Reviews Category
We don’t just report off-beat news, breaking news and digest the best and worst of the news media analysis and commentary. We give an original take on what happened and why. We add lols, satire, news photos and original content.
Eddie Shah says underage girls can be blamed for some rapes
TODAY founder, Eddy Shah, has said that under-age girls who engage in consensual sex can be “to blame” for any rapes that come their way. He was offering his opinion on the subject after he was cleared of raping a schoolgirl in London hotels when she was between 12 and 15.
He said:
“Anybody walking down the street can point at a celebrity and say, ‘he raped me’. If we take the pop groups and people of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, who everybody knows that women were throwing themselves at them – young girls who looked 17, 18, 19 and 20…
“Rape was a technical thing – below a certain age. But these girls were going out with the pop groups and becoming groupies and all the rest of it, and throwing themselves at them. You cannot put that down to the fact they’ve been abused.
“Young girls and young men have always wanted a bit of excitement when they are young. They want to appear adult and do adult things.”
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Posted: 14th, August 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
Russian State TV says gays have hearts that aren’t fit for life
RUSSIAN politicians hate gay people. Quite why, it isn’t clear. Have they even heard Mighty Real by Sylvester? Clearly not because that’s the greatest pop song ever made and on impact, it turns even the worst git into a whirling disco machine in love with gay culture.
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Posted: 13th, August 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
Alexandra Hill’s murder: More collateral damage in America’s pathetic War on Drugs
TWO-year-old Alexandra Hill is dead because the state of Texas in its infinite wisdom believes “violent foster parents prone to flinging toddlers about like rag dolls” are more suitable caretakers for children than “the child’s own loving parents, if one of those parents occasionally smokes the dreaded illicit marijuana.” (Alcohol is legal and presumably safe, which is why trustworthy Texas parents eschew smoking cannabis at night but may freely guzzle booze until they pass out.)
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Posted: 10th, August 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
Detroit becomes a national park of wonders: how education works in a failed city
DETROIT is a dead duck.Katie Pavlic sees one problem:
“In the city of Detroit, 47 percent of adults are functionally illiterate. Students in Detroit’s public school system have a higher chance of going to prison than they do of graduating high school.”
Iowahawk has a suggestion for Detroit’s future:
Turn Detroit into a national park, to show our kids the wonders of “Government Help.”
Detroit’s emergency management means many are concerned over the city’s public schools. They might well worry. This is about the now former president of Detroit’s school board:
The debate has been over whether formerDPS board president Otis Mathis should have resigned after exhibiting horrendous behavior and poor judgment. Mathis quit after admitting to “inappropriate actions” with his hand between his legs behind his desk while the district’s female superintendent sat opposite him trying to have a conversation.
He expressed deep regret and then, inexplicably, asked for his resignation back, buoyed by the comments of fellow board member Reverend David Murray, who dismissed the behavior of the 55-year-old Mathis this way: “He’s a young man; maybe he didn’t know it was offensive to her … That’s just the way it is.”
He resigned in 2010. He cited “health problems”.
Joanne Jacobs reports on other education news:
Aproduct of Detroit Public Schools now leads the school board that’s trying to raise worst-in-the-nation literacy scores. Otis Mathis can’t write, reveals Detroit News columnist Laura Berman. The board president’s e-mails are notoriously garbled:
Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row’s, and who is the watch dog?
In another e-mail:
If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats.
Mathis concedes, “I’m a horrible writer.” He was placed in special education in fourth grade and was “kicked out” of several high schools.
He graduated from Southwestern High School in 1973 with what he says was a 1.8 grade-point average but was previously reported as a .98 average. After serving in the Navy, Wayne State placed him in a special program to help academically unqualified students move forward, on the G.I. Bill.
…
Mathis told Berman he can read, but “sometimes needs to read documents two or three times to fully comprehend their contents.”
After working as a counselor at Wayne State, Mathis worked as a substitute teacher in Detroit schools, ran a nonprofit and served on the Wayne County Commission. He is liked by colleagues, who elected him board president on a 10-1 vote.
Mathis and some of his supporters say he’s a role model, showing that it’s possible to succeed despite limitations. He understands the problems, backers say.
“Only in Detroit and in the public school system would someone who can’t compose a basic sentence be the best candidate for school board president. If I lived in Michigan, I would be outraged that my tax dollars were going to such an unqualified individual.”
…
It’s kind of scary to even talk about,” says Patrick Martin, 49, a Detroit contractor whose 12-year-old son is a student at Noble Middle School.
