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.
Meat Is Red Rum: town takes record for world’s biggest horsemeat helicopter
To the Russian town of Kumertau, where the world’s biggest helicopter model made from horsemeat is on display. The horsemeat chopper celebrates the towns’ anniversary and the local helicopter factory.
Horsemeat seller Liliya Amineva explains:
“Today’s helicopter is made of horsemeat. Our company produces horsemeat sausages. And the helicopter is made exclusively of our products made from organic meat grown in our region.”
The horsemeat helicopter is over 3.5m long, about 1.8m high and weighs over 120kg.
Meat is Red Rum, as they say in Russia.
Posted: 14th, June 2015 | In: Reviews, Strange But True | Comment
Manchester City’s Yaya Toure and Sandra Ntonya in Sainsbury’s sex shocker
Manchester City’s Yaya Toure is the subject of the Sun’s story that he has been allegedly seeing a “£140-an-hour hooker”. The story begins with this tremedous line:
Sandra Ntonya, 34, told last night how she exchanged a string of texts with Man City star’s mobile to meet near a Sainsbury’s car park.
Product placement is everything. You can imagine the Sainsbury’s marketing team working out how to milk claims that a £200,000-a-week footballer knows the way to their shop.
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Posted: 14th, June 2015 | In: Manchester City, Reviews, Sports | Comment
Wonderful photos of fleeing Syrian women throwing off their Islamic State burqas
As they arrive in Kuridsh-controlled territory, women fleeing Islamic Stateare are tossing off their buqas.
Freedom Portrait A woman takes off blackness after reaching safety, #Kurds #YPG contrld area, west #GireSipi #Rojava pic.twitter.com/ky5oeSttoi
— Jack Shahine (@jackshahine) June 4, 2015
All credit & appreciation for these incredible photos go to footage owner: @servankobane Shervan Derwish #Kobani pic.twitter.com/8qIFyiZdMM
— Jack Shahine (@jackshahine) June 6, 2015
#Arab woman taking off blackness after fleeing #IS controlled #GirêSipî #TalAbyad today, reaching #Kurds contrld area pic.twitter.com/TDLV02vpQB
— Jack Shahine (@jackshahine) June 2, 2015
Spotter: Jack Shahine
Naked earthquake maker Eleanor Hawkins heads home
Naked earthquake maker Eleanor Hawkins, 23, is on her way back home. Having endured a three-day prison sentence for outraging public decency, Hawkins is free to begin her life on the British media treadmill.
“I am totally remorseful for my actions,” her lawyer quotes her as saying. “The conditions under remand were tough and I do not want to be in this position again.”
Hawkins was, of course, one of ten backpackers who got naked atop Malaysia’s highest peak, Mt Kinabalu. Their actions were linked to a July 5 earthquake that killed 18 climbers, including six children.
No naked Westerners have been held responsible for the fate of Flight MH370. But give it time…
Rachel Dolezal: Godfrey Elfwick strikes again as fake tan dupes whites into thinking you’re black
She was black on the outside and white on the inside. Black community leader Rachel Dolezal has been exposed as a white woman with a stick on Afro and a spray tan:
Rachel Dolezal, who heads Spokane’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter and teaches Africana studies at Eastern Washington University, refused to directly answers any questions about her alleged racial ruse after it was reported.
A KXLY reporter bluntly asked her, “Are you African-American?”
After a stunned pause, she replied: “I don’t understand the question.”
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Posted: 12th, June 2015 | In: Reviews, Strange But True | Comment
10 strippers arested for using their sex apepal to maximise their income
Lapdancers are being watched. Police in Seminole County, Florida, have arrested 10 lapdancers at Rachel’s Men’s Club. The Orlando Sentinel says the ten are accused of breaking the local county’s “straddle-dance” law that forbids physical contact between dancer and punter.
No contact when you’re grinding your body close to a randy man in a darkened club is no easy thing to maintain. In addition, one of the ten is accused of “solicitation of alcohol” for the crime of asking an adult policeman to buy her and another lady drinks.
