As is often the case nowadays, I felt a lot less knowledgeable and informed after I had read the Sunday papers yesterday. I read that Bush is scrabbling around trying to save his face, that here in the UK the Labour party has hitched onto the idea of the 'mid terms' because they can't think of any other vehicle to distance themselves from any of the many unpopular agendas they have promoted to date (or lately anyway), and that Britney Spears' ex husband allegedly taped them having lots of sex on their honeymoon and wants a zillion dollars for the tapes. I think I could have guessed most of all this without the guidance of our Sunday sages and columnists and editors and reporters and snoopers. (Actually, I think the snoopers are the most legitimate. At least they are trying to give us information we didn't have before we opened their newspapers.)
Every weekend, mrs househusbandnot and I feel duty bound to trawl through acres of print, but we never feel we have actually learned anything. (Three full pages on David Hare? Did anyone other than his family really have time to read all that?) Am now considering a pro-environment anti-newspapers stance to see if I do actually fail to keep up to date with the news if I don't read newspapers for a while. I'm guessing I would miss out on the occasional celebrity death, and maybe not know who the shadow minister for snow is going to be this winter, and on more ping pong journalism about our world leaders, but I reckon I would still be able to hold my own at a dinner party on current affairs etc.
Actually, that's the problem with the Sunday papers isn't it. They are looking to give us enough information to get away with gentle dinner party conversations, to appear informed, and opinionated, and 'political', and 'cultured', without educating us in anything other than the most subjective and middle class manner. Serves me right for reading middle class newspapers I guess. Or for expecting to get anything other than what they are offering.
Maybe I am looking for information/entertainment in the wrong places. I borrowed a fistful of CDs from Styx after our lunch on Friday. Going through them will be much more exciting that reading The Observer music supplement. And the latest leaflet from the Jehovah's Witnesses kicks off by asking me to "Picture the scene. A harlot is sitting on the back of a fearsome beast. The beast has seven heads and ten horns." Now there's something to get you thinking. (mrs househubandnot, if you are reading this, I haven't converted I promise.)
Actually, to some extent I blame my dissatisfaction with the Sunday newspapers on househusbandnot. I now know exactly how easy - and hard - it is to write something about nothing.
Incidentally, excellent lunch with Styx on Friday. We went to a Scandi-Eastern European restaurant called Baltic, and drank vodka cocktails and had a long discussion about how men and women watch television in different ways. Best news feed I've had in ages.
the ongoing saga of pretending to be a house husband in the new millennium
Where's Vinderama?
8 comments:
since when was the snooze of the world a middle-class paper hhn?
Re the gender-differential in TV-watching skills. That sounds like an intriguing avenue to explore - what were the salient points of Styx's theory?
Styx? You were saying on Friday that you are often tempted to comment to househusbandnot?
STALINIST CENSOR - SITE NEEDS PURGING IF YOU CANNOT ACCEPT OPEN CRITICISM
Often tempted, but have never succumbed ......
damn!
I think the inter-sex tv-watching differences waffle was inspired by the recent episode of The Sopranos? It went something along the lines of: "Men relate the subject matter to the general human condition, while women relate it to themselves and their family". Sound familiar, hhn?
Of course, we also discussed the pointlessness of fast-forwarding the ads on sky-plus when mrs styx is hyperactive and likes to go for a walk every 15 minutes - very frustrating for the dedicated couch potato.
In my younger years 'inter-sex tv-watching' amounted to something rather different from Styx settling down in front of the telly with pipe and slippers. Come to that, 'pipe and slippers' amounted to something rather different. And come to that, 'something different' amounted to something different...
And traffic to househusbandnot doubles. Styx in da house. (Last time - or vaguely last time - I saw blokeihaventseeninages - he was half naked and trying to get a parrot to eat seeds out of his belly button, so he's not lying about how things have changed.)
I wouldn't let a parrot anywhere near my sagging thorax - it was a cockatiel, if memory serves. And the seeds were from a health food shop, so no problem there. Why does hhn feel the need to be the architect of controversy?
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