Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Surely Clueless is firmly Gen X?

yeah clueless is gen x

THAT'S Y IT'S NEWS

the inevitable live blog of people writing live blogs

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/mar/17/generation-y-takeover-as-it-happens

The trend for including yesterday's "internet sensation"/wacky Youtube clip on website front pages (happens a lot on both The Guardian and Independent websites) seems a bit tragic. Makes me like both sites less than I would do otherwise. There's a skill to being click-baity - I clicked on Suzanne Moore's piece on Clarissa Dickson Wright earlier (someone I have close to no interest in) and was glad I had done.

no fucking way am i ever reading this:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/25/michael-gove-chap-hop-favourite-genre-mr-b

gave up at "My name is Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer."

toes curled so hard i thought my shoes would split

I hope everyone involved is sacked on the spot.

i read it and now i'm not sure if i'll ever stop squirming.

presume this was commissioned off the back of the zingy profile thing yesterday which basically and correctly said that this music is garbage and anyone who likes it is a shitlord. every single one of Mr B's awful fanbase signed up to comment squeakily with their own name and photo

So I bought the Guardian today to get the men's fashion special, to lookit the suits.

This has a 6-page spread on a footballer's hairstyle.

The Guardian is just trolling me at this point, right?

(It's not even his haircut, to be honest.)

The Guardian has seen the UK cultural zeitgeist and embraced it.

which footballer?

?

http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/apr/12/footballers-hair-scott-parker-tim-dowling

There's an online piece with Ken Loach, Reggie Yates and a dude from Matches critiquing various managers / players on their fashion choices, which seems OK. I have no problem with looking at sports people as 'fashion icons' in the same way as pop stars, generally. Many cultivate a look, they're hugely influential and managers are often a guide to 'adult' fashion for kids.

Why does Tim Dowling even exist. Why.

Yes, that "football managers in suits" article is also in the same issue. Also there's another article about sports presenters' style choices. I feel like I have fallen into some bizarro world I no longer understand.

I suspect that is how most people normally feel when reading style sections.

I don't know about that. I've been reading men's style sections since I was 9 (the New York Times used to do a really amazing one, OK?) and it's not like it requires particularly specialist language or knowledge? No more so than reading a supplement on architecture or a supplement on science requires specialist language?

Don't you ever feel vaguely... patronised when reading things aimed at men, and this presumption of being a colossal oaf with limited interests? Like it has to be ~bloked~ up with a bunch of football signifiers to make it palatable? I don't disagree with the assertion that football players can be and are fashion icons. But 6 pages of "Tim Dowling gets a footballer's haircut" is really an appallingly bad idea, clumsy and also bizarre.

But I do recognise that this probably has a great deal to do with my loathing of both Tim Dowling and football. I don't want either of these things besmirching my suit pr0n, so both of them together is just... extra special ugh.

I really enjoy Tim Dowling's column, I realise this is a minority opinion but he often makes me laugh.

If Tim Dowling were a female Guardian columnist writing about the banal, navel-gazing tedium that Tim Dowling writes about, he'd be ripped to shreds.

"Oh no, the Big Dog has eaten my son's shoes! I'm getting a footballer's haircut. I'm a helpless American who doesn't understand grass!" There, column filed.

Err, yeah, cause female columnists get so much easier a time than male ones.

Sorry – just woke up. Reading failure. As you were.

Wait, that's not a Tim Dowling column because I haven't mentioned my banjo playing or put in a free plug for my band! Now I can file. Where's my paycheque?

If they made a habit of bloking up fashion coverage it would annoy me but most, in the Guardian and elsewhere, does tend towards 'aspirational' and if you aren't in your mid thirties and in the market for £100 jumpers, £250 blazers and £700 suits will quite possibly look like bizarro world.

idk, I think there is still a tendency on both sides to look at a lot of young men who care about their image and like nice clothes as 'not fashion'. The occasional feature that makes fashion more relatable seems fine.

If Tim Dowling was Tess Dowling but wrote the same pieces I'd still find her funny.

why cant you type 'porn' btw, do you have an aversion to the word? is it a 'quirky' stylistic thing? does my nut in.

Isn't the female Tim Dowling just Lucy Mangan over the page? She's a bit less cringe I guess. imagine having so profoundly little to say about the world, and so thuddingly dull a way of saying it, as dim owl ting

Yeah that's why you shouldn't ever attempt humour lex

Lex, it's dim low ting.

has anyone here read Tim Dowling's novel, 'The Giles Wareing Haters' Club'?

Giles is a freelance writer of amusing articles for a national newspaper. One day, feeling particularly fortyish, he happens to type ‘Giles Wareing+unfunny’ into a search engine. And that’s when he discovers the thread. The thread is called ‘The Giles Wareing Haters’ Club’, and is entirely devoted to holding everything he has ever written up to excoriating criticism and ridicule. As Giles becomes obsessed with the thread, with tracking down its participants, his angst begins to focus on one particularly scornful contributor, and it soon becomes clear that things are going really quite badly wrong . . . A tragedy, a farce and a detective story, The Giles Wareing Haters’ Club is an absorbing, hilarious and razor-sharp look at the modern male in all his dysfunctional glory.

There is a fine line between "write what you know" and "so autobiographical as to be utterly unfunny to anyone outside of your tiny soap bubble world."

(Assuming that is not an actual parody as opposed to thinly veiled self parody.)

He has a new book out later this year:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Yp0jezNzL._.jpg

there's this as well, but I think it's a different Tim Dowling?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41NRxBhLNpL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_SX385_SY500_CR,0,0,385,500_SH20_OU02_.jpg

also looks like it's saying Tim Dowling is the nation's worst problem

Is the is the guardian worse than it used to be thread worse than it used to be?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/03/max-clifford-meeting-him-morality-media-sexism

This headline/standfirst combo is basically everything the Guardian points/laughs at when other papers do it:

Amal Alamuddin faces a very different engagement in Libya trial
George Clooney's fiancee is fighting to be able to defend Muammar Gaddafi's enforcer at a trial in which both Libya and the international criminal court are coming under attack

Observer, though.

oops wrong thread

There's something i find insufferably smug about this:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cartoon/2014/may/05/first-dog-nigeria-girls

It doesn't appear to be a consciousness-raising exercise, as anyone reading the Guardian is likely to be familiar with the story, rather an effort to shame (largely female?) others for not caring enough to do anything about it. idk.

More than 200 Nigerian girls are still missing after having been abducted by extremists, and you spend most of your days drawing dogs.

not as heinous as I was expecting, seems to be portraying the bleak futility of squaring quotidian life with the colossal horrors existing in some nebulous 'out there'

Englanders not getting Firstdogonthemoon is one of life's current joys.

in terms of reducing me to incoherent rage, The Guardian succeeds far better with absolute fucking shit like this

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/quiz/2014/apr/29/quiz-how-good-taste-films

http://www.theguardian.com/film/quiz/2014/mar/18/how-highbrow-is-your-film-taste

those really are shameful

Guardian columnist Tim Lott now writing irritating commentary in the Indie:

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/tim-lott-crime-down-good-things-on-the-up-youve-got-to-admit-its-getting-better-9287706.html

I just took the first film quiz.

It was odd. Lots of the choices were mainly blockbusters or films that have always sounded terrible and overrated.

15.Pick a film about a boat

Titanic

Battleship Potemkin

https://medium.com/p/7f4f88ade648