Another women allegedly told a policeman “she would ‘party’ with him for $350 an hour”.
The whole thing is pathetic. These women are being criminalised for using their sex appeal to maximise their earnings in a strip club.
Next week Florida police check to see if bears really do poop in the woods.
Spotter: Orlando Sentinel, via D&T
Legal brothel offers free sex in tax protest: golfers and other masochists offer to pay
Pascha and staff
To Salzburg, Austria, where brothel keeper Hermann ‘Pascha’ Müller, owner of the licensed Pascha brothel, vows to no longer be “the tax office’s pimp”. So Müller is offering free sex at his houses of ill repute. He is, however, paying the prostitutes’ usual hourly rate “out of his own pocket”.
“In the last decade I have paid taxes of almost €5 million,” says Müller said. “The problem is, the tax office wants more and more, and they are not cracking down on illegal street and apartment prostitution.”
We wonder why Pascha doesn’t enlarge his BDSM business and invite masochists to pay his pax bill for him? After all, he’s already appealing to the every kind of pervert – including golfers:
Mother guilty of leaving children in hot car leaves children in hot car outside court
To Henrico, Virginia, where Laquanda Newby, 25, is at the Henrico County Courthouse. She admits to having left a child in a hot car.
When Newby turned herself in, police said she again left children in her car. Deputies could not say how long the two children were inside the car, but surveillance video showed it was more than an hour. The car’s windows were closed and the car keys were left on the floorboard, police said. Temperatures hit the 90s on Monday.
Henrico Sheriff’s Capt. David Kinkle said: “Their shirts were wet, sweat rolling off their brows. They seemed to be okay, but it was very hot.”
Mum was taken to a room with open windows, albeit with bars over them.
Posted: 12th, June 2015 | In: Reviews, Strange But True | Comment
Free Speech: Linda Jones trial makes a mockery of hate crime
Linda Jones, 65, of St Albans, has been found guilty of a religiously-aggravated hate crime. Jones, who had no previous, is now the owner of a 12 month community order and six week curfew following an altercation in Watford on April 17, 2014.
The Herts Advertiser reports:
Judge Pilling found Jones, who had no previous convictions, guilty of a religiously-aggravated Section 4A public order offence last month, after she called two Muslim men “terrorists with guns in their pockets”.
During the Jewish holiday of Passover last year, Jones and other members of the Beit Nitzachon congregation were manning a council-approved literature table in Watford town centre.
The table was draped with the national flags of Britain and Israel and carried Messianic Jewish literature.
Hamza Shah, 21, and Haroon Munir, 24, came over and began to talk about Israel – they are not in favour of the country.
After several minutes Hamza Shah led Haroon Munir away from the argument, during which Jones was found to have made the racist comment.
Richard Cavarth reports on the courtroom exchange, in which District Judge Annabel Pilling refers to Israel as the ‘Holy Land’. Words matter. Judge Pilling has made a conscious choice. The country whose flag was being objected to is called Israel. The case also featured Jones being asked under cross-examination by prosecutor for the CPS, barrister Alan Burdis-Smith: “Was that [the Israel flag] there to wind up Muslims?”
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Man with first penile transplant gets lover pregnant
The 21-year-old South African who became the recipient of the world’s first penile transplant is to become a father – at age 18 he was let with just 1cm of his penis after a circumcision. The “transplant worked” says Andre van der Merwe, the surgeon who helped perform the nine-hour transplant at Stellenbosch University and Tygerberg Hospital.
Dr Van der Merwe tells the BBC:
“This is what we intended, that he should be able to stand up and be able to urinate and have intercourse, so it is a milestone for him.”
The jokes write themselves. But they would pale against the human ingenuity, which really is incredible.
Bud And Breakfast: Colorado opens holiday park for stoners who like to be organised
Stoners can now hang out together in a cannabis-themed holiday park in Colorado. It sounds as awful as any place where enthusiasts meet.
