As we enter the festive season with the rotting carcass of Brexit stinking up the air, as the judges of the supreme court untangle its lights and string them up there is a single sweet note reaching our noses.

Twitter has been abuzz with the news that our separation from the continent may bring back to our shores the Christmas Pie, so long known to us in only the form deemed acceptable by the unelected, unappreciated, unwanted and unenlightened Eurocrats, the hated “mince pie”.  Such has been Europe’s total domination of British culture that it’s now rare to find a person who came of age after the disastrous referendum of ’74 who has even heard the “mince pie” being called its true and noble name.

The earliest record of Christmas Pies comes from 3rd century Gnostic sects.  The Gnostics were widely regarded as heretical because of their rejection of a formal church structure, in favour of individuals working to be closer to god and it was their effort to understand the mysteries of the nativity that led to the pie.  They came to believe that by eating the animals that had been in the manger with Jesus they could get a flavour of the first Christmas miracle, figuratively speaking.  A recipe from circa 450AD – the only known pie recipe older than Mary Berry – describes a pie containing beef, pork, lamb, shepherd, mutton and donkey, mixed with grains, carrots, and beets and is described as “a goodful and hearty way with which to celebrate the Christ-child’s mass.”.

For the next 1,200 years the recipe for Christmas pies would slowly evolve, while their name stayed the same, but this was struck a terrible blow when parliamentarian, puritan and noted Europhile, Oliver Cromwell, outlawed the celebrating of Christmas.  England, still reeling from the civil war, found itself thrown into recession as tinsel-weavers, tree-baggers, toy-makers, sprout-harvesters and writers of humorous books, suitable for reading on the privy,  all found themselves unemployed.  To meet the population’s reduced living standards butchers began mincing whatever meat they could get their hands on – horses, badgers, left-over cavaliers, cats, etc. – and, these became the first mince pies.  This also associated them with poverty, enforced mirthlessness, Eurocratic meddling and occasional ‘Mr Whiskers’ tags.

Britain slowly crawled out of puritanism, but was slower to reclaim the Christmas pie.  The reintroduction of the term was most widespread in the part of the country you’re nor from and don’t visit often, as those living there will attest.

In the mid 18th century it was noticed that, other than in the first folios, all Shakespearean mentions of “Christmas Pie” had been  removed.  Presumably this happened during Cromwell’s reign, but it was the general feeling of parliament that people were used to the modified versions, so they should be treated as the definitive plays henceforth.  Authors came to regard this as an in-joke, and frequently included Christmas Pies in scenes they intended to edit or delete at a later date.  A charming example is taken from Charles Dickens’ handwritten draft of ‘A Christmas carol’ and adds some colour to a familiar scene near the end of the story…

“What’s today?” cried Scrooge, calling downward to a boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to look about him.

“Eh?” returned the boy, with all his might of wonder.

“What’s to-day, my fine fellow?” said Scrooge.

“To-day?” replied the boy. “Why, Christmas Day.”

“It’s Christmas Day!” said Scrooge to himself. “I haven ‘t missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow!”

“Hallo!” returned the boy

“Do you know the Poulterer’s, in the next street but one, at the corner?” Scrooge inquired.

“I should hope I did,” replied the lad.

“An intelligent boy!” said Scrooge. “A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there? Not the little prize Turkey; the big one?”

“What, the one as big as me?” returned the boy.

“What a delightful boy!” said Scrooge. “It’s a pleasure to talk to him. Yes, my buck!”

“It’s hanging there now,” replied the boy.

“Is it?” said Scrooge. “Go and buy it!”

“Chuck me down some money then!” yelled back the boy, his hands forming a bowl to catch the pennies from heaven.

“I haven’t any cash on me,” replied Scrooge, realising he was still in his night-shirt, “Tell the butcher to put it on my account.”

“Tell the butcher to give me the biggest turkey in the shop, on the account of the meanest man in town? He’ll think it a lark, sir, and tan my hide,” explained the boy.

“Very well,” muttered Scrooge, “Tell him to put it to one side and I’ll be round once I’ve been to the cashpoint.”

“Yes, sir, and a merry Christmas to you, sir.”

“Oh, good point, tell him to put two dozen Christmas pies aside as well!” called Scrooge, as he started hunt for his trousers.

