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.
Iran fires its faked missiles at Star Wars
PHOTOSHOPPED image of the day is featured in Iran’s Mehr News Agency, where the headline story “Iran’s missile program no threat to Europe, U.S.: French official” is illustrated by this photo of loads of helter-skelter ballistic missiles. Boy, those rockets have multiplied since their 2008 unveiling. Back then, the obvious photoshopping was spotted and lampooned. One parody featured a familiar face, that of Star Wars character Jar Jar Binks.
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Posted: 6th, May 2012 | In: Reviews | Comments (5)
Those Daily Express heat-wave warnings
THE Daily Express loves weather. Often, it’s front-page new. The latest weather report is that “Winter to last until June”:
“Icy winds will send temperatures plunging today before torrential rain returns next week.”
Previously the paper – much of the facts supplied by human scarecrow Nathan Rao – have been variable:
“81F – Glorious Spring On Way” – February 25
…there is little chance of any sustained rain – spelling misery for farmers and water firms longing for heavy downpours.
So. Loadsa sunshine and no rain. Which was soon followed by:
“Easter Arctic freeze on way” – March 31
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Posted: 5th, May 2012 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
The Chin Reducer AND Beautifier
FOR “CURVES Of YOITUH” you need to pull the cords on Prof. Mack’s Chin Reducer and Beautifier. Be the envy of all your pals with an effaced chin and reduced glands*.
* Only available in 1890.
Posted: 5th, May 2012 | In: Flashback, The Consumer | Comment
Ken Clarke kickstarts prison economy
PLANS are for prisoners to work for high street companies. Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Minister, says “prison is just a warehouse”. Given the right training prisons can work better. Right now, Clarke says prison is boring. It’s not nearly as interesting as the brochures and TV shows tell you it is. Once you’ve masturbated, brushed your teeth, counted the bars on the window, counted the cracks in the paint, counted the hairs on your eyebrows and made your bed it’s mostly just sitting around and being punished.
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The Invasion Dublin Star Wars Convention v The Irish Dancing Open Championships
FACES of the day: Sarah Duggan, 13, (left) and Shannon Tone, 14, practice Irish dancing beside a Star Wars Storm Trooper at the Citywest Convention in Dublin. The Invasion Dublin Star Wars Convention and the Irish Dancing Open Championships are both taking place this weekend. If these two forces of darkness unite, humanity is doomed. There will be blood…
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GOTCHA: Argentine athlete exercises on Falklands war memorial
THE Sun says that the “Argies” are dancing on “our graves”.
Not your grave. The graves of Our Boys.
The Sun sees the advert featuring a hockey player named Fernando Zylberberg using everyday objects on the Falklands adverts as training aides. He runs on Our pavements. He crunchers his triceps on Our cycle racks outside Our Globe Tavern. He runs past the offices of Our Penguin News. He jogs by a red telephone box, un-Britishly refusing to urinate freely inside.
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Posted: 4th, May 2012 | In: Reviews | Comments (5)
An ‘Unlawful Arrest’ In Essex – the oddest video you will see this year
WHAT’S going on here? Karen spots a video of a woman from Essex being arrested for allegedly breaking the speed limit. What follows is odd, worrying, priceless and could pass for a parody. Using the name halloweenpropsuk, she has posted this video of her lament.
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Posted: 3rd, May 2012 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comments (3)
Maria Gallastegui is the latest victim of the London Olympics purge on protest
THE Olympics are coming and London must be made shiny and happy. So. Occupy London Stock Exchange is removed by force. And today protester Maria Gallastegui was ordered to remove her box and tent from Parliament Square or else. The High Court has lifted an injunction preventing the removal of the last anti-war protest tent.
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Posted: 3rd, May 2012 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
Airbrushed images of super-skinny models don’t make you sick
IT is tragic when young people get so concerned about their appearance that they deprive themselves of food and fall ill. That’s what happened to Rachel Johnson, a former anorexia sufferer who weighed just four-and-a-half stone in her teens. Now, the 20-year-old Johnson and her mother have launched a petition to ban airbrushed images that target under-16s. They believe that such a ban would help keep young people from striving for unrealistic body ideals.