CannaCamp is a 170-acre slice of heaven, where recreational marijuana and our Colorado mountain resort combine to create an unprecedented opportunity for cannabis users to experience the outdoors in a safe, comfortable, and social environment. Our all-inclusive rates include luxurious accommodations in one of our nine well-appointed cabins, decadent dining throughout the day, beautiful surroundings in the heart of nature, and an incredible wealth of free activities that highlight adventure, wellness, and cannabis.
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Posted: 11th, June 2015 | In: Reviews, The Consumer | Comment
Transfer Balls: Higuain loves Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and topless Chiara, if she’d let him (photos)
Transfer Balls: The Daily Express’ Ben Jefferson tells us “The REAL reason Gonzalo Higuain wants Arsenal, Chelsea or Man Utd move”.
Higuain plays for Napoli. Sun readers think he plays for Arsenal – the Sun declared that Arsenal bought the player for £23m in 2013. You might suppose the “real” reason Higuain wants to play for Arsenal, Chelsea or Manchester United is because:
a) He loves all three clubs with all this heart
b) He can earn a fortune
c) They are the only three Premier League clubs he’s heard of
d) He thinks Manchester is in London
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Posted: 11th, June 2015 | In: Arsenal, manchester united, Reviews, Sports | Comment
Eleanor Hawkins nude photos: backpacker says she was ‘stupid’ on Mount Kinabalu
Mountain Kinabalu, Borneo Island
Eleanor Hawkins, 23, says getting naked with nine others on Malaysia’s Mount Kinabalu was “stupid and disrespectful”. Her father, Timothy Hawkins, says she “is very sorry for the offence that she has caused”.
She has denied accusations that any of the group urinated on the mountain. The mountain stands at over 13,000 feet. Are there public toilets or just private drinks bottles?
He tells the Guardian:
“I have got every faith in [Malaysia’s] judicial system. I just hope they don’t make an example of them.”
Too late:
Watch Future Shock: in 1972 Alvin Toffler’s film excited our human response to over-stimulation
American writer Alvin Toffler poses during portrait session held on July 3, 1980 in Paris, France.
Those good people at Disinfo point us towards Future Shock, the film based on Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book. Released in 1972, Orson Welles narrates.
Alvin Toffler notes:
“We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism’s physical adaptive systems and its decision-making processes… Put more simply, future shock is the human response to over-stimulation…”
This is Future Shock…
Posted: 11th, June 2015 | In: Film, Reviews, Technology | Comment
Read Laura Huxley’s letter about injecting husband Aldous with LSD on his deathbed
British writer Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963) sits with a newspaper on his lap, 1930s.
On 22 November 1963, on the same day President Kennedy was assassinated, Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, died of the cancer that had been destroying him for three years. On his deathbed, Huxley asked his wife Laura to inject him with uncut LSD. She did.
Laura would attest (via):
“All five people in the room said that this was the most serene, the most beautiful death. Both doctors and the nurse said they had never seen a person in similar physical condition going off so completely without pain and without struggle.”
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Posted: 11th, June 2015 | In: Celebrities, Reviews | Comment
Eleanor Hawkins photos: the naked selfies that angered Malaysia’s mountain gods
Eleanor Hawkins, a 24-year-old Southampton University graduate from Derby, has been arrested for posing nude on a sacred Malaysian mountain. Also arersted are: 23-year-old Canadian Lindsey Peterson and his sister Danielle, 22, 23-year-old Dutch man Dylan Snel and 33-year-old Canadian Emil Kaminski.
Miss Hawkins and her pals face three months in prison for posing naked atop the 13,435-foot Mount Kinabalu, the highest mountain between the Himalayas and New Guinea. They posted their naked photos on social media. Their guide complained. The police acted, stating:
“Around 7am, while the group were on their way back from the summit, they started to strip off their clothes – ignoring their guide. The guide warned them not to do so, but they replied: ‘Stupid man, go to hell.’ He could not stop them. They even took a group photo and a selfie. Then they dressed and returned to the backpacker lodge.”
