Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

xp

i don't think that's fair on lex. i think part of the reason most of us don't find her funny is that she's doing something different to "comedy", so it seems reasonable that people who don't like "comedy" could like her.

okay fair enough re. Hyde, but the point pertains whne Lex says stuff like this "ilx tends to think some pretty unfunny shit counts as great comedy"

I can never decide whether this thread is funny or not.

i blame the subs for that too

Libya's Supreme Guide had lost his way. His slogan of 40 years: "God, Muammar, Libya: Enough!" had lost its power. And in the end he is being blown away as surely and as brutally as an unsuspecting airliner climbing gracefully through Scottish skies.

no way

that's fucking shocking

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/23/libya-gaddafi-vicious-despot

was that in the print edition?

hey simon tisdall, you know that little knot in your stomach as you typed that last line, the one that intensified when you sent it to the subs? pay attention next time

lol that as on p6 of a national newspaper

Leaving aside the issue of taste it doesn't even work as a simile on a basic level because toppling Gaddafi took six messy months and he's still at large. He'd have had to be assassinated for that to even begin to work.

and libya didn't do lockerbie, no lorax.

sssh don't tell joe biden

tracer, i think this sentence might be even more tone deaf than the worst of the style section in the nyt

was that in the print edition?

― caek, Wednesday, 24 August 2011 17:38 (34 minutes ago)

that's where i saw it

tisdall isn't usually like this is he? or at least i haven't noticed it

i blame the subs who lurk beneath the surface before torpedoing vulnerable journalists as surely and mercilessly as their ww2 era namesakes dispatching banana boats

this sentence should have been stricken from the page as ruthlessly the lusitania was removed from the surface of the wide blue ocean, sinking with great loss of life especially to women and children fleeing the war for the safety of america

Tisdall is one of the few Guardian news columnists worth reading IMO. Perhaps tired and emotional when writing this, though.

rmde at the bbc doing a sanitised profile of latuff as well

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/aug/26/used-car-prices-fall-auto-trader <-buy auto trader! buy!

The company, which claims to be the largest digital marketplace for vehicles with 80% of all available used cars for sale in the UK (and is part-owned by Guardian Media Group),

at least they owned up to the shameless shilling

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/sep/08/andy-murray-donald-young-live

Hello! I wasn't meant to be doing this, I was doing something else with my time, but it turns out no one else was doing it. Hooray for us! Well done everyone! So here we are. Here I am. Anyway this match has been going on for the last 20 minutes or so and the big news is that Andy Murray has broken Donald Young twice and leads 5-2 in the first set.

i was thinking of reviving for something dumb about pop culture in today's G2, but i've basically forgotten what it was already. oh, it was the pass notes on eddie murphy. that was pretty dumb. also one of the front page headlines is 'police question Guardian reporter'

i saw simon munnery the other night and one of his gags was "sometimes i get so downhearted and fatalistic about the mindlessly cruel nature of the world and my inability to do anything about it that i have to have a bit of a lie down and stop reading the guardian for two or three days"

guilty, self-regarding laughter

TBF Police question Guardian reporter is a genuine story, in the context of the whole phone-hacking saga.

also one of the front page headlines is 'police question Guardian reporter'

Reminds me of one headline in The Hampstead and Highgate Express (surely the most smugly upper-middle class local paper in the world): "Teen Has iPod Stolen".

In fairness, it was the headline story on the front page of the Evening Standard yesterday. The Guardian ignoring it would look worse than running with it.

has timothy garton ash ever said anything interesting ever

did he not mention that he was in Berlin when the wall fell?

As a commentator on central / Eastern Europe he's preferable to Luke Harding, tbf. Indicative of the paucity of good writing on the area that Garton Ash's one of the less objectionable reporters.

also one of the front page headlines is 'police question Guardian reporter'

err this is kind of a big deal rly

as private eye put it, no police officer has been really done for leaking to NI over a freakin' decade. but one police officer talks to one guardian journalist and...

Indicative of the paucity of good writing on the area that Garton Ash's one of the less objectionable reporters.

― A little bit like Peter Crouch but with more mobility (ShariVari), Thursday, 8 September 2011 19:50 (2 hours ago)

idk i have only really read his comment articles which are mostly full of grandstanding WELL what BOTH sides fail to see is... 'objectivity' and the recourse to some sort of olympian perspective which allows him to grasp things that the people running the show somehow fail to notice

he's like the marcello carlin of journalism

not the best-formed 'puccini of' joke i've heard this year

rong

xxp, yep, that's a fair characterisation of Garton Ash. On the other hand, what he's competing against tends to be partisan nonsense on both sides so anyone willing to at least acknowledge complexity in the issues they're talking about is a step up, even if they're rarely all that perceptive in reality.

Was it some kind of editorial mess-up, or was Lex of this parish praising British Sea Power in today's Review section?

ERM WHAT

obviously not but WHAT HAS HAPPENED

haven't read garton ash for years, but have always been fond of a story he told about being a journalist in an iron curtain country in the 70s or 80s, re phone-surveillance

he and some dissident -- a literary type -- were chatting on the phone, not about politics (which would have been nuts) but about novels... at a certain point, some way into the chat, a third voice unexpectedly broke into the conversation, to tell them they were BOTH RONG abt such-and-such a classic author/text, and what all right-thinking intelligent readers knew to be the case was [insert opinion here]

anyway, i have always liked the notion of this impatient secret policeman, unable to bear the pretentious nonsense his targets were blabbering, being unable not to bust cover and put them straight literature-wise

xp

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/sep/08/film-and-music-playlist?INTCMP=SRCH

"This rousing 14-minute art-rock epic remains the standout of what was one of the noughties' finest debuts" -- the lex

:D

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>:(

lex otm

xp print edition F & M playlist:

British Sea Power, Lately

... This rousing 14-minute art-rock epic remains the standout of what was one of the noughties' finest debuts.

Alex Macpherson

Didn't think you would be writing that!

and oh dear

Man I really hope this isn't a hilarious attribution cockup and that there's actually a new Alex Macpherson who will be consistently repping for Belle & Sebastian and Embrace records from now on.

"Alex Macpherson on his all-time favourite album, Pulp's Different Class"

"nimble bass lines"