[Abernathy]

I increasingly steer clear of the vacuous Sunday supplement glossies, but I've yet to wean myself completely off them. Hence today's Observer magazine, featuring in the regular "This much I know" slot, the rugby automaton "Jonny" Wilkinson.

It opens with Jonny apparently saying "I live by Kaizen - a Japanese philosophy. It's about continuous self-improvement. You imagine being watched by a video 24/7 to help you get better each day and make good decisions" .

So, like just about everybody else on the fucking planet, "Jonny", you try to do your best. You're nowt special, you arse. "Kaizen" ? Fuck you.

The "This much I know" feature is extremely handy for definitively identifying utter wankers.

[Andy McDandy]

Kaizen isn't quite that. It's more a way of making small decisions to improve the way you do things, or in a workplace it means fixing problems quickly as they happen, rather than waiting for a massive changeover of everything. In sports terms it's what they call the small increments theory - you try every time to do something a bit better, a bit faster, every time.

But yeah, he's using it in the 'oh, this makes me look deep and spiritual' sense.

[Bones McCoy]

It's only really funny because a lot of the rugby fraternity (with honourable exceptions) seem to feel they're a deeply
cultured lot in contrast to the planks who play round ball football.
The truth is that all sports probably have a distribution of intelligence and "interestingness" - but the top echelons tend to concentrate the dull obsessives.

A couple of beer fuelled evenings on a training tour does not make you a character.

[new puritan]

More crap from Rawnsley.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... d-ed-balls" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Majoritarians reckon Labour ought to be aiming higher, partly because they believe it is good in itself to try to maximise vote share, partly because they fear a Miliband government would not have much authority if it came to power with thin support. They are not so crazy as to believe that Labour could win an actual majority of votes; no party has managed that in decades.

They're not 'majoritarians' then. It's surprising how little infighting there's been in the Labour ranks - given the scale of the defeat in 2010 it could have been far worse. Yet here we have Rawnsley trying to make what are fairly minor disagreements out to be something colossal.

[youngian]

More crap from Rawnsley.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... d-ed-balls" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

That reads like a jokey filler article knocked off for a lifestyle magazine supplement.

[new puritan]

Also worth noting that he conflates the Parliamentary Labour Party with the wider Labour Party. What goes on in the latter is, presumably, of no interest to a petty gossip merchant like Rawnsley.

[new puritan]

Nick Cohen gets a bit of a roasting from Evan Harris. I'll be honest, I quite enjoyed it.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... t-46614239" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... mentpage=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Tubby Isaacs]

Enjoyed that too, thanks.

[spoonman]

You had one job...

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Looks like one of the 1-page dummies that are put out early in the evening, before the headline was finalised.

[Kreuzberger]

In fairness, it's reasonably amusing if you don't know anything about the business of press production.

But. Thinking that a "Labour at War..." headline could every be that short, that's pure amateur-hour.

[Bones McCoy]

A proper "Let's knock off before last orders" front page.

You had one job...