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Transfer Balls: Manchester City’s £160m for Pogba, Sterling and de Bruyne is not fine with FFP
The Sun says Manchester City manager Manuel Pelligrini will be given a “blank cheque” to make his team Champion League winners. But very quickly into the story that blank cheque features a figure:
…owner Sheikh Mansour is ready to bankroll bids for the likes of Paul Pogba, Kevin de Bruyne and Raheem Sterling — worth £160million.
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Posted: 11th, June 2015 | In: Manchester City, Reviews, Sports | Comment
Transfer Balls: Manchester United agree to buy Chelsea’s Nicolas Otamendi from Valencia
Transfer Balls – a look at dire football reporting. The Daily Express says Manchester United have “BID” for Nicolas Otamendi.
The story of the Valencia player begins:
Manchester United are readying a £35million bid to sign Nicolas Otamendi, according to the Daily Mirror.
To the Mirror, then, where David Anderson has news:
We learn:
Otamendi is understood to have told Valencia of his desire to leave, with the Spanish club determined to receive their full valuation for the centre-back.
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Posted: 10th, June 2015 | In: manchester united, Reviews, Sports | Comment
Jessica Fuchs: biology teacher sacked for ‘sex’ with pupil (photos)
The teacher accused of shagging a 16-year-old student with Washington’s Bainbridge School District has been sacked. Her name? Jessica Fuchs. She is a biology teacher.
Fuchs was suspended in February amid allegations she’d had sex with a pupil and sent him a video of her naked and masturbating. Fuchs says she not a victim of nominative determinism. She pleaded not guilty to the charges in May.
Her trial is scheduled at Kitsap Superior Court for June 29.
NYPD chief Bill Bratton stops and frisks New York for blacks with no criminal record
“We have a significant population gap among African American males because so many of them have spent time in jail and, as such, we can’t hire them.”
Somone tell him.
This from 2014:
An analysis of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practice by the New York Civil Liberties Union found that innocent black and Latino New Yorkers were stopped 400,000 times in 2012, far more often than whites. The report also found that police made more arrests for marijuana possession last year than for any other crime…
Someone tell him…
In Photos: ‘Cheer mom’ Iris Gibney pleads guilty to sex with 17-year-old soccer player
Married Iris Gibney, 42, is receiving counselling for having car sex with a teenager. Gibney, 42, who works at a Victoria’s Secret store, told the Pennsylvania court that having sex with a 17-year-old at a park on November 15 was a “horrible decision”. At the time she was operating as – get this – “cheer mum” at her daughter’s school.
Gibney has pleaded guilty to disseminating obscene or sexual materials (she sent him near-nude photos of herself) and corruption of a minor. There is no word from the corrupted 17-year-old boy.
Homemade Dutch sex toys (the video)
The video to Dutch band De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig’s tune Elektrotechnique features DIY sex toys. If they remind you of happier times, do tell us how they work and if nails or glue is better:
Spoter: DM
The 10,000 Hour rule is bunkum: here’s why
In 10,000 hours time this could be you
The story goes that if you do something for 10,000-hours you get to be expert at it. It is a theory I loathe. It offers no space for drive, grit, magic and natural talent. It excites only the robotic and insecure who want to break down the vagaries of human life into flat facts. You can run a mile faster if you start training at a young enough age and practice and practice. Running a mile on a track has rules. But writing for 10,000 hours will not enable you to produce the Great American novel, let alone the Great American tweet.
Daniel Goleman confronts the 10,000 hours claim in Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence:
The “10,000-hour rule” — that this level of practice holds the secret to great success in any field — has become sacrosanct gospel, echoed on websites and recited as litany in high-performance workshops. The problem: it’s only half true. If you are a duffer at golf, say, and make the same mistakes every time you try a certain swing or putt, 10,000 hours of practicing that error will not improve your game. You’ll still be a duffer, albeit an older one.
No less an expert than Anders Ericsson, the Florida State University psychologist whose research on expertise spawned the 10,000-hour rule of thumb, told me, “You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal.”
“You have to tweak the system by pushing,” he adds, “allowing for more errors at first as you increase your limits.”