“If this is the leader, what does it say about the followers?
Said Mathis:
I would tell the kids about my grade point and how I survived,” Mathis told Frank Beckmann this morning on WJR AM-760. “I’d tell them about my grandchild, who’s been identified as special needs since birth. And that’s all I would say. Don’t let them stop you no matter what anybody says. Don’t let them stop you. Don’t let them stop you.”
Reach for the stars…
Posted: 8th, August 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
Rehearsing to be shot in Egypt
ANYONE know what’s going on in Egypt, where hundreds have been killed?
Spotter: Tim Blair
Posted: 8th, August 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (3)
A pictorial history of King’s Cross Station
KING’S Cross Station is named in honour of George IV. Fitting, perhaps, that our pictorial history of the grand London terminus (born: 1852) should feature many images of the Royal Family to-ing and fro-ing.
In a move to raise the rather tarnished image of the area, a statue of King George IV was erected at the Battle Bridge crossroads in 1830. The statue attracted ridicule and was demolished in 1842, but the new name for the area – ‘King’s Cross’ – stuck. Between 1849 and 1852 the Great Northern Railway (GNR) developed their London terminus in the area. The GNR purchased land for the station to the south of the canal and land to the north for its goods station and steam locomotive depot.
King’s Cross was never the smartest area.
The story of King’s Cross begins with the Fleet River and a small settlement, which grew up at a place known as Battle Bridge, named after an ancient crossing of the Fleet River which flows beneath, near the northern end of present-day Gray’s Inn Road.
Some of the earliest enterprises in the area were the spas, which developed around the Fleet’s springs, becoming fashionable resorts in the eighteenth century. It was, however, an early attempt at traffic planning which determined the area’s fate. Thomas Coram built the Foundling Hospital for children in 1742-1747 just south of the present day King’s Cross and ten years later, in 1756, the New Road was cut across the fields from east to west to channel traffic away from the city centre. Today, as the ever-busy Euston Road, it serves the same purpose.
By the early-nineteenth century Battle Bridge had become a depressing place. It was low lying and subject to flooding. The Smallpox Hospital had been built in 1769 and a fever hospital was added in 1802. It had become notorious for its tile kilns, rubbish tips and noxious trades.
On a personal note, I lived in this part of Islington for some time; family member’s worked in the roads behind St Pancras, the grander station next door. Noxious trades were often those in human flesh: no trip to buy first-edition newspapers or to the all-night Scala cinema and Mole Jazz was complete without an offer to buy sex or drugs.
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Posted: 8th, August 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts | Comment
Brompton Road Tube Station: photos of the secret bunker in the smart part of London
FOR Sale: The Brompton Road tube station, a disused station on the Piccadilly line between South Kensington and Knightsbridge which is owned by the Ministry of Defence. Opened in 1906, the station closed 30 years later. Why? Too few passengers, so they said. When war broke out, the station was taken over by the 1st Anti-Aircraft Division. They say this bunker was where Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s deputy in the Nazi Party, was brought to be interrogated after being captured in Scotland in 1941.
It would make a terrific torture chamber; or storage room for a wealthy local woman’s handbags.
Ministry of Defence property surveyor Julian Chafer, ascends the spiral stairwell in the former Brompton Road tube station
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Posted: 7th, August 2013 | In: Flashback, The Consumer | Comment
The media-stoked moral panic over Ask.fm suicides and Twitter hate
TROLLING is big news. The latest story is that young people using the site Ask.fm are dying. This follows news that women are being subjected to vile abuse on Twitter. But only women to whom the mass media is sympathetic are featured as victims. And that is odd.
The Daily Mail delivers the case for the prosecution in bullet points.
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Posted: 7th, August 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews, Technology | Comment (1)
Judge John Crater: On August 6 1930 Supreme Court judge became The Missingest Man in New York
FLASHBACK to August 6 1930: Judge Joseph Force Crater vanishes.
The 41-year-old came to be known as The Missingest Man in New York.
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Washington Post sells for less than The Worcester Telegram & Gazette
NEWSPAPER sales news:
Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos is buying the Washington Post for $250 million …
Just three days ago the New York Times Co. sold the Boston Globe for $70 million, having paid $1.1 billion for it in 1993.
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Incongruous Songs – when the music of rebellion is used by the wrong people
A FLASHBACK about Incongruous Songs. The music of rebellion adopted by the wrong people at the wrong place and the wrong time. Look what they’ve one to my song, ma.
