Digit dignity

WALKING home recently from a football match where my team yet again contrived to score fewer goals than the opposition – don't they practise winning games? – I found myself giving the finger to a bus load of victorious away fans as they crawled past me in the evening traffic. In mitigation, they started it. But even though it was a reflexive, spontaneous and oddly satisfying gesture, it was also a childish one. I admit that. I nearly walked into a lamp-post as I was doing it, which probably serves me right.

Luckily nobody important saw any of this, and even if they had I wouldn't have lost my job over it. Spare a thought, then, for 50-year-old Juli Briskman, who hasn't been so lucky.

Briskman was cycling along a road in her home town of Sterling, Virginia when she too was compelled to make a reflexive, spontaneous and oddly satisfying rude gesture – not to a bus load of bevvied Scottish football fans, but to the six-strong motorcade which rolled past her on its way out of a nearby sporting facility. Let's call it the Trump National Golf Course, because that's its name. Inside one of the cars was – you guessed it – El Prez himself.

“Honestly, my blood started boiling at that point,” Briskman said later. “I just got angry. I lifted my arm and started flipping him off. I started thinking 'You’re golfing again when there is so much going on right now'.”

Luckily for her, she avoided hitting a lamp-post. Unluckily, this act of defiance was captured by press photographers trailing the motorcade and images of it soon went viral. Satirical late-night NBC chat show host Jimmy Fallon featured it on his programme, and Briskman began to be referred to online as a “she-ro”. Though probably not by the Trump-loving Fox News. Emboldened, she stuck the image on both her Twitter and Facebook accounts and decided she should probably tell her HR department that she was the woman in the images. Briskman, a marketing analyst, is employed by a company which oversees US government contracts.

Or she was, because it was when she 'fessed up that the trouble started. According to a report in the New York Times, she was called into a meeting the next day, told she had violated the company's policy regarding obscene content and social media and asked to resign. Then she was escorted from the building.

President Trump, who has effectively been giving the finger to the whole world for a year now and is regularly photographed doing so, is still in a job. How's that for justice?

Stranger singalongs

JIMMY Fallon's late-night rival over on CBS is James Corden, the funny one from Gavin & Stacey who wasn't Gavin or Stacey. The Briton hosts The Late Late Show With James Corden and one of its most popular segments is Carpool Karaoke, in which famous people drive around Los Angeles with Corden, either singing along to one of their own songs (Elton John did Tiny Dancer and Crocodile Rock) or murdering someone else's (Michelle Obama did Get Ur Freak On, LeBron James did Maniac from Flashdance).

Corden doesn't really take requests, but like it or not he is currently the subject of one. Sort of anyway: a petition has been raised by fans of Netflix sci-fi series Stranger Things to invite some (or all?) of the cast members onto Carpool Karaoke. The campaign has been launched on the website Care2 Petitions and at the time of writing it had 3,161 supporters. “Everyone's been through so much after this season, they deserve a bit of a break and some fun,” the petition says, referring to the show's climactic, er, climax. “Maybe sing the Diana Ross classic, Upside Down?”.

If you haven't seen Stranger Things, now in its second series, that may mean little to you. If you have, I'm sure you'll agree that watching Winona Ryder and her child co-stars bellowing the 1980s chart-topper out of the car window at passers-by would be one of the TV highlights of the year. Maybe even the century.

To A Moz

THAT said, the TV highlight of the Christmas period looks like it's going to be the John Lewis Christmas advert. Again. This one features a farting monster called Moz which lives under the bed of a cute seven-year-old called Joe and comes with a soundtrack provided by Elbow via The Beatles – a cover of the Fab Four's Golden Slumbers, to be precise. Its unveiling at 7.50am on Friday on ITV's Good Morning Britain had host Charlotte Hawkins in tears. She probably won't be the only one so moved over the festive period.

But for those of a more cynical nature, help is at hand in the form of the myriad parodies which will soon be clogging up your Facebook feed. First out of the blocks were the students of London's School of Communications Arts, who convened in a self-styled “war room” at 8am on Friday to do in seven hours and for £700 what John Lewis did in seven months for a cost of £7 million. Their “discount ad” parody was produced in conjunction with discount website My Voucher Codes. But there will be many others along in the next few days and weeks. Why not make one yourself?

Fake chews

HAVING recently enjoyed my first taste of Korean food – you haven't lived until you've had a crispy omelette made with kimchi, a spiced and salted cabbage pickle that may explode if you don't “burp” it regularly during the fermenting process – I'm keen to learn more about the country's cuisine. So for once I was delighted that Donald Trump had been allowed out of the country to meet a foreign leader, in this case South Korean president Moon Jae-in. Delighted, you see, because they sat down to break bread together at an official state banquet whose menu has been now released.

And so we know that among the Korean delicacies The Donald tackled with his Presidential chop-sticks was shrimp caught off the island of Dokdo, and a beef rib dish made using a 360-year-old soy sauce. If you're frantically trying to do the maths, I'm way ahead of you: we're talking 1657, the year the Levellers tried to assassinate Oliver Cromwell, coffee was introduced to France, and the first series of Midsomer Murders aired. And over a century before the so-called Founding Fathers signed their names to the American Declaration of Independence. That last point won't have been lost on the visiting Americans.

This wasn't the only sophisticated political point-scoring the South Koreans indulged in, however. Ownership of the island of Dokdo is contested with Japan and the presence of the (otherwise blameless) shrimp on the menu caused a right old fishy stink in Tokyo. “Anti-Japanese” was how the local media saw it. It was just a shrimp, dudes.

Back in Scotland, I'm more concerned with food than politics, especially as it's nearly lunchtime. Beef in 360-year-old soy sauce sounds pretty good to me, and I'm also keen to try the delicacy the Trumps were offered when they landed in Seoul – dried persimmons coated with chocolate and tea, handmade by South Korean First Lady Kim Jung-sook. Yum yum.

Over the border in North Korea, things aren't so rosy food-wise. A United Nations report issued in March estimated that 18 million North Korean citizens aren't getting enough to eat, including 1.3 million children under the age of five, and over 10 million are actually undernourished. That's around 40 per cent of the population. Despite that, defectors from the north have recreated some of the country's favourite snacks for sale in the south, offering a glimpse of what North Koreans eat – injogogi, for instance, made from the dregs of soy bean oil. It's normally fed to pigs but it can be rolled and pressed into sheets or, as injogigibab, rolled into tubes and filled with rice and chilli paste. The name means “man-made meat”.

I don't suppose Donald Trump was given that to eat. But I'd be surprised if, in his exquisitely-presented state dinner, there wasn't just a trace of fermented cabbage. Properly “burped” beforehand, of course.