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.
Marriage proposal hit by massive wave (video)
ROMANCE. It doesn’t work. Kissing in the rain isn’t nice, it’s horrible. Rose petals on a bed? That’s just a load of decaying bits of flower that’ll need hoovering up. Chocolates give you diabetes and making love requires you to take clothes off your horrible string of sausages body.
One chap found out that romance is stupid when he took his loved one to the sea to pop the special question (please note: there is absolutely nothing special about getting married because any idiot can do it – it is less special than whistling because not everyone can do that). (Did she turn you down – ed?)
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The troubling case of Chris Wilson – convicted for not telling his sexual partner he was transgender
IN Scotland, freedom is being challenged. Chris Wilson has been at Edinburgh High Court. He entered a guilty plea for “obtaining sexual intimacy by fraud” and “deceiving” two sexual partners. Wilson’s crime was to tell/show his lovers that he was a man. But, according to his birth certificate, he’s a female.
Chris Wilson had sexual relations with two young women. One was aged 15. It went no further than a kiss. The other was 15 but told him she was 16. She and Wilson did have sex. Wilson told them both he was 17. He was 21 at the time. He’s now 25.
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The mystery of Liverpool’s Williamson Tunnels: digging to Armageddon
WHAT is the point of the tunnels that lie beneath Liverpool’s Edge Hill area? Do they need one? Is just being there enough?
The Williamson Tunnels “were built and conceived in the early 19th century by eccentric businessman Joseph Williamson, who paid soldiers returning from the Napoleonic war to build them. No records were kept of how far they stretch, nor which direction they go in. After Williamson’s death in 1840, the tunnels fell into disrepair.”
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Posted: 12th, March 2013 | In: Flashback | Comments (2)
Russian bus driver nicknamed ‘The Punisher’ for ramming into cars [VIDEO]
DRIVING is an infuriating pastime at the best of times, with jams, woefully under-maintained roads and worst of all, other drivers. Those swine tailgate you, beep, swear, swerve and cut you up.
One Russian bus driver has got an answer for this bozos and talks to them in a language bad drivers understand – equally dangerous driving. Alexei Volkov has been given the nickname ‘The Punisher’ as he delivers vigilante justice to motorists who cut in front of him.
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Posted: 12th, March 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
Vatican’s gay sauna awaits results of Papal conclave
HAS all this talk of sex and ‘inappropriate behaviour’ been pumped out by Vatican rivals to discredit their opponents in the race for the papacy?
The latest caper involves the Holy See’s purchase of a €23 million share of a block of flat in Rome that just happens to house Europe’s biggest gay sauna, the Europa Multiclub:
Behind this door awaits a world welcoming, exciting, fun … A place willed and created by men and for men only. A place where men shed stress and insecurities, and enjoy the priceless joy of being themselves!
Here you will find: mega turkish bath, sauna, big whirlpool, pool with waterfall, relax rooms with video, Technogym fitness room, video room, a cinema, aesthetics – solarium – massages, parties – Shows – surprises, music therapy, aromatherapy, color therapy , EMC Cafe ‘always open!
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Beach goers form human chain to save boy from drowning (video)
TO Napier, New Zealand, where Josh McQuiod, 12, has been swept into the sea at Marine Parade. He’s been in the water for eight minutes.
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Pupils not allowed on Welsh bus without proof of believing in Jesus: no Muslims, Jews and Jedis allowed
RELIGION isn’t inherently bad. It is, however, filled with bad representatives and too much middle management. If you’ve read the Bible, you’ll see that Jesus thought the same. Alas, no Christian is ever going to listen to everything he says in a bid to interpret his words in the way that best suits them.
Such a shame.
Either way, there’ll be more hubbub around Christianity after a schools in Wales brought in a frankly preposterous rule which states that pupils will now have to show a baptism certificate if they want free school transport.
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Posted: 11th, March 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
Saudi Arabia runs out of swordsmen to execute prisoners
“This solution seems practical, especially in light of shortages in official swordsmen or their belated arrival to execution yards in some incidents; the aim is to avoid interruption of the regularly-taken security arrangements.”
