In days of old, when news media reported interesting and important happenings in a sober fashion for most of the year, the mid-to-late summer period was known as \u201cSilly Season\u201d in the UK and elsewhere.<\/p>\n
The official explanation is that the amount of government and business news declines in the summer, so the newspapers have to be padded out with \u201cother\u201d news. No doubt battle-scarred journalists took the opportunity to go on their holidays, and did whatever it is battle-scarred journalists do on their time off. Meanwhile, their apprentices (were they called interns back then? If so, would \u201cThe Sorcerer\u2019s Intern\u201d have been a catchier title for that story?) were left to fill the pages of our great national dailies with faintly amusing, trivial, and most importantly, safe<\/em> (i.e., libel-proof) stories.<\/p>\n This was when we\u2019d hear about Burmese pythons appearing in people\u2019s toilets as if they were snake charmer\u2019s baskets; or groups of children clubbing together to pay for new tassels to go on the ends of the handlebars of the bike of the kid at the end of the street whose parents had just been impoverished by the receipt of a bill for mandatory removal of a pile of used diapers they\u2019d accumulated in preparation for creating a piece of art that would grace both the National (Art) Gallery and the pages of the Guinness Book of Records.<\/p>\n Plagues, pestilence and world wars had to wait for the battle-scarred journalists to return from\u2026 wherever; such events were not permitted to happen during silly season. WWI started just before silly season and WWII just after. Coincidences? I think not!<\/p>\n These days, it\u2019s difficult to know when silly season begins and ends. The vast majority of online news outlets focus so much on clickbait that even coverage of major world issues like religious intolerance and extremism are reported in the same manner that an outbreak of an STD\/STI in a nunnery might be. The upside is that it\u2019s just about impossible to schedule in another world war, so there is hope for mankind after all.<\/p>\n And just as climate change is affecting the weather in each of our seasons, technology change has affected our news-reporting seasons.<\/p>\n So in an effort to create an impression that there was a silly season this year, here are some topics that I\u2019ve had on file as fodder for potential \u201cwhat if\u201d articles, but which, for one or more of a number of reasons I\u2019ve so far been unable to imagine into a satisfactory scenario.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with the revelation <\/a>in May that toddlers have shot at least twenty-three people in the USA up to that point in 2016. That statistic shocked me and reignited my yearning for guns to be banned. But I saw no way of turning it into an informative, entertaining and amusing piece without causing deep offence. The truth, as I see it, is that other than for livestock protection and bona fide hunting (i.e., hunting for the table), there is no valid argument for ordinary people to have the right to bear arms, especially handguns and military style weapons. People obviously can\u2019t be trusted to keep them away from their own kids, so are they mature enough to understand the consequences of squeezing that trigger?<\/p>\n So that item was in my Silly Season folder because I find the whole argument for the right to possess firearms silly. Unfortunately, I won\u2019t be able to use it any further.<\/p>\n Next in my folder was an article <\/a>about an Indonesian fisherman who found a seemingly lifeless body on the seashore and believed it to be an angel that had fallen from heaven.<\/p>\n It turned out to be a sex doll. The article reported that the parents of the man who found the ‘angel’ had cared for it every day, changing its clothes and giving it a blouse and hijab as it slowly deflated.<\/p>\n The report amused me greatly at several levels (few of them politically correct!), and I presume it amused a great number of other people, because it was on the \u201cstrange but true\u201d sections of many news outlet websites as well as thousands of blogs. But in order to create a \u201cwhat if\u201d piece based on it, I would have had to cross a line of respect that I have for the sincerity of belief that some people have in their religious faith, so it had to be shelved.<\/p>\n The kerfuffle <\/a>in May about China\u2019s banning of ‘erotic’ banana-eating live streams was so done to death everywhere that I saw no point in adding to what was, in any case, a tacky topic.<\/p>\n The news <\/a>in April that Brits had run a public poll for what to name a two hundred million pound polar research ship and that the hands-down winner was \u201cBoaty McBoatface\u201d summed up the mentality of large swathes of the voting public to me. While the name of a ship isn\u2019t going to affect the destiny of the civilized world, the act of such a serious-minded organization reaching out to the public in such a trusting manner should not have been abused.<\/p>\n Judging by the anecdotes I\u2019ve read and heard about people\u2019s votes in the UK\u2019s recent Brexit referendum, that poll was treated with much the same maturity as Boaty McBoatface was. What responsible person would register a protest vote in a yes\/no referendum for something as history-changing as Brexit?<\/p>\n I wanted to compare and contrast the Boaty vote and Donald Trump\u2019s popularity, but decided that making overtly political comments wasn\u2019t part of the mission of this website, so I let the boat sink (and resisted the urge to state that I hope the same fate awaits The Donald. Oops. I said it.)