Johnson believes that images of skinny celebs and models fuelled her own weight obsession as a teenager and made it harder for her to overcome her illness. She used to make scrapbooks with pictures of slim models which she would look at as a way of motivating herself to stay away from food and drink. But it wasn’t just altered pictures that upset Johnson – her main obsession seems to have been Victoria Beckham who, with our without airbrushing, is extremely slim.
While Johnson and her mother are going after airbrushed pictures, their real concern seems to be with contemporary body images and beauty ideals – and those can’t be altered simply by removing altered pictures from glossy magazines and billboards. Anyone who believes prevailing beauty ideals are problematic is going after a phantom enemy by targeting the advertising industry’s airbrushing practices. After all, advertisements reflect and perpetuate ideals that are grounded in society. They express and appeal to our desires, material needs and aesthetic sensibility. Whether you think these are positive or not, you can’t simply do away with them by rendering certain pictures unacceptable. That’s like trying to airbrush public life.
Worse, such an approach contributes to a censorious climate where everyone who feels that they would be better off without certain images or messages around them feels they have the right to call for the government or industry bodies to slap an embargo on those images. In recent years, the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld complaints about ads that used young-looking models, ads that poked fun at religion, ads that portrayed women as sexual objects, ads that showed couples fighting… the list goes on.
Of course, companies have a responsibility to tell the truth in their ad campaigns and, critics of airbrushing say, retouched images are not truthful. But images are manipulated from the moment they’re taken, and not just in post-production. Models wear make-up and are told to strike poses. Photographers choose lighting, camera lenses and sets, to create certain looks. The point of advertising is to create an idealised version of reality. This can create a sense of pressure that can be positive for some insofar as it creates a striving for a better life, while for others it might be negative inasmuch as it inspires in certain people a feeling of inadequacy.
The hard truth is that it is neither possible nor desirable to banish all the things that make you feel uncomfortable, unhappy, angry or sick because in the end we’d have no images left to look at. Nor is it possible or desirable to single out airbrushed images as an explanation for why some young people suffer from eating disorders.
Johnson herself seems aware that it takes more than altered images of models to turn a young girl anorexic. ‘Although airbrushed images didn’t actually cause my eating disorder’, shetold the Daily Mail, ‘once I was unwell I would obsess over them’.
Young or old, we all experience various forms of social pressure to behave in certain ways, to achieve certain goals or to conform to certain ideals held by parents, friends, colleagues and society at large. For instance, kids today are subjected to a relentless war on fat, which is being waged by everyone from government health officials to celebrity chefs, with teachers acting as school-lunchbox inspectors. It must be harder than ever to be the chubby kid in class when even adults are pointing fingers at you.
The idea that ridding glossy magazines and billboards of airbrushed images is a fair way of preventing destructive behaviour is based on the misguided notion that people simply copy things they see in the media, monkey-see, monkey-do style. Even children can differentiate between image and reality so, although contemporary pop culture features a great deal of skinny people, most young girls do not become anorexic. And while many of us have spent part of our teenage years obsessing over celebrities, as adults we get over them.
The e-petition drafted by Johnson and her mother is no doubt well-intended but, like other campaigns in that vein, it reinforces the idea that we need more media censorship. It assumes that, young and old, we are dupes of the advertising and beauty industries and are unable to set our own ideals or to differentiate between the glossy fantasy world of gossip mags and real life.
