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.
Halloween: too much, too soon for our sexy pumpkin fed toddlers
I DON’T know how British people celebrate Halloween—with understated elegance and a solemn appreciation for tradition, no doubt—but future archaeologists will conclude American Halloween was a giant fertility festival, which is why everybody wears the skimpiest costumes they can even though, in most of North America, the last night of October is waaaaay too cold for that.
Discount retailer Walmart is even selling what it calls “naughty” costumes for toddlers this year. In context, “naughty” obviously doesn’t mean “refuses to eat vegetables,” “dropped her bedroom slippers in the fishtank” or other age-appropriate misbehaviours; it’s synonymous with sheer, skimpy and sexually scintillating, which is fine to market to adults and various older teenagers, but … three-year-olds, dude.
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Posted: 26th, September 2013 | In: Reviews, The Consumer | Comment
Top 10 weird reasons that couples break-up
PEOPLE break up for stupid reasons. Seen So, I Married An Axe Murderer? Someone got dumped in that because they ‘smelled of soup’.
Well, Fickletattoos.com has done a survey to find some of the bizarre reasons why Britons have ended a relationship.
One answer put a break-up down to a partner’s excessive sex toy collection, while another stated that they dumped their beau because they refused to wash their Sunday league football kit.
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News in photos – September 25 2013: Pearly Kings, Fulham evict Michael Jackson and Liverpool’s Luis Suarez is back
NEWS in photos – September 25 2013: Pearly Kings and Liverprool’s Luis Suarez is back:
[Not a valid template]Posted: 25th, September 2013 | In: Photojournalism, Reviews | Comment
Trumpington Village Hall, Cambridge, cancels bondage on a budget with tea workshop
THE trustees of Trumpington Village Hall have cancelled Peer Rope Cambridge’s “relationship meeting” over concerns that the venus has been booked “under false pretences”:
“It has been brought to [our] attention that the premises have been hired under false pretences by PRC Cambridge.
“When the bookings were made, the activity was described as a ‘relationship support group meeting’. The booking did not fully state the activities undertaken.
“The trustees have therefore cancelled all future bookings and have no further comment to make.”
You wonder how this could have been misconstrued, as the Cambridge News reports on the event’s flyer:
“Mr Allen will show you how to truly get a bottom’s attention with canes”
…
“Mistress Bond will chair a group discussion on how to ensure your sessions go with a bang!”
…
“Maid Sarah” will to serve “sandwiches, crisps and fruit”
“Our maid for the day, Sarah, serves tea, coffee and biscuits from 10.30am-4.15pm. The charge for this is included in your entrance fee.”
…
“Ian from The London Tanners will take you through a variety of impact play methods and implements suitable for spanking both naughty and ‘not-so-naughty’ bottoms”.
And best of all:
“Moot will lead a group discussion of various ways to indulge in BDSM (Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission), without breaking the bank”
Cllr Sheila Stuart, who represents Trumpington on Cambridge City Council says:
“I think this is becoming much more common and less hidden with the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, and has brought it much more out in the open. Cambridge has a very diverse community so I am not surprised. And they do seem to be very organised and I am pleased to see they are also offering catering.”
And get a load of how well folded those napkins are. That ones’a swan. That one’s a boat. And that one looks like Mrs Archibald the rector’s wife riding a sealion.
We dug around the web a little to find out more.
An advert for a similar event runs:
On behalf of all of the organisers, we are pleased to announce Peer Rope Cambridge, presented by Cambridge Kink AND our first but hopefully not last Peer Whips Cambridge in next room.
The admission fee for PRC/PWC will be the same as always, and participants can move between the two halls as they wish.
Peer Whips:
PWC is designed for those who own a single tail whip who need a safe space to practice cracking it. It is held in the large hall, in a separate space from the rope area. Bring your single tail whip (and ear plugs/defenders), and practice your technique.
NB The whip event is not suitable for complete novices – there will not be any tuition available. We intend this to be for target practice only, not on live bunnies.
And if the media wants to speak with them, it had best try harder. Their website says:
Members of the Press are not welcome at our events
Cambridge Kink is not interested in receiving any media coverage
We are not interested in contributing to articles
Cambridge Kink are not available for comment, even ‘off the record’
Another site adds a spot of history:
Rope Bondage Peer Workshops started a few years ago in San Francisco. This is only the third one ever held outside the USA. And we do things a bit differently than they do. To a large extent, by how we behave at this event, we are deciding how such things will get done in the future. Please behave in a way that will make future workshops likely to be fun events full of helpful courteous people doing lots of great bondage. This is not a disco. This is not a commercial event with people paid to do stuff for you. It is more a class than a party. Floor space and time on equipment is a scarce resource. This is a rope bondage event, organised by rope bondage enthusiasts for rope bondage enthusiasts.
