Tuesday 2 February 2010

His Truth Is Dumber Than His Fiction

It's a slow news day here at Squid Towers, so let's throw in some meaningless and outdated mockery of Richard Littlejohn. This is four or five months old, but I missed it the first time around, so here is a delightful slice of Littlejohn's total inability to grasp the most basic requirements of professional journalism (h/t to Chris B from GeekPlanet):
Reader Nick Paterson-Morgan drew my attention to the following announcement in The Times:

My first reaction was that this must be a wind-up, probably placed for a bet by someone at the swine flu hotline with nothing better to do. We rang The Times advertising department and they assured us it was genuine.

There’s no mention of a Mr Pong, or any father’s name for that matter. If true, which I still doubt, somewhere out there in Shropshire is a single mother called Kate Pong with quins, variously named after an American pop singer, a model and the U.S. President.

You couldn’t make it up.

We'll leave aside exactly what Littlejohn's problem with naming children after celebrities or world leaders is - I guess it was a slow day at The Foetid Floridan Swamp of Littlejohn, too [1]- and why exactly the concept of five children being born to the same mother apparently strikes him as too outlandish to even be conceivable within the realms of fiction.

No. Let's go straight to a picture of the mother herself.


It's a chocolate labrador. Littlejohn must have been kicking himself. Not because he managed to so totally humiliate himself once again in the national eye, but because the fact she's a brown dog could have afforded all sorts of opportunities for borderline offensive race-based "quips".

Still, Bighead pointed out that labradors might not originally hail from Britain. I looked it up, they were originally Canadian, which makes Kate an immigrant from the Commonwealth, a status Littlejohn presumably hates almost as much as immigrants from the Eastern EU (who themselves are only faintly preferable to gypsies or homosexuals).

And here they are, spewing out babies and taking our jobs. There's a guy in our department who's usually accompanied by a labrador trained as a hypo-alert dog. Aren't there any British dogs that can fulfil that function, huh? This poor thing:


has been unemployed since we first got her ten years ago. All she asks for is a chance to prove herself. "Give a dog a fish", and all that. Though in this case, you might be better giving her a sheep, I guess. Though she is scared of sheep. And fish.

Where was I going with this? Oh yes, Richard Littlejohn is some combination of an idiot, a bully, a borderline xenophobe, and a dog hater. And, since most of his broadsides against those who don't love (his entirely fictional version of) England enough are written from inside a gated in Florida, a hypocritical prick. A hypoprick, if you will. Admittedly, etymologically that word looks like a diagnosis of an abnormally small penis, but that's a risk I'm prepared to take.

Update: I've fixed the picture of the original Times article so that it can be seen in its entirety. This process actually led to me stumbling across Littlejohn's own blog. I note he hasn't bothered to print a retraction. You could argue the article isn't worth one, but he was the one who decided it was newsworthy...

[1] Imagine a retelling of Shreck, only with a more annoying voice, and replacing Myer's obsession with scatalogical humour with a truly disturbing obsession with each and every variation of homosexual copulation imaginable. There's something Littlejohn presumably wishes he could make up, though since one of his novels involves a man being sodomised with a truncheon, we should at least note that he's giving it a go.

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