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.
The NRA paid Holocaust fetishist Wayne LaPierre $972,000 in 2011
WHAT does the NRA’s chief executive officer, Wayne LaPierre earn from his job?
In 2010 LaPierre was paid $970,300 and during 2011 received $972,000 for his leadership and service. He took home an additional $1,700 or 0.17% more in compensation last year, which means he didn’t keep pace with the rate of inflation.
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Posted: 14th, January 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
Peter Howson’s crucifixion of Christ is hung on the wall
PETER Howson’s crucifixion of Christ is on show at the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art in Glasgow. It shows Jesus free of the cross. Jewellers are thought to be delighted, now free as they are to position Jesus with other items, such as a wall, cheeseburgers, Mel Gibson, and holding the scarf of his favourite football team (rumoured to be Spurs).
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Sugar rationing in World War 2 – photos
SUGAR was in limited supply during WOrld War 2. Sugar was the first food the US rationed, in the spring of 1942.
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Posted: 14th, January 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, The Consumer | Comments (2)
Daily Express sees double snow ploughs in Cumbria
THE Daily Express’s weather reporting is legend. On January 12, 2013, the paper lead with news:
“WORST FREEZE FOR 20- YEARS”
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Helping the Retarded to Know God
BOOK of the day: Helping the Retarded to Know God. Published 1969 by Contordia.
Add it to the list of terrible book titles.
Posted: 13th, January 2013 | In: Books, Flashback | Comments (2)
Gun Appreciation Day twinned with Martin Luther King Day
THE head of Gun Appreciation Day says if black slaves had gun they would not have been slaves.
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Local news: the Sex shop in Kent is for slingers
THE KENT and Sussex Courier has a great local news story: Southborough mayor Jacqui Jedrzejewski and locals are objecting to the presence of a sex shop. Here’s the headline and the accompanying photo. Titter ye may:
Finding happiness in poverty with TINA (‘there is no alternative’)
YOU might not be rich, but you can be happy and poor. Well , so they say. Ashley Frawley:
The politics of happiness encourages us to accept our lot, breathing life back into the patronising idea that you can be ‘poor but happy’.
…There are many reasons whyhappiness, thus conceived, was widely embraced. Most significantly, many implicitly accept Margaret Thatcher’s famous mantra that ‘there is no alternative’ to capitalism (TINA). If we cannot hope to change society in real, material terms, then individual minds and behaviours become some of the few sites open to change. With the political outlook narrowed in this way, ideas like ‘rediscovering happiness’ as the ultimate goal of society can sound radical, utopian even. They also offer a way of bypassing uncertain political identities, connecting with people using the lowest common denominator. After all, who doesn’t want to be happy?
But constructing issues in such broadly agreeable terms makes it difficult to imagine how they might be challenged or opposed. Everyone seemingly agrees that ‘money can’t buy happiness’. The problem with the politics of happiness is that it abstracts this emotion from individual and social experience, and makes it into a flat, measurable policy objective. I have no idea what the future holds, in the same way that no one in 1800, if they had been handed a ‘happiness survey’, would have rated themselves less happy in the expectation of modern innovations like access to electricity. Each generation finds happiness in accordance with the world they take for granted. As a measure of ‘progress’, happiness defaults to an affirmation of the present as the best of all possible worlds.
Just happy to be here.
Posted: 13th, January 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (3)
473,000 adult victims of sex crimes every year in England and Wales?
SCARY stuff:
Nearly one in five of all women in England and Wales report that they have been the victim of a sexual offence since the age of 16, according to a new official analysis.
The study says there are about 473,000 adult victims of sex crimes every year
It depends what the law defines a “sex crime” as.
1977: The Lyons Maid lolly and ice-cream poster (bring back Zooms)
IT’S 1977. Lyons Maid is tempting you with its ices. What did you enjoy?