In 1976, a Mancunian punk band called Buzzcocks borrowed £500 from friends and relatives and recorded and released the Spiral Scratch EP (Print run: 1,000 copies). 
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Posted: 6th, August 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, Music | Comment
Scare stories: Dutch wolves invade Britain
SCARE story of the summer is not foxes or sharks: it’s wolves. The Daily Mail Reporter has news:
The wolf’s at the door: First killer beast turns up in Holland for 150 years sparking fears they may soon arrive in Britain
Amid the welter of facts – “When chasing prey, they run at around 40mph; They listen to their prey’s heartbeat from several metres away with their uncannily powerful hearing and can judge when it is petrified; They are also highly intelligent” – there is no news how they can swim or hide in the back of a family hatchback on a Continental ferry.
Michele Catalano: The backpack, the pressure cooker, the cops and the evolution of WTF really happened
PROCRASTINATION is usually a bad habit but occasionally it pays off. Like last week, when the American blogger (and professional writer) Michele Catalano had something terrifying happen to her family: six agents from a “joint terrorism task force” came to her house and spent 45 minutes questioning and searching after she did a Google search for “pressure cookers” and her husband searched for “backpacks,” both on the same computer. Catalano said the agents claimed to do a hundred such anti-terror searches per week.
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Posted: 5th, August 2013 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
Revealed: The real cause of the great Twitter row, bomb threats and insults
THERE is currently mass outrage at how people are acting on Twitter. How could these gormless oiks be so rude and crude as to scream obscenities at Mary Beard and that bird who won the banknote thing?
And there’s an answer to this, one that’s really not all that flattering about us as a people but true all the same.
You might guess, then, that the current furore over Twitter doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Before Twitter got rid of the ability to watch the public Twitter timeline, I’d often sit and gaze the world’s tweets in real time. It’s no wonder they disabled that function because it didn’t take long before you would see how truly bestial we are as a species. I don’t even mean that small percentage of people who are, for want of a better word, ‘bad’. I mean huge segments of our population who demonstrated how illiteracy and stupidity prevail. I began using Twitter believing it a novel way to confine language, encourage pithy expression. I grew to realise that it’s actually the perfect way of expressing our piggish grunts, our infantile nature, our utter slavery to branding, marketing, and celebrity. Reading Twitter’s public timeline was like being trapped inside the mind of one enormous planet-sized imbecile.
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Posted: 5th, August 2013 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
Live tweeting your mother’s death
WHAT did you make of the NPR’s Scott Simon decision to live-tweet his mother’s dying in a Chicago area hospital?
You wake up and realize: you weren’t dreaming. It happened. Cry like you couldn’t last night.
Meghan O’Rourke had a view:
Simon’s Twitter feed was not an imposition of his mourning on others, not some kind of gruesome exhibitionism. It was simply a modern version of what has always existed: a platform for shared grief where the immediate loss suffered by one member of a community becomes an opportunity for communal reckoning and mourning. As the novelist Marilynne Robinson once said, suffering is a human privilege. Grief is the flip side of love. Mourning has become an all too isolated experience—but Facebook and Twitter have become a place (strange as it may seem) where the bereaved can find community, a minyan of strangers to share their prayers. Yes, it might seem strange to stumble upon announcements of death or the intimate details of dying amidst updates about summer trips to Costa Rica, Anthony Weiner’s escapades, and the arrival of a new puppy. But this strangeness is the strangeness of the real.
Will more and more people tweet from hospital rooms? It’s possible. It’s already common on Facebook, where people often announce that a loved one is in the hospital or has died. While some have bemoaned this—the Social Q’s column, in my recollection, once pronounced that Facebook was not the place to announce a death—it doesn’t feel morbid or inappropriate to me. It’s our equivalent of the ringing of church bells in the town square, for better or for worse.
Is any shock based on the idea that he was invading her privacy? Do we feel it as unusual because the tweeter is the dying woman’s son – he loves her – than a TV news crew reporting on a war or famine, filming the dying and dead for a TV show?
Photo: Simon’s parents on their wedding day.
Says Simon:
“When I first went to my mother in the ICU here in Chicago, more than a week ago at this point, I didn’t know it was going to be her death bed and I, of course, was hoping and praying that it wouldn’t be her death bed. But she was so interesting. And of course I was there all day, and it was the most interesting thing I was hearing all day. She was funny and perceptive and bright and sparkling and this is just something that I wanted to share.