So it was that, but the time of the 1974 referendum on EU membership, the Christmas pie was seen both as something forbidden or taboo, and also a cry back to better times, before austerity, puritanism and EU meddling.  Obviously this did not fit with Britain’s new place in federalised Europe and the government of the day quietly agreed to dampen down talk of “Christmas pies” in favour, if not in flavour, of “Mince pies”.

Here we stand then, on the historic day when MPs have backed the government’s timetable to invoke article 50 of the Lisbon treaty by March next year. Perhaps this yuletide will be the last where we won’t be cheerfully calling out, “Pass me a Christmas pie, please!”

What does the result of the Richmond by-election tell us?

It tells us that Sarah Olney, of the Liberal Democrats, will now be a member of parliament, as more of the people who voted voted for her than anybody else.

What now for Zac Goldsmith?

In the immediate future he’s going to have to stop attending the House of Commons and calling himself an MP.  In the longer term he’s probably going to have to get a different job. Hopefully one he’s good at.

What does this result mean for Labour?

It means that their candidate won’t be an MP, because only 1,515 people voted for them; far fewer than the number required to win.  In parliamentary terms this means that Labour now have exactly the same number of MPs as they had yesterday.

Who are winners and losers?

In a very real sense Ms Olney is the winner, and this was confirmed by the returning officer.  Zac Goldsmith and the 6 other candidates who stood are the losers, but in a larger sense the losers are those who predicted that either Ms Olney would lose or that somebody else would win.

What does this mean for Brexit?

While the Brexit process is far from clear this result has clarified that the parliamentary part of that process will involve at least one more Lib Dem MP and one fewer Zac Goldsmiths.

Is this the start of a Lib Dem revival?

Because of direction of the arrow of time it is literally impossible for us to be sure.  Mathematically we can be certain that, between yesterday and today, the number of Liberal Democrat MPs has increased by 12.5%.  Were that rate of growth to continue then, by Christmas, there would be 135.13 Lib Dem MPs.  Politically, however, this is unlikely.

Is it too early to start making predictions for the next general election?

No. If a general election were to take place the point we’ve labelled ‘Observer’ on this diagram then, as you can see, all predictions should be made within the past light cone.

Predictions made within the future light cone would fail the acid test for predictions, i.e. they must be about something that is going to happen, rather than something that has already happened.

What does this result tell us about future by-elections?

They will also be decided based upon who gets the most votes.

Is this result vindication of my personal theory on politics, identity, society, power, polling, Brexit, Heathrow, London’s place in the world or racism?

I’m sure your 2,500 word Medium piece will say it is, yes.

 

Washington DC, Dateline: 20 January 2025

Sadness hangs in the air today, as we gather to watch the inauguration of President Norris and bid a fond farewell to the premiership of President Trump.

Many people in the thousands-strong crowd have signs, placards or banners begging President Trump – their beloved ‘Don’ – to serve for 4 or 8 more years. One woman’s sign reads, “King Trump!!”, and there’s not even a “Fuc” at the start of it.

How different things are now to the fear and hatred which welcomed President Trump into office in January 2017.  We’ve all learned so much in the eight years that have passed since then.

 

The most shocking lesson was, of course, just how much time and energy we wasted in trying to ensure that our president was qualified to run the country.  Every political observer has been staggered by just how much more effective it has been to have a politician who is not only unqualified to run the country, but is also completely uninterested in doing so.

President Trump’s inner-circle of advisers have been very forthright in letting us know that this means that all conversations with the commander-in-chief boil down to 1 of 3 kinds:

1. The kind where they ask the President to make a decision, but he doesn’t understand the problem and can’t be bothered to listen, so tells them to do whatever they think best.
2. The kind where the President tells about his latest stupid plan, but gets bored when they start to enumerate the problems with it and then tells them not to bother.
3. The kind where they ask the President to make a decision, he makes a stupid one and then gets bored when they start to explain why it’s stupid, so just tells them to do whatever they think best.

In practice this has meant that the duties of the President boiled down to:

• Appearing on TV
• Signing things that are put in front of him
• Pardoning Thanksgiving turkeys

President Trump has excelled at all of these things, and expert staff have excelled in getting on with everything else.  The marriage of ignorance and inattentiveness has birthed us into a new enlightenment.

Back in 2020 we saw Michelle Obama – smart, tough, qualified and much loved by the left – try to topple this new order and fail and, this year, we’ve seen a rush to the bottom from the record number of contenders for the Republican Party nomination.

