hang of Twitter dead quick: from the canny username to the enticing language he uses, this guy just seems purpose-built for getting what he wants out of social networking. He’s a natural!)

Personally I think it’s great that we live in an age where two such bastions of intellect can trade crushing quips in public. I’ve heard some people say they wish Twitter was around in the days of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Bollocks, quite frankly. Big, *hairy* bollocks.

For instance:

“@OfficialGlitter @Joey7Barton I never for one second claimed that what I did was right. My past is my past,but I refuse to be lectured to by someone like you”

And two minutes later:

 “@Joey7Barton @OfficialGlitter announcing a tour? Some front u! If it is u. I personally think boiling u alive is too good for u and ur sort”

What a tremendous melange of self-righteous indignance, modern linguistic abbreviation, and creative corporal punishment. All traded between a convicted child abuser and a man who once put a cigar out in somebody’s eye. How super. Huzzah for 2012, Huzzah!

Non-Music OMG-Is-That-Really-Him? Story Of The Week

Haley Joel Osment, the small medium from The Sixth Sense, has re-emerged, this time as a medium large.

Osment, who I’m going to blithely assume is now somewhere in his early 20s, and has probably received millions of dollars of counselling in a fruitless attempt to blot out the never-ending howls of “I SEE DEAD PEOPLE” that rain down on his every trip to the shops, is set to play a gay guy in a new film called Sassy Pants.

Can I just say that you’d better be reading this because I had to go to Perez Hilton’s website and everything. I’d never been there before and it takes AGES to load.

Anyway, here’s the important bit, a picture of him in the film, looking a tiny bit like Matt Lucas, only with hair.

If you ask me, he looks more like a lesbian than a gay guy.

Genuine Actual News Story Of The Week
Delivered via extended allegory…

Outside the giant pub that is The Internet Arms, there is a beery row going on. A gaunt man who looks a lot like a ticket tout has been thrown out. He has been standing next to the pub’s jukebox with a tape recorder since the moment it opened (in 1997), and has been recording every single song blaring out of its speakers. Having been able to do this unimpeded for such a long time, he is visibly drunk on his powers (and a whole bottle of gin, let’s make this plausible). He’s made loads of copies of the tapes and has distributed them to his friends when they come in. He’s also been videoing everything they’ve shown on the TV, has scribbled his own interpretations of history in the pages of the pub’s encyclopaedia, and shamelessly masturbates in the direction of any attractive women who happen to cross his field of vision.

Clearly, this can’t go on.

Finally, the landlady, Auntie Piracy, has had enough. She’s been keeping a dossier on everything he’s been up to. She’s chucked him out and now they’re having a blazing row in the smoking area. He looks all lumpy because he’s stuffed so many bags of pork scratchings inside his jacket, and he can barely speak; partly because he’s hammered, and partly because of the three fags he’s trying to smoke all at once.

“What about Mr. Google?” he stammers, “He was doing it too!”

But his pathetic cries are drowned out by the sound of helicopters overhead. The SWAT team abseil down the walls of the pub and ram their enormous guns in his gormless face, treating him like some sort of deranged maniac (fair enough, the wanking thing went a bit far, if you ask me). They sling him in the back of their impressive van and scream off into the night.

Satisfied, Auntie Piracy turns to look at the first floor window, where she exchanges a coy smile and a small wave with the man there.

From his place at the window, Mr. Google merely nods.

YES, IT’S MR. GOOGLE. HIM AND THE LANDLADY ARE HAVING A “THING”, YOU SEE?

By God I am good at this.

Anyway, some websites got shut down this week by the US Government. If you want to do something about it, go here.