good news week

Over here at Gary Sauer-Thompson's place amid the discussion about the financial crisis and the end of capitalism and why Michael Costa is a dill, is a comment about how the language of economics has become the language of ordinary discourse.

Quite so. Ever since the term "reform" entered the lingo in the early nineties (someone will now tell me it happened in 1972 or 1917 or 1838 or something, or maybe it's always been with us) the remorseless commercialisation or our lives has taken speed. We never used to have basis points, now everybody knows that the Reserve Bank either doles them our or repossesses them every month, and last year for the first time they repossessed in the middle of an election campaign. We know that privatisation is king. Oh, and so is cash, especially recently.

So you could make a confident argument about how out lives are slowly drained of blood, exsanguinated indeed, we are frogs in a pot, the tide of economics drags us further out to sea from whence we will never return.

And then you run across a restaurant review, ffs, in which USP appears. Unique selling proposition, natch. Everybody's got one.

AA Gill's USP is that he is a very funny, evocative writer or restaurant reviews and so you should go and read him right now.

It's far funnier than the standard funny/odd/local gossip page of today's local rag, which informs us that during the week, someone farted in the lift at the local hospital.

Slow news day, I guess.