I see that over the weekend the Irish Internet Association’s Net Visionary 2006 Awards singled out the awful Twenty Major as Best Blogger. One wonders what it was about that blog that won over the judges: Was it Twenty Major’s hilarious “conceit ” of building a “colloseum” to watch Travellers fight to the death (“the public could vote to let the combatants go free, or they could vote to release the specially imported starving panthers and crocodiles to finish the job?”)

Perhaps they chuckled over an anecdote in a similar vein, in which one of Twenty Major’s imaginary friends laughs about killing a Traveller in a hit-and-run. (“Hurrah!” says Pete. “I thought I’d killed a real human being.” “You’re one jammy clit, Pete” I said, kicking the body back into the ditch, before we went for a rake of pints.)

Maybe the judges just liked the cheerfully foul-mouthed manner in which Romanians are referred to as “c***s”, the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign are renamed the Irish Palestine C**ts Convention, and those involved in same-sex marriages are described as ugly “lezzers.”

I suppose in the Age of all-conquering Borat, all this can be taken as “satire.” Which is just as well, because in the past such scribblings would be dismissed as puerile and bigoted.