The Falklands referendum: photos of a loaded vote
DO the Falkland Islanders want their home to remain a British Overseas Territory? The vote is a forgone conclusion. It’s more loaded than Prince Harry at a frat house party. If the islanders reject Britain, the Argentines will see it as one more reason for it to take control of the rocks and their oil-rich waters.
So. Do you want Blighty or Bitchy? No contest:
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1956 Hard Disk Drive – loading IBM’s storage unit on a PAA jet
PHWAOR! Cop a load of that hard drive being loaded on a Pan American Airways jet. It’s as big as a car:
In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first ‘SUPER’ computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5 MB of data.
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Posted: 10th, March 2013 | In: Flashback, Technology | Comment
Pizza thief too fat to attend court
LIAM Johnston, 21, has pleaded guilty to obtaining almost £120 worth of goods – namely, Domino’s pizas – by fraud (a fake credit card). But he’s not at Livingston Sheriff Court because he’s too fat, or “medically unfit”, as his lawyer calls it.
Mr Johnston tips the scales at 40 stone.
Johnston, is now “getting advice on what benefits he could claim after losing his Job Seekers Allowance.” He has been asked to be examined by his GP.
One might suggest a cure all – that Mr Johnston take up working for Domino’s as a walking pizza delivery man to pay off any debt. Or that the courtroom docks be made larger, and the scales of justice less biased towards the thin and slippery.
Spotter: The Scotsman
Posted: 10th, March 2013 | In: Reviews, The Consumer | Comment
Vengeful woman kept names of Jimmy Savile’s BBC paedophile ‘ring’ in her autograph book
IN “REVENGE OF SAVILE VICTIM”, the Express introduces us to Leisha Brookes, 45. She claims to have been abused by the late Sir Jimmy Savile, Papal Knight, NHS ward wallah, BBC stalwart and keeper of those Princess Diana secrets. And her revenge is to…
a) Dig up Savile and beat him with sticks?
b) Have cigars rebranded as ‘Peado Sticks’?
c) Firebomb the London Marathon?
d) Murder everyone with the surname Savile
e) Refuse to pay her TV licence
Yep, it’s (f). Says she:
“No matter what you fine me, I am not going to give a penny to my abusers from the BBC. I cannot pay the BBC or anyone connected with it.”
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Posted: 10th, March 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
TV shooting show presenter Gregory G. Rodriguez shot dead by angry husband
IN north Montana, Wayne Bengston (right in above photo) shot dead Gregory G. Rodriguez, 43, of Sugar Land, Texas (left), allegedly.
Rodgriguez was the host of the Sportsman Channel show A Rifleman’s Journal, an editor at Shooting Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Petersen’s Hunting, Guns & Ammo and Dangerous Game.
Apparently, Rodriguez was talking with the shooter’s wife at her mother’s home. She works at a firearms manufacturer. Bengston, 41, shot Rodriguez dead. He then beat his wife with a pistol – she’s mother to their 2-year-old son. He then killed himself with a shot to the head.
Bengston did not have a criminal record. He worked for the U.S. Forest Service.
So. About those guns…
Posted: 9th, March 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
The truth about those Israeli apartheid buses
ABOUT those separate buses for Israelis and Palestinians. You know, the story Prada headlined: “Israel rolls back to Apartheid.” The Telegraph’s Jake Wallis Simons notes in “Palestinian-only buses: Israeli apartheid?”:
…the current plans are merely one step away from enforced segregation; this may very well cause more problems than it solves, and may set a troubling precedent.
It sounds terrible.
The Telegraph’s Robert Tait has more. He quotes Ofra Yeshua-Lyth, an activist with Women For Civil Disobedience, an Israeli-Palestinian campaign group:
“They are institutionalising segregated services for Jews and non-Jews. Many people don’t class the Israeli situation as apartheid because for a long time, Israel refrained from the characteristics of petty apartheid, like separate roads, cafés and buses. This bus situation is a step in the direction of petty apartheid because people are being segregated in their daily activities.”
