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Themes for the 100-91 bracket: Shit, DJ Magazine, and shit.

Stay tuned next week for 90-81!

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I don’t have a telly, so Christmas 2009 at my family’s house presented a rare chance to veg out in front of terrible shows, including BBC3’s three hour sewage fest ‘100 Most Annoying People - 2009‘. It was great fun, and I stayed up till 3am learning things about Lembit Opik, Jedward and Jordan I would never have known about otherwise.

I had to admit though, it was an arbitrary list, relevant to no one, that the world could have done without, and it struck me further that all Top 100 lists are arbitrary and irrelevant - but fun - and that there would be no better way of illustrating that than by compiling my own Top 100 list of Top 100 lists. So I went onto Google and searched the phrase ‘Top 100′.

I took the first 100 unique Top 100 lists that Google offered me; Google’s own Top 100 list Top 100 lists. I say ‘unique’ as lists such as ‘Top 100 Computer Games’ came up very frequently, so I took the first of these and ignored all those that came after.

I have since ranked Google’s own list into my preferred order, and over the next ten weeks I will release 10 at a time, counting from 100 down to 1, in classic style.

100-91 coming up…

I have just sent the following email to my MP, Dr. Des Turner. I urge you to do the same, as some commentators have suggested that if enough people send similar messages, a debate in the House of Commons will be inevitable, and will probably topple the Digital Economy Bill.

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Dear Dr Turner

I have written to you before about this but in the light of recent events I felt it necessary to reiterate my thoughts. I write today about Lord Mandelson’s Digital Economy Bill. There is a feeling abroad that this legislation may pass on to the statutes before the upcoming General Election without actually being debated in the House. I frankly cannot believe this, particularly bearing in mind that it doesn’t take a genius to see some fairly basic flaws with the bill.

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The removal of the concert hall section of Brighton’s West Pier is an unforgivable act of council-sponsored vandalism. Brighton & Hove Council leader Mary Mears said ‘The removal of part of the West Pier will be a sad moment‘. She is gravely wrong, choosing to professionally downplay the scale of the political travesty that she and her colleagues have visited on Brighton & Hove. It is much worse than that, and I’ll tell you why, in unsentimental terms.

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Brighton punches above its weight in all aspects of culture except one: history. We have venues for music, galleries for art, cinemas for film, theatre for plays, groups for geeks, workshops for writers - the list goes on and on - but nothing for history. The Catalyst Club caters for it a little perhaps, but it doesn’t have a historical remit, it just happens that the subjects discussed there inevitably involve events from the past, which isn’t strictly history.

I’d like to go somewhere where I could hear someone telling me something interesting about a historical subject new or largely unknown to me. I was put off history at school by a bad teacher, but recently I’ve realised its import. It touches everything. It doesn’t matter what one does, the more history one knows, the better placed one is in one’s field.

So two alternatives present themselves to me. Either someone tells me about an existing historical lectureship group in Brighton (comments box below), or perhaps I could start one? I know from FlashBrighton how simple such groups are to organise; a venue, a few emails, and they run themselves.

What do you think?

In all seriousness; how can we? It has to be stopped. I am interested in practical advice that will make an actual difference, not just an egoistic debate. I have written to my MP about it, but that’s a technique to make pissing into the wind look efficacious; nothing has ever come of any letter I have written to any MP.

David Mitchell pointed out that the only successful political protest of the present Labour administration was the Fuel Protest, which was successful because it physically denied the whole country access to petrol. One million people marching prior to the invasion of Iraq - the largest march in the UK ever - had no influence at all on Tony Blair’s decision to go to war. Only when put under the kind of pressure that the Fuel Protesters created, will the government acquiesce.

Do we have to adopt their tactics? If so, how? And if not, what do we do?

We have about a month to act. Let’s hear some ideas.