I imagine that when Milo threw his hat into the ring he truly believed that, as has been the case for most of his life, he was the worst a human could be.  How humiliating it must have been for him to be defeated in the first debate by a GIF of his own face pasted into a loop of film from a scat-porn.

When Norbert Norris – then an unknown 48 year-old from Nebraska – was selected as the nominee the Democrats realised the fight was lost and put up their candidate with so little campaign spending that even The Washington Post only ever referred to him as “some lawyer guy”.  Really he was lucky to get 51% of the popular vote.

Norris – who will become President Norris very shortly – is a high-school drop-out who plans to follow Trump’s examples of not living in the White House or surrendering control of his business interests to, instead, stay in his parents’ basement and continue to run his 2nd-hand car lot, and who says he will fit in being President at the evenings and weekends, when everybody else is out of the house, and has asked for his presidential salary to be paid entirely in subscriptions to cable porn channels.

From here it is hard to believe how apprehensive people in 2016 and 2017 must have felt as Trump appointed his first cabinet; white supremacists, deniers of evolution, the big bang theory and climate change, rogues and charlatans.

The expectation was that these people would radiate their ignorance to the country…but ignorance is a privative, it is darkness that is driven out by the light.  We took these people, who weren’t just ignorant but were leaders in their fields of ignorance, and put them in situations where they had to listen to experts.  We educated them.  We educated the people who were trusted by , idolised by, followed by, read by and shared by millions upon millions who shared their ignorance and, in doing so, we made them the spreaders of knowledge.

In the dark ages, pre-Trump, we used to think it was shameful that icons could be so uneducated, now we realise that what was shameful was that it took us so long to realise how easily that could be exploited.

I can now see Britain’s head of state moving to his seat on the platform.  This has been an amazing 8 years for that plucky little island as well.  The Brexit vote was a godsend to them, and not just because it meant that they were out of the EU before its ruinous collapse, which left its former member states begging to become part of the New British Empire, it also showed the British that if they voted for something – no matter how stupid, expensive or impossible – that they would get it.  In 2016 they’d never had dared dream that today they’d be represented by a clone of David Bowie, or, to give him his official title, The Thin White Duke of Edinburgh (although I still weep that fewer than 10,000 votes kept us from Emperor McEmpireface)

President Trump’s motorcade has arrived and the president is making his way to his seat, his trademark limp from the time he bet The New York Times that he could fly still very much evident.  And how frightening the dawn of post-truth politics must have seemed to those simple souls back in 2016.

To their oldthink minds it looked like politicians were getting away with lying.  Of course politicians had been getting away with lying for years, post-truth simply meant that nobody cared if they were lying any more.

What a boon to society and civilisation.  What a glorious day when we discovered that the truth couldn’t hurt those in power.  What a magnificent achievement for humanity that we could become so apathetic about what others thought of us that we wouldn’t even spare the effort to lie to them any more.

We all remember the protests in ’18 and ’19, when thousands of journalists ran riot in the streets, protesting that there would be no more political scandals because literally no-one gave a shit.  Those days of No-more-gates-gate where when we realised that the evil geniuses, like those in Bond films, could now explain their plot to the hero and let them go, because they could tell who the fuck they liked.

If war is peace and freedom slavery then lies are honesty and President Trump has made politics an honest man’s game.  By the third time he briefed reporters that he’d had somebody killed none of them were even bothering to take notes.

So, as President-elect Norris comes to the stage, to take the oath given by Simon Cowell we say goodbye to Trump’s presidency – an era which brought us wisdom from indifference, education from stupidity and truth from apathy and only really cost us the lives of those who disagreed with him, the minorities and our own self-respect.

God bless you, President Trump.

 

 

Donald Trump’s election to the office of president this week has given us the rare opportunity to, as an entire species, stop and take stock of where we are and how we got there.

Despite my 20-year campaign to treat the whole of the Internet as a write-only medium I have taken the time to read the opinions of others, and if this week’s news has done anything it is to create a glut of opinion.  In accordance with the age-old laws of economics when a surplus of opinion meets an unchanging demand for same the value of opinion falls.

Thanks to my reading I know that Donald Trump’s election was as unforeseeable as it was inevitable. Unscrupulous pundits misrepresented accurate polls, while cute pundits studiously  presented inaccurate polls.  The right people weren’t polled, people on the right weren’t polled, the people who were polled weren’t right, there aren’t the right people polling.

