Lord Christopher Monckton (pictured left—that's really him!) says his wacky denials of global warming were unfairly skewed in a recent BBC documentary on the environment. Lord Monckton—a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher and not an invention of Evelyn Waugh's—claims, "They made it sound as if these were just my personal views, as if I was some potty peer. It was caddish of them." Oh dude, you have got to be in the news every weekend forever!

Maybe being a professional poet isn't a romantic escape from the drudgery of work and intellectual boredom. Being the Poet Laureate of the United States is kind of a pain in the ass—full of events and obligations, you're lucky to find time to write. But being Britain's Poet Laureate is even worse: the current one, Andrew Motion, is counting the days 'til his term is up next year because he's miserable:

Ha ha, the New York Times ran a story about how all Brits are drunken louts and when they go on vacations to Greece they fight and vomit and drink and cuss and cross-dress so much that Crete is like, wanting to ban British citizens altogether. Ha, unruly people. But for Times reporter Sarah Lyall, all this drunken madness coverage is familiar territory. We must ask, in all seriousness: has Sarah Lyall spent her entire career on the "Drunk-ass English people" beat? Look at this: NYT stories by Sarah Lyall, a selection: 6/2/06 "It's Springtime for Soccer, And For Rowdy England Fans" 1/11/06 "Ever Since Falstaff, Getting Sloshed Is Cricket" 7/22/04 "British Worry That Drinking Has Gotten Out of Hand" 9/2/02 "What is it About British Men? Cheap, Drunk, and Stiff-Lipped." 5/1/00 "Later Pub Hours? Europe Tells Britain It's Time." There's more!

Toby Young, the British exile and former Vanity Fair writer whose mildly amusing book How To Lose Friends and Alienate People is now being turned into a (doubtless middling) movie, is concerned about how hard it is for even famous writers to make any serious money in America these days. Except for Toby Young himself, of course, who is getting paid to write cute little missives back to the UK about how hard it is for even famous writers to make any serious money in America these days. "I'm currently in the Hamptons," he starts off:

Toby Young became famous long, long ago, when he was fired from Vanity Fair and then wrote a book about being fired from Vanity Fair. The book was also about how VF editor Graydon Carter is a bit of a tool. No one liked the book that much [Update! Besides Nick Denton and most of the UK!] but it was kind of funny and the media stuff was fun back in the early days of Gawker. But now! Thanks to The Devil Wears Prada we're finally getting the film of the book about getting fired from Vanity Fair. Toby Young's publicity campaign begins with an interview with Young Manhattanite, in which he says this: "[Gawker] has turned New York into what the philosopher Jeremy Bentham called a Panopticon — a type of prison in which all the prisoners are capable of being observed 24/7." And then he says this: "Who's Nick Denton?" Hah. [YM]

Street art, culture jamming, anti-corporate activism, celebrity loathing, celebrity worship-it's all mixed up into a vast cultural stew these days, making the individual messages of many artists hard to parse. When in doubt just assume the message is, "I'm trying to get famous." British artist James Cauty has taken a pop art style, combined it with an advertising-remix motif, and sprinkled in a little blatant fame whoring to cap it all off. He's just commandeering billboards with pieces about celebrities saying how much they love him, and you have to admit that really crystallizes pop culture circa 2008. Plenty of people with day jobs in advertising dream about having the balls to do this (illegally). Pictured, Cauty's image and billboard theft starring Kate Moss; below, another one with celebrity chef Nigella Lawson.

So, the son of Camilla Parker Bowles—you know her better as Mrs. Prince Charles—has a new book out. (That's him in an undated photo with his sister Laura.) The book's something about eating exotic food on his world travels. He's also an editor at Tatler, the cheeky British mag where Tina Brown became editor at the tender age of 25. Also, his wife is an editor at Harper's Bazaar. They live in Notting Hill, which Tom accurately characterizes as the land where everyone's a twat.

This morning, we received an email solicitation to subscribe to a magazine called Scarlet, which promised, for only £1 an issue, to be "THE MAGAZINE THAT TURNS WOMEN ON." Well well well! Color us intrigued. It turns out it's, like, this totally British version of Our Bodies, Ourselves plus Cosmo plus self-empowerment + skankiness... wait, did we just describe Jezebel?