An innovative new social ‘image only’ media site set up online specifically to receive and post images of President Donald Trump in – as the site specifies – naturally acquired [no photo-shopped or otherwise digitally manipulated/altered images] of dumb-looking, gormless, weird, obtuse and similar facial captures, crashed today when it received more than a million submissions per minute from around the globe.

The creator and owner of dumbtrumppics.com, Tay King Thepess, explained to the world’s media how he and a small team launched his site on the back of their opening day Special Event only to have this dream introduction shattered by the unexpected immediate popularity and resultant colossal global digital traffic,

I had no idea it would be this popular. Instantly! We’d customised our search engine marketing based on local usages and adapted the social media element for various languages and Boom – the whole idea ignited and blew up in our faces. Or in Trump’s face, to be precise!

Asked if the site would be re-opened, Thepess commented further,

Yes, but under a new name and with a far less appealing Special Event launch, if that doesn’t sound too counter-entrepreneurial! It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was too phenomenal as an advertising and marketing notion. Someone in the team suggested the new site name of ‘nicetrumppics.com’ and linked launch but for so many obvious reasons that wasn’t going to be a suitable alternative. We’re currently thinking of something to do with people’s lookalike pets – but not ones that resemble Trump!

Amid reports of a surge in sales of Orwell’s 1984 in response to the Trump administration promotion of ‘alternative facts’, I wonder if this will have increased hugely in value [obviously not in the league of a first edition copy of the book itself]? Enough to purchase an escape pod…..?

Who would have thought my book of a year ago would have a predictive title for subsequent events here in GB and the USA?!

People are
offended by
humourless,
deliberately Michael
Gove and
his metaphor
getasnowlife,
the flakes
of his obtuse
life and
comments

You are an asshole

No, you are an asshole

OK, I’m an asshole

Tooshay [that how you spell it?] I’m an asshole too

Bubble

The Time Traveller
was animated

eyes burned brightly,
incandescent lights
in the lilies of
his face,

and was expounding
in his earnestness:

a recondite matter to us
in this after-dinner
atmosphere,
a paradox to our
lazily luxurious bubble
of free glasses.

Haves and Have-nots

Workers

the Have-nots

continually adapted
to the conditions
constituted as
to be miserable

and Labour there
getting ventilation to the
Haves

not suffocated

not rebellious

The Project Gutenberg full text edition of HG Wells’ The Time Machine is open on my computer, ready for me to find alternative texts from within, this accidental and fortuitous approach to writing.

At the very same time, and quite by chance, the ‘Freak Out’ music compilation I am listening to plays the band Factory’s song Time Machine [1971 single release].

Far out, in so many ways.

I don’t have a problem with Tristram Hunt leaving politics and the Labour Party. Two reasons: firstly, the directorship of the Victoria and Albert Museum seems like a very attractive job for a historian, and whilst paying at least double his MP’s salary [and more, I suspect] I don’t believe it compares/competes with the more lucrative and probably sinecure’s positions most Tories and the like would and do take when they have finished with political life; secondly, I don’t feel he was a particularly effective member of the Labour Party – and I don’t mean his criticism of Jeremy Corbyn which he is entitled to make even if I disagreed – but especially as the Shadow Education Secretary pre-Corbyn’s leadership.

I have written about this before but as he departs his political life I will remind readers of his pretty fruitless and silly time ostensibly formulating Labour policy on Education:

First and foremost, I don’t recall him making any attempt whatsoever to prevent Michael Gove from destroying much of GCSE, but especially English Literature.

Second, there was his teacher’s Hippocratic Oath idea – swearing allegiance to the job – which was patronising, insulting and stupid.

Third was his Master Teacher idea which was a teacher-as-prefect notion that was patronising, insulting and stupid.

And last, just so as not to waste any more time, an exemplification of how his brand of ‘Labour’ politics and articulation of this hardly appealed to the widest possible audience, revealed in this infamous [in my recall] response to a question:

What is a left-wing approach to education? ‘I see it as a heated dialectic between Gramscian rigour and Ellen Wilkinson’s evangelism for innovation, creativity and freedom. In Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks there is this remarkable paean for the traditional rigour of the classics as being crucial for Italian working-class consciousness. On the other hand, Wilkinson, Clement Attlee’s first education secretary, argued: “Schools must have freedom to experiment, and we need variety for the sake of freshness. We want laughter in the classroom, self-confidence growing every day, eager interest instead of bored uniformity.” A modern, left-wing response to the 21st-century digital economy needs a dose of both. But where these two philosophies meet is equally important – that education is precious beyond instrumental labour market outcomes. That is something we must fight for when the right attempts to commodify it.’

There is a positive kernel of liberal sense in this, but my goodness, the verbal manure that needs to be cleared to locate is too many shovelfuls.

I am pleased that extracts from my new work Novel Finds is available to read at Stride and International Times. I also posted one on this site a few days ago. These are a sequence of found poems based on the historical timeline of the British novel ‘canon’.

It is such a challenge and such fun to write experimentally – the term will do for now – and especially Found poetry. The rules are self-selected, and can be as broad or narrow as one chooses. I set myself quite specific disciplines and like the tension between the complete randomness on one hand, and the pre-planned, self-imposed control on the other.

from The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins is here at Stride

from Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift is here at International Times