The Times notes:
‘Apartheid’ anger as Israel starts separate bus lines on West Bank… One Palestinian official, who is considering a legal complaint, said: “This smacks of blatant racism; it is yet another rung in the ladder that Israel is slowly climbing until all the world will call it an apartheid state.”
Oddly, Al Jazeera says “a number of Palestinian commuters have welcomed the move…”
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem wasn’t listening to that:
“The attempt at bus segregation is appalling, and the current arguments about ‘security needs’ and ‘overcrowding’ must not be allowed to camouflage the blatant racism of the demand to remove Palestinians from busess”
They want apartheid? Well, no. Jeffrey Goldberg reports the message he received from Aaron Sagui, spokesman at the Israeli embassy in Washington:
Right now, Palestinians wishing to cross legally into Israel (with a working permit) have no direct line to the border crossing. So they either take unauthorized taxis (at expensive fares, since the service is uncontrolled by transportation authorities), or they have to walk or travel to an Israeli city or village (Ariel, for instance) and there take a bus into Israel. The relevant bus company opened two lines that will serve Palestinians, going from their place of residence into Israel, saving them the trouble of going to Ariel first, or taking those taxis.The bus company made it clear, in an official announcement, that no Palestinian shall be shunned or rejected if they choose to travel on the Ariel line.
So. There are two sides to the story. It’s not apartheid, then. It’s business…
The new bus service started yesterday, March 4. It also may have ended yesterday.
There were riots Monday morning at the Eyal Crossing because there weren’t enough buses – which Transportation Minister Israel Katz said would be rectified. But too late, because Monday night someone set fire to two Afikim buses which were parked in the Arab town of Kfar Qassem. The bus company has now removed all their buses from the area because of the violence and destruction.
Such are the facts.
ON 5 March 1938: Evelyn Waugh wrote a letter to the New Statesman magazine. He wanted to talk about use of the word “Fascist”:
St James’ Club, Piccadilly, W1
5 March 1938
SIR,—I am moved to write to you on a subject that has long been in my mind, by an anecdote I have just heard.
A friend of mine met someone who—I am sure, both you and he himself would readily admit—represents the highest strata of “Left Wing” culture. The conversation turned on the “May-fair” jewel robbers and the Socialist remarked that they exhibited “typical Fascist mentality.” This seems to me an abuse of vocabulary so mischievous and so common, that it is worth discussing.
…
There was recently a petition sent to English writers (by a committee few, if any of whom, were English professional writers), asking them to subscribe themselves, categorically, as supporters of the Republican Party in Spain, or as “Fascists.” When rioters are imprisoned it is described as a “Fascist sentence”; the Means Test is Fascist; colonisation is Fascist; military discipline is Fascist; patriotism is Fascist; Catholicism is Fascist; Buchmanism is Fascist; the ancient Japanese cult of their Emperor is Fascist; the Galla tribes’ ancient detestation of theirs is Fascist; fox-hunting is Fascist … Is it too late to call for order?
It is constantly said by those who observed the growth of Nazism, Fascism, and other dictatorial systems (not, perhaps, excluding USSR) that they were engendered and nourished solely by Communism. I do not know how true that is, but I am inclined to believe it when I observe the pitiable stampede of the “Left Wing Intellectuals” in our own country. Only once was there anything like a Fascist movement in England; that was in 1926 when the middle class took over the public services; it now does not exist at all except as a form of anti-Semitism in the slums…. if they persist in throwing the epithet about it may begin to stick. They may one day find that there is a Fascist party which they have provoked….
Evelyn Waugh
Photo: British novelist and writer Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh is seen on November 22, 1937.
Jon Venables knew my mother: James Bulger’s killer unites country in hate
IS Venables “my dad?” So asks a “young mum” from the cover of the Daily Mirror. The answer should come in two words: Jeremy Kyle. This televised patenity test would pack them in.
The story is, however, thinner than the aforesaid Kyle’s prayer book:
A young mum fears James Bulger murderer Jon Venables could be the father of her son.