The working class were to blame for getting Trump elected, especially the working class who are also the middle-class and the high earners.  They dealt a blow to the establishment, who are delighted by having one of their own elected.  Blacks, Latinos and Democrats stayed at home, with Trump’s support coming from blacks, Latinos and traditionally Democratic voters.

The third party candidates took votes from Trump and handed him the victory and, thus, are entirely to blame…in a blameless sort of way.

Many racists voted for Trump and we must listen to their concerns, while also ignoring their concerns, vocally rejecting their concerns and conceding that their concerns weren’t a key factor in this election.  Fascists, emboldened by Brexit, recognised that Trump was an entirely different kettle of fish to Brexit, but voted for him anyway…and they aren’t really fascists. Unless they are.

One thing is for certain, Trump’s election is bad news for Corbyn.  Unless it happens to be good news. Although there’s a good chance it makes no difference at all, obviously.

As a president Trump is certain to carry out the outrageous promises he made on the campaign trail while he’s busy discovering that he cannot simply carry out the outrageous promises he made on the campaign trail.  He’ll be dictating the agenda to the GOP while they dictate the agenda to him, which will lead to a government whose agenda  is simply a feedback loop.  The Republicans will reign-in Trump, while he drags them to his democratic roots and, anyway, the supreme court will rigorously enforce the limits of executive power…a case of putting the court before the arse.

It seems most likely that Trump will be the first two-term president to be assassinated before taking office and impeached in his first year while handing over to the VP because he simply isn’t interested in doing the job.

Liberals go on-line to express their fear that Trump’s election has emboldened the alt-right while alt-right go on-line to write “nigger” and “special snowflake”, which is exactly what they’ve been doing for the last 8 years, except that the on-line liberals they’re upset about aren’t cowering in the safe-spaces (which they hate), but are out protesting on the street (which they hate) and not on-line at all (which is confusing) and it’s anybody’s guess whether all this is the fault of the people who get triggered or the people with the actual triggers.

At the end of it all the important thing is that I’ve learned a valuable lesson; opinions are like arseholes…I’d have been much happier if I hadn’t gone on-line to see yours.

 

 

Note: On this very special day I am delighted to announce that we have a very special guest blogger, Joseph Essex III.  Dr Essex was appointed professor of applied temporal physics at Oxford University in 2116 before being appointed to the role again in 2113 and then, finally, being appointed to the role for the first time in 2110, following the tragic deaths of many better qualified and more ethical academics.  Please make Professor Essex feel welcome.

I am a frequent visitor to the 21st Century, coming to seek the three things that aren’t easily available in 22nd Century Little England; French food, existential dread and gambling in rooms that don’t have temporal shielding.  Whenever I visit I’m frankly appalled by how ignorant people in this time period are as to the practicalities of applied temporal physics.

This job isn’t all swanning round space and time with Karen Gillan or Jenna Coleman, you know…indeed, thanks to budget cuts, that’s barely 20% of the job anymore.  I literally spend twice as long lecturing as I do showing all of the marvels of history to some young totty in the hope that she’ll be amazed out of her pants!

But what really gets my goat is that every time I let slip to someone from your period that I’m a time-traveller the first thing they ask is, “Why haven’t you killed Hitler?”

Always with the Hitler.  Here I am, a respected academic, and all you want from me is that I act like the star in some terrible B-movie.

I know you people don’t have time-travel yet, but you could at least study history.  Do you imagine that you can just kill Hitler in isolation and have nothing else change.  You’re living in the era that coined the phrase “the butterfly effect” and yet you imagine that you can just blow Hitler’s brain out and things will carry on as normal.

Do you imagine that he was single-handedly responsible for WWII and the Holocaust? Do you imagine that he wasn’t just the figurehead for a populist movement seeking an easy route to power?  That if he wasn’t around then somebody else wouldn’t have stepped into the exact same role?

And even if we could stop those things happening, look at the global changes that war effected; the UN, the modern state of Israel, the air of optimism that birthed the NHS, the air of randiness that birthed the baby-boomers…who went on to vote against the interests of the NHS because they wanted the money for their pensions, the political shift away from fascism and the far-right, The Great Escape.  If you want to preserve all of these things then you can’t just be arming yourself with a gun suitable for baby-shooting and heading back to 1889.

So please don’t ask me again; I haven’t shot Hitler because, sometimes, terrible things are necessary to bring about huge positive changes.  It’s sad, but that’s how history works.

