ZONE OF SELF-FACILITATING MEDIA NODES

Mbia fined, QPR mugged off

On Monday, tweets from the Twitter account of QPR's Stéphane Mbia seemed to indicate that the player was keen on a return to Olympique de Marseille and that he was stupid enough to say so via such a public channel. This was followed by press reports to the effect that Mbia's account had been hacked. Then came a further tweet from Mbia's account to the effect that the account had not been hacked. Right now (Wednesday lunchtime), this latter remark remains on the player's timeline. As promised, QPR have investigated the matter and taken action. This just in from the club's press man:

So we are to believe that even now, Mbia cannot log into his supposedly hacked account and remove the remarks written by some third party? Well, I know what we would have said at school on hearing such an obviously false story: CHINNY RECKON. BENNY BULLSHIT. FANTASY ISLAND.

What's really happened, then, is that the idiot Mbia, caught out like a naughty child, refuses to do the decent thing and admit what he's done. So the club has to give him his deserved rap on the knuckles but pretend it's for allowing his account to be hacked rather than for his real offence (i.e. mugging the club off by announcing publicly that he wants to return to his beloved l'OM). Ridiculous. Farcical. Only at fucking QPR.

more on (moron?) Mbia

Perhaps this is a feeling entirely alien to the kind of thick-skinned sociopaths writing for our nation's tabloids, but some of us can sometimes feel a bit uncomfortable when really laying into the subject of some particularly angry piece of writing. Yesterday, for example, this is my england featured a particularly heated piece about what appeared to be the moronically insensitive behaviour of QPR's Stéphane Mbia. The Twitter account of the error-prone Cameroonian had issued remarks indicating that the player wished to leave Loftus Road and head back to Marseille. 

Having dashed off a piece written in haste and in anger, the reason for feeling uncomfortable here was the lurking fear of having somehow been taken in. What if Mbia's Twitter account had been hacked? What if the player's feelings for our club and respect for our fans were, in fact, unimpeachable? After all, this is the guy who picks out some deserving-looking kid to receive the gift of a shirt at the end of many matches. This is the fellow in whom some fans feel they have seen a hard-working exception to the general disinterestedness of the Rangers team. Oops? Shame-faced retraction of angry blog posted needed?

Well, that started to look possible when The Guardian's Dominic Fifield claimed his 'paper had had contact with Mbia:

Yet Mbia, when asked to explain that follow-up, claimed he had not written the messages. "I do not know how this happened but someone must have got hold of my login and password because I did not write these things," he said when contacted by the Guardian. "This was not me. I did not write the tweets, and I have made people at the club aware of that. I saw the messages this morning and spoke with the club about them, but now I see there are more appearing in my name."

In light of this, it's hard to explain the latest from Mbia's Twitter, written just this morning:

Translation: "I want to deny the rumours of hacking on my Twitter account."

Some people might want to contend that this latest message also comes from a malicious hacker. But that's hardly likely, is it? It doesn't take long to reestablish control of a hacked Twitter account. So if Mbia's account had been compromised, the player would, surely, by now have had time to delete the offending tweets, write his own clarification and worked with the QPR media team to untangle this messy situation.

So the feeling here is that not only did Mbia write the original messages but he must have also lied to journalists at The Guardian and then decided to revert to the uncomfortable truth. So it's looking rather as if that as well as being a pretty useless player and a shamefully disrespectful twat, the (hopefully soon-to-be former) Rangers man is a rather confused person. A bit of a nutter, it seems. What are the chances of another club wanting to part with good money for such obviously damaged goods? It's a worry. Add it to the QPR worry pile.

Stéphane Mbia: MORON

Writing about QPR this season has been a pretty dispiriting business. This accounts for the lack of Rangers-related output here at this is my england over the last few months. Many a depressing game has been attended but not been written about. It's just been no fun at all. That said, some sort of bitter rant is on the cards and will doubtless appear here before too long.

