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While Mr. Brown and his party may deserve to be punished, their political opponents don’t deserve to be rewarded. After all, would a Conservative government have been any less in the thrall of free-market fundamentalism, any more willing to rein in runaway finance, over the past decade? Of course not.

Here, in other words, is a long-range backstory—a device that, in the Hollywood of recent times, has grown from an option to a fetish. “Batman Begins” … What’s wrong with “Batman Is” ?

The only group that holds a consistently high opinion of newspapers is newspaper people. They’re the ones who do the bragging about how newspapers enrich democracy by uncovering pollution, malfeasance in office, abuses of power, and unsafe consumer goods.

‘This computer thing,’ my editor said to me one time in 1983, ‘I don’t get it.’ And I think about that conversation a lot. It’s a perfect example of how newspapers have botched everything connected to everything new ever. Granted it was one conversation with a 72-year-old man back in the era of Flock of Seagulls, but that didn’t stop me from making it the title of my upcoming book, ‘This Computer Thing, I Don’t Get It,’ coming out in October from Obsequious Press.

I wonder if the BBC shouldn’t run some kind of opt-out scheme where celebrities can sign a form that reads “In the event of my untimely death, please, under no circumstances should the BBC invite everycunt to share their half-formed opinions of me (after googling me to work out who the fuck they think I was)