Totally got your back on President Trump, though…and you are going to love Oliver Stone’s DJT.

A lot has been said about democracy this week, and with whom it lies.

To a large number of Leave voters three judges have stood in the way of democracy, by delivering a verdict that frustrates the will of the people.

To a large number of Remain voters the judges are protecting democracy, by ensuring that our government is answerable to the courts and must operate within the law.

When we speculate who the defenders of democracy are we uncomfortably avoid making eye contact with the huge misconception at the heart of it all…that democracy is the name we give to the lie that we don’t secretly believe that everybody else is a fucking idiot.

Thirty-three million, five hundred and seventy-seven thousand, three hundred and forty-two people voted in UK’s referendum on June 23 this year.

The 16,141,241 who voted ‘Remain’ think that the 17,410,742 who voted ‘Leave’ are fucking idiots…and they’re right.

The 17,410,742 who voted ‘Leave’ think that the 16,141,241 who voted ‘Remain’ are fucking idiots…and they’re right.

The 33,551,983 who voted either ‘Leave’ or ‘Remain’ think that the 25,359 who spoiled their ballot paper or otherwise cocked-up putting a single cross into a single box are fucking idiots…and they’re undoubtedly right.

Now I’m sure some people, on both sides, weren’t idiots, but the issues of remaining or leaving are extremely complex, they cross over law, trade, diplomacy, history, accounting, sociology, economics…you don’t so much need to be a polymath to be well read on all of those subjects as an immortal who has been cursed with eternal diarrhoea.

How many voters really had an in-depth understanding of all of those issues?  Three-thousand?  One percent of one percent.

I’m lumping myself in with this, by the way.  I voted ‘Remain’ because I think that immigration is broadly a positive thing, that the economy would be harmed by us leaving and because all of the politicians on the ‘Leave’ side were simply appalling examples of humanity.

Of course, to counter that, I live in Northumberland, which has an extremely low number of immigrants.  Possibly if I lived in an area of high immigration I’d hate it.  I know nothing about economics at all, other than having gained an ‘Unclassified’ grade at A-level nearly 30 years ago (I skipped a key exam because I was on a promise. I stand by my decision, but it does add to the case for me being a fucking idiot).  My wife laughs about the stupid people at her work who voted ‘Leave’ just because they hated David Cameron and wanted to oppose him, and I haven’t the courage to confess that I’m really just as stupid, except that I hate Nigel Farage.

This week’s judgement has upset some of the Leave voters because they recognise that, in the face of expanding suffrage, it has been Parliament’s job to maintain the pretence of democracy whilst simultaneously keeping the number of fucking idiots running the country at a manageable level of 650-ish.

Or maybe they don’t recognise that. They are, after all, fucking idiots.

Our love of democracy stems from its openness; it allows people to air their views, so that we can easily find those who share our views and huddle together with them, like moths around a candle, believing that if we all think the same thing then we can’t all be fucking idiots.

It is the tragedy of democracy that this is not the case.

Those who want Brexit are fucking idiots. Those who think that Parliamentarians or the House of Lords are going to save them from Brexit are fucking idiots. Those who imagine the country uniting behind Corbyn in a snap general election are fucking idiots, as is anyone hanging their hopes on the Lib Dems, and those of us who don’t have a plan but think it’s fun to laugh at all of the other fucking idiots…well, we’re the biggest fucking idiots of all.

Whatever you think about poppy wearing you are wrong.

Even if you have a PhD in fashion biology and have spent the past 27 years writing about the family Papaveraceae you are still wrong.  I know this because I have a blog.

Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II.  Because I was young when they died I have no meaningful memories of them, which arguably gives me no closer a connection to them than you have…but, in a larger sense, doesn’t it justify any old nonsense I want to write?

They fought for and, much later, died for my right to build straw-men, and it would be a bitter insult to the memory of them that I barely have not to do so!

I read an A J P Taylor book once and, on this, the centenary of one of the years in the First World War – the great war that birthed the greatest generation who birthed the generation who birthed The Generation Game – I wonder if, in 100 years time, we’ll be remembering the youth who, year in, year out, urinates on a war memorial.

I don’t think so.

But perhaps we should…because of freedom.

Maybe, in the 2016 poppy war we should all take a moment to reflect that, for many, the greatest tragedy is non sequitur, ad hominem, #MakesYouThink.

Until next year, then.

