If this isn’t a warning to him, nothing will be. Photoshop: Kelly Welles.

Pleasant weekend, peeps?

If not, here are some things that amused/irritated or otherwise grabbed my attention while I was trying to do other things.

John Terry:  Karma Chameleon to the Snarks

STREEEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIIKKKKKKKKEEEEEEEE TWO! Image: Julian Finney/Getty Images Europe.

I’m proud to be a football fan, even though members of my family, most of my friends and quite a few people I’ve never met feel the need to reiterate at every opportunity that it’s an appalling sport, that the players are overpaid idiots and how everyone who follows it is essentially a thug with shit for brains.

I can refute two of those allegations quite comfortably, given enough beer and a functioning etch-a-sketch, but even armed with these essential items I admit defeat when it comes to the matter of John George Terry. The former England captain suffered his second pre-match handshake rebuff in as many years on Saturday, when Anton Ferdinand left him hanging after Terry was found not guilty of racially abusing the QPR defender.

Prior to that, Wayne Bridge refused to shake Terry’s hand after news broke that Terry had had an affair with the mother of Bridge’s child.

John, I have to tell you. Your behaviour is habitually disgusting your peers now. Given what most people think of footballers in general, you are a misdemeanor away from the heights of popularity enjoyed by a goth in West Memphis. Or Boy George at a Klan rally, as Bill Hicks put it. Neither, for the record, is good. Although the latter is funny.

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Julie Burchill: Goddess of Snark

Julie Burchill hurled a bucket of freshly squeezed snark over ‘shabby chic’ in her latest column for the Guardian. And not for the purposes of making a perfectly serviceable mirror frame look like you found it at the bottom of a skip. A few people got exorcised about her piece on Twitter, but if you were one of those who leapt to the defence of nostalgia geeks, fearful perhaps that their distressed tablecloths would be wholly ineffective to mop up the contents of said bucket, allow me to ask you a question. Do you genuinely believe that the world would be a more terrible place if  people spent less time jacking off over soft furnishings and more time contemplating poverty and oppression?

No. Well then.

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Insidious: Too Much Snark For One Film Review

Yes, alright. The warning signs were there for everyone except the kid to see. Image via thedeadcentre.

That title is a ruddy in joke, y’know. Insidious? Like nerve gas.

There you are, scrolling your way through Netflix choices and bickering with your companion over their suggestions like you’re five in the video shop and suddenly, there it is! The agreeable alternative! “…an independent American psychological horror film” by the creative teams behind ‘Saw’ & ‘Paranormal Activity. What better to while away a sunny Sunday afternoon in September?

It all started promisingly enough, but as quality control goes I must advise you that I was post-prandial beverage and as sharp as Play-Doh. Therefore I may have allowed the Paranormal Activity-esque vibe to slide for the paltry compensation of a couple of cheap shocks.

But I wasn’t so comatose that the next vintage horror homage was going to drift across my glazed eyes without acknowledgement. The terrorised young family, having moved house to escape the presence of some vague but loud spectre, call in a random ghost botherer the husband’s mother just so happens to know, after figuring the spectre thing has bloody gone and followed them to their new home. Imagine the scenes!

Well, if only someone had imagined ‘dem scenes, instead of getting to that point in the script, scratching his head with his pencil (because all screenwriters write in pencil) and thinking, “I can’t figure out where those ghost hunter types fit into the Paranormal Activity template, so I better find a new story.” He lifts his tired, jaded eyes up to the DVD shelf and follows the spines along until the gap appears. “What was next to Paranormal Activity? Ah, Poltergeist. That’ll do.”

The supposedly gifted but probably a mad fraudster in real life woman. The blokes with the totally unconvincing tech equipment. The parent as the sacrifice. It’s bad enough knowing Poltergeist off by heart because my parents had it on video and I used to watch it when they went out. You’re going to make me watch someone with a noticeably lower budget try to recreate the ante-room to the afterlife using a smoke machine and some bloke in a leotard and a mask that’s been coloured in with a crayon?

I won’t have it. Not even if I’m drunk.