“I don’t think it’s any less sacred because it was shared with a lot of people and it must be said, you know, there was a lot of stuff that I didn’t share. There was a lot of stuff that I will tell only my wife and maybe someday my children. I certainly had a sense of proportion and delicacy. I don’t think my mother knew much about Twitter or social media platforms but I would read her an occasional message from someone in Australia, someone in Great Britain or Singapore and she was very touched. She was an old showgirl and I wouldn’t — I didn’t tweet anything and wouldn’t have that I didn’t think she would be totally comfortable with.”
Simon has down is introduced us to his mother and then let us better understand the aftermath:
So much important flotsam in the wake of a life. USPS says fill out change-of-address for deceased. Wish I knew to where…
Very few of us are prepared for death.
Tweets from Scott Simon @nprscottsimon:
“When she asked for my help last night, we locked eyes. She calmed down. A look of love that surpasses understanding.”
“Mother cries Help Me at 2;30. Been holding her like a baby since. She’s asleep now. All I can do is hold on to her.”
“Thought that my mother won’t get another glimpse of the city she loves is unbearable. My wife, from France, points out—’She is seeing Chicago in the faces of the loving, tough, & kind souls working so hard for her in the ICU.’ She’s right.”
“I love holding my mother’s hand. Haven’t held it like this since I was 9. Why did I stop? I thought it unmanly? What crap.”
“Was my mother saving this line? My family flies in. My wife & I joke about me sleeping in the ICU (‘All the beeps! Can’t you med people keep it down?’) Tell my mother I’ll see my wife downstairs, back in 10. Mother says, ‘Have a quickie!'”
“Breathing hard now. She sleeps, opens eyes a minute, sleeps. I sing, ‘I’ll always be there, as frightened as you,’ to her.”
“Mother groans w/ pleasure–over flossing. ‘When they mention great little things in life, they usually forget flossing.'”
“I think she wants me to pass along a couple of pieces of advice, ASAP. One: reach out to someone who seems lonely today.”
“And: listen to people in their 80’s. They have looked across the street at death for a decade. They know what’s vital.”
“Oh, and: Oh earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you. It goes too quickly.”
“City is cool, bright, & lovely this morning. My mother touches a splash of sunlight w/ her fingers. ‘Hello, Chicago!'”
“I just realized: she once had to let me go into the big wide world. Now I have to let her go the same way.”
“ICU seems to be staffed by good, smart young docs who think they know everything, and wise RN’s who really do.”
“When my mother woke briefly I sang her My Best Girl. She replied w/ You Are the Sunshine of My Life. Broadway in the ICU.”
“Derek, mother’s kind & wise nurse, says ‘Get some sleep. Mothers like to see sons sleep.’ But I hold her hand while I can.”
“Wake up, see my hands shaking. Mother holds them, murmurs, ‘Goodnight Sweet Prince.’ Morphine, but no sleep for her.”
“Mother asks, ‘Will this go on forever?’ She means pain, dread. ‘No.’ She says, ‘But we’ll go on forever. You & me.’ Yes.”
“I don’t know how we’ll get through these next few days. And, I don’t want them to end.”
“Mother called: ‘I can’t talk. I’m surrounded by handsome men.’ Emergency surgery. If you can hold a thought for her now…”
The more you read, the more you understand. And it hurts. Boy, does it hurt…
The war on drugs: child placed with ‘killer’ foster mother because dad had smoked cannabis
HOW’S that war on drugs going? KVUE in Texas reports from the front line:
[O]n Monday night, [Joshua] Hill’s daughter Alexandria, or Alex as they liked to call her, was rushed to a Rockdale hospital with severe head injuries, then flown to Scott and White Children’s Emergency Hospital in Temple and immediately placed on life support.
Alex was living with foster parents after DFPS removed her from her parent’s home last November for “neglectful supervision.”
Hill admits they were smoking pot when their daughter was asleep.
“We never hurt our daughter. She was never sick, she was never in the hospital, and she never had any issues until she went into state care.”
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Twitter moralists only protect women they like: Mary Beard and Grace Dent are no Emma West
PROFESSOR of Classics at Cambridge Mary Beard says of the abuse many receive on twitter: “It is is scary and it has got to stop.” Beard was threatened with rape. In response to that, many Tweeters abandoned Twitter in a 24-hour silent protest.