Last month, in response to a suggestion by Daniel Hannan (a man who always justifies Brexit with the air of an undergraduate who, after a pint of cider, will propose betting £5 that he can convince you that Stalin would have excelled in Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet) that post-Brexit it was in the EU’s interest to maintain the status quo and continue to allow us access to the single market, I wrote the following:

That was just a silly joke, but the more I thought about it the more I realised that Costco isn’t just the perfect analogy for the EU, but they should be running the EU.

I don’t think the EU is perfect and neither is Costco, but the way they’re imperfect is magnificent and utterly loveable.

My local store – the only one I’ve ever been to – opens with TVs.  A giant, concrete-floored warehouse with shelves towering 30 feet above you, surrounded by the largest TVs available to humanity, is the worst possible space imaginable to gauge what size TV will fit in your home.  I can cheer myself up on any visit to Costco by speculating that anybody who actually buys a TV there finds themselves leaving with something they believe to be the size of an old B&W portable and arrives home to find they actually have a telly that’s 80% of the size of the wall they’re planning to mount it on.

It’s not just imaging the misfortunes of others that makes Costco great, they also make trade fun.  Like the EU they may have commerce as their lifeblood, but they rise above the ordinary, everyday shops.  Some of their produce is cheap if you buy in unimaginably large qualities and, unlikely as it may seem, there a certain happiness to be had from being in a position to think, “I feel a little flush this month…I might pop out to Costco and buy myself a decade’s worth of toilet paper.”

A lot can happen in 10 years, empires can rise and fall, but you can face it all knowing that, whatever else, you won’t have to wipe your jacksie with a cardboard tube, so you’ll reach the end of it both spiritually richer and financially better off.

One of my favourite moments in Costco was seeing, about three shelves up, a cardboard box the size of a double-bed, upon the side of which was printed the legend, “King Edwards – Entire crop”. How hard-hearted would you need to be not to love that?

It’s not just about bulk buying at low prices, of course.  Some things – especially meat – aren’t any cheaper than you could buy in a supermarket, but are higher quality.  This is how regulation should be – you pay a little more than you absolutely need to, but you get something that’s better.  The EU finds this the bane of its life, but in Costco literally nobody is standing by the meat counter shouting that they want cheaper stuff that isn’t as good.  Why?  Well perhaps its because if you stand next to a chiller full of beautiful steak shouting that you want cheap crap then you sound like an idiot.  The EU needs a few more people donning hairnets on a Saturday to hand out free samples of its best produce to convince everyone that premium products are best.  If nothing else it will breed a new generation of support, because my kids – who react with the suspicion of Kurt Gödel if they’re given anything slightly different at home – will happily down plastic beakers of lilac scented fabric softener if it’s been given away free at a Costco stand on a Saturday.

The children are our future…the ones who’ve OD’d on Comfort less so.

Finally there are things which are neither cheaper nor better than their equivalent in Tesco. I’m thinking mainly about alcohol here. You can buy the same drinks at probably a slightly higher price than, say, Asda.  Crucially, however, nobody in Costco judges you if you happen to be buying 24 bottles of whisky and one of their giant pizzas.  This tolerance of any and all is as central to the Costco experience as it should be to the EU.

Take the issue of the burka – in Costco it’s a non-issue because literally no living person owns any combination of clothing that is not appropriate for shopping in Costco.  You feel uncomfortable seeing somebody wearing a burka in public? Just move to the next aisle, where a man in a Winnie-the-Pooh adult onsie is arguing with a woman in an evening dress about whether the TV in their trolley is too large to fit into their flat.  You can’t walk around Costco thinking, “They look strange”, because you’d literally never to the tills, and that means a decade of having to wipe with double-glazing fliers, that are far too shiny for that purpose.

There you have it, then.  Costco have a model where you pay to be a member and, in exchange, you get no-nonsense trade of spectacular breadth.  Which other single store could you wander into and come out with a whirlpool jacuzzi, a 6ft tall teddy bear, 5Kg of oranges, a set of tyres for your car and a new pair of glasses?  And no-one complains.  No idiots write letters like the one at the start of this blog demanding they’re allowed to trade without paying to be a member. Nobody harangues the doorman, demanding to be let in without their membership card.  Nobody says, “Well, actually, I don’t like the giant hot-dogs, actually, so I should get a reduction in my membership fee, actually.”

It all just works.

