Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

i've never ready anything by jay rayner but i know what he looks like and he beat me to a lovely cast iron skillet at a stall in the lambeth the country show and for that I will never forgive him.

Puzzled by the Dominican Republic line. Where is that anyway?

It's half of a Caribbean island. The other half is Haiti.

JR is good mates with a friend of mine from high school, and she invited us out for drinks to meet one another a few years ago. I like him a lot - he reminds me and my school friend of guys our age from our town - sorry he beat you to a good skillet.

it was very unusual and reasonably priced

At an event once I told someone 'Jay Rayner' was a pen name and his real name was 'Ray Jayner' and he overheard me and told the person that it was true. Legend

— JC (@jmsclee) April 25, 2019

Jay Rayner often reviews restaurants local to me (he lives round here) and it’s a very useful service.

Jay Rayner looks like Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen. If there's one aspect of broadsheet journalism that the internet should have killed off it's restauarant criticism.

this is the first time I've ever heard anyone say they didn't think he was a revolting cunt

He lives locally so I see him walking around -- always seemingly out of breath -- about once a month.

this is the first time I've ever heard anyone say they didn't think he was a revolting cunt

― ogmor, Monday, 28 October 2019 08:38 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

tbf i get the feeling you'd say this about each & every member of a certain media caste, namely the 'flamboyant speaker of one's truth'

which is kind of ironic because

xp
life is tasty, brutish and short for the professional high-class bon-viveur :p

I know a lot of ppl who hate(d) a a gill as well its true

this is some of the worst music in the world.

seems v much of a piece with the more recent wave of post-takoma guitarists who show their cloth-ears by treating the new age copycats & originals as being much of a muchness. sure there's a lot of detail which can be hard to concentrate on, but if you unfocus your ears it all blurs into a sweet mellow vibe. it's utopian in the way a show-home is utopian, bland and featureless.

if ppl's anhedonia has rendered them numb to all but the most cartoonishly saccharine & they retreat into this mush as an act of self-care then they have my sympathies. mb ppl will find the strength to engage more intensely when the political climate improves, or mb it's just indicative of ppl tending to be at their most boringly self-involved and incurious between 30 & 50. in any case I'm managing fine with solids, ta

― Jay Rayner, Monday, 21 May 2018 13:08 (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

if lj thinks i'm flamboyant tho i think it's time to call it quits

This is probably the only Jay Rayner piece worth reading btw.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/sep/06/chinese-restaurant-silk-road-london

Years before Uighurs became more known to the west. It's got that awkwardness that liberals trade in when trying to write about other cultures.

tbc i have time for both JR and ogmor and long may persist their distinct but equally lavish reviewing styles

can you kill me before you go fuck yourself pls darling

^the bracing turn of phrase we all need more of

itt ogmor resists assimilation into the southern private school wordsmithery mafia

A a gill was a cunt, and it's good he's dead

I think the only time i agreed with an a a gill piece was when he said billy connolly is an overrated unfunny cunt, stopped timepieces and all that ...

aa gill spoke to me when I worked in a call centre for a credit card company, sorry to report that he was basically polite and respectful so not really a good anecdote tbh

aa gill and amber rudd are such distinct types of cunt that its very strange to picture their marriage. hard to imagine it wasn't always snowing though.

When he left her for someone young enough to be his daughter naturally he had to write some gloating articles about what is like to sad odb.

I used to hate read him when I didn't even think about hate reading as a concept. My fave one was the umbrage taken when a girl in the supermarket told him off for calling his
daughter after a brand of margarine

i can't believe it's not bertha gill

theguardian.com is basically one big hate read for me. it is my most shameful compulsive habit because I get hooked on their live feeds of news stories and the drip drip drip of information and the delusion that details are building to something climactic and that this will be the decisive moment or the next after the next refresh. I guess it has always been known for its terrible proofreading and factual inaccuracies but the commitment to providing a barrage of info directly into the gaping mouthholes of news consumers has surely worsened standards in this regard. sentences trail off, articles provide background information that includes details they have already retracted separately in another article. frequently I get confused because by misreporting of something that I already know to be untrue and then have to double-check. Articles that report on research findings frequently report conclusions that the authors do not and could not draw from their data. I don't think the intention is to mislead but although I cant think of specific examples there have been times where I have seen pieces I found pretty lax or even irresponsible in this regard. But they have groomed me by always being there with an avalanche of comment bits, news articles fragmented into five or six separate articles. linked in the side bar. link link link. maybe the worst things are the 'funny' comment bits where people just use hyperbolic extra adjectives like marina carr or the guy from peep show. sometimes I read them and am amazed. i once read one about how *everyone* knew what a twat JRM was all the way back at Eton.

Finally, we know who’s behind the Comment is Weird tumblr...

yeah we talked of little else in the quad

srsly fuck every last one of these people

https://66.media.tumblr.com/957d47424ff2132de6b65995eddf9763/tumblr_noksriYmni1uus9j6o1_1280.jpg

needs to be two quoted sources in that article, one an office temp "in his twenties" and one a spokeswoman for something nobody has ever heard off, clearly contacted through mumsnet.

on the plus side i’ve never known as much about hyperlocal Australian goings-on as i have since reading the Guardian regularly

TBF they don't have that great local coverage, there's only about 5 people working at guardian Aus so they can't cover every 'Stand up paddle boarder eaten by crocodile' story, only the really important ones.

I did not know that A A Gill was married to Amber Rudd.

How bonkers.

"hell is other people" never seemed more a truism!

Amelia Gentleman is married to Jo Johnson, in other surprising-but-not-surprising news

Surprised to see the coming resettlement of Little Bay Islands' 54 people as the top viewed story "across the Guardian". Are these rankings localized?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/29/canada-little-bay-islands-newfoundland-labrador?&cf=1

It's the second most viewed story for me, after the Brexit live blog

I did not know that A A Gill was married to Amber Rudd.

How bonkers.

Now this is the kind of thing a newspaper is for, you wouldn't see this in the Mail:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/oct/29/jacob-rees-mogg-my-early-career-as-an-avant-garde-film-star

I mean

it's interesting

just disappointed that they were given time with jrm and didn't use it to deck him

I was at Labour's official campaign launch yesterday.

JC was inspirational.

The Guardian immediately reported it as: Doubts about JC's future.

tbf I don't think him being inspirational and there being doubts abt JC's future aren't mutually exclusive

There's an (I assume) unintended extra negative in there but otm.

Aye, too much negatives as it is.

They could have reported that he was inspirational.

No one in the thousand-plus audience heard JC, or saw the whole shadow cabinet on stage, and thought: I have doubts about JC's future.

It was a media idea, inserted by the media, which the media then reported.

They might as well have asked a question about anything completely unrelated to JC's speech -- then reported this as the story.

JC's speech said many things - notably about policy. Might be an idea to report on that, rather than things he didn't say and didn't prompt anyone to think about, except cynical media people who come with their own agendas and presumably have contempt for 99% of the people in the room.

if they report on policy though people might start liking the direction in which corbyn wants to take the country, which would be an unconscionable dereliction of duty on the part of the uk press

pic.twitter.com/u1qJqjqr1s

— Peter (@pickyouredge) November 1, 2019