Madeleine McCann: the couple who heard a child crying at night and went to help
IN “WHO SOOTHED WEEPING MADDIE, the Daily Express leads with a Madeleine McCann “exclusive”. It adds: “Police seek couple who entered McCann apartment when Madeleine was crying.”
This becomes:
Mystery couple seen going into McCanns’ flat on night before sobbing Madeleine disappeared
The night before? A couple of strangers walked into the McCanns’ apartment where a child was crying the night before that child vanished? How does the Express know it was Madeleine who was crying? Three children were in the McCanns’ apartment.
SCOTLAND YARD detectives are trying to find a middle-aged couple said to have entered Madeleine McCann’s holiday apartment to comfort her because she was crying, we can reveal today.
Posted: 19th, May 2013 | In: Madeleine McCann, News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Amanda Knox and that kiss: Italians weep and wail at death while Americans do the splits and yoga
AMANDA Knox has tapped into the realisation that the media will not leave her in peace. That’s one view. Another is that she’s courting the media to make any conviction for her alleged part in the murder of Meredith Kercher less likely. What we believe boils down to whether or not we in the court of public opinion like her or not.
Posted: 18th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
1970s: Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks and “FREE DR Who Badges!”
FLASHBACK to the breakfasts of yestedday with Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks and “FREE DR Who Badges!” John Pertwee played the BBC time traveller between 1970 and 1974. He drove a jalopy called Bessie.
UNIT was the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. The Brigadier was its stalwart. Jo Grant was a junior civilian operative for UNIT. The Master was the enemy, naturally.
Posted: 18th, May 2013 | In: Flashback, The Consumer, TV & Radio | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
IN the early 20th Century, tiger hunting was all the rage. King George V went looking for them after a good lunch with the Nepalese King. In 1902, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Sheffield went tiger hunting. He recorded his adventures in How I killed the tiger; being an account of my encounter with a royal Bengal tiger.
He tells his readers:
My main purpose in writing this little book, was to place in a permanent form a description of my wonderful preservation from death in a chance encounter with a Royal Bengal Tiger. My life had been adventurous up to that time. I had shot big game of various kinds. But this episode, so marvellous in itself, so important in its influence upon my after life and character, marks the close of my career as a hunter of big game.
These are the plates:
Posted: 18th, May 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
MADELEINE McCann: Anorak’s at-a-glance look at the missing child in the news: 20 new suspects with Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell:
The Front Pages:
Daily Mail (front page): “20 New Suspects”
The Sun (front page): “Brit Cops List 20 Maddie Suspects”
The Star (front page): “Maddie: Cops Hunt New Suspects
Express (front page): “Police Identify Maddie Suspects”
Daily Mirror (front page): She May Be Alive”
Posted: 18th, May 2013 | In: Madeleine McCann, News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Mechanic threatened by man wielding large black dildo over ‘lost’ Mercedes-Benz
WE join in the action in Sydney’s Central Local Court. Mr Aaron Sabbah’s is appealing for bail:
Magistrate Eve Wynhausen: “What is the alleged arm?”
Prosecutor Christian Hearn: “It’s a black dildo, your honour.”
Posted: 18th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Man set fire to neighbours’ home over refusal to mow lawn
PHILLIP Roger Bennett, 58, was so upset by his neighbours’ apparent reluctance to mow their lawn in Bartow County, Georgia, that he set fire to their house.
Mr Corbitt tells us what happened:
“He kicks my door, tells me I’ve got five seconds to come outside. I turn around and call 911. And while I’m on the phone he comes back with two gas cans in his hand. He walks up to my kitchen door again, takes a gas can, smashes it against the glass, breaks the first pane… Then he turns around and grabs a brick, throws it through the window. And then he grabs a gas can and starts pouring it into the kitchen. And as he’s pouring he takes his lighter and lights it. And flames were everywhere. I ran back to my little girl’s room, grabbed her, ran out the back door over to my neighbor’s and watched the house burn.”