I neither know nor care who the faceless, unelected, unanswerable bureaucrats behind Costco are, but we desperately need them running the EU – something else we need to just work.

In the game show Who wants to be a Millionaire the most effective life-line is ‘Ask the audience’, which delivers the correct answer more than 90% of the time. Statistically it’s far more likely to be right than phoning a friend, even though, presumably, everyone picks the cleverest friend they know to phone in their moment of need.

This, I suppose, is at the heart of the Brexit situation.  Experts say that bad things are currently happening and that worse things are coming, but the public are sick of experts, the wisdom of the crowds has chosen for the UK to leave the EU and nobody wants to call the voters stupid for voting as they did.

Let’s take a step back.  Why does asking the audience deliver such impressive results?  There are, broadly speaking, two choices…

1. The audience is composed of geniuses
2. The audience are normal people, and some other force is at work

Let’s assume the answer is (2) and see what this other force could be.

Imagine a question is asked of such a difficulty level that only 10% of the general population know the answer.  If our audience has 200 members that then suggests that 20 of them know the right answer.

What about the rest of the audience? They don’t know the answer, but they’ve got a 1-in-4 change of getting it right, so they might as well guess.  If the guessing was totally random then we’d expect each of the 4 possible answers to get ¼ of the vote.

From our audience of 200 we have 20 people who know the answer and 180 that are guessing, so each of the four options should get 45 votes (¼ of 180), and the correct option will get those 45 votes plus the 20 votes of the people who know the correct answer.  So, with perfectly random distribution, three of the answers will get 22½% of the vote and one answer – the correct one – will get 32½%.

Democracy works!

Why then is the Ask the Audiences’ success rate high, but not perfect?

Consider what happens if we make our question harder, so that only 2% of the audience know the answer.

Now, from the 200, we have 4 who absolutely know the right answer and 196 who are guessing.  With perfect distribution we’ll get 3 answers that 49 people plump for and one answer, again the correct one, that 53 people select.

Democracy is still working, right?

Well, the killer here is the phrase “perfect distribution”, which means that everybody who doesn’t know the answer makes a completely random choice and that those random choices balance out so that everybody making a random choice spreads it evenly over the possible answers.

However, consider this question:

Which of these celestial objects is the smallest?

A. Mercury

B. The Moon

C. The Sun

D. Pluto

Now distribution isn’t perfect, because most people know that the sun is huge.  Some people don’t know that and some people will just select any stupid answer you give them (believe me, I work in market research), so a small minority will pick option C, but the rest will scatter their answers over the remaining 3 options.

Before we ask the audience let’s use another life-line and go 50:50.

Which of these celestial objects is the smallest?

A. Mercury

B. The Moon

C. The Sun

D. Pluto

We know that 4 people in our audience know the answer, the other 196 will vote based on what they think, using a whole raft of rationales to justify their answer.  The wrong option will get, statistically, 98 votes and the  right one will get 102.

In other words, even if everything goes perfectly, the final result will be 49% vs 51%. IF, and only if, it just so happens that all of those people guessing guessed perfectly randomly AND those random guesses happened to be distributed evenly.  If either of those assumptions is wrong, even by a little bit, the margin between right and wrong is so small that we end up in one of the situations where Ask the Audience delivers an incorrect answer.

If this was for the £1 million question would you gamble based on the 51% result and risk losing £468,000, or would you take the half-million and walk away?

If you take the half-million quid you’re not insulting the audience, just accepting that the majority of people who answered were guessing the answer.  The audience wasn’t filled with expert astronomers, it was filled with ordinary people who applied what they knew to a very finely balanced question and delivered a result which may or may not be right.

Just because you don’t want to risk gambling a huge sum of money on their guess doesn’t make democracy fundamentally broken, it just means recognising that people didn’t become experts on heavenly bodies just because they were asked a question on them.

In the same way that people didn’t become experts on economics, immigration, law, trade, etc. just because they were asked to vote on the UK’s future in the EU.  The strength of their opinions isn’t proportionate to the depth of their knowledge…and I’m talking about people on both sides of the debate here.  A tiny number of people on each side of the campaign had a realistic view of what their answer entailed and the rest of us guessed, and we now find far, far more than £1,000,000 riding on…well, riding on whether, as Chris would ask:

Here we are then at instalment 7 of the Dickshark saga, or, if you prefer old money, the one 4 after I should have shut the hell up about Dickshark.