Professor Beard was going to be silent but then received more abuse:
“Planned to be off twitter, but I’ve had more threats this morning (rape and worse). It IS still going on. Tried to report to Twitter, failed.”
One message was from an idiot threatening to bomb her home.
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Posted: 5th, August 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment (1)
Newport council gives away free cannabis in plant pots
WELCOME to Newport, South Wales, You’ll never bother to leave. There’s free marijuana.
Council officials in Newport have yet to speak to the tourism division in their investigation into how cannabis came to feature in the town’s flower pots brightening up the city centre.
Local shopkeeper Dean Beddis, spotted the weed among the petunias:
“I had never seen cannabis growing in the wild before so it was crazy to see it. It’s actually rather a beautiful plant and stood out wonderfully. But they have gone now. I don’t know who took them. Either the council spotted them or some young type has spotted them and put them in his garden.”
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Langauge police ban ‘Brown bags’ and white paper – pack lunch next
THE Language Police at Liverpool FC should cock their ears to Seattle. The city is debating whether to band the phrase “Brown Bag when referring to workers bringing food to work because it’s racially insensitive”:
City officials urge ban on ‘potentially offensive’ language
An internal memo at Seattle City Hall is causing quite a stir.
It suggests government workers no longer use the terms “citizen,” or “brown bag.”
According to the Office for Civil Rights, the terms are potentially offensive and other words should be used. “Luckily, we’ve got options,” Elliott Bronstein of the Office for Civil Rights wrote in the memo. “For ‘citizens,’ how about ‘residents?’” Bronstein wrote.
The Office of Civil Rights says Seattle serves all residents, whether they’re United States citizens or not. And while city leaders publicize “brown bag” lunch meetings as a way to designate a bring-your-own lunch time event, the term has a sordid history.
“It used to be a way people could judge skin color,” Bronstein said in a phone interview. Does the public find it offensive? Most people agree it’s not.
But the City of Seattle isn’t alone. State lawmakers have voted to remove gender specific words in official records. Freshman are now “first-years,” journeymen are “journey-level,” and penmanship is simply “handwriting.”
To offend or not to offend, turns out to be a very sensitive question. So what is a person supposed to say instead of brown bag? According to the memo, people should try “lunch-and-learn” or “sack lunch.”
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August 4 1914: The United Kingdom declares war on Germany ‘for a scrap of paper’
ON August 4, 1914, Germany invaded Belgium. In response, the United Kingdom declared war on Germany. In a Treaty of 1839, Britain had promised to defend Belgium.
“For a scrap of paper, Great Britain is going to make war?” said the amazed German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg.
At once, the Government took control of all railways. Admiral Jellicoe was placed in supreme command of the Home Fleets. The King declared:
“At this grave moment in our national history I send to you and, through you, to the officers and men of the fleets, of which you have assumed command, the assurance of my confidence that under your direction they will revive and renew the old glories of the Royal Navy, and prove once again the sure shield of Britain and of her Empire in the hour of trial.”
Germany was now at war with the UK, Russia, France and Belgium. Germany had grand plans; ambitions triggered by the event in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, when the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated.
Photo: An artist’s rendition shows the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife, Czech Countess Sophie Chotek, during their visit to Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28, 1914. The assassin, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip, left, of the group Black Hand, was captured.
Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith made a speech. The King of Belgium had made a call for help.
“Simultaneously, we received from the Belgian Legation in London the following telegram from the Belgian Minister for Foreign Affairs: ‘The General Staff announce that territory has been violated at Verviers, near Aix-la-Chapelle. Subsequent information tends to show that a German force has penetrated still further into Belgian territory.’
“…we cannot regard this as in any sense a satisfactory communication…
“We also received this morning from the German Ambassador here a telegram sent to him from the German Foreign Secretary: ‘Please dispel any distrust that must exist on the part of the British Government with regard to our intentions by repeating, most positively, the formal assurance that, even in case of armed conflict with Belgium, Germany will not, under any pretence whatever, annex Belgian territory. Please impress upon Sir Edward Grey that the German Army could not be exposed to a French attack across Belgium, which was planned according to absolutely unimpeachable information’…
“I have, to add this on behalf of the Government: we cannot regard this as in any sense a satisfactory communication. We have, in reply to it, repeated the request we made last week to the German Government that they should give us the same assurance with regard to Belgian neutrality as was given to us and to Belgium by France last week. We have asked that a reply to that request and a satisfactory answer to the telegram of this morning, which I have read to the House, should be given before midnight.”