In the meantime, yet another piece of dismal social media misuse on the part of one of our players cannot pass without brief comment. Here (in a since deleted tweet) is Stéphane Mbia making it clear that he'd like to return to Olympique de Marseille:

Surely it is be hoped that he gets his wish. Why should we remain saddled with players who are too fucking stupid to be subtle about having no regard for our club? It's not even as if Mbia is much of a player anyway. All that money just to totter around like a daddy longlegs on roller-skates, giving away game-changing free kicks and rolling around like a play-acting tart when an opponent breathes on him? No thanks. With any luck, we've seen the last of this waster in a hooped shirt. If not, perhaps anyone reading this might want to give him an appropriately warm reception at the next couple of fixtures - fixtures rendered meaningless by the ineptitude and gutlessness of Mbia and his pals.

that OCD cleanathon thing...

... it gets a grip of some people, doesn't it? on their hands and knees at all hours, scrubbing the floor, polishing the banisters, removing every speck of dust from every stick furniture. OUT DAMNED SPOT. RUB, DON'T BLOT. and all that. some kind of obsession. cleanliness is all. the devil is in the dirt. well, as far back as March, there were signs that this nervous condition was gripping our man stu (the mischief-making stickers and stencils maestro of Camden). further proof of this can now be seen on stu's rectangle of choice. all he bangs on about these days is clean this and clean that. the poor chap's been driven to distraction by the destruction of his art. now he's expressing this frustration via the medium of dirty van (complete with CLEAN ME finger daubs):

SUN, SEA AND BONEHEADS

Dear old Brighton. For all its faults, we like it a lot. Love it? That might be going a bit too far. But it remains dependably likeable and it's rare that a trip down there does not prove to be enjoyable. This weekend? No exception. Plenty of sufficiently eye-catching new (or new to me) graffiti, street art and whatnot  to warrant the constant snap-snap of the trusty SLR (see results below);  and, as ever, the people-watching was decent, the seaside city's residents and visitors combining to create an interesting mix... tough girls with generously-filled leggings stretched over hi-vis thongs; quasi-bohemian media monkeys with their iPads, Bugaboos and Birkenstocks; loudly chattering gaggles of excitable ragazzi, burdened by the branded backpacks of EuroTrash Language Centres.

All of this was the normal seaside stuff. Different, though, was learning on the drive down that our kiss-me-quick Sunday was to be affected to some degree by the presence of literally tens of dismal pricks, mixing their fearful fug with the better notes of fish, chips and beachy ozone. You see, as we were feeding a hungry car park ticket machine and looking forward to some family fun, a supposed March for England was getting underway down on the seafront. Various Facebook pages and Twitter feeds associated with this event would have you believe that the intention was nothing more sinister than a display of pride in Englishness, timed to occur as close as possible to St. George's Day. So you'd expect a bit of morris dancing, right? A sort of Jubilee street party vibe... tea and cakes... bunting... all that stuff. Well, not so much. Instead, Brighton was treated to repurposed football songs, badly done casual gear and artless tattoos. The March for England, you see, however much its participants may try to protest to the contrary, is a confection cooked up among the rabble this country's chaotic and mercifully short-handed far-right groups. MFE is the alphabet soup you get when you mix up ingredients such as EDL, EVF and maybe even a dash of BNP.

Of course, one of the really charming things about this mob is their insistence on provocation. The nonsense about merely celebrating their patron saint's day (What's racist about that? No one minds St. Patrick's day or bloody Diwali etc. etc.) is so obviously disingenuous because of the location of the march. Its two Tory MPs notwithstanding, the city of Brighton and Hove is home to many left-leaning folk and the atmosphere of the city is certainly sold as one of cosmopolitanism, diversity and tolerance. Whether these values are truly at the heart of the experience of living there is probably something only a resident could tell you for sure. But the reputation is there. Throw in good-sized contingents of local anarchists, anti-fascists and all that and there you have it: the perfect destination for the far-right's bickering street gangs when they're looking for their preferred kind of seaside day out. They want a hostile reception. They want to leverage that hostility when attempting to add some weight to their specious and incoherent arguments. If they didn't want to court disapproval, presumably they would go marching somewhere well-stocked with ideological fellow travellers.

