News in Brief 11/09/21

All the horror of the last seven days in one convenient place.

A Very Mad Max Christmas.

It might seem an odd thing to say, given how utterly Boris Johnson has failed in the face of the Pandemic, but sweet Jesus, Boris Johnson was lucky Covid came along when it did.

Sure, a hundred and fifty thousand people died on his watch, but it gave him a perfect excuse for all of the catastrophes caused by Brexit. Problems with supply chains? Covid. Supermarket shelves empty? Covid. Health system horribly underfunded after ten years of Conservative austerity and Johnson’s own lies about a Brexit windfall? Probably something to do with Covid.

Despite the all-purpose excuse of the pandemic adding to Johnson’s seemingly endless run of teflon-coated luck, there might finally be some cracks starting to show, as the government has anounced that the UK is so short of heavy goods drivers that they will be relaxing the tests needed to qualify. This, you might have noticed, isn’t something that any other country has needed to do regardless of how many people caught the virus.

Still, with the new lack of restrictions designed to come in and fix our haulage infrastructure in time for Christmas, it’s nice to know that they’ll soon put basically any cunt in charge of twenty-odd tons of speeding metal and set them loose on the nation’s highways. Maybe this is some sort of brilliant plan to make us all stay off the roads and thereby reduce carbon emissions, but given that the Tory leadership can’t seem to think three steps behind what’s happening, the odds of them thinking one step ahead are minimal at best.

Personally, I’m not sure that our lack of HGV drivers is caused by the application process being too difficult. It might have something more to do with most people thinking it looks too much like hard work for shit pay, which probably isn’t helped by the fact that most lorry drivers weren’t allowed into the businesses they were delivering to during the lockdown, and as a result spent months having to improvise creative toilet arrangments after a long drive. That one, at least, could fairly be laid at the door of Covid.

What’s not the fault of Covid is that most European haulage firms don’t want to deliver to the UK because exporting from Britain has become difficult, meaning their trucks would come back empty, halving their profits.

Still, if you’d like a life of endless motorway driving and sometimes having to shit in a plastic bag, but were worried that the barrier to entry was too high, then this week has seen some great news come your way.

At Last, The Bottom Of The Barrel!

You have to hand it to capitalism: It might cause a lot of problems, but at least it consistently makes money out of stupid and unworkable ways to fix them.

Enter early oughts R’n’B star Usher, who is going to be one of the hosts of “The Activist,” a reality TV competition in which people compete to get the most online engagement for their charitable cause. The other hosts are three people I’ve never heard of and who I’m not going to read into because I might end up blowing my brains out.

There is basically no way that this show doesn’t end as a sort of happy-clappy freak show, in which people wheel out kids with increasingly horrible deformities to try to generate social media clicks. Except that they’ll be trying to spin it as inspirational and altruistic. But I’m calling it right now, even if this show starts out with charitable causes like dog rescue and literacy, the quest for ratings and online engagement will eventually see competitors trying to find the most harrowing shit imaginable to parade in front of the viewer whilst a has-been and three people who never were give advice about how to be famous.

The best charitable cause I can think to support right now is years of therapy for anyone who ever thought this would be a good idea.

Fight Night.

Evander “the Real Deal” Holyfield will be stepping back into the ring this weekend, just shy of his fifty-ninth birthday. Or, as Evander himself would put it: “Evandrrr thurrul deel Holyfuld wubbee shtepping back… uh… fight… fighting. Money. Money for fight. Which wunnayoo has my dry cleaning? No, wait, this issunnuh bus station...”

It has been genuinely horrifying watching Holyfield, a classic example of a fighter who wrongly thought the money would last forever, pumping himself full of steroids in order to continue picking up head trauma into his dotage. Comparisons of his speech patterns from his youth to the modern day are enough to make you wince more than any of the individual head shots that left him this way.

However, because we live in the worst possible timeline, a punch-drunk sixty year old boxer dragging himself around the ring for a pay cheque is only half the awful on offer, as the commentary for the fight is going to be provided by Donald Trump. No, I’m not kidding. Yes, that one.

Don Jr. has said that his dad might use the broadcast to tell viewers what he knows about Area 51.

If there’s one thing Donald Trump is known for, it’s his concise and sharp analysis of any situation, and his ability to think quickly whilst explaining things with a neat economy of language and an uncanny focus on the topic at hand.

Wait, no, the opposite of everything I just said. Donald Trump is a rambling, idiot blowhard who knows less about fighting than he does about how to satisfy a woman, and I say that knowing his wife frequently went around looking like this:

Making a senile old man commentate on the fight of another old man with different but no-less-severe-brain damage on the anniversary of a national tragedy might seem like the formula for a boring, incoherent horror show, or a bitter, satirical point about something unclear. There is, however, a slim chance that it’s going to be awesome.

In 2007, an Alabama steroid ring was busted by police and listed on the company books was “Evan Fields,” a man who shared Evander Holyfield’s date of birth. Also - some would say suspiciously - when investigators rang the attached phone number, Evander Holyfield picked up. Holyfield has strongly denied that he was using steroids, but I think we can all agree that of course he fucking was. This was fourteen years ago.

Can you imagine what experimental cocktail of growth hormone, elephant viagra and molly it must require to get a man as medically ruined as Holyfield back in the ring at this stage?! Whatever they’re giving him has a non-zero potential to turn him into some sort of unstoppable mutant Hulk-like creature, live on TV, while an oblivious and embittered ex-President and child molester complains to the audience about how nobody likes him in between blurting military secrets. I’ve got to be honest, sold that way, I’m very tempted to pay for the fight…

Advertising Space.

Elon Musk is reportedly considering a satellite that will broadcast ads in space.

For the time being, the idea is basically to fly a TV into space and have people pay to broadcast their pictures to it, allowing them to get a picture from the craft’s attached “selfie stick” of their chosen image orbiting our home planet. Everyone has been keen to stress that the space billboard will not be visible from the ground.

Yet.

Because who are we kidding? If Musk can get away with it, he’s absolutely going to end up building an orbital laser projector to fire ads across the night sky and blot out all that worthless stuff like “the stars” or “any of the darkness that humans and animals need to sleep properly.”

This is, of course, dystopian to the point of (almost) being funny, but I think we can push it over the line into actual funny if we all chip in and buy a gargantuan space ad that says “Elon Musk is a fucking dipshit.” I’m also fine with starting a trend for this by putting a tiny ad saying the same thing on his prototype space screen as a temporary measure.

If, after the inevitable collapse of human society, the only thing left as our monument and epitaph is a giant projector in outer space that tells other species that Elon Musk was a cock end of galactic proportions, I can actually live with it.

The human race. We put a man on the moon, we built some pyramids, and Christ, that Musk guy was an asshole…