Photo: Kaiser Wilhelm II as the ‘new King of the Belgians’.
Later, the Foreign Office announced:
Owing to the summary rejection by the German Government of the request made by His Majesty’s Government for assurances that the neutrality of Belgium would be respected, His Majesty’s Ambassador in Berlin has received his passport, and His Majesty’s Government has declared to the German Government that a state of war exists between Great Britain and Germany as from 11pm on August 4.
Viscount Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, famously said in 1914: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our time.”
By December 1914 opposing lines of trenches extended from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier. This was hell on earth.
Photo: German soldiers wearing gas masks and throwing hand grenades.
Posted: 4th, August 2013 | In: Flashback | Comments (2)
In 1965, Jack Kerouac and his mother were On The Road to New Orleans
IN 1965, Jack Keroauc narrated his a trip to New Orleans with his mother (“Memère”) for the May issue of Holiday:
There’s hardly anything in the world, or at least in America, more miserable than a transcontinental bus trip with limited means. More than three days and three nights wearing the same clothes, bouncing around into town after town; even at three in the morning, when you’ve finally fallen asleep, there you are being bounced over the railroad tracks of a town, and all the lights are turned on bright to reveal your raggedness and weariness in the seat. To do that, as I’d done so often as a strong young man, is bad enough; but to have to do that when you’re a sixty-two-year-old lady … yet Memère is more cheerful than I, and she devises a terrific trick to keep us in fairly good shape—aspirins with Coke three times a day to calm the nerves.
From mid-Florida we roll in the late afternoon over orange-grove hills toward the Tallahassee and Mobile of morning, no prospect of New Orleans till noon and already fair exhausted. Such an enormous country, you realize when you cross it on buses, the dreadful stretches between equally dreadful cities, all of them looking the same when seen from the bus of woes, the never-get-there bus stopping everywhere, and worst of all the string of fresh enthusiastic drivers every two or three hundred miles warning everyone to relax and be happy.
Sometimes during the night I look at my poor sleeping mother cruelly crucified there in the American night because of no-money, no-hope-of-money, no-family, no-nothing—just myself, the stupid son of plans all compacted of eventual darkness. God, how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life.
The 10 best lowlights from 50 Shades of Burnley
TO FACEBOOK, where the page “50 Shades of Burnley” is advertised as an “absolute disgrace” by the locale’s LibDem MP, Gordon Birtwistle.
It’s enough to us clicking to page featuring “Everything f*cked up in Burnley”.
Go those of you still not convinced to take a peek, Mr Birtwistle adds:
“I think this group is an absolute disgrace and I will try to get it closed down. If the people who have set this up are residents of Burnley they should be ashamed of themselves. Why would anyone want to humiliate their own town and residents? There are so many good things happening in Burnley with lots of investment and an exciting future ahead. We should have groups celebrating Burnley, not running it down.”
Indeed. Add the local MP to the list.
A few lowlights will now follow:
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1936: Jess Owens accepts hi Olympic 100m Gold medal
AUGUST 3, 1936:
The ceremony honoring the three winners in the 100 meter Olympic final in Berlin on August 3, 1936, which was won by Jessie Owens, U.S.A, middle, second was Tinus Osendarp, Holland, front, and third Ralph Metcalf, U.S.A. (extreme right).
Doing the Funky Chicken for kicks: the choking game gets updated
EVER do The Funky Chicken? It’s where the children hyperventilate until they pass out. This report worries about its popularity in South Australia.
The Australian Medical Association (AMA) says the big issue is with the falling down and hitting your head. Dr Patricia Montanaro from the AMA says:
“Death can occur in extreme cases, it becomes more of an accident at the end.”
A quick search of the web tells us that funky chicken is “That smell, you know it, when chicken has been left out too long”.
It is also the name of a chicken restaurant in London.
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The 22 greatest vintage guns for kids adverts
WHEN did you lean to like guns? As Lileks says:
I’m not saying it’s the be-all / end-all of ideological tests, but you can tell a lot about a person by their reaction to these ads. That was then, to understate the case. Nowadays we’ve done away with these dangerous violent antisocial pseudo-guns, and replaced them with merry-makers like Nerf guns and Supersoakers and other items whose makers encourage you to point them at your friends.
If a Nerf gun more likely to appeal to a nascent serial killer than a Daisy? What about a victual gun on Tour of Duty? There will be studies:
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Posted: 3rd, August 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, The Consumer | Comment
