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Also in 2000 an English amateur player, Lee Todd, was sent off after two seconds when he responded to the referee's whistle to start the game by saying "xxxx me, that was loud" and was dismissed for foul and abusive language.
I wanted to add 'If you do I will sue' at the bottom of it, but you have to stop at some point.
Mendes has never been a 'genius' in the traditional neurotic mould; he's much more like a charismatic magician with a seemingly bottomless bag of very elegant tricks. This in itself can be nerve-racking. Mendes tells me about his very first moment in motion pictures. There he was, with a budget of $15m, several highprofile stars and a veteran cinematographer, yet he had to approach Conrad Hall before the first day of shooting American Beauty and say: 'I know this sounds really stupid, but when do I say "Action"?'
Hall explained; the moment arrived; Mendes said it. Instantly, he drifted off into a reverie of boyish excitement. 'I'm thinking: "Oh my God, I just said 'Action'! That's amazing! I'm in Los Angeles, California and I actually said 'Action'!" And the whole crew is standing there looking at me and I say, "What?" I'd forgotten to say "Cut".'
In recent months, [Prime Minister] Aso has accused doctors of lacking common sense, criticised parents and made contradictory policy statements. His most recent target was the "feeble" elderly - a group whose support is vital to the ailing LDP. Why, Mr Aso asked, should he have to pay taxes for those who "just eat and drink and make no effort".
Public anger forced top government spokesman Takeo Kawamura into a clarification. The prime minister had wanted to stress that pensioners should take an active role in maintaining their health, he said.
"It would be better if I did not have to explain [the comments]," he added. "But it's part of his character and there may be various comments from now on, and it's my job to make efforts to let everyone understand his real intention."
Taro Aso is not alone; there is an established tradition of gaffes from Japan's leading lawmakers. Almost as soon as Mr Aso took office, his tourism minister, Nariaki Nakayama, had to resign after calling Japan an "ethnically homogeneous" country that did not like foreigners.
Shinzo Abe's cabinet was plagued by ill-judged comments. One of the most high-profile was when his health minister called women "birth-giving machines" and appeared to blame them for the low birth rate.
By far the most notorious plain-speaker, however, was Yoshiro Mori, prime minister briefly between 2000 and 2001. He joked about Aids, said the US was full of "gangsters" and offended the entire city of Osaka by calling it a "spittoon". After a few months in office, bureaucrats reportedly made him speak only from cue cards.
An early legend (the details of which differ, depending on who is consulted, but nevertheless is representative of Moon's routine post–check-in behavior) recounts how in 1967 he drove a car into a pool at a Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan. This was only after he dropped his own five-tier birthday cake all over the carpet of his room during a party where guests sprayed the decor with fire extinguishers. The incident allegedly resulted in Moon's arrest, $24,000 in damages, and a Holiday Inn chain-wide ban on the Who. A year later, in Australia, Moon threw a TV off a balcony on the top floor of the Southern Cross Hotel and into the pool below. When a manager arrived in the suite with a drenched television in hand, demanding to know who did the deed, Moon exclaimed "I did!" before snatching it back and throwing it over the balcony once more. It became his signature move at hotels, a whimsical routine less psychotically “Shining”-esque than the time he went to a hardware store, bought a hatchet and proceeded to turn each piece of furniture in his Saskatoon, Canada, hotel room into timber. Our favorite, though? The time Moon set off a dynamite explosion in the bathroom of an American hotel to teach the manager, who had asked him to turn down the racket on his cassette player, the difference between "noise" and the Who.
In June, 2005, Bernanke was sworn in at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. One of his first tasks was to deliver a monthly economics briefing to the President and the Vice-President. After he and Hubbard sat down in the Oval Office, President Bush noticed that Bernanke was wearing light-tan socks under his dark suit. “Where did you get those socks, Ben?” he asked. “They don’t match.” Bernanke didn’t falter. “I bought them at the Gap—three pairs for seven dollars,” he replied. During the briefing, which lasted about forty-five minutes, the President mentioned the socks several times.
The following month, Hubbard’s deputy, Keith Hennessey, suggested that the entire economics team wear tan socks to the briefing. Hubbard agreed to call Vice-President Cheney and ask him to wear tan socks, too. “So, a little later, we all go into the Oval Office, and we all show up in tan socks,” Hubbard recalled. “The President looks at us and sees we are all wearing tan socks, and he says in a cool voice, ‘Oh, very, very funny.’ He turns to the Vice-President and says, ‘Mr. Vice-President, what do you think of these guys in their tan socks?’ Then the Vice-President shows him that he’s wearing them, too. The President broke up.”
Q: What's the worst thing you've been in?
A: A show called Bombshell by the producers of Footballers' Wives. The only place it was ever shown was New Zealand, which was a godsend. The script was really diabolical. It almost made me give up acting.
