星期一 [ 2010-1-11 9:51:52 | watches1009 ]   Looking on the bright side of mugging Byline: KEITH WATERHOUSE AS IF the new crime wave weren't bad enough in itself, one of its depressing side-effects is the rise and rise of the mugging bore. As the late Al Read used to say, you've met him. Unfortunately, the mugging bore has not himself been mugged - but he knows someone who has. '... Bloke I know comes out of the Boss-eyed Cockatoo Club in Soho, broad daylight, these two druggies get him up against a wall and grab his watch. When it turns out it's not a Rolex they belt him one with an iron bar and do a runner. Fifteen stitches...' The mugging story is what the Government Shrink Tank - the unit whose function it is to persuade us that things are not as bad as they seem - would call anecdotal evidence of our preoccupation of the moment. Rolex Fake Which happens to be street crime. Until a few weeks ago it was the NHS scandal. Before that it was the state of the railways. The true megabore should be able to weave these three elements into the same story. Bloke gets mugged on his commuter train while it's stuck in a tunnel for two hours and all the lights have gone off. Drags himself off to the hospital covered in blood, where he has to wait three days in A & E before a doctor can see him. Add bonus points if they got away with his mobile. But what on earth did we find to talk about before we found ourselves up to the neck in calamities? The weather, I suppose. Yes, it all comes back to me now. Floods. Foot-and-mouth... Have they stopped manufacturing good news? The reverse, I suspect. The spin doctors carry on churning out good news statistics but we no longer believe a word of them. We dwell in the land of the emperor's new clothes. National Guesswork Authority figures show that up to 89.4 per cent of all Government statistics have been manipulated or doctored in some way. In fact, that estimate has itself been fixed. The true figure is 98.6 per cent, but it has been weighted, or rather de-weighted, in accordance with a secret Improved New Labour formula for looking on the bright side. WHAT Tony Blair needs to augment his Shrink Tank - it is certainly what he would like, if he thought he could get away with it - is a full- scale Department of Rose-coloured Spectacles, which would devote itself entirely to disseminating the good news, or 'stressing the positive aspects instead of forever harping on the negative', as it is technically called in New Labour-speak. John Prescott could stop complaining that he has nothing to do and become Secretary of State for Positive Thinking - the advantage being that as nobody could understand what he was banging on about he could never be accused of cooking the books or 'adjusting' the figures. Fake Franck Muller Watches Jo Moore, who we all understood was going to quietly resign once her 'Nine- eleven is a good time to bury your bad news' gaffe had blown over (and why didn't she?) could be his sidekick. And off we go. Instead of the number of muggings, the number of non-muggings - whole neighbourhoods mugger-free. Look at the number of cars that have not been car-jacked. Instead of highlighting the queues for hospital beds, why not turn the spotlight on the millions of people walking about perfectly healthy? And finally, the train that ran on time. [p Other articles: http://syaa.wxhqqc.com/Blog/View/?423 http://www.bdmh.net/Blog/View/?757 浏览(191) | 回复(0) |