If you’re new here and wonder why I’m writing my 7th blog reviewing a film that doesn’t deserve one-seventh of a blog then start here.

If that seems like too much work then just know this, we’re one hour and six minutes into the film and, to quote Charles Darwin, “I hate the Dickshark as no man ever has before”.  Every time I start a new blog I swear it will be the last, that I’ll watch the whole film and rattle off 800 words on how dreadful it all was and move on with my life…yet every time the dreadfulness catches me in its web.

Maybe, however, things are looking up, because the next scene opens in a new location and, right off the bat, tells us the name of the woman in it – Jill.

Bill and Jill have a very short conversation. We find out that Jill is his ex-girlfriend, who “still welcomes [his] gaze” and who enjoys sunbathing in the forest (so that the leaves provide a natural diffusion filter, rather than her having to apply the toxic chemicals in sunscreen to her body)…and that’s it for this scene.

The whole thing lasts less than 90 seconds and seems, to my untrained eye, to be utterly pointless.

Let’s not dwell on that, though, because another bikini-clad young woman is going for a swim (in slo-mo, natch), unaware that the titular monster is entering the water.

While our (once again) unnamed heroine slips off her bikini the shark edges closer.

As the shark swims closer it uses some kind of hitherto unmentioned psychic powers (indicated by wavy red lines on the screen) to entice the bather into performing oral sex on its dorsal penis, meanwhile, unperturbed, a duck swims by in the background.  No, really, she’s giving a blow-job to a rather manky looking rubber dick and there’s a duck happily swimming by right behind her.  Nobody on this film was even concerned enough with continuity to shoo the duck away, to stop it disappearing between different angle shots.

After a very short length of time (stretched out to eternity by the combination of slow-motion and that fucking no-name metal/grunge band who are providing the soundtrack) our fellator spits out what appears to be half a pint of milk.  Not yet satisfied the dickshark returns, backs her against a pier and starts having sex with her, possibly driven to new heights of lust by the cameraman’s discovery of how to use fish-eye lens shots.

This intense moment of the film doesn’t quite make it into the horror hall of fame because it’s transparently obvious that the dickshark (a) is only having sex with the woman courtesy of her pushing and pulling it in the right directions and (b) clearly floats on its side, just like a real shark.

Who knows, maybe if the shot had been fleeting, or filmed in near darkness then this could have looked like a terrifying aquatic rape, but Bill Zebub isn’t one to fall foul of such clichés.  The shot is in full daylight, so that we can see exactly how shoddily made the shark is, and, like most of his scenes, lasts as long as the camcorder battery.  It’s not often you find yourself thinking, “OK, I am now bored with watching this naked woman fuck herself with a poorly constructed phallic shark”, but this film affords you that rare treat.

Even the director, unschooled as he is in the ways of film-making, seems to recognise the boredom creeping in.  This can be the only possible reason he cuts away from the rape for 30 seconds to show the viewer the ducks again.

Back with, you know, the plot (such as it is) the shark appears to be satisfied (more milk has appeared in the water) and its victim makes it out of the water and onto the pier…where she spends 90 seconds getting to safety, mainly on all fours, naked and with the camera following her.

Now there are two ways to do that shot:

a. Tastefully; have the camera high, looking down on the actress’ back, perhaps focussed on her shoulder-blades.  This allows you to see her fearfully looking behind to see if the beast is pursuing her, or

b. Exploitatively; with the camera low so that hopefully none of your target audience will give a flying-fart whether she’s looking behind or not.

Guess which one is used.  Go on, just guess.  You can phone a friend if you want.

Then that scene suddenly ends and we’re treated to a spectacularly bad special effect of two speed-boats crashing into each other and then the most extraordinary thing…

We may have just had 90 seconds of starring at a rape victim’s vulva, but surely the inclusion of a dressed woman, who’s on-screen for at least 2 seconds, shows that Dickshark is serious about its ‘not a porn story’ credentials.

This apparently was a commercial for ‘Mako boat body repair’. I don’t know why it was in the film. Perhaps it’s going to be relevant later. Perhaps it’s a real boat company. Perhaps the director is just throwing every scrap of film he has lying around his house into this movie.

Actually, probably that one.

Almost as soon as the commercial starts it’s gone and over a visual of a pair of buttocks a woman protesting, “I don’t see why I have to be naked”.

No, nor do we, but that’s a mystery for Dickshark VIII to solve.

The review continues here