Amusingly, the Hall’s manager is called Roger…
Samantha Lewthwaite: will speculation on the White Widow kill an innocent woman?
MORE no-news on Samantha Lewthwaite – the woman dubbed “The White Widow” by British journalists versed in Agatha Christie and melodrama. Was the British-born Muslim convert who married a man who committed murderous suicide on 7/7 involved in the Nairobi shopping centre massacre? There is no evidence that she was.
And the notion that a woman could lead a band of al-Qaeda style nutjobs on a murderous mission seems out of kilter with Islamist group Al-Shabaab’s views of women as wombs with brooms and mutilated genitals.
Yet, The British media ploughs on with the theory that the white women led the massacre.
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Good manners cost Aberdeen DJ his career and his cannabis stash
Deathwise child rides plastic tricycle down busy motorway
DRIVERS will know that, when you’re behind the wheel, you have to stay alert. Cats run into the road, cyclists weave in-and-out of traffic and weird accidents can happen.
However, in Brazil, motorists got the shock of their lives as they dodged an eight-year-old boy riding a tricycle alongside them.
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Posted: 25th, September 2013 | In: Reviews, Strange But True | Comment
Failed audition tapes: Tom Selleck was Indiana Jones
Once upon a time, Tom Selleck was Indian Jones…briefly:
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Posted: 25th, September 2013 | In: Film, Flashback | Comment
Video: mother and daughter play dead in Kenyan mall
MOTHER and daughter played dead to avoid being murdered in Kenyan Mall massacre:
The Fourth Plinth Exhibitions: 6 news objects to decorate Trafalgar Square
THE Fourth Plinth has been a joy. Artists and how-offs get to pose. The latest 6 entrants for the pedestal are:
Really Good by artist David Shrigley
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Fancy dressers salute drug smugglers Melissa Reid and Michaella McCollum
MELISSA Reid and Michaella McCollum, both 20, have admitted to trying to fly from Peru to Spain with more than 11 kilos of the class-A drug in their luggage. The British women confessed they knew the bags ere full of the Class A drugs. They face six-years in prison.
Let that be a lesson to you:
Don’t go faking your online reviews – it’s a criminal act
AT least don’t go faking your online reviews in the US. For this might surprise a few people in this thriving little business, but faking a review online is actually a criminal act.
A year-long investigation by New York prosecutors has found 19 local businesses guilty of faking reviews on sites such as Google and Yelp, a practice that has now earned them over $350,000 in fines and penalties.
As part of “Operation Clean Turf,” investigators from the office of the New York Attorney General posed as yogurt shop owners from Brooklyn, and asked leading search engine optimization (SEO) companies for help in improving their presence online.
There’s all sorts of things one can do to manipulate results on the internet. Pay people to link to your website for example, this used to work. It creates a link that makes Google think your site is more important and thus raises you in the search results. Unfortunately Google has cottoned on to this and if they find out you’ve been doing it then you sink back down to the bottom of the results.
The rise of the recommendation sites has led to this other stuff. If people are going to read reviews to tell them where to go and anyone can submit a review then obviously people are going to submit fake reviews. It might cost $10 or so to get a decent one written and placed (that is about the right cost for a good one, bad ones are much cheaper) and you only need to get one or two customers to make that sort of price work. But, as above, at least in the US, this is illegal.
Someone will no doubt come up with another way to game the system soon enough. But for the moment…
Posted: 24th, September 2013 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
News in photos – September 24 2013: death in Nairobi, Damien McBride’s collars and Ben Johnson’s foot
NEWS in photos – September 24 2013: death in Nairobi, Damien McBride’s collars and Ben Johnson’s foot:
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Posted: 24th, September 2013 | In: Photojournalism, Reviews | Comment
Shoplifter caught out by his pet dog
DARWIN calls William Cochrane, 28, who celebrated his birthday by nicking an iPod and speakers from Asda in Inverness.
Off he ran with his booty. And he would have gotten away with it, too, had it not been for one small issue: he’d left his dog tied up outside he store. Cochrane’s address and name were on the dog’s collar.
At Inverness Sheriff Court, Cochrane admitted two charges of dishonesty.
Posted: 24th, September 2013 | In: Reviews, Strange But True | Comment
Samantha Lewthwaite: The White Widow who tells the brown and black men to kill in Kenya
THE tabloids continue their hunt for the The White Widow:, the nickname given to Samantha Lewthwaite, the British-born women who was married to a man who became a 7/7 bomber and fled to East Africa. Yesterday, the Mirror and Sun told us that she was the brains behind the operation, “barking out orders“ to her “assassins“.
The Sun’s assassins are the nutcases who used precision instruments like grenades and AK47s to murder scores of people out shopping in Nairobi mall. Neither paper wondered too much how a white woman managed to rise to the top of militant Islamic group al-Shabaab, whose view of women is as wombs with brooms than potential leaders of men. In Somalia, the righteous men also like mutilating women’s genitals. But the Sun says that in this climate of sexual equality and feminism, Lewthwaite is the leader.
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Posted: 24th, September 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
In 1983 Dennis Hopper performed this Russian Dynamite Death Chair Act in Houston
IN 1983 Dennis Hopper went to Rice University in Houston, Texas. Students piled onto buses. They followed Hopper to Houston’s Big H Speedway. His arrival was announced thus:
“Stick around folks and watch a famous Hollywood film personality perform the Russian Dynamite Death Chair Act. That’s right, folks, he’ll sit in a chair with six sticks of dynamite and light the fuse.”
Rice News reported:
Dennis Hopper, at one with the shock wave, was thrown headlong in a halo of fire. For a single, timeless instant he looked like Wile E. Coyote, frazzled and splayed by his own petard. Then billowing smoke hid the scene. We all rushed forward, past the police, into the expanding cloud of smoke, excited, apprehensive, and no less expectant than we had been before the explosion. Were we looking for Hopper or pieces we could take home as souvenirs? Later Hopper would say blowing himself up was one of the craziest things he has ever done, and that it was weeks before he could hear again. At the moment, though, none of that mattered. He had been through the thunder, the light, and the heat, and he was still in one piece. And when Dennis Hopper staggered out of that cloud of smoke his eyes were glazed with the thrill of victory and spinout.
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Posted: 23rd, September 2013 | In: Celebrities, Flashback, Key Posts | Comment
Islamist who protesteted against Danish Mohammed cartoons has change of heart
CAN an Islamist change?
Michael Moynihan interviews Ahmed Akkari, who helped to whip up the frenzy riots during the Danish cartoon controversy. Akkari then changed his mind. He moved to Greenland – well away form his former friends:
There is no simple explanation for why he flipped, but Akkari’s time in Greenland, having emerged from the swamps of Islamism, was crucial. “In Greenland, I had space and time—and I had the public library. I started reading.” It was there, shrouded in Arctic anonymity, that he confronted his own prejudices, reading books of philosophy, history, and sociology, ultimately consuming—but, he admits, not always comprehending—Danish existentialist philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard.
“In 2011 for the first time I read an Islam critic.” It was the work of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd, an Egyptian scholar exiled from his homeland and forced by an Egyptian court to annul his marriage for the “crime” of apostasy. His writings transformed Akkari. “He made me move further with my break from Islamism,” a system that he now views as “a way of controlling people. You use God, you use metaphysics, and that’s very strong.”…During the cartoon crisis, a popular Saudi imam told Al Jazeera that free speech was the enemy of religious faith: “The problem is that [the Danes] want to open up … everything for debate. That’s it. It begins with freedom of thought, it continues with freedom of speech, and it ends up with freedom of belief.”
It now seemed a prescient observation, because it was liberalism, the consumption of dissenting ideas—the very thing he had once dedicated his life to shutting down—that changed Ahmed Akkari. Jacob Mchangama argues that, for Akkari, the Danish tradition of free speech acted as a disinfectant. “The Akkari affairs shows the fallacy of the argument that we need to ‘compromise’ and be ‘pragmatic’ when it comes to free speech and religious sensitivities.”
Photo: Palestinian militants from the Popular Resistance Committees burn a Danish flag during a protest rally in Gaza City, Monday, Feb. 18, 2008. Dozens of militants of the Popular Resistance Committees protested Monday against Danish newspapers reprinting a cartoon lampooning the Prophet Muhammad. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)
Dragoncon: Epic cosplayers gets Cease and Dessist letter for the vomitous Marriott carpet design they copied
CONGRATULATIONS to the cosplayers at the 2013 Dragoncon who dressed as the hideous carpet at the Atlanta Marriott hotel. But when one of the carpet assassins offered to supply the outfit to others, the lawyers stepped in. The garish horror flooring is made by Couristan Inc. Not only were they not ashamed to say they created that stuff, they issued a a legal threat.
Retro toys: Donny And Marie Osmond action figures, TV studio and adoption kit
DONNY and Marie Osmond were the stars of their eponymous TV show. Between 1976 and 1979, kids tuned in to see the beaming Mormon siblings singing country-style songs. They also performed skits with star guests, performing parodies of hit films, like Star Wars (1977) and Battlestar Galactica (1978).
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Posted: 23rd, September 2013 | In: Celebrities, Flashback, Key Posts, The Consumer | Comment
The White Widow: Samantha Lewthwaite spreads fear in Kenya and excitement in Britain
THE Islamist attack in Nairobi has claimed the lives of men, women and children. The al-Qaeda loons murdered shoppers with anything they could use, including grenades and AK-47s. The gunmen did pick out some victims by asking them to take pop quiz: name the mother of the Prophet Muhammad and live. In case you should need this information, the answer is Aminah.
As ever, the domestic press is interested in any British links. We know that at least three of the dead are British. But the Mail says one of the killers is too.
Terror raid ‘led by white widow’: Gang mastermind in veil barked orders at gunmen in mall massacre that left three Britons dead
Is this woman – the fugitive wife of a 7/7 bomber – the white, Buckinghamshire born Samantha Lewthwaite?
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Car spinners funeral’s peace disturbed by woman removing her knickers
CAR spinning clubs from as far afield as Mpumalanga, Limpopo and Pretoria came to pay their respects t the funeral of Bongani Makhubo, 40, of Soshanguve, Tshwane, who died after a short illness.
After the funeral at Soshanguve Cemetery, the drivers had a wheel spinning competition, revving their engines and spinning their cars in circles, spectators cheered.
At some point a young woman took off her knickers and began dancing in the middle of the spinning cars.
A John Lelaka was unimpressed:
“People are allowed to celebrate but not in a way that disturbs other people’s peace.”
This is what car spinning looks like. It is not yet an Olympic sport:
Is Syria a sign that End of Times is upon us? Fox News v Channel 4
IS war in Syria a sign that the End of Times is upon is. Has the end of the world begun?
Fox News
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Posted: 22nd, September 2013 | In: Reviews, TV & Radio | Comment
JD Salinger: Five new manuscripts and a post-Holocaust film to duck
JD Salinger died in died in 2010 at age 91. Some of his unpublished works have been found. Cornel Bonca looks at them:
[T]his is the biggest literary “get” of the American 21st century.
The books include a World War II novel featuring Sergeant X from “From Esme,” the most intriguing character outside Holden and the Glass family that Salinger ever created. It includes a novella, in diary form, written by a World War II counterintelligence officer — Salinger’s job during the war — “culminating in the Holocaust.” Given Salinger’s war experience and his painstaking writing process, these two works could conceivably add up to a contribution to American World War II literature on a par with the work of Mailer, Jones, Heller, and Pynchon.
A third manuscript is, we’re told, a “manual of Vedanta,” a book explaining Vedanta Hinduism (and presumably, its relation to Salinger’s work), “with short stories, almost fables, woven into the text.” Finally, there are two compilations, one entitled The Family Glass, gathering all the published Glass stories together with five new storiesabout Seymour, the last of which “deals with Seymour’s life after death.” Given that once Salinger got going on the Glasses, his “stories” inevitably metastasized into novellas, this book is likely to be a real tome, and might conceivably be the greatest contribution Salinger makes to American letters, dealing as it must, with the question of how to live a genuine spiritual life in a postwar, post-Holocaust world.
Then there’s the final book, which [biographers David] Shields and [Shane] Salerno describe as “a complete history of the Caulfield family,” gatheringCatcher, six previously published (and I would imagine, wholly rewritten) Caulfield stories written in the early-to-mid 1940s, as well as new stories featuring, presumably, Holden, Phoebe, Allie, and D.B. Caulfield. Five new Salinger books! Doubtless, they will make us entirely reconceive Salinger’s current oeuvre. If the books are even close in quality to Catcher or Franny & Zooey, they might reroute the course of late 20th-century American literature.
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Posted: 22nd, September 2013 | In: Books, Film, Flashback | Comment