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Posted: 9th, March 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (11)
Picky Portsmouth eater finds hairy lump in her mum’s lasagna
TO Portsmouth, where Shani Stock has found “a grisly hairy lump” in her mum’s lasagna. No, not the lodger. This was a lump of substance in the dish mum Trudy made using a £3 bag of frozen mince from Iceland.
The Portsmouth News reports:
Mum Trudy, 29, of Grove Road in Elson, Gosport is concerned as her daughter, already a fussy eater, now refuses to eat much else apart from crisps and picks through any meals she does agree to eat.
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Posted: 8th, March 2013 | In: Reviews, The Consumer | Comment
Courageous Samira Ibrahim rejected by Obama for her ‘racist anti-American’ tweets
SAMIRA Ibrahim, 26, was declared an international woman of courage. The ubiquitous Michelle Obama was to award the Egyptian with an award. Ibrahim had protested against Egyptian doctors forcing “virginity tests” on women in captivity. That showed courage.
She says that after being arrested in Tahrir Square, a doctor tried to test her. Furthermore, she was “arrested while in high school for writing a paper that criticised Arab leaders’ insincere support to the Palestinian cause.”
This was deemed to be courageous.
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Posted: 8th, March 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
The Playboy Bunny Club Manual 1968 (know your rights, Bunnies)
IN 1968, the Playboy Bunny Club was for swinging cats who liked their women holding “man-sized” drinks, lighting cigarettes and dressed as saucy rabbits. It being a club meant there was rules. In this brochure, you can bone up. You can look around the club here.
This manual is worth the read. You can learn how to smoke like a Playboy Bunny, dress like one and sell lots of drink to win the star prize. Yep, it’s a… Playboy Mug:
Posted: 8th, March 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts | Comment
Operation Elveden: Ex-police officer guilty of telling on John Terry’s mum
ALAN Tierney was a police constable with Surrey police who sold information about Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood and Chelsea footballer John Terry’s mother to the Sun in 2009. He earned £1,750. Terry’s mother, Sue Terry, had been cautioned on suspicion of shoplifting (clothes). Wood had been involved with a fracas with his then Russian lover, Ekaterina Ivanova.
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Posted: 8th, March 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
Retro masks – when hiding makes you wonder
MASKS look terrifying at the best of times. View them in fade black and white and they look macabre. The wearer instantly looks like they are up to no good. Episodes of cartoon show Scooby-Doo routinely ended with the criminal being unmasked. Why did Michael Jackson dress his children in masks? Paris Jackson said: “I was really confused. I didn’t get why I was wearing a mask.” Masks don’t make you ignore the wearer; they make you stare. What’s beneath it? A death mask, made from a facial impression of the recently dead, is disconcerting. It’s the person stripped of all signs of life. The mask makes you see what isn’t there.
Masks can work as a device. The Rubberbandits are an Irish comedy duo who wear masks made from plastic bags. They are very funny. Their song Up the Ra invites the coward to give it up for heroes of the Republican cause, like Ayrton Senna, Sharon Stone and R2-D2. Here, the masks give them freedom.
York student who cooked live hamster should have eaten it
JAMES White, 21, fried his flatmate’s Syrian hamster in a pan at their York University digs. He had been drinking.
When asked what had happened, White is reported to have said:
“I fucking fried it, I fried it.”
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Why did the New York Times lose the argument on manmade global warming?
THE Climate Change war is over. The New York Times has closed its climate change desk and Green Blog. Why?
Kevin Drum wonders:
Obviously the Times editors are going to come in for plenty of criticism over this, and that’s fine. They deserve it. But let’s face it: the reason they did this is almost certainly that the blog wasn’t getting much traffic (and, therefore, not generating much advertising revenue). So a more constructive question is: Why do readers—even the well-educated, left-leaning readers of the Times—find environmental news so boring? Is it because we all write about it badly? Is it something inherent in the subject itself? Is it because most people think we don’t really have any big environmental problems anymore aside from climate change? Or is it because it’s just such a damn bummer to read endlessly about all the stuff we should stop doing because, somehow, it will end up destroying a rain forest somewhere?
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Posted: 7th, March 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (10)