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Posted: 13th, January 2013 | In: Flashback, The Consumer | Comments (8)
Ex-police chief and weapons trainer vows to fire first bullet in war on guns
WAYNE LaPierre, the NRA leader, has a competitor for the USA’s biggest nut-job gun supporter. Meet James Yeager, CEO of Tactical Response:
Tactical Response students come from all walks of life. Regardless of age, gender, occupation or race our training provides them one common bond: the Mindset, tactics and skills to prevail in a violent confrontation. Come take a class with us and find out for yourself what makes us unique in the training industry.
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New York Times closes Environment Desk – climate change reporting is dying
AFTER the Cold War Desk, the Environment Desk closes:
The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated. No decision has been made about the fate of the Green Blog, which is edited from the environment desk.
“It wasn’t a decision we made lightly,” said Dean Baquet, the paper’s managing editor for news operations. “To both me and Jill [Abramson, executive editor], coverage of the environment is what separates the New York Times from other papers. We devote a lot of resources to it, now more than ever. We have not lost any desire for environmental coverage. This is purely a structural matter.”
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Shaving a shih tzu and the thinking skills programme
TO Hertford, where Robert Davey, 26, of Cotton Drive, Hertford, is guilty of shaving his ex-girlfriend’s shih tzu dog.
Prosecutor Elaine McMillan tells Stevenage Magistrates’ Court:
“As she was walking home [from work] she could see the windows and doors were open. In the kitchen she could see a large amount of dog’s hair next to the sink. She looked at the dog and saw the hair had been cut away. “The word ‘liar’ had been scrawled across the walls, door and fridge and in the lounge and hallway. The damage to the property is quite extensive. The words were very large and written in black marker pen.”
Says Davey:
“I definitely agree I overreacted on a large scale. My defence is I don’t like being lied to. I’m a nice person, believe it or not.”
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Costa Concordia: Dry Francesco Schettino was saved by the ‘effect of gravity’
LISA Cameron Smith saw the Costa Concordia founder. She lives on Giglio, the island where the Italian cruise ship floundered. Thirty-two people died.
The conduct of skipper Francesco Schettino remains under the spotlight. She tells the Times:
“If I was him I would be on that boat. Probably, I would have been with those who died.”
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Posted: 11th, January 2013 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment
Football sports betting: the winner of this season’s Premiership
AT the halfway stage of this season’s Premier League season, it would perhaps be fair to say that the league has been both predictable and unpredictable. When it comes to the former, few observers will be surprised to see the two Manchester sides sitting first and second in the table, but the middling performances of Manchester City during the first half of the season would not have been what many would have predicted before the start. So at this stage, which side is likely to go on and win it?
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Ireland spends €40,000 a year on footballs for prisoners
THE Irish Examiner reports that the Irish Government spends €40,000 every year on footballs for prisoners. Why so much? Well, many of the ball gets impaled on razor wire. It’s almost as if – as if! – the lags are aiming for it.
As a result, the Irish Prison Service has spent 130,000 euros on footballs for prisoners over the last three years.
The paper’s Freedom of Information request revealed that at Cloverhill Prison, the “position of razor wire leads to a couple of balls being destroyed in each yard per day”. Two a day. Or one-all, as the competing teams put it.
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Posted: 11th, January 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
Police arrest 107 people for murder of woman who gave rapist sanctuary
INDIA has its Gulabi Gang. In South Africa, the approach to man-on-woman violence is yet more direct. Police have arrested 107 people allegedly murdering a woman who gave santuary to a amn who had allegedly raped and killed a teenager.
The mob is said to have arrived at the woman’s home in Madadana, near Bizana, Eastern Cape, and forced her to drink poison.
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The most controversial British TV shows ever
THE shows they loved to hate:
The BBC is under fire again – this time for its new sitcom Way To Go, which finds humour in the subject of assisted suicide. It comes hot on the heels of a tabloid fury over Channel 4’s Big Fat Quiz of the Year, in which jaded drunken luvvies made tedious jokes about the Queen.