…
Hours and hours of practice are necessary for great performance, but not sufficient. How experts in any domain pay attention while practicing makes a crucial difference. For instance, in his much-cited study of violinists — the one that showed the top tier had practiced more than 10,000 hours — Ericsson found the experts did so with full concentration on improving a particular aspect of their performance that a master teacher identified.
Which suggests flair and natural ability at play. Diligence, opportunity, an inate interest in the chosen field, genes and listening to experts pays off.
Ideally that feedback comes from someone with an expert eye and so every world-class sports champion has a coach. If you practice without such feedback, you don’t get to the top ranks.
The feedback matters and the concentration does, too — not just the hours.
Focus is all.
Daydreaming defeats practice; those of us who browse TV while working out will never reach the top ranks. Paying full attention seems to boost the mind’s processing speed, strengthen synaptic connections, and expand or create neural networks for what we are practicing.
At least at first. But as you master how to execute the new routine, repeated practice transfers control of that skill from the top-down system for intentional focus to bottom-up circuits that eventually make its execution effortless. At that point you don’t need to think about it — you can do the routine well enough on automatic…
Amateurs are content at some point to let their efforts become bottom-up operations. After about fifty hours of training — whether in skiing or driving — people get to that “good-enough” performance level, where they can go through the motions more or less effortlessly. They no longer feel the need for concentrated practice, but are content to coast on what they’ve learned. No matter how much more they practice in this bottom-up mode, their improvement will be negligible.
The experts, in contrast, keep paying attention top-down, intentionally counteracting the brain’s urge to automatize routines. They concentrate actively on those moves they have yet to perfect, on correcting what’s not working in their game, and on refining their mental models of how to play the game, or focusing on the particulars of feedback from a seasoned coach. Those at the top never stop learning: if at any point they start coasting and stop such smart practice, too much of their game becomes bottom-up and their skills plateau…
Ericsson finds world-class champions — whether weight-lifters, pianists, or a dog-sled team — tend to limit arduous practice to about four hours a day. Rest and restoring physical and mental energy get built into the training regimen. They seek to push themselves and their bodies to the max, but not so much that their focus gets diminished in the practice session. Optimal practice maintains optimal concentration.
Spotter: Maria Popova
US Army doctor accused of performing macabre human experiments in Virginia
U.S. Army Medical Corps retired Lt. Colonel John Hagmann is seen in a 1980 handout file photo provided by his former employer, the U.S. Military’s Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. REUTERS/Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences Handout via Reuters
On Reuters, John Shiffman reports on Dr. John Henry Hagmann. An expert in treating wounded soldiers, Dr Hagmann retired from the Army 15 years ago. He created Deployment Medicine International, winning over $10.5 million in business from the federal government. And now he’s in trouble:
The taxpayer-funded training has long troubled animal rights activists, who contend that Hagmann’s use of live, wounded pigs to simulate combat injuries is unnecessarily cruel. But an investigation by Virginia medical authorities alleges that pigs weren’t the doctor’s only training subjects.
During instructional sessions in 2012 and 2013 for military personnel, Hagmann gave trainees drugs and liquor, and directed them to perform macabre medical procedures on one another, according to a report issued by the Virginia Board of Medicine, the state agency that oversees the conduct of doctors.
Hagmann, 59, is accused of inappropriately providing at least 10 students with the hypnotic drug ketamine. The report alleges Hagmann told students to insert catheters into the genitals of other trainees and that two intoxicated student were subjected to penile nerve block procedures. Hagmann also is accused of conducting “shock labs,” a process in which he withdrew blood from the students, monitored them for shock, and then transfused the blood back into their systems.
The report alleges that Hagmann also “exploited, for personal gain and sexual gratification” two participants who attended a July 2013 course at his Virginia farm.
Spotter: @medinamora
Upset mother dresses cat in daughter’s nipple-revealing crop top
Anyone buying a $3 knit crop top from Amzaon whousl know that it shows your nipples and, as one mother says, “Do not buy this, even for your cat.”
Psychoanalyse that.
Posted: 10th, June 2015 | In: Fashion, Reviews, Strange But True | Comment