No close-up shots of these charmers here, I'm afraid. No video footage of the bits and pieces of trouble that are meant to have broken out during the day. How come? Well, when you've got a 7-year old kid in tow and you're in town for the rides on the pier and a quick round of crazy golf, you're disinclined to get into the firing line of potential missile throwers or fist wielders on either side of barricades. So for proper details on what went down, and for the inevitably slanted accounts of the marchers on one hand and the much more numerous anti-march protesters on the other, you can do a bit of Googling. But don't get excited, you'll soon find that the whole thing was a bit of a damp squib. It was hardly Cable Street 2.0.

That said, we were not a zillion miles from what passed for action. Take it from me, navigating the pitted green concrete of a crazy golf course just a couple of hundred yards from all the chanting and whistling and general hoo-ha is a weird experience - not least while attempting a kid-friendly explanation of the point of the march, the nature of the marchers and the presence of so many heavily-armoured police officers. By the time we were attempting a tricky shot under a sad-looking windmill, we had, if I remember rightly, got so far into the ensuing discussion that the topic blowing the nipper's mind was the business of why his great grandma had had to run away from Germany in the 1930s. If nothing else, it was educational.

But tears looked imminent when it seemed that the repeatedly promised visit to the pier and its rides would be delayed, if not made altogether impossible. Happily, however, there was a viable route onto the pier via steps up from beach. This route, though, took our kid within close proximity of a particularly malevolent-looking fellow who seemed to have become separated from the lads with the St. George's flags and the fear of change. It was a nothing moment, really. But there was something a bit chilling about it. Yes, you might argue that when we heard about the shenanigans going on that day we should have aborted our plans for a bit of harmless family fun. But you hear that line about not letting the terrorists terrorise us out of living the lives we want to live, right? You know the kind of thing: if we become so fearful that our daily lives become constricted then we've let them win. Well, in Brighton on Sunday, we felt a bit like that about the EDL et. al. not stopping our kid from enjoying the day out we'd promised him.

Once we'd braved the creaking, rusting log flume (AKA Wild River) and the loopy Galaxia (which the Mrs. really endured rather than enjoyed), we headed back along the planks for dry land to find that the marchers had been loaded onto coaches. The last of these was pulling away as we made it up onto King's Road. What fun it was to see rows of contorted, bloated faces snarling and sneering at us from a forest of v-signs and raised middle digits. Another fun memory for the kid to treasure forever! 

After that, it was just blissfully normal Brighton stuff. Meeting up with an old friend. Getting stuck into a good supper. Snapping a few more pics. The nonsense had blown over. As seems to have been the case for the last few years, the March for England had generated a bit of noise, got a few of the locals very annoyed but ultimately left Brighton unchanged and unimpressed. 

Anyway, here are those street art pics:

I'M SO SORRY....

... writes Norwegian YouTube user and CGI wizard logitech4873 (crazy name, crazy guy, as Glenda Slagg would say?). Sorry for what? Sorry for spending SIXTY-TWO HOURS rendering his THIRTY-ONE SECOND clip of AN INCREDIBLE COLLAPSING TOWER OF DICKS. But why be sorry? If you're having a dark day (Contemplating man's inhumanity to man, perhaps? Heading to Loftus Road for today's deathwatch match vs. Stoke City RFC, maybe?), the silent beauty of these tumbling phalluses (phalli, if you're a pedant) is bound to make your spirits sore anew:

PLOTTING

PREVENTION...

... would surely be better than cure in the FCC graffiti war. this piece has not scrubbed off well:

RUNNING TODAY

as observed just last week, it really is almost impossible to do the First Capital Connect commute these days without seeing big, fresh and shiny graffiti runners. here's today's specimen: