The top ten FA Cup Final Songs ever (plus rosettes, goal action flick books and Super-8 films)
ONCE upon a time, we are always told, the FA Cup Final was one of only two games shown live on television each year. (The other being the England v Scotland fixture in the late and unlamented Home International tournament.)
And in the days before video recorders, there were few opportunities to relive those magical moments.
You could look at your rosette, with its odd-looking cup.
You could read your official match programme, with its pages of Double Diamond ads (and in the case of the 1946 final, the news that, along with their “stockings”, Charlton Athletic wore white knickers, and Derby black).
You could watch a goal again and again by flicking the pages of a flip-book.
You could buy Super-8 films – if you had a projector, and weren’t too bothered about burning the living room curtains as the celluloid caught light.
Or more timid souls might have opted for a souvenir LP of the match commentary.
For most, however, the gift that kept giving was the Cup Final Song, usually sung by the lads themselves and carefully mixed to hide the vocal shortcomings therein. Some made the pop charts; others disappeared into oblivion. Here’s ten of the best.
10. Liverpool
The Anfield Rap came from left-field before the 1988 FA Cup final against Wimbledon and the only fond memory of that occasion for Reds fans.
9. Stoke City
The Potters’ ponderous We’ll Be With You was the soundtrack for their far-from-ponderous League Cup victory in 1972.
8. Arsenal
Good Old Arsenal is a strange hybrid. The tune is ‘Rule Britannia’ and the lyrics (such as they are) were penned by Jimmy Hill – a man with no connection to the club.
7. Everton
Plenty of club songs in their locker, including this effort from the sixties.
But their representative here is Here We Go – an interesting take on the theme song from the miners’ strike. In another interesting twist, it was recorded after their 1984 FA Cup win.
6. Leeds United
A-side Leeds United made the charts, but like a Beatles single, it was the B-side (Leeds! Leeds! Leeds! commonly known as Marching On Together) that endured.
5. Chelsea
The Pensioners’ anthem Blue Is The Colour was recorded not for the famous 1970 FA Cup Final, but for the 1972 League Cup Final, which they lost to Stoke. This video shows the recording session, including a very drunk Alan Hudson, who probably hadn’t recovered in time for the final.
4. West Ham United
A valiant, if somewhat dated, reggae version of the Hammers standard, performed by Bonzo, Sir Trev and pals for the 1975 FA Cup Final against Fulham.
3 Crystal Palace
The Dave Clark Five’s Glad All Over became the Palace anthem during the 1960s, so it was the obvious choice for the team to record for the Wembley debut in the 1990 FA Cup Final.
2 Tottenham Hotspur
Spurs had plenty of cup form in the studio. The Cockerel Chorus hit the carts in the early 1970s with Nice One Cyril, and a decade later came Ossie’s Dream, recorded by Chas & Dave with the ‘Tottingham’ squad. The duo would go on to pen two more cup final tunes: Hot Shot Tottenham in 1987 and, best of the lot, Tottenham, Tottenham in 1982. Here it is on Top of the Pops.
1 Millwall
Not an obvious choice, perhaps, but a classic nonetheless. Recorded decades before the club’s first FA Cup Final in 2004, Let ’Em Come was the theme tune for the road to Wembley. A rousing tune with pleasingly menacing undertones.
Posted: 12th, May 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, Sports | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
How to conceal the smell of cannabis
“We were wondering what was going on because two men were painting the outside of the shop every day. They did not appear to be professional painters. They were just wearing jeans and things. I think some people in the street had noticed the smell. They were obviously hoping that the fresh paint smell would cover it up.”
“The smell was just the jam or cream inside the cakes.”
Posted: 11th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Student owns teacher: Jeff Bliss is right
THE three things that stand out in this video of classroom rebel Jeff Bliss, 18, at Duncanville High School, Texas:
1. The student is right
2. The other students don;t say a thing or back him up to put him down
3. The patient teacher listens and debates with him
Teaching by handing students test papers to fill in has become the norm in too many schools. It’s lazy. It teaches only compliance.
Posted: 10th, May 2013 | In: Anorak TV, News | Comment (1) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
78,000 apply to live and die on Mars, because they hate Earth, clearly
SOME people hate Earth so much that they’ve applied to live on Mars, even though Mars looks like an arid death hole. More than 78,000 people from 120 different countries have applied to leave Earth, which frankly makes them traitors and we should round them up and boo them into oblivion.
The openings come from a new reality TV series from Dutch non-profit organisation Mars One.
Posted: 10th, May 2013 | In: News, Technology | Comment (1) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Nominative determinism: Mr And Mrs Speed jailed for dealing amphetamines
NOMINATIVE Determinism takes us to Nottingham Crown Court to see a couple sentenced to two-and-a-half years choky for possessing amphetamines with intent to supply. Daniel, 36, and Abigail Speed did not blame fate for their lot.
Posted: 10th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Marijuana Man runs out of weed (video)
MARIJUANA Man run out of weed. Just say “no, thank you.”
Feel the Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Posted: 9th, May 2013 | In: Anorak TV, News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
How Ariel Castro tortured Amanda Berry, Michele Knight and Gina DeJesus
AMANDA Berry, Michele Knight and Gina DeJesus “were chained in the basement during the first years of their captivity…”
As for their keeper:
”In the note found in [Ariel] Castro’s Seymour Avenue home in Cleveland after his arrest, the former school-bus driver scoffed at the stupidity of his captives for getting into his car on the days they vanished….”
Posted: 9th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment (1) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Charles Ramsey becomes the victim of a media hatchet job – gutter press turn on black hero
CHARLES Ramsey is a hero. He did the right thing when he heard Amanda Berry hollering and broke down the door to save her, a young child, Michele Knight and Gina DeJesus.
Connor Simpson told his readers:
No one is saying that Charles Ramsey isn’t worthy of the “hero” mantle.
Two days on and they are. Katherine Bindley writes in the HuffPost:
Charles Ramsey, the Cleveland man who has been hailed as a hero for his role in helping to free three women from the house where police say they were held, has a criminal record that includes a history of domestic violence.
So what? He’s not on trial. The women’s kidnappers and rapists soon will be. Ramsey was just the right man in the right place at the right time. The media made him a star and the internet made him a meme. He’s just being himself.
Bindley adds:
As praise for Ramsey’s actions continue to surface from media outlets, it remains to be seen how his past will affect the public’s perceptions of his character.
Nice, eh. Mr Ramsey rescues three women from sexual slavery and gets his character questioned by a hack. He’s not standing for public office. He’s not pontificating on the lives of others. He’s a man who did the right thing.
The media has praised Ramsey in recent days in part because he said he thought kidnapping victim Amanda Berry, whom he heard screaming from a neighbour’s house, was a victim of domestic violence when he went to help her.
The media praised him. Does he give a toss what the media thinks of him? Did he give toss what the media would think of him when he kicked in that front door? He did the right thing and then, when questioned by the TV news, spoke candidly. But Bindley sits in judgement in the court of popular opinion. She continues:
However, that fact — coupled with Ramsey’s remarks about how he had been raised to help women in distress — now seems to stand in contrast to his past behavior.
What a hideous, cowardly hatchet job.
The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart updated a flattering article about Ramsey to reflect the new information, but he said it did nothing to change his mind about the man’s status as a hero.
Having questioned Mr Ramsey’s character, Bindley now defers to another writer who made an opinion. Bindley is inviting her readers to debate Ramsey. Revolting.
And then the aforesaid Simpson gets wind of Ramsey’s rap sheet.
Charles Ramsey is still a hero for the good he did. He undeniably helped save three women from a horrific situation that’s straight out of the worst, most exploitive horror movie you can imagine.
But…
But that doesn’t change the reality that he has a history of violence himself.
Send the man down!
Posted: 9th, May 2013 | In: Key Posts, News | Comment (1) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Monaco tries to salve its chronic short man syndrome by seeping into the sea
MONACO is, like Dubai, a country suffering from small-man syndrome. It wants to be bigger. It’s wearing the flashy gold watch, driving a sports car and attracting celebrity friends but it remains small. Monaco is further damaged by being a very small version of France, that venue for scholastic exchanges, romance, booze cruises, burning sheep and car-b-cues. Monaco’s a foreigner’s view of an al fresco French drawing room, a gilded, gaudy, snooty, ultra-conservative bastion of monied minds, opulence, esoteric watch brands and tackiness.
Maybe it can improve if it can grow? The country is taking bids for a six-hectare (14-acre) development project of land drained of the sea. You have until 23 July to design a new district for Monaco’s new district by 2024.
New Monaco will be environmentally friendly and favour pedestrians and cyclists. Residences will be blocks of flats. Can it be that New Monaco will look like an old Russian slum, the locals all emigres recapturing the mood of Stalin’s Steppes, their heads swaddled in Dr Nip ‘n’ Tuck’s scarves as they affect a look of a housewife taking a Siberian winter full in the face – at least until the stitches mend?
Monaco is seeping into the Med like a sewage outlet of greed. It’s good for the little men, of course.
Come on in, the water’s shallow…
Posted: 9th, May 2013 | In: Money, News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Cleveland hero Charles Ramsey was raised right (video)
CHARLES Ramsey was raised right. The man who saved Amanda Berry, Michele Knight and Gina DeJesus is a star. “I’m the definition of a man, bro’”. Here he is on the telly:
Posted: 8th, May 2013 | In: News, TV & Radio | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
The ex-girlfriend who took on the world of revenge porn – you all need to read this
HOLLY Jacobs is the face of revenge porn. She was just another body in a mucky video until she set about turning the tables on her nemesis. She stepped up and filed a criminal case against a revenge porn distributor. She doesn’t know who that it, but she thinks it’s an ex.
This is her story:
ON a drizzly evening in Tampa in 2006, 23-year-old Holly Jacobs was enjoying a typical date night with Ryan Seay, her boyfriend of a few short months. As the time to head home approached, he walked her to her car and reluctantly kissed her goodbye. She clung dreamily to the sweater Mr. Seay had given her earlier in the evening, when she’d said she was cold. As her car pulled out of Mr. Seay’s driveway, she noticed it: a little heart that he had traced in the raindrops collected on her rear windshield.
Posted: 8th, May 2013 | In: Key Posts, News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Married high school teacher Jennifer Vigil, 31 allegedly forced 18-year-old to have sex with her
IN other news: “Married high school teacher Jennifer Vigil, 31, allegedly pounced on her now 18-year-old victim at Pojoaque Valley High School…”
Posted: 8th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Charles Ramsey sings and memes (Reginald D Hunter is busy)
CHARLES Ramsey, break-out-star of the kidnapping, imprisonment, enslavement and likely rape of three women in Cleveland, Ohio, is now a singer.
Posted: 8th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Who stole the bear’s bicycle? Circus performer seeks new act
WHO stole the bear’s bicycle? The thief struck as the bear was scheduled to perform at a circus in the Russian republic of Tatarstan.
The story goes that Timofei the bear was deeply upset at not being able to cycle around in circles that he stopped eating. Timofei’s trainer is merely “hysterical”.
The steel bicycle is unfit for humans who don’t look like bears.
Edith Crocker’s Teddy Bears ride motorbikes in Harringay, London, back in 1950. Back then bikes were the go-ahead transport. Nowadays, what with global warming and rising fuel costs, bears have turend to push bikes.
Bikes for short bears, London, 1950.
Noel Edmonds’ big break into light entertainments, 1953.
Bears at Peter Storm
During an act of the new clown-owned circus, Hans Grocker shows his high-riding bear during the opening run in Hamburg, Germany on March 27, 1951. “The bear is programmed as the only one in the world which can ride a bicycle as high as this one. He gets on and off with a ladder.”
Good with a ladder, you say? Was the missing bike stored in an upstairs room..?
Posted: 8th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Skills of Defensive Driving – Episodes 1 to 5 (1973)
IN Skills of Defensive Driving, the Australia Department of Transport pops the sex comedy soundtrack into the player and keep your eyes on the road. This was made by Film Australia in 1973:
Episode 2: Easter Time
Episode 3: The Car Behind
Episode 4: The Head On Collision
Great intro. An inspiration for Police Squad.
Episode 5: Cross-roads crash
Spotter: Jalopnik
Posted: 8th, May 2013 | In: Cars, Flashback | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Robber thwarted by a face full of chilli
WHEN you’re faced with someone trying to rob you, it is difficult not to freeze in terror. However, that’s the polar opposite of Joanna Tarnoski’s actions as she dealt with Tyrone Holmwood, who got a little hot-headed.
Tyrone was trying to rob the till at a takeaway shop in Sydney, but it all got a bit too hot to handle for the bozo as he soon found he had a bucket of chilli on his stupid head.
Posted: 8th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
THE story of Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus’s escape from a suburban prison is made made relevant to a British audience by the mention of missing child Madeleine McCann, the benchmark of not only missing children but now of all missing teenagers and women, too.
Alison Philips writes in the Mirror:
Inspiring mothers who fought for missing daughters keep hope of Madeleine McCann miracle alive
A miracle is a happening so incredible is must be the work of God.
The discovery of three women held captive in a house for 10 years can only have reignited hope Madeleine may one day be found.
Indeed, Gina DeJesus’s aunt Sandra Ruiz said: “If you don’t believe in miracles, I suggest you think again.”
From the perspective of the missing women’s loved one their reappearance after ten years of nothing must seem like a miracle. But from the victims’ viewpoint, it must be anything but. They endured captivity at the hands of three men.
What happened to Madeleine McCann remains a mystery. When she vanished, the Mirror conjured six theories, none of which involved the supernatural or God. The Mirror’s six theories of what happened to the innocent child were: “PAEDOPHILE GANG”, the “LONE PAEDOPHILE”, the “JEALOUS MOTHER”, “DROWNED”, the “OPPORTUNIST PAEDOPHILE” and the “CHILDLESS COUPLE”.
Alison Philips then watches the parents:
Last weekend Kate McCann boarded a flight alone to return to Portugal where her daughter Madeleine was abducted almost exactly six years ago. She was going back to the spot where she lost her three-year-old daughter and to the moment she last saw her, tucked up in bed with Cuddle Cat.
Kate was also going back to where she lost her own life, the life she had before it became defined by loss forever. The pain of returning to that whitewashed town on the Algarve must be horrific.
And yet friends say Kate does it to feel close to Madeleine.
This is news, how?
Presumably immersing herself in the pain of her loss is preferable to that awful alternative – forgetting about her little girl. And Kate can’t do that. She more than anyone knows that she wasn’t there when her daughter needed her most.
So now she must fight for the rest of her life to ensure that if Madeleine is still alive, she knows her mother is there for her now.
That’s pretty brutal by Philips. isn’t it. She says Kate McCann’s search for her daughter is in part inspired by notions that she let her daughter down. How does that make Kate McCann an “inspiring mother” as the title to Philip’s piece states?
We don’t yet know Amanda Berry, 16, Gina DeJesus, then 14, and Michelle Knight, then 22, were kidnapped. But we do know they were out in public at the time.
Philips then speculates:
Even if she is dead, Kate’s job remains to keep her daughter’s memory alive because while memory remains, so does life.
In appearing to salute Kate McCann, Philips now says the tabloids’ Our Maddie might be dead. Theta’s the very thing the McCanns’ campaign to find her doesn’t want us to think.
Indeed Kate and Gerry said:
“The discovery of these young women reaffirms our hope of finding Madeleine, which has never diminished. Their recovery is also further evidence that children are sometimes abducted and kept for long periods. So we ask the public to remain vigilant in the ongoing search for Madeleine. Our thoughts are with the women in America and their families.”
But this is an opportunistic and wholly shallow article the intent of which is to fill space by linking events on Cleveland to British readers. Philips then writes:
And this week Kate’s pain must be even more acute as the discovery of three women held captive in an American house for 10 years can only have reignited hope that Madeleine may too one day be found.
They must have. Just as they must have when Jaycee Dugard was found alive and when Elizabeth Fritzl emerged from erh father’s cellar.
The tabloids never say how such events give hope to Andrew Gosden’s parents, Charlene Downes’s loved ones or Ben Needham’s mother. The points of reference have been set. Madeleine McCann is the benchmark for all missing children.
Philips ploughs on:
Like Kate McCann, the mothers of Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight, had fought tirelessly to keep the stories of their missing daughters in the public eye in the hope that one day it might help bring them home.
Amanda Berry’s mother was led up the garden path by psychics. Gina DeJesus’s father campaigned tirelessly, marking the anniversary of her disappearance with a rally. We know next to nothing of Michelle Knight. Philips makes an assumption.
Gina DeJesus’ mother Nancy Ruiz had plastered posters of her missing daughter all around the neighbourhood after she went missing aged 14 as she walked home one day from school. One of the posters somehow made it into the home where she was chained up.
However bad her life must have been in that suburban dungeon – and it must have been horrific – there must have been some crumb of comfort for Gina knowing her mum was still looking for her, waiting for her to return.
Oh, please. The kidnapped teen got a crumb of comfort from a poster that points to what she didn’t have, what was ripped from her? That’s comforting? It sounds more like torture.
Just as Amanda Berry’s mother Louwana Miller scoured the streets for her daughter until she made herself sick and finally died, broken-hearted, seven years ago.
And that is why Kate McCann cannot give up her search, however painful it might be.
Even if it is the remotest chance, she has to ensure if Madeleine is alive she knows her mother is waiting for her.
How does she ensure what Madeleine knows that, then?
These mothers were all extraordinary in their own way in refusing to stop fighting for their missing daughters.
No. They were not ALL extraordinary. They did exactly what any rational, loving mother would be expected to if their child vanished. They are ordinary women thrust into extraordinary circumstances.
But in another way they were totally ordinary – isn’t it what any mother would hope to do in this situation? And that’s what is extraordinary about motherhood – the superhuman strength it gives to women.
Philips has thus managed to make the extraordinary story ordinary. Who dare say tabloids only deal in sensationalism?
“The nightmare is over,” Cleveland FBI Special Agent Stephen Anthony said during a press conference yesterday in Ohio. For Kate McCann the nightmare goes on until she either dies herself or Madeleine is found.
Every day she must relive the nightmare for Madeleine, just as the mothers of Amanda, Gina and Michelle did for 10 years. In doing so, these dedicated women are an inspiration to mothers everywhere.
They inspire mothers to be, erm, ordinary?
Posted: 8th, May 2013 | In: Madeleine McCann, News | Comments (2) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus news round-up: sex, popsicles and experts
AMANDA Berry, Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus news round-up.
The three women from Cleveland, Ohio, are back with their families. Ariel Castro (52), a former bus driver, and his two brothers, Pedro (54) and Onil (50) have been arrested.
The Child:
Amanda Berry emerged form the hosue with a six-year-old child.
ABC News: “Cleveland Girl Born in Captivity ‘Smiling,’ Eating Popsicles”
The Dungeon:
Daily Star (front page): “Sex Slaves Chained For 10 Years in Dungeon”
“They had five babies in shackles”
Daily Mirror (front page): “Five Babies Born in Brothers Grim Dungeon”
NYDaily News: “Three kidnapping victims were repeatedly raped, resulting in 5 pregnancies: sources
What sources? We’re not told. It’s just sources. Still, sex sells…
Police would not say how the women were taken captive or how they were hidden in the neighborhood where they had vanished. Investigators also would not say whether they were kept in restraints inside the house or sexually assaulted.
The Women:
The Times (front page): “Police praises the courage of women who survived ten years of captivity”
The Castros:
Irish Times: “The son of a Cleveland man suspected of abducting three women interviewed the mother of one of the kidnapped women months after her disappearance, while working as a student journalist.”
In a bizarre twist in the remarkable story of three women freed on Monday after a decade in captivity, it emerged yesterday that the son of Ariel Castro, one of the suspected kidnappers, interviewed the mother of Gina DeJesus, a 14-year-old who went missing in April 2004.
Castro’s son, writing at the time as Ariel Castro but now known as Anthony Castro, interviewed the mother Nancy Ruiz for an article in a local newspaper in 2004, seemingly unaware of his father’s alleged role in the teenager’s disappearance.
Asked by a local news station about his 2004 interview and the events of recent days, Anthony Castro, now 31, said: “This is beyond comprehension . . . I’m truly stunned right now.” The older Ariel Castro (52), a former bus driver, and his two brothers, Pedro (54) and Onil (50) were arrested on Monday after one of the women, Amanda Berry, escaped with help from a neighbour and alerted police.
“Help me, I am Amanda Berry,” the 27-year-old woman told police in a hysterical call to 911 emergency services from a neighbour’s house. “I’ve been kidnapped and I’ve been missing for 10 years. And I’m . . . I’m here, I’m free now.”
The Police:
Four years ago, in another poverty-stricken part of town, police were heavily criticized following the discovery of 11 women’s bodies in the home and backyard of Anthony Sowell, who was later convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
The families of Sowell’s victims accused police of failing to properly investigate the disappearances because most of the women were addicted to drugs and poor. For months, the stench of death hung over the house, but it was blamed on a sausage factory next door…
This time, two neighbors said they called police to the Castro house on separate occasions.
Elsie Cintron, who lives three houses away, said her daughter saw a naked woman crawling in the backyard several years ago and called police. “But they didn’t take it seriously,” she said.
Another neighbor, Israel Lugo, said he heard pounding on some of the doors of the house in November 2011. Lugo said officers knocked on the front door, but no one answered. “They walked to side of the house and then left,” he said.
“Everyone in the neighborhood did what they had to do,” said Lupe Collins, who is close to relatives of the women. “The police didn’t do their job.”
There had been signs that something was amiss inside the two-story house with faded paint, which sits on a street packed with small homes with open porches just steps away from a gas station and a Caribbean grocery. Neighbors said that several years ago, a naked woman was seen crawling on her hands and knees in the back yard, and pounding was heard on the doors in 2011. Police showed up each time but stayed outside, the neighbors said.
The home in a heavily Latino neighborhood was owned by Ariel Castro, 52, a former school bus driver who was arrested along with his brothers, Pedro Castro, 54, and Onil Castro, 50.
City officials said children and family services investigators had gone to the home in January 2004, when two of the girls were missing, because Ariel Castro had left a child on a school bus.
Investigators “knocked on the door but were unsuccessful in connection with making any contact with anyone inside that home,” Cleveland Mayor Frank G. Jackson said at a news conference, adding that officials “have no indication that any of the neighbors, bystanders, witnesses or anyone else has ever called regarding any information regarding activity that occurred at that house on Seymour Avenue.’’
That’s not what Charles Ramsey said. The hero of the hour said the Castros were normal guys.
Atlantic Wire: “Charles Ramsey Is an Internet Hero for All the Wrong Reasons”
No one is saying that Charles Ramsey isn’t worthy of the “hero” mantle. He helped save three women who were held captive — brutally — in his Cleveland neighborhood for over a decade. But the Internet’s instant meme-ification of this man — a lower-income black man talking about a horrible crime, played on repeat at the expense of stereotypes and with the blinders fully up about the truth — it’s all a little gross, no?
The Loved Ones:
Gina’s aunt Sandra Ruiz: “If you don’t believe in miracles, I suggest you think again.”
The Experts:
The Telegraph: ”Kidnap experts say it is possible the three women held prisoner in a Cleveland house may have developed a bond with their kidnappers, reports Colin Freeman”
What might seem the most obvious theory, that the house was some kind of cleverly-disguised jail, is not the necessarily the most likely. While police said on Tuesday that they thought the three girls had been tied up, kidnap specialists point out that holding them prisoners against their will would be difficult to do without neighbours becoming suspicious, especially over a long period of time.
ABC: Psychic Who Said Amanda Berry Was Dead Silent After Berry Is Found Alive
Sylvia Browne has gone oddly quiet.
Posted: 8th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment (1) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
I was the face of Vladimir Tretchikoff’s Chinese Girl
PEOPLE in famous pictures presents Monika Pon-su-san, the subject of Vladimir Tretchikoff’s portrait Chinese Girl. Says she of the reassuringly expensive artwork, that helped make the artist “significant”:
“I thought I looked like a monster from a horror film – I pulled an ugly face and said ‘Ugh – green face!’ ”
…
“I liked him very much. He was a funny man – we always laughed a lot. In all, I was paid six pounds and five shillings for the work. He had a class of about 20 pupils. All the time I was sitting for him they could see me but I was never allowed to see the painting – it always had its back to me.
I would nag him: “What are you going to call it?” He said that a name would come to him later on. It was only at the end of the six or 10 weeks – I can’t remember exactly how long it took – on the night his exhibition opened that he said it was called Chinese Girl. I thought that was very ordinary.
Well, yes. It is. Like the simple name, the picture makes you notice what’s not there.
Spotter: BBC
Posted: 7th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
BBC blocks licence fee payers from accessing BBC websites
APOLOGIES if a bit slow to pick this up, but WTF? In attempting to read the story on researchers who ‘printed’ a 3D kidney, I got this message:
BBC Future (international version)
We’re sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com.
It’s the BBC. It’s all funded by the bloody licence fee. The BBC have taken our money under pain of law and used it to invest in a business the investors – us|! – are barred from seeing it. That’s just wrong.
BBC Worldwide Limited is the main commercial arm and a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) which operates in the UK and over 200 countries around the world. The company is self-funded and exists to exploit the value of the BBC’s assets for the benefit of the licence fee payer and invest in public service programming in return for rights.
No. It can’t be. It trades off the company we created. It even uses its name to get kudos and trust. It’s called BBC WORLDWIDE LIMITED.
We acquire the commercial rights to great programmes such as Doctor Who, Top Gear and Dancing with the Stars and find ways of earning money from these rights across different media and markets.
Those negotiations to acquire the rights to BBC shows must be bloody brutal, eh.
In 2011/12, BBC Worldwide generated headline profits of £155 million on headline sales of £1085 million and returned £216 million to the BBC. For more detailed performance information please see our Annual Review website.
Good-oh. But why can’t we Brits see the stuff you sell?
In April 2009, the company was awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise, recognising the company’s substantial growth in earnings over the previous three years.
What a cosy arrangement.
BBC Worldwide operates under the BBC Charter and Agreement, which sets out the following four commercial criteria with which our activities must comply. BBC Worldwide must:
Fit with the BBC’s Public Purposes set out in the Charter
Be commercially efficient
Not jeopardise the good reputation of the BBC or the value of the BBC brands
Comply with the BBC’s Fair Trading Guidelines and avoid distorting the market.
How can the BBC not distort the market? If you’re British and own a telly you have to give the sods money…
Posted: 7th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Kid confronts illegally parked police officer getting food and goes viral in the process
OVER in America, they have a funny relationship with the police. Basically, they revere and loathe their force in equal measure. Wait, that’s like every country in the Western world.
One difference is, is that Americans are much better at being wise-asses with their police, and a video of a 12 year old boy confronting a police officer has gone viral.
Posted: 7th, May 2013 | In: News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
Charles Ramsey’s call to police (NSFW) – the rescue of Amanda Berry, Michele Knight and Gina DeJesus
CHARLES Ramsey was the right man in the right place. When Amanda Berry knocked on the window of 2207 Seymour Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio, Charles Ramsey was listening. He kicked in the door and rescued Berry and her six-year-old daughter. And he called the police. Inside Ariel Castro’s home they found Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight. All three of the women had been kidnapped around a decade earlier. The child had been born in captivity.
Ramsey was the right man for the job, not only because he had the wherewithal to spring into action, but because he had the wit to call the police and talk to the TV news.
Posted: 7th, May 2013 | In: Key Posts, News | Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed:RSS 2.0
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