Archive for the ‘news’ Category



Opera Notes

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

The Royal Opera House’s forthcoming production based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith might offend the cognoscenti, but what a story line…..

At eighteen she married a kitchen hand while working at Jim’s Crispy Fried Chicken Restaurant near Waco,Texas; when the marriage failed she moved to Houston but her lack of talent as a topless dancer had her switched to the lunchtime shift where as luck would have it lonely octogenarian oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall II would pass an hour. When she was asked if it was love at sight, (shades of Mrs. Merton asking Debbie McGee what first attracted her to the millionaire Paul Daniels), Anna Nicole revealed it was his liver spots that turned her on.

He married her, ignoring the sixty three-year age gap and paying for the 44DD breast implants which brought her Playboy shoots and her own TV show, but within a year he’d died, leaving her half his fortune.

Happy endings are bad news in operas and sure enough Anna Nicole spent the next five years in failed bids to get her hands on the cash, ballooning to fifteen stone by her bankruptcy hearing and finally dying of a drug overdose in a Florida hotel. Such was her fame that when a judge burst into tears when awarding custody of the body, he was promptly offered his own TV show.

But hold that curtain! Act Three centres on her funeral, (for which she wore a designer ball gown with matching tiara and a light dusting of her 44 DDs with J. Howard’s ashes), where her two ex’s stared each other down across the nave and her mother arrived to a chorus of booing. She was thirty nine.

Casting’s a cinch – Covent Garden have fat ladies coming out their arias – but the uninspired title of ‘Anna Nicole’ will have to go – for the life story of a thwarted topless dancer, it has to be, ‘If She Wants to Rigoletto.’

Hit and Miss

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

By going freebie,the London Evening Standard’s reader demographics might no longer stack up for advertisers.Promised newspaper readership is also under attack by the measurable hits of online editions, not helped when the papers unwisely list their most viewed stories.
The Telegraph Online’s top three favourites today are not MP’s expenses, the Middle East or the BNP saga, but….

1. Man proves he has world’s strongest fingers.
2. Video of Russian nearly killed by a runaway bus.
3. ‘Jesus’s face’ spotted on the toilet door in Ikea, Glasgow.

Unfortunately, the newspaper’s Business section carries a whole-page ad from the Newspaper Marketing Agency with the tag line, ‘Nothing targets customers quite like a newspaper.’


Toughing it out at the FT

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

The other half are having it tough too, you know, and no better barometer of their suffering than the weekend’s Financial Times which urges its readers to consider a caravan as their new second home.

It also reports that Mukesh Ambani, boss of India’s Reliance Industries, is docking 60% of his pay “to set a personal example of moderation in executive remuneration.” (You remember Mukesh, he’s the chap building a $1 billion 27-storey house for himself and an Airbus jet for his wife, and still be good for $18 billion in loose change). Elsewhere in the FT Magazine, Sterling Montague offer a bespoke search service for ‘distress’ sales of new and pre-owned yachts and jets.

Sadly, the downturn has failed to dent the ‘collectable’ watch industry which continues to advertise some of the most grotesque bad taste outside of Moroccan souks, with the jewel-crusted crap and Dali-esque multi-dialled competing with uber-cool see-through confusions led by Cartier’s Santos 100 Skeleton 9611 MC Calibre, its movement which – visible through a micro drain cover – offers visible ‘polished angles and file strokes’ but, with a nod to the global recession, has to be wound manually.


News you may have missed

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

Returning to Heathrow from the madhouse tour of the States promoting ‘India Exposed’ provided catch-up time on news that may have slipped through the global net…

Italian tax authorities, pursuing Maradona’s unpaid tax bill when playing for Napoli FC, raided his Alpine chalet and confiscated his earrings. It’s a start, but he still owes $54 million.

When stumped for ideas writing the sequel to ‘The Da Vinci Code, author Dan Brown says he dons gravity boots “because you think differently upside down,” which might well explain his prose.

With patriotic pride, Texan Tom Nall has launched organic tequila in a bottle shaped like Texas. Trouble is, the tequila’s made in Mexico, and the bottle in China.

Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah has pronounced on her husband, His Majesty King Abdullah II Ibn Al Hussein, King of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
“OK, I am biased,” she tweets, “but u gotta admit my King is kinda cool, no?”

Winners of the literature category in the latest Ig Nobel Awards are the Irish police who have issued 50 traffic tickets to visitor Prawo Jazdy which is Polish for ‘Driver’s License.’