Posted: 18th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
In photos: Indian Muslim Sufi devotees use sharp objects and self flagellate during the Urs festival
IN photos: Indian Muslim Sufi devotees use sharp objects and self flagellate during the Urs festival procession to mark the death anniversary of Sufi Muslim saint Hazrat Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti, in Ajmer, India. Some of these photos are challenging viewing:
Posted: 17th, May 2013 | In: Key Posts, News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
IN Georgia, being gay is difficult. Today there was an anti-gay pride rally, in Tbilisi, Georgia. You might call it bigot pride. Thousands of anti-gay protesters, including Orthodox priests, occupied a central street in Georgia’s capital Friday, with some threatening to lash with nettles any participant in a gay pride parade which was to take place there. The gay parade was to feature around 50 marchers. Police in Tbilisi guarded the gay activists and bused them out of the city center shortly after they arrived at the gathering. In other words, they were rounded up and booted out of town.
Posted: 17th, May 2013 | In: Key Posts, News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
In photos: The Hong Kong Bun Festival
THE Hong Kong Bun Festival:
Climbers collect mock buns during the Bun Scrambling contest at the bun festival at midnight in Cheung Chau island, Hong Kong Friday, May 18, 2013. The Bun Festival is the traditional event celebrating the islanders’ deliverance from famine centuries ago and is meant to placate ghosts and restless spirits.
Posted: 17th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Watch the video of a stupid deer leaping through a bus window
STUPID animals are rife, but one dim-witted deer had a bloody lucky escape after being hit by a bus. Instead of dying, it ended up going through the window and wobbling around like Bambi.
The deer jumped across the path of the bus in Johnstown, Pennsylvania and smashed through the windscreen and was caught on video.
Posted: 17th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
1951 manual: How To Use a Dial Telephone
IN 1951: anyone uncertain of how to use a telephone was being educated:
Posted: 17th, May 2013 | In: Flashback, Technology | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
A man responds to a PR: dear Kacey-Lee…
EACH week, Anorak fields hundreds of PR missives. Most are banal. On Spin Alley, Grey Cardigan replies to one gormless message:
THE CURSE of the over-familiar press release continues unabated. “Hi Grey,” an X Factor reject and probably unpaid intern called Kacey-Lee gushes. “I do hope you and your family had a wonderful Bank Holiday weekend and managed to get out and enjoy yourself in the lovely sunshine. Did you have a barbecue? I just wanted to get in touch regarding a revolutionary new range of homeopathic cures for irritable bowel syndrome…”
Brilliant stuff. And it gets a reply:
“Dear Kacey-Lee. Thank you for your interest in the well-being of myself and my family. Unfortunately I couldn’t get out in the sun to enjoy myself because I am twice-divorced and therefore don’t have enough money to even pay for a Mr Whippy. As for a barbecue, a Lidl sausage toasted over a blow-lamp is about my limit. My children won’t talk to me, my latest ex-wife is shagging an investment banker while still shafting me for every penny she can get, and I can’t go out in the sun because I have red hair and turn bright crimson if I even walk past a microwave oven. Anyway, it was rainy and foggy up here, somewhere north of Kensington, so there was no sun anyway. Oh, and my dog died, which somewhat took the gloss off the weekend…”
Posted: 17th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Madeleine McCann detectives identify ‘potential suspects’ but won’t tell us how many or why
MADELEINE McCann vanished six years ago. Another summer of sighting looms, all eagerly reported by newspapers looking for easy news in the shark-spotting season. The Evening Standard reports:
British police identify new leads in hunt for Madeleine McCann and urge Portuguese to act
Go on:
Scotland Yard has identified a number of potential suspects who may have abducted Madeleine McCann, the force’s top detective revealed today.
Posted: 17th, May 2013 | In: Madeleine McCann, News | Comment (1) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Walmart says breastfeeding is pornography
“When he went to go pick it up, they brought the photo out and said unfortunately, although this means a lot to you, we can’t print it for you and we cannot sell it to you. He said, well why not, and they said because it’s nudity and Walmart has very strict no nudity policy.”
The photo was – and let’s use the buzzword of today’s illiberal tosspots – “inappropriate”. Mrs Andre adds:
“He replied with, it’s not nudity, it’s my wife feeding our child. And they said well if you look really closely, you can see a little bit of something there. My photo has no sexual connotation at all and here it is getting denied.”
Men can find a sexual connortation is pretty much anything.
“We made a mistake. That photo should have been printed. It’s the clarity in the policy. It’s obviously inappropriate to print certain photos so there needs to be some guidance for photo centre staff but that guidance wasn’t clear enough for them to know that those photos should have been printed from the get-go.”
Posted: 17th, May 2013 | In: News, The Consumer | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Kai Nicodemus, aka Caleb Lawrence McGillvary, did not murder Shane Dixon Kavanaugh
REMEMBER Kai, the hero who gave TV the greatest interview of 2013 (before charles Ramsey) when he smu-ashed a ne’er-do-well with a hatchet? Well, now police allege that Kai, aka Kai Nicodemus or Caleb Lawrence McGillvary, bludgeoned attorney Joseph Galfy to death in his New Jersey home. The two men had met in New York City and then gone to the house.
Posted: 17th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Racism map reveals the world’s most and least racist places
SWEDISH researchers were looking at race:
The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors. Some respondents, picking from a list, chose “people of a different race.” The more frequently that people in a given country say they don’t want neighbors from other races, the economists reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society. (The study concluded that economic freedom had no correlation with racial tolerance, but it does appear to correlate with tolerance toward homosexuals.)…
Posted: 16th, May 2013 | In: News | Comments (3) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
The Mickey Mouse gasmask was utterly terrifying in 1942 – and it still is
WAR is utterly terrifying. It’s ugly. But in 1942, T.W. Smith, Jr., owner of the Sun Rubber Company, and designer, Dietrich Rempel, created something to give children nightmares: the Mickey Mouse gas mask, as approved by Walt Disney.
Posted: 16th, May 2013 | In: Flashback, Technology | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
1936: How to die by electrocution in 30 pictures
AUSTRIAN physician Stefan Jellinek founded The Electro-Pathological Museum in 1936. Hr provided the content in Elektroschutz in 132 Bildern (Electrical Protection in 132 Pictures). DEath and electricity went hand-in-hand. But with this book, you would be forewarned.
If you can identify all the contraptions, let us know.
Posted: 16th, May 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, Technology | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Belly laughs: watch men feel the pain of child birth!
SOME men, as we know, are utter arseholes. They mock period pains and child labour and say they could handle it all with ease. This of course, encourages a certain arsehole kind of woman who sneers about ‘man-flu’ and such.
However, child birth clearly tops the lot. Not only do you have the dreadful pain, but also, the hormonal mentalness and the vaginal tearing. And probably the pooing everywhere while you sit naked in a room filled with strangers.
No fun.
And so, to two fellas who gamely decided to experience simulated labour pains. Mercifully, someone was on hand to film it all. Women who have given birth to babies conceived by gittish husbands, now’s your time to laugh.
“I’m telling you right now, I felt like I was having a baby,” stated one volunteer. The other said: “Mom, if anything that I just experienced was anywhere close to what I did to you all those years ago, I’m sorry. You’re like a superhero.”
Have a butchers.
We’ve been here before:
Photo: The pregnant man poster, issued by the Health Education Council. Such posters are being distributed in their thousands to persuade men to seek advice on contraception. Dr Bill Jones, Director General of the Health Education Council said “We want to make any ignorant or unthinking man stop and consider the suffering and problems he can cause through an unplanned pregnancy”. Date: 11/03/1970
Posted: 16th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Naked John Inman impersonator arrested for ‘striding down South Street in Chichester’
OLD impressionists never die, they just get tired and emotional:
A naked man impersonating a character from Are You Being Served has been arrested by police.
Startled shoppers saw the six-foot-tall nude male striding down South Street in Chichester at around 1:20pm this afternoon.
He went into a shop and yelled “I’m free!” before hugging a worker and trying to touch his face.
He’s not free any longer…
Photo: John Inman sitting in a £2,000 petrol driven scaled down Volkswagen in Regent Street, London, today, as life-sized traffic roars past him. One of these cars, provided by the toy store Hamleys, will be competed for by the audience of “Mother Goose”, which opens at the Victoria Palace theatre on December 21st. The winner will be named by John Inman, the star, at the last performance of the pantomime. Date: 14/12/1981
Posted: 16th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Homeless man proves Atheists are more generous than Christians and Muslims
RELIGIONS are often the first to point out how good charity is and that we should always reach out to those in need. However, one homeless chap has conducted an experiment which shows religious people aren’t taking their own advice.
The homeless man, as seen in a Reddit thread, bears a sign that says: “Which religion cares the most about the homeless?” There are nine begging bowls in front of him, each with money in them.
Posted: 16th, May 2013 | In: Money, News | Comment (1) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Why does the Daily Mail have a sudden and urgent desire to understand transsexuals?
WHEN Richard Littlejohn attacked transsexual Lucy Meadows for working as a female teacher after her gender reassignment, his Daily Mail article was met with howls of protest and calls for his head. A short time after Littlejohn’s piece, Meadows took her own life. Many saw a link between the Mail’s coverage and her suicide. A vigil was held outside the Daily Mail offices in Kensington.
The Mail removed the article from its website.
This month, the Mail changed direction. An article by Jane Fae was entitled:
Prejudice. Abuse. And surgery that needs nerves of steel. A brave and moving account of… The cruel reality of feeling Nature trapped you in the wrong sex
Here, JANE FAE sets out her own experiences of being transgender — as well as the prejudice she’s faced — and challenges misconceptions about the issue…
This is the same Fae, who in reaction to the Littlejohn article wrote in the New Statesman:
“[Meadows] talks of her good luck in having a supportive head. But the stress of her situation is also visible. She complains bitterly of how she must leave her house by the back door, and arrive at school very early, or very late, in order to avoid the press pack. She talks of the press offering other parents money for a picture of her; of how in the end they simply lifted an old picture from the Facebook pages of her brother and sister without permission. A Year 5 drawing removed from the school website was simply recovered through the magic of caching.”
She spoke of Leveson:
Where is the public interest, beyond the pro-family moral agenda, proudly proclaimed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre in front of the Leveson Inquiry? Were this a trans woman stealing money to fund gender re-assignment, there might be a story. Or a trans patient going on the rampage. Though in both cases, the real-and-unlikely-to-be-addressed question might still be: why would an individual act in this way?
And in death, the disrespect, the “monstering”, as some commentators have described it, continues. Ms Meadows broke everything in her life for one desperate reason: to be the woman she knew she was…
Yet it is the same old, same old. In death, the most venial of politicians and press barons are usually airbrushed into almost-sainthood. Not the trans community. For without any possibility of legal retribution, the “tranny freak” is now “fair game”.
Just, I would suggest, as the whining, crocodile tearing lily-livered national press of this country. Maybe they played no great part in this tragedy. But they tried. And for that, they stand guilty as any common thug or thief in the night.
Not fair? No. Nor was Lucy’s death.
Odd, indeed, how the Mail has changed direction so suddenly. And as one voice notes, the paper’s readers are being untypically fair. MandyB writes on the Angels Forum:
The comments are so universally positive and out of step with the usual DM comment that the cynic in me wonders if they are being moderated. Either way, the DM deserves some credit for the long overdue change of approach. I hope it continues.
Further oddness is that neither the article nor any of the published comments mention Meadows. It’s like it never happened…
Posted: 16th, May 2013 | In: News | Comments (2) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Idiots pictured carrying unexploded bombs between Worbarrow Bay and Tyneham
JESUS WEPT. Some people are dim aren’t they? Take for example, the two fellas who have been pictured carrying a pair of unexploded bombs in a park.
The Ministry of Defence has launched an urgent appeal to find two men photographed ambling through Dorset with two ‘unexploded bombs’ on their shoulders.
Posted: 16th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Hong Kong crushed when Florentijn Hofman’s massive Rubber Duck deflates (in photos)
HONG Kong resident Mirinna Chan looks at the deflated rubber duck and speaks for her people: “The sky looks like it is crying for me – I took time off from work just to see the duck, now it is just a blob.”
Posted: 16th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
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Anorak is an independent online sensation exposing prejudice, inhumanity, stuff shirts, misogyny, a biased news agenda, conformity, misanthropy, spin and the worst and best of human culture in words, pictures and video.
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