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Posted: 11th, January 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, TV & Radio | Comments (3)
American Family Association leader says Hurricanes and bushfires are God ‘spanking’ gay humanity
IN this video, we see American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer explaining that natural disasters have a pupose. It is to spank humanity. Why would God be angry enough to spank us?
Does AFA Hate Homosexuals?
Absolutely Not! The same Holy Bible that calls us to reject sin, calls us to love our neighbor. It is that love that motivates us to expose the misrepresentation of the radical homosexual agenda and stop its spread though our culture. AFA has sponsored several events reaching out to homosexuals and letting them know there is love and healing at the Cross of Christ.
What about gay grizzly bears?
One human being is worth more than an infinite number of grizzly bears. Another way to put it is that there is no number of live grizzlies worth one dead human being. If it’s a choice between grizzlies and humans, the grizzlies have to go. And it’s time.
Of course there is a simple answer: shoot these man-eaters on sight.
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Taft school shooting: Unarmed teacher talked 16-year-old shooter into dropping weapon
A 16-YEAR-old pupil at Taft High School in Taft, San Joaquin Valley, California has been shot by a fellow student. The shooter, armed with a 12-gage shotgun, aimed at another student but missed. The shgooter had lots of bullets.
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Photos: How Tim Holmes, his wife and five grandchildren endured the Tasmania bushfires
IN Dunalley, a village 30 miles east of Hobart, Tasmania, Tim Holmes saw his wife Tammy and their five grandchildren two-year-old Charlotte, four-year-old Esther, six-year-old Caleb, nine-year-old Liam and eleven-year-old Matilda – hiding for hours under a jetty to escape the bushfires. He took these photos so that his daughter, the child’s mother Bonnie Walker, could see them, maybe. Says Mr Holmes:
“The difficulty was that there was so much smoke and ember really that there was only about probably 200 to 300mm of air above the water. So we were all heads low, water up to our chins, trying to breathe, because the atmosphere was just so incredibly toxic. The fire raged for three hours. Everything was on fire. It was just exploding all over the place, everything … just scorched.”
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Climate deniers are Nazis, says Green Shirted FDR embodiment
BILL McKibben is FDR, leader of the Green Shirts:
Consider the moment when the great president of the last century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was confronted with an implacable enemy, Adolf Hitler (the closest analogue to physics we’re going to get, in that he was insanely solipsistic, though in his case also evil). Even as the German armies started to roll through Europe, however, FDR couldn’t muster America to get off the couch and fight.
There were even the equivalent of climate deniers at that time, happy to make the case that Hitler presented no threat to America.
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Boobs on sale for advertising!
REMEMBER when Homer Simpson sold off bits of his body for advertisements? Everyone bought blue pants and remembered to chow down on Maine potatoes.
Well, one mysterious individual has decided to sell the space on her boobies.
For money, you can put adverts on them. Adverts. On real life human breasts.
Of course, with this being breasts rather than male genitalia (which no-one wants to look at, including gay men and randy women), there’s been rather a lot of interest.
Clients can advertise their products or events on one of her breasts for a bargain £5, with a special offer of just £9 available for both. Seems reasonable.
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Posted: 10th, January 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
Is it kinder to harpoon whales trapped in Canadian Arctic?
IN Canada’s Arctic, a pod of killer whales are trapped under a vast stretch of ice. The Times writes:
Local people are calling for help for the increasingly distressed orcas, which have gathered around a single hole in the ice, slightly bigger than a car, in a desperate attempt to get oxygen in the frigid waters near the Inuit community of Inukjuak, Quebec…
“They are trapped,” the community’s mayor, Peter Inukpuk, told CBC radio. “It appears from time to time that they panic. Other times they are gone for a long time, probably looking for another open space, which they are not able to find at the moment.”
Mr Inukpuk has urged the Canadian Government to send an icebreaker as soon as possible to crack open the ice and help the mammals find some open water.
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The most depressing thing you will see today: snowballers v lions
LET’S pray for Karma for these snowballers firing at captive lions:
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Posted: 10th, January 2013 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
