Dr Andrew Wakefield, who suggested the MMR vaccine was causing autism, was found to have acted unethically today.  Supporters outside the General Medical Council’s headquarters in London, where the hearings took place, chanted, “Wakefield’s right!”. The supporters were apparently mainly parents of the allegedly affected children.

The thing is, his research and conclusions have already been discredited, and the journal that published his work, the Lancet, has said it shouldn’t have. So what you have is a group of understandably upset parents who have, by continuing to support a man who has been shown to have been wrong in both his conduct and conclusions, unfortunately rendered themselves an ignorant mob. I understand why they need to believe, but I aso lament it.

In other news, a teenage girl was retrieved from the rubble of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, 15 days after the earthquake. She had survived by “drinking water from a  bath”. Rescuer JP Malaganne apparently considered this a “miracle”. The god of hydration works in mundane ways.

According to the rescuers on the scene they had arrived just in the nick of time. “I don’t think she could have survived even a few more hours,” said Rescuer Claude Fuilla, in no way aggrandising her role.

“She just said ‘Thank you’, she’s very weak, which suggests that she’s been there for 15 days,” said Samuel Bernes, head of the rescue team that discovered her. We can surmise from this that without some form of proof Mr Bernes would have entertained the idea that the young lady became stuck after crawling into the rubble for a bit of a lie down.

I also heard on the radio that someone on the medical ship where the girl was being attended to said that her survival was medically unexplainable. I simply don’t believe that’s true.

Have you seen KoobaTV? It seems the boys haven’t produced anything recently so have resorted to posting amusing clips of 1950s Americana. (It should really be United-States-a, because America is a CONTINENT that’s home to many INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, but that would be a rubbish word.)

The latest one features the back of Jerry’s head, Carolyn who may or may not have been involved in some kind of scandal, a lesbian banging at the closet door, and a horny young man who calls his cock his ‘vote’ and looks something like a stretched out Bill Murray. The latter also annoyed me by saying ‘math class’ instead of mathS class’. Do US citizens do mathematic? No, they do fucking mathematics like the rest of us. Our ancestors weren’t happy with having a ‘new’ continent, they had to alter the language too. Splitters. Murderous, raping splitters.

If you enjoy the clips, I recommend the film Reefer Madness. It was intended as a warning to parents about the oh-so-frightening dangers of cannabis use, but was bought, re-cut and distributed as an ‘exploitation’ film. Today it’s sold as an invaluable piece of comedy, suggesting as it does that otherwise balanced middle class youngsters will become thieves, murderers and rapists once they smoke the deadly weed.

Another, similar film I saw once had guys scratching at their arms and sweating in their ‘need for weed’ after having smoked half a joint the previous day. It ended with the ‘pusher’ crashing his car. Whilst he lay in the wreckage – which had caught fire – bleeding, the cop stood at the top of the embankment with some local youths, surveying the destruction that is so often wreaked by the most evil of drugs. He said to the kids, “See what can happen when you smoke marijuana?”, and turned his back on the dying hoodlum.

What a message. What a culture. What a country.

Read my Kooba Radio blog

After the success of the Rage Against the Machine for christmas number one campaign – an excellent example of collective action utilising one of the few real powers we have left in modern society, that of the consumer – there’s now an effort to ‘get a GENUINE unsigned band into the charts‘.

As I write, the group on Facebook has over 5,000 members, around 30 admins, and I have no idea how many suggested artists. Unfortunately, I believe it is this level of interest that dooms the experiment to failure.

The RATM campaign was coordinated by two people and had a single clear aim – to make a song number one in order to send a message about the dominance of TV talent shows and the death of the UK charts as a regular source of good music – and asked supporters to do just one thing. That is why it was successful.

The unsigned artists campaign, in contrast, asks too much of too many people and is not as easily to communicate to those who aren’t already invested in this kind of action.

Above all, it misses the point that the RATM campaign was a negative campaign. All those who bought ‘Killing in the Name’ did so as an act of protest. It may seem that it was positive as it sought to make a song number one, but it was a positive means to a negative end – to stop the winner of that TV talent show yet again reaching number one at christmas.

I’m sure the coordinators of the unsigned bands campaign will argue that it’s also an attempt to send a message, but there’s simply no clear recipient. It will also suffer because everyone will remain loyal to the artist they suggest, and if they don’t like the song that’s picked they just won’t buy it. The strength of feeling against that TV talent show sadly isn’t matched in this case, and it was that which drove us to come together in December 2009.

Read my Kooba Radio blog

Apparently I’d already seen Clay Pigeon at Foxfest in 2009, but my inebriant/politics/philosophy addled mind doesn’t always recall the experiences it’s been the recipient of; thankfully I have friends with little grey cells more effective than mine. This is particularly shameful as I penned the Foxfest 2009 liveblog, on which occassion I opined that one of the band looked like Zammo from Grange Hill.

They took to the stage at the Fox & Firkin once again on 16 January and, although opening the evening’s entertainment, were by far the strongest act. Individual, competent and entertaining, they brought smiles and raised eyebrows to the slowly gathering crowd.

Although they were kind enough to furnish me with a set list, a week later I find it difficult to remember much more than the overall impression of their performance. I headed to their MySpace page, but it conveys neither their considerable musical talent nor the atmosphere they generated.

Half the songs they played are as yet without title and therefore don’t feature on MySpace anyway, which is perhaps the reason it doesn’t tell the full story of where this highly talented group is at the moment. I would imagine, not being a musician myself, that updating web pages isn’t the first thing on your mind when you’re creating. Communication is important, but without a product you’re just selling your own dreams, and I’m sure we all have enough of our own sweaty night time imaginings to be going along with.

What I can say is that the members of Clay Pigeon are all impressive musicians, not just as far as their individual playing goes but in their live work as a group and the songs that they’re producing. The elements are familiar – bouncy ska rythms, the nu-metal screech-growl, classic rock guitar solo work – but the overall effect is individual. When so many bands mimic the others in their genre it’s refreshing to find one that creates something new out of what had seemed redundant.

I’m aware this isn’t much of a review – think of it more as an exhortation to go and see the band wherever you may find them. But especially at the Fox – it’s a place where people know your name, and they’re (almost) always glad you came.

Read my Kooba Radio blog

I want to have a tantrum. A really big fucking tantrum of screaming and crying and lashing out and refusal. The simple refrain of a child becomes huge and laden with age: I don’t want to. I emphatically do not want to.

A child that can tantrum like that doesn’t have a sense of duty though does it? Because I can’t just not. I have to live, to clothe, feed and keep safe myself. Although I don’t know to whom I have this responsibility; is it me? All I can say is that it feels like living is something I have to do, even when I don’t want to, and however much I make it harder.

I was in love with this girl once. Well, if you’d asked me I would have said I was in love with her. But she didn’t love me. It drove me crazy for a while, but there was nothing to do but accept it. The alternative simply isn’t. Some things just are.

So I talk a lot. I conjure visions of grandiose activity and success. I wonder aloud and to myself that if only this could be the case, or if that was not the way it is, I would conquer my life and it would resonate with meaning. But it’s all crap. Wherever I am or whatever I am doing the I remains the same. The I remains despondent, lazy; I am anaesthetised, and through my stupor intimately aware that it is I who monitors my sedation.

The essence of my fraudulence is the fact that I can state any of this at all – that I know myself as a fraud. Acutely aware that nobody can change my world but me, I wait uncomfortably at the side of the road for someone who bears my face and my name and yet is not me. But the dust just piles up around me, and soon there will be nothing for anyone to notice.