I’ve held back from speaking about the spectacular demise of News International (and, with any luck, more of the red-top tabloids) on here, lest I jinx it and everything goes back to normal. No doubt, you’ll have heard about it all already. No doubt you’ll continue to.

One odd development for me, however, has been my dreams over the past week. My subconscious has betrayed all its principles by sending me erotic dreams about Rebekah Brooks. I don’t fancy her. Fancy is the wrong word, after all. She represents everything I despise about the corporate media and its inextricable bond with politics and policing. Yet twice now, I’ve dreamt of pulling her hair very hard and giving her a rather brutal spanking. I can only imagine that it’s penance for Max Mosley and all the other BDSM enthusiasts she’s played a part in outing through her tabloids over the past years. Whatever the case, doing bad things to Brooks is disturbingly sexy, even in the context of a horrible, sleeping fantasy that I seem to have no conscious control over. I’m a sick pervert. Let’s never speak of it again. Feel free to make your own pun-based ginger joke about red-top tabloid scandals instead, while I go very quiet and grin to myself.

Anyway, I urge that you all add an Istyosty extension (it’s free) to your browser. It not only automates cached pages of the Daily Mail website (therefore stopping the Mail’s ad revenue being boosted by your click) but also does the same to a bunch of other tabloids. The simplest way to remove the influence that these papers hold over society is to stop paying them, directly or indirectly.

For Chrome/Chromium, click here and follow instructions.

For Opera, do much the same, but here.

For Firefox, go here, download, then a rule needs to be added (click “options”, then “add” and fill in the form as follows):

Include pattern: ^(http://(w*.)?(dailymai​l|express|thesun|dailystar​|telegraph).co.uk/.*)

Pattern type: Regular Expression

Photo below courtesy of the Guardian:

In romantic comedies, female characters fall over. They fall over a lot.

It’s something of a Hollywood trope: a woman starts out strong and independent, then (literally) topples off her pedestal and humiliates herself in a spectacular and symbolic revelation of her own innate helplessness. Shortly afterwards, when our heroine is suitably humbled, a man will save her, they will live happily ever after, and the picture will fade to credits.

It’s strangely akin to the scene in so many horror movies where a soon-to-be victim tries to flee from a predator through dark, misty woods, then takes an undignified but inevitable tumble into the mud. Yet in romantic comedies, it’s love that awaits our heroine, not death.

Why should this be the mass-marketed template for dating? To be desired – or even tolerated – by a man, non-fictional women shouldn’t have to be demeaned beforehand, their high statuses destroyed, some unseen narrative crushing them into a state of submission worthy of a man’s love. And thankfully, they’re not. No healthy relationship starts out like that (aside from the overtly non-abusive 24/7 BDSM kinds, of course, but that’s another story).

So why do so many romantic comedies follow this exact pattern? Just how much has this kind of crap influenced how women grow up believing they should behave, in the hope of being loved? Why has this become a standard plot device, why are films containing this generic storyline so regularly commissioned, and why are women the majority consumers of this sort of thinly-veiled misogyny?

The last word comes from The New Yorker, on screenwriting for female characters: “Funny women must not only be gorgeous; they must fall down and then sob, knowing it’s all their fault.”

Quite. Just take a look at a few examples:

I realise I’ve somewhat neglected the footwear fetishists of the flock lately. Here, therefore, is a little treat from the wonderful “How To Be A Retronaut” blog. It’s a collection of vintage shoe designs from 1939 that are so unexpectedly modern that Lady Gaga wouldn’t look out of place falling off any of them. Click here to see them all.