CHRIS ROPER: The gnomes are restive
It’s time for nausea induced by too many Woolies. Best. Ever. gherkins
It’s a bit early for the annual silly season, but I thought I’d get a jump on the pack. The silly season is the time of the year when media abandon their coverage of the real news of the day and start publishing frivolous fillers for the stockings of the mind.
In the UK’s Saturday Review of July 13 1861, there’s a description of why journalists (and in this case The Times) turn to the silly season. “In those months the great oracle becomes — what at other times it is not — simply silly. In spring and early summer, The Times is often violent, unfair, fallacious, inconsistent, intentionally unmeaning, even positively blundering, but it is very seldom merely silly … In the dead of autumn, when the second and third rate hands are on, we sink from nonsense written with a purpose to nonsense written because the writer must write either nonsense or nothing.”..
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