Quotulatiousness

December 15, 2018

Season 3 of The Grand Tour to be the final one

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The TV trio of James May, Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson are giving up the show after the third season, due to begin in January, and will instead move on to “Hollywood budget” specials on Amazon Prime:

An emotional Jeremy Clarkson has revealed he will walk away from the studio car shows that helped turn him into a household name following the third series of The Grand Tour.

The outspoken presenter, 58, will give up on the traditional format employed by the hugely popular Amazon show and long-running BBC flagship Top Gear after more than 17 years.

However, fans needn’t be alarmed since Clarkson – joined by co-hosts Richard Hammond and James May – has inked a new deal with Amazon Prime for a fourth series of the show in a brand new format.

[…]

‘It’s a really sad day,’ Clarkson later told The Sun. ‘I will miss the banter with each other and with the audience. But we’ve been doing that show for effectively 17 years — sitting around in studios, watching cars race around the track.’

He added: ‘We all agreed that we’ve been doing it a long time and everything eventually runs its course. Besides, I’m 58 and I’m too fat to be climbing on to the stage.’

Clarkson, Hammond and May will now focus on a series of extravagant, big-budget specials over the next two years that will take them away from their usual studio environment.

I’m far from a petrol-head, but I’ve been a fan of Clarkson/Hammond/May for several years, and I still barely know anything about cars…

Twitter cannot hold her back – Titania McGrath speaks!

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Despite the patriarchal oppression of a Twitter permanent suspension, Titania McGrath will be heard:

My name is Titania McGrath. I am a radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice, and armed peaceful protest. In April of this year, I decided to become more industrious on social media. I was inspired by other activists who had made use of their online platforms in order to spread their message and explain to people why they are wrong about everything.

This week the powers-that-be at Twitter hit my account with a “permanent suspension” (a semantic contradiction, but then I suppose bigots aren’t known for their grammatical prowess). This was the latest in a series of suspensions, all of which were imposed because I had been too woke. The final straw appeared to be a tweet in which I informed my followers that I would be attending a pro-Brexit march so that I could punch a few UKIP supporters in the name of tolerance.

Don’t get me wrong. I have always supported censorship. Major social media platforms have a responsibility to ensure that we are expressing the correct sort of free speech. Twitter’s decision to suspend Alex Jones, host of American website InfoWars, set the right kind of precedent. I fully supported this action because Jones is known for disseminating fake news and wild conspiracy theories. But the fact that I was also banned makes me think that Twitter were being secretly controlled by InfoWars from the very start.

Indeed, Twitter’s modus operandi appears to involve routinely silencing those who defend social justice and enabling those who spread hate. In my short time on the platform, I have regularly come across hate speech from the sort of unreconstructed bigots who believe that there are only two genders, or that Islam is not a race. It’s got to the point where if someone doesn’t have “anti-fascist” in their bio, it’s safest to assume that they’re a fascist.

The permanent suspension only lasted for a day, but the experience was traumatic and lasting. I now understand how Nelson Mandela felt. If anything, my ordeal was even more damaging. Mandela may have had to endure 27 years of incarceration, but at least his male privilege protected him from ever having to put up with mansplaining, or being subject to wolf-whistling by grubby proles on a building site.

They may have silenced the great Godfrey Elfwick, but thank goodness Titania McGrath can continue to point out the absurdities and inconsistencies of the wider world.

Who were the Sea People? Bronze Age Collapse

Epimetheus
Published on 24 Nov 2018

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Who were the Sea People? and the Bronze Age Collapse

QotD: New Country music

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Eagles, more than any actual country acts, are responsible for the current denatured state of “Country” music. “In the nineties,” says Considine, “a whole generation of Stetson-topped singers and pickers insisted that the Eagles were as much an inspiration as Hank Williams (if not more).” That jibes with my experience: It takes me ten minutes to figure out whether I’m listening to a country station or some reanimated corpse of KlassiK RocK.

Tim Cavanaugh, “Why Don’t You Come to Your Senses?”, Reason Hit and Run, 2005-03-30.

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