I don’t usually offer fashion advice on this website, but I feel I might just dip my toe in those shark-infested waters for a change because this is just brilliant.

Now, I am guessing not everyone who reads this site is as depressingly shallow as I am so I am going throw this question open to the audience: what exactly would you think of a girl who wore leggings with pads on the knees? Exactly. What else is there to think? Would you even have to buy her a drink first, or do you reckon you could get away with just whipping it out in the middle of a crowded pub, because I’d be surprised if the girl in question was going to be picky enough to demand a bit of attention first. Or even basic civility.

The leggings in question can be viewed here. Yes, you read that correctly, they go by the name of Mr. President. But surely no amount of ironic nomenclature can make up for the fact that you are basically suggesting that a girl walk around in public dressed in a manner that pretty much says ‘I swallow on the first date. Maybe even in the first quarter of an hour if you’re lucky’. I’ve known some pretty easy women in my time, but even the most loose-winged of them all liked to keep up some sort of basic pretence for at least a few hours.

The irony of it all is that these garments of horror were designed by World Championship Sperm Guzzler Lindsay Lohan, who has pretty much abandoned the world of pork swords for the world of beef curtains these days, and somehow that is way less sexy than you’d think. Either she designed these things a while ago or she is delivering something of a coded warning to her girlfriend Samantha Wotshername not to get too comfortable, because she could be off at any minute, fellating the next random stranger who catches her eye – much like the old days.

Either way, leggings with knee-pads! Are you fucking joking? That’s crazy talk.

The Decemberists – A Cautionary Song
Gavin Friday – Baltimore Whores

I read an interesting but slightly frustrating article in The Scotsman the other day, all about kids’ top ten favourite and least favourite things to read. There was a fair bit of hand-wringing about the emergence of blogs and lyrics websites in the favourites, and the inevitable presence of Shakespeare in the least favourite – not among the writers, funnily enough, but among the parents of the kids in question.

This is an age-old conservative reactionary mistake (we all have a conservative reactionary inside us somewhere, this is not a political dig) of confusing the medium with the content. There is nothing inherently good about a book, nor superficial about a website. There are some pretty shitty books out there, there really are, just as there are a massive number of pointless, vacuous websites. I have learned a lot recently from excellent blogs and sites written by the exact same professionals that write the books.

It is one of the things that people who lay into the online world as full of lies and fluff (which it certainly can be, I am not denying that) tend to forget: a lot of the time the actual, genuine experts cross media quite happily, often so they bring to bear the full weight of their knowledge and expertise unshackled by editors and sponsors with agendas and word counts. And then of course there are some very talented amateurs to be found as well.

Aside from that, the idea that books are inherently good because they are books is also silly. Have any of you seen some of the empty headed, badly written, poorly conceived, scantly characterised and just plain fucking inaccurate stuff that gets published? I have read some genuinely awful, awful books in my time.

Websites are interesting because they drive home what is going to become one of the central skills of the internet era: the ability to interpret the quality of information. Anyone who thought history class was pointless is suddenly going to have to think again, because the concept of primary and secondary sources and the ability to evaluate the agenda of the writer is becoming crucial. This always existed with books, but people tended to be less aware of it. Political and historical books in particular have always needed careful scrutiny for the bias of the author, and often the publisher as well.

This is even more the case with websites, not because they’re so unreliable, but because a lot of them are very good indeed. If it was all bollocks this would be obvious fairly quickly, but it’s actually the good ones that make the crap ones harder to spot.

There is some evidence that kids are getting pretty good at evaluating what they are reading (note lack of source: bad information) and I would honestly have more faith in the abilities of people who have grown up in the internet world than people who have not. Adults are proving particularly bad at critically evaluating what they are being fed online as well. Forming little echo-chambers of people who will never challenge your opinions is pretty easy on the internet, and even when people do use evidence to add weight to their views by linking to papers and studies, they are often able to lie blatantly about the contents, safe in the knowledge that no-one will ever follow up.

So rather than teaching our kids that the internet is bad and books are good, or that people in chatrooms are paedophiles (honestly, it’s just not that easy to pick up teenagers in chatrooms, and believe me, I’ve tried) we should instead be focussing on a lesson absolutely all of us need to learn: how to tell the good shit from the bad shit and, when someone tells you something, to make sure that it is true. When the differences can be very subtle indeed and there is always someone with a lot to gain from fooling you, it is becoming both harder and way more important.

Eels – Old Shit/New Shit
Belle & Sebastian – Put the Book Back on the Shelf
The Decemberists – Billy Liar
Gene – Truth, Rest Your Head (Live)
Fela Kuti – Truth Don Die

[Sorry, but I've had to disable the audio links in this post.]

[This is a long, long article which my brother wrote for the site. It's a fascinating and really slightly scary piece of writing and I seriously recommend you make the time to read the whole thing. He explains very neatly how the quality of recorded music is taking a massive nosedive, and how really high-definition may be lost to us forever quite soon.

This is something I am genuinely proud to have on this site. After all the fanny jokes and random bollocks, it's nice to publish something with genuine depth of knowledge and thought, despite the depressing inevitability that it took someone else to write it. Little bastard. He's handsomer than me too, the little fucker.

The other thing is that he illustrates his points with mp3s and I am not sure if the quality of the songs I provide will make his argument properly, but click on the pictures and you'll get the point. I know it doesn't fit the narrow column width format too well, but there's not a lot I can do about that, I don't think.]

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