<\/p>\n In mid-May, an eight-year-old boy was suspended <\/a>from a church school in England for his hairstyle. The style was a short back and sides\u2014exactly the style that my brother and I, and most of our male school friends had at junior (elementary) school in the 1960s. The controversy arose, apparently, because the boy had copied the hairstyle of a character in a BBC drama about youth gangs in early twentieth-century England called Peaky Blinders.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t recall suspensions being handed out in the 60s and 70s for boys wearing their hair like Rasputin or Al Capone or the Deansgate Mob<\/a>, or for that matter, the Peaky Blinders\u2014if they had, then schools in the 60s would have been empty. And I haven\u2019t heard of suspensions being handed out more recently for boys wearing their hair like mods or rockers or skinheads or greasers or Charles Manson or Jimmy Savile or Gary Glitter.<\/p>\n However, it\u2019s not good form to mock the rulings of school policies if you\u2019re not familiar with the background culture of the situation, and because I\u2019ve not watched any of the Peaky Blinders programmes, I decided to leave this one alone.<\/p>\n (In a perverse display of puritanism, Americans call cockerels \u201croosters\u201d, so let\u2019s call peacocks \u201cpearoosters\u201d, shall we? Nah!)<\/p>\n Speaking of gangs, in May, the BBC reported <\/a>that a gang of peacocks was causing havoc in Beccles, a town in Suffolk, England. A few weeks earlier, they had reported <\/a>a similar problem in a village in County Durham. And in July 2014, they\u2019d reported <\/a>another gang of peacocks causing a flap in a Manchester suburb\u2014one resident claimed a peacock entered her home and pooped in her kettle.<\/p>\n These reports might yet get used in a future \u201cwhat if\u201d article, but in the meantime, I\u2019m scouring the internet for reports of church schools that are banning the wearing of peacock feathers with school uniforms.<\/p>\n In June, a news item<\/a> informed us of a fox cub that had been discovered trapped inside a vet\u2019s dishwasher. I\u2019m still wondering what to make of that one.<\/p>\n Later in June, a Winnipeg resident with a sense of humour decided to register a humorous protest at the size of the potholes on the streets by placing a lifeguard\u2019s chair <\/a>next to the water-filled hole. The killjoys in Winnipeg\u2019s highway maintenance department filled the hole within hours of the story breaking, but an article about a town council getting creative with its infrastructure maintenance budget problems suggested itself to me. Watch this space\u2014it could appear here sometime!<\/p>\n Following on from peacock gangs, we were treated to a story <\/a>about a family of ostriches on the loose in an Ayrshire (Scotland) village. The similarity in shape between an ostrich and the bagpipes set my mind working in several directions, so once again, watch this space.<\/p>\n In July, an article <\/a>appeared on websites worldwide about a study that revealed that British badgers are terrified of CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) programming. The report screamed out for some satirical response, but I decided that given the ridiculousness of the topic and the widespread nature of the reporting, it had to have been part of silly season, and therefore not fair game.<\/p>\n Incidentally, the sound of the BBC World Service and of an audio recording of The Wind in the Willows scared the badgers as much as the CBC programs, and more than the sound of wolves, dogs and bears did. However, since the study was carried out in Oxford, England, the local badgers may have been unacquainted with the sound of a grizzly bear chowing down on a berry bush.<\/p>\n Last week\u2019s crop of \u201cStrange but True\u201d stories are real doozies, but I\u2019ve not had time to think them through in terms of tastefulness and humour potential, so I\u2019ll keep them under wraps for now. However, I will say that the two top contenders are related to bagpipes and nose picking respectively.<\/p>\n To be honest, I\u2019m happy that silly season is now spread throughout the year. The stories that appear are such ripe source material for the kind of articles I enjoy writing, and I\u2019d hate to have to rely on a three-week harvest of such stories to last me through the year. I only hope that the stories are true\u2014I\u2019d hate to be spreading falsehoods based on the fertile imaginations of other writers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In days of old, when news media reported interesting and important happenings in a sober fashion for most of the year, the mid-to-late summer period was known as \u201cSilly Season\u201d in the UK and elsewhere. The official explanation is that the amount of government and business news declines in the summer, so the newspapers have to be padded out with… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[181],"tags":[156,168,167,158,157,169,164,155,159,161,166,165,160,162,154,163],"class_list":["post-391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fake","tag-angel-sex-toy","tag-badger","tag-bagpipes","tag-banana-eating","tag-boaty-mcboatface","tag-cbc","tag-greasers","tag-guns","tag-haircuts","tag-mods","tag-ostriches","tag-peacock-gangs","tag-peaky-blinders","tag-rockers","tag-silly-season","tag-skinheads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1641,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions\/1641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/reggothard.com\/kelvin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Guns Aren\u2019t Toys<\/h2>\n
Deflated Angel\u2014Her Halo Must Have Slipped<\/h2>\n
How Not to Eat a Banana in China<\/h2>\n
I Name this Ship\u2026<\/h2>\n
Style Council for the Prosecution<\/h2>\n
Peacocks Terrorising Towns<\/h2>\n
What Does the Fox Say (when he\u2019s stuck in a dishwasher)?<\/h2>\n
How to Get a Pothole Repaired<\/h2>\n
Bagpipes\u2014What You Get When You Cross an Ostrich With a Hydra<\/h2>\n
How to Traumatize a Badger<\/h2>\n
Enough Silliness for One Season<\/h2>\n