The best photos from the Occupy May Day protests in the USA
THE Occupy Movement grasped May Day and made a noise. In Oakland, California, Seattle, Washington, Miami, Florida, and New York, New York, protestors against greed, the rich, poverty, the right, war, unfairness, police and whatever else took their fancy made their voices hear. You might not agree with the protestors, but you should agree with their right to protest. The best photos of the day are here:
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Police prepare to arrest members of a combined group of ACT UP and Occupy Wall Street activists who chained themselves and block traffic at Wall Street and Broadway, near the New York Stock Exchange, on Wednesday, April 25, 2012. Police used chain cutters and wrestled protesters to the pavement in the middle of Broadway. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
How tabloids work: The Sun undermines Rupert Murdoch with Madeleine McCann scoop
HOW the Sun speaks truth to power:
“Has the Sun got a large audience? Yes, certainly. Do people follow everything we say? Certainly not” – Rupert Murdoch to Lord Leveson, April 25, 2012
“SUN PLEA TO PM SPARKED YARD PROBE – The Sun launched a petition demanding that the case [Madeleine McCann] be reopened and the PM quickly agreed” – The Sun, April 26, 2012
Such are the facts…
Flashback to May 2 – Photos from this day in history
PHOTOS from May 2:
Lars Ulrich, drummer in the band Metallica, looks down as he speaks to the media outside of the offices of Napster Inc. in San Mateo, Calif., Wednesday, May 3, 2000. In the latest battle over trading music online, the heavy-metal group Metallica has gathered the names of more than 317,000 Internet users it says are illegally sharing their songs over the Internet through the online company Napster. Lars Ulrich and attorney Howard King hand-delivered to Napster Inc.’s headquarters on Wednesday some 60,000 pages of names of people the band says have been trading its songs online. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)
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Is CNN dying?
IS Big Media dying? No. It’s just that 24/7 rolling TV news is not the must-see broadcast it was:
It’s no April Fool’s joke — last month CNN delivered its lowest-rated month in total day in over a decade, since August 2001, the month before the September 11 attacks. The once-dominant cable news network posted decade-lows among both total viewers (357,000) and Adults 25-54 (108,000).
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Oetzi – what really happened to the 5,30-year-old Ice Man
OETZI (or Ötzi), the 5,300-year-old Ice Man discovered in the Italian Alps, is back in the news. Oetzi has the oldest blood ever found in a mummy. It’s undergone lots of tests by experts.
The least news is that Oetzi was shot in the back by an arrow and died later.
Experts tell readers of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, that Oetzi did not die immediately.
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Posted: 2nd, May 2012 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
Lynette Nock’s death and a failed drugs policy
CAN LYNETTE Nock’s death be used to fit an agenda? Lynette Nock, 28, took Gamma-butyrolactane (GBL), a Class C “party drug”. Later she died.
The Metro says she allegedly took GBL during a wake in Birmingham for 24-year-old Carl Fearon.
Lynette Nock’s father tells media:
“If Lynette had GBL in her system, did she and the others at that party ingest it without knowing what they were taking?”
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Posted: 2nd, May 2012 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
Rupert Murdoch, Roy Hodgson and a tabloid laugh-in
RUPERT Murdoch is accused of being “not a fit person” to run a big international corporation. That’s the conclusion voiced by MPs on the Culture Committee. But not all of them agreed. The Conservative MPs on the panel did not suport that statement.Tory committee member Philip Davies said: “Some people’s conclusions were written before any of the evidence was ever heard.”
But all the MPs – and those of who can recall the expenses scandal and dodgy dossiers may well snort with derision – say Rupert Murdoch showed “wilful blindness” towards wrongdoing at News International.
Other Murdoch employees – Les Hinton, Tom Crone and Colin Myler (video) were acussed of misleading the Committee.
So. It’s a big news story. And how does the Sun cover it? Well, its front-page headline yells: “BWING ON THE EUWOS.” The Sun focuses on England manger Roy Hodgson, an influencer of the public mood who will be rubbed smoother than an ancient bannister by politicians should he prove to be successful.
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Posted: 2nd, May 2012 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
That Colin Myler phone hacking interview – with added dry cleaner
COLIN Myler is in the news. The last editor of the News of the World is now woking in New York as the editor of the New Daily News. ITN caught up with him in the Big Apple. The Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s found that the Myler misled MPs during their investigation into phone hacking. He was not alone. The MPs say Les Hinton, the former News International chairman, and Tom Crone, the paper’s former legal manager, also misled them.
The MPs said the buck should stop with Rebekah Brooks for the “grotesque” behaviour in hacking into missing teenager Milly Dowler’s phone. The MPs on the Culture Committee also ruled – and get this – that Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person” to run a major international company. That would be his own multi-billion dollar company, the one Rupert Murdoch created and grew. So say the MPs who have never run anything.
There are clearly a few worthy news people to interview. But it’s far easier to get to Myler, given that he remains a news man in the world’s most bustling city – and Brooks is behind a big wall and surrogate’s bump in Oxfordshire.
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‘I was bashed with a dildo by man in leather mak…and he killed my dog’
“I WAS bashed with a dildo by man in leather mask…and he killed my dog” – headline of the year, courtesy of Australia’s Daily Mercury...
Tube racist Jacqueline Woodhouse admits crimes – video
WESTMINSTER Magistrates’ Court court calls Jacqueline Woodhouse, 42, who was filmed by Glabant Juttla mouthing off on the Central Line between St Paul’s and Mile End stations on January 23.
It’s pretty clear from the tape that Woodhouse says odious things and is not sober. Indeed, in court, we learn that the PA had been drinking champagne and was on her way home.
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Posted: 1st, May 2012 | In: Reviews | Comments (8)
May Day in photos: Fertility pole dancing at the Avebury Stone Circle
MAY Day in photos: In the wet and the cold, the Pagans weaved around the maypole at Avebury Stone Circle, Wiltshire, celebrating Beltane, a time of fertility. This is how pole dancing once looked. Good, dirty fun for all the family…
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May Day in Oxford – photos
MAY Day celebrations and protests: Students and local residents enjoy the Magdalen College Choir in Oxford as part of the May Day celebrations. These face paints don’t run…
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It’s 1958 and the kids are dancing The Stroll
CONTINUING our look at dancing on the telly, we hark back to 1958, and all the guys and gels are doing The Stroll (not be confused with The Shamble)…
Posted: 1st, May 2012 | In: Flashback | Comment (1)
Making Natalie Esack’s celebrity murder a bit more entertaining
NATALIE Esack was murdered in her Esack Hair & Beauty salon on the High Street in Ashford, Kent. Her estranged husband, Ivan Escak, has been arrested on suspicion of killing her. He used to be a policeman. Now he works, says the Daily Mail, as a “football agent”.
A neighbour arrives to say that he was always a wrong un, had shifty eyes and they knew something terrible was about to happen. No, not really. The unnamed source tells the Mail that Mr Esack is “outgoing” and has ambitions to become a local councillor, and together the Esacks were “pleasant”. A former collage of Mrs Esack’s says she was “bubbly”, and given the circumstances of her violent death, bizarrely adds: “You will not find a single person with a negative thing to say about her.”
Not one. Really?
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Posted: 1st, May 2012 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment (1)
Photos: Manchester City v Manchester United – how the 2012 Premier League was won and lost
IN Photos: Manchester City v Manchester United – how the 2012 Premier League was won and lost – with a goal from Vincent Kompany, views by Maradona and Rio Ferdinand’s tongue…
Today, New York City grows taller
1 WORLD TRADE CENTER – aka 1 WTC, aka “Freedom Tower” – is set to surpass the height of the Empire State Building today, making it the tallest building in New York City.
The 1 WTC skyscraper is being built in lower Manhattan to replace the Twin Towers that were destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. It will offer stunning views of the city, including the Empire State in midtown which, excluding its antenna, has a total height of 1,250 feet.
Tonight, the tower will be lit in blue-and-white colours in celebration of its new height and perhaps in an attempt by its owners to taunt their midtown rivals. The New York Post reports that the 1 World Trade Center owners are “waging an all-out business war against its Midtown cousin”. They’re promoting the building’s observation decks and are trying to attract the broadcasters that currently beam their signals off of the Empire State. When finished, 1 WTC will likely be declared the tallest building the United States. It is expected to rise to 1,776 feet.
Construction on the Empire State was completed on 11 April 1931. It took just one year and 45 days to build. It remained the world’s tallest skyscraper for more than 40 years, until the Twin Towers were constructed in 1972. By contrast, construction on 1 World Trade Center was delayed from 2004 to 2006 and is only expected to open for business in 2013.
But at least the ambitious height of the Big Apple’s newest skyscraper and the rivalry between 1WTC and the Empire State Building shows some of that old New York spirit.
