Johann Hari apologies...

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I've always really liked Hari. Before this whole scandal blew up, I noticed that he was given to overstatements and bizarre claims, e.g. he once claimed that former Japanese PM Junichiro Koizumi was nearly killed by a robot while touring a factory, which seems quite an exaggeration of what really happened - I seem to recall that the article was about the use of robot soldiers in the near future, and so it served the article's purpose to suggest that a Terminator-style assassin had almost done for Koizumi, whereas what actually happened was this:

http://www.devilskitchen.me.uk/2011/06/factchecking-johann-hari-junichiro.html

That aside, I like Hari for his opinions, not his facts.

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Which columnists do you like?

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Columnists aka Polly Filler have been the death of newspapers, but I like Jeremy Clarke of the Spectator.

As for Hari, he is a disgrace to journalism. Amazing how hard it is to get sacked these days.

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Clarke writes about his HIV test, women, drunkenness and general failure to get life. It's very honest and funny, as in this brief encounter.

Quote :

‘Do you want a dance?’ she said. She stood there smiling at me with her hand held out invitingly. I’d already decided I wasn’t going to get caught up in the dancing. But this woman — well, you should have seen her. She was about 19; as full of health, life and potential fecundity as point-of-lay pullet. And yet a vulnerability in her smile gave the impression that she’d had to pluck up the courage to ask. I said to my friend, and my friend’s friend — we’d been deep in conversation about the perilous state of a football club dear to our hearts — how could I possibly refuse and would they excuse me for a moment? They nodded curtly and returned to their football and I offered her my hand. She grasped it firmly and hauled me away.

She led me across the bar, through a swing door at the far end, down a staircase and into a small theatre with a knee-high stage and four or five rows of seats, from which about 20 or 30 young men were watching a woman with no clothes on at all and unusually pale skin lying on her back at the front of the stage and opening and closing her legs like a pair of scissors.

In the aisle behind these seats we joined a queue of other waiting couples. ‘What’s the queue for?’ I said. ‘For cubicle,’ she said. She was east European. ‘Cubicle?’ I said. ‘For dance,’ she said.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/life/5734653/the-other-club.thtml