Archive for the ‘news’ Category
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.’
Tags: anna nicole, news, opera
Posted in Diary, news | 1 Comment »
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.’
Tags: free, news, newspapers
Posted in news | No Comments, be the first »
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.
Posted in news | No Comments, be the first »
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.’
Tags: news
Posted in news | No Comments, be the first »
Sunday, September 27th, 2009
Here’s an interview I did recently with Shutterbug Magazine radio in San Diego, California (requires quicktime player – which you can download here for free)
Posted in Diary, news, Writing | No Comments, be the first »
Friday, September 25th, 2009
The first UK review of ‘India Exposed,’ (over two pages in today’s Daily Mail), is enthusiastic but suggests an inaccuracy in my description of the erotic Tantric carvings at Khajuraho.
Without wishing to be pedantic, if anyone knows about 900 year-old slow sex, it’s me.
Tags: book, review
Posted in Diary, news, Writing | No Comments, be the first »
Friday, August 21st, 2009
There’s hard sell, soft sell, and there’s Hollywood scriptwriter Ric Hardman. (Or there was, he’s just died). Though better known for saving the career of Tab Hunter, he switched to novel writing and immortally described his Sunshine Rider in 1988 as “a new coming-of-age Western which shows that a man can do what a man’s gotta do and still be a vegetarian”.
Curiously, it never made the screen.
Tags: hollywood, obituary, scriptwriter, Writing
Posted in news, Writing | No Comments, be the first »
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009
That’s it, then. News photography is dead. So says a spokesman for the owners of the Gamma Agency of Paris, who have just filed for bankruptcy – and they didn’t come much better than Gamma. Maybe I’ll end up demonstrating the old skills to school parties at some provincial craft museum as they superglue me to my milking stool. More from Gamma’s eulogy here
Talking of death, the Italian journalist Roberto Saviano, has written of life in protective custody since threats from the Camorra in 2006 when his mafia exposé ‘Gomorrah’ was published. Moving writing in beautiful English from a man who, despite a team of armed guards and forever on the move, can die at any moment.
While soldiers face the same, they have occasional lulls in battle or R&R behind the lines; not for Saviano who, at twenty nine, faces an open-ended 24/7 threat of execution for writing the truth in a First World democracy. Read the full article here.
Tags: gamma, news
Posted in Diary, news, Photography, Writing | No Comments, be the first »
Monday, August 10th, 2009
Last week The Telegraph ran a witty rant in which journalist, George Pitcher, logging his holding time as he vainly tried to contact Aviva’s insurance claim department, compared it with their policy renewal extension’s instant response.
‘Aviva’s delaying tactics are a fraction of the daily barrage of snake oil deceit that engulfs us, ranging from corporate-speak denial and weasel-worded excuses to small print cop-outs and product claims that border criminality, triggering the thought that our vocabulary has no word for such sharp practises that nudge legality, and of the need to create a noun – easily verbalised for America – that embraces these deceptions.
None of my attempts warrant exposure, but surely someone out there can come up with one. No prizes, but etymological fame and the gratitude of all who claim they have been victims of… what’s the word for it?’
Posted in Diary, news | No Comments, be the first »
Monday, August 3rd, 2009
1. Garrett Lisi, (39), a surfer/snowboarder from Nevada, whose new theory of the universe has wowed part of the scientific community, based it on E8, a complex eight-dimensional maths pattern with 248 points first noted in 1887.
“My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing,” he told New Scientist. “I thought: ’Holy crap, that’s it!’” Archimedes and Einstein could not have put it better.
2. Pagan-practising inmates of UK prisons may now officially possess a flexible twig for a wand.
Posted in Diary, news | No Comments, be the first »
|