I think this is awesome! Should be done more often, gives people perspectives on areas they wouldn't otherwise know or think about.
I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
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Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#62Maybe now the crappiest places have something common that should not be mentioned.
Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#63A fellow Elbonian made a book [1] depicting the ugliest places in our town. Despite the tongue-in-a-cheek mood it's a great piece of nostalgia trip spiced with some interesting local history lessons. He also have an automotive youtube channel dedicated to popular old cars and he loves to film them in these obscure and sordid locations mentioned in the book. EDIT: fun note - when MS released their first digital encycl…
"We do our best with the worst."
Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#64Yes, it’s a problem that something like that is insulting to publish.
I’d be pretty upset if the value of my home was harmed because someone decided to make it common knowledge that the town I lived in was crap.
Presumably, anyone looking to buy your home would visit and quickly ascertain whether or not your town is crap.
Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#65> There’s a website (I won’t link to it) that has kept on running a survey of the worst places in the UK for years and years I will, it's ChavTowns. https://web.archive.org/web/20061013053524/http://www.chavto... Still running as https://www.ilivehere.co.uk/ Also the owner is giving up on it as of the start of this year -- mainly because nobody visits the site; churnalists just freeboot it and they rank higher on goo…
> organisations who despite their name, do not give a flying ** about their social housing stock
> and run-down decaying towns in the whole country
You cannot simultaneously have landlords living in Spain and well maintained local housing. Both are expensive. Pick only one. There exists a sweet spot when people are desperate enough to live in a place and pay every rent for any housing, but the sugar coating has washed off.
PS. How could they miss Bedford in the ranking?!
Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#66Twenty years ago, I think there was still a sense that we were collectively laughing with each other about the dullness of small towns. We all had the same shops - Woolworths, Dixons, Our Price, BHS. We all had a leisure centre that looked like everyone else's leisure centre. Some towns were better off than others, some towns had parts that you were better off avoiding after dark, but the majority of towns belonged t…
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Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#67Twenty years ago, I think there was still a sense that we were collectively laughing with each other about the dullness of small towns. We all had the same shops - Woolworths, Dixons, Our Price, BHS. We all had a leisure centre that looked like everyone else's leisure centre. Some towns were better off than others, some towns had parts that you were better off avoiding after dark, but the majority of towns belonged t…
I’d argue that your last paragraph has the cause-and-effect reversed: We’re entering into a populist phase because the managerial class is incapable of addressing the problems experienced by most people — so they’re going to try dismantling the current elite systems and rebuilding them. To say that the problem is elites inability to suppress populism is to miss that the elites own chronic failures is what caused the…
The only issue is that - in the past - weapons had to be wielded by people. The same working people that revolted.
There is very strong evidence that this will not be the case by the time this wave you have imagined gets really rolling.
I hope it does not happen for decades yet, because frankly: I cannot see the working class (of which I am part of) win that conflict.
Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#68If, as a humorist, you are concerned about whether you can publish your humorous book you can be certain that you live in a cursed timeline. Additionally if you think there are two kinds of jokes: those that were once funny and those that were never funny, then I suggest that your jokes were at best lazy. The human condition is pretty constant throughout the ages and those jokes that are aimed at such universal experiences continue to amuse for centuries or millennia.
Understandably the humor of the inexperienced 20-something will differ from that of the 40+ year-old. The simple and absolute world that we believe to see and understand in our younger years tends to vanish from our grasp as we become older and attain the wisdom of experience. Perhaps the author's belief that "it has been done already" reflects some of that wisdom, and just maybe those of a certain age at the time of the publishing of "Crap Towns" felt exactly the same way about his book. It seems, after all, that every generation believes that it is the first to do or discover a thing without considering that humans have been doing human things for an awfully long time and that the observation "there is nothing new under the sun" has some merit.
Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#69Twenty years ago, I think there was still a sense that we were collectively laughing with each other about the dullness of small towns. We all had the same shops - Woolworths, Dixons, Our Price, BHS. We all had a leisure centre that looked like everyone else's leisure centre. Some towns were better off than others, some towns had parts that you were better off avoiding after dark, but the majority of towns belonged t…
This is what I was going to say. Back then, a book like this would have been perceived as the UK making fun of itself. Now it’s perceived as being cruel to those less fortunate.
I think it’s worth putting into context that the economy was doing great in the era this book was first published and huge progress was being made with things like homelessness, inequality, and poverty. It felt like the country had turned a corner from the lows of the 80s.
Since then, we’ve had the global financial crisis, local councils being bankrupted, and a huge rise in homelessness and inequality. The rich have more and the poor have less.
If you published that book today, the contents might be the same, but the story it tells would be quite different.
Re: I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
That author on Slough, > Ricky Gervais encapsulated its brutalist new town grim with ‘The Office’ before giving up and writing lame punching-down anti-woke “gags” for the educationally subnormal That's a very strange reading on Gervais' post-The Office career. After The Office he did things like Extras, a sitcom about extras on TV and film sets, Derek, an emotional series about a well-meaning care worker who thinks i…
He also did The Invention of Lying , which, 16 years since I watched it in the cinema, is still the answer I give without hesitation to "what's the worst movie you've ever seen?"
For me that has to be High Life. Pitched to me as "Robert Pattinson has to to take care of a baby in space", in reality it was basically a side plot to "serial killers and rapists are stuck on a spaceship together" and all that implies.