Q: Isn't their stuff supposed to be tongue-in-cheek?
A: It was supposed to be serious but they couldn't manage it so tried to make it camp halfway through. I was playing an army officer who'd had his foot blown off. By the last episode I was stalking Zoe Lucker, hiding in some bushes while she's having dinner with her boyfriend, with camouflage paint on my face, holding a submachinegun. It was insane.
Beyonce Knowles revealed her hairy arm pits when she waved to shocked fans. The glamorous star had apparently forgotten to shave as she walked the red carpet at the New York premiere of her new Etta James biopic Cadillac Records.
One horrified onlooker said: "Beyonce always looks her best at these kind of events. She obviously either ran out of razors or just missed a bit in the bathroom."
The State Government had passed laws to give police extraordinary powers to arrest and fine people for "creating annoyance" to pilgrims during World Youth Day. However parts of these laws were overturned by the Federal Court following widespread protest. Bryce's legal representatives from the NSW Council for Civil Liberties yesterday told the Downing Centre Local Court that the case could not proceed until police provided further details of the charges.
Outside court his lawyer, Stephen Blanks, said the charge did not seem "particularly appropriate" given the condition in which police found the car. "The police are being particularly intelligent in trying to find a way to prosecute Mr Bryce," he said. Bryce said police had detained his Popemobile for about an hour "going through a range of possible charges on the radio to headquarters. I was very surprised [by the charge] because I thought that all advertising is designed to distract.
The hubbub makes you sorry that you are not deaf. I hear the beefcake boys wheezing and panting as they lift their lead weights, and the masseur's hands slapping their shoulders. Then, the ball players arrive and start yelling out the score - that's usually all I can take. But there's also those people who plunge themselves into the water with an almighty splash, and that only gives a mild idea of what goes on. At least these people have normal voices. Apart from them there is the depilator who screeches for customers and never shuts up until he's stripping the hair from someone's armpits and making them yell even louder than he does. Then there's the drinks pedlar, and the sausage salesman, and all the other hucksters, each bawling in his own special way.
The best bit of advice anyone’s ever given me was ‘shut the f—k up’. This was back in about 1990 when I was on a panel at some new music conference in New York. I was f—king off my trolley, spouting off at the mouth about bootlegs or something else I knew nothing about and Barry White leaned into the mic and went (adopts an earth-rumblingly low voice) ‘OK, shut the f—k up!’ I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I’ve just been told to shut the f—k up by Barry White. Class.’
That was quite an eventful conference actually, because Ice-T and Ice Cube were there and it was all kicking off between their respective posses. They were running around with guns and all that, it was f—king wild. Ice Cube was actually supposed to be on our panel but he stormed off and some journalist put his hand up in the audience and said, ‘Excuse me, is Ice Cube coming back?’ Again, I was off me trolley and quick as a shot I said, ‘No mate, he’s f—king melted!’ It went down like a lead balloon…
Australia the movie [...] has one huge problem. It stars Nicole Kidman. Big mistake. Big, big mistake. At a stroke, the world's female cinemagoers will say as one: “I'm not going to see it if she's in it.”
Kidman is one of those women who turns other women off. And no, not just because she's pretty and we're jealous. It is because we perceive, and men don't, that she's one of the most overrated actors in the world, a woman who has been the kiss of death in practically every movie she has starred in.
Kidman is exquisitely accomplished at being awful. Did anyone see Cold Mountain? The sweeping American epic (note: another epic) foundered on the rocks of her gormless mirror-gaze. She can't act. Instead, she drifts around films like a lost porcelain doll, looking frozen, brittle and vapid, staring at the camera with her oh-golly-look-how-I'm-looking-interesting blue eyes.
And today's (predominantly male) directors haven't quite woken up to the fact that it just isn't enough for female actors just to wander around like supermodels: they need another skill too. Like emotion.
Bohumil Dolezal, a leading commentator who once advised Mr. Klaus, said Mr. Klaus’s greatest talent was his ability to appeal to average Czechs, who imbibed his easy populism along with their beers.
“Czechs have a deep and hysterical past full of injustice, and Klaus is a master at tapping into this,” Mr. Dolezal said, adding that the office of the presidency, despite its limited powers, lends the aura of emperor-king.
“Even if a horse was president of the Czech Republic, it would have a 50 percent approval rating,” he said. “And Klaus is surely much cleverer than a horse.”
He distrusted Churchill, who in return disliked his work even when he was a powerful morale-booster during the Blitz. Perhaps his humane cynicism about high-flown rhetoric stung the war leader: Giles was in the Home Guard and saw domestic destruction close-up, and in drawing his unheroic soldiers followed the tradition of Bruce Bairnsfather in the first war, observing that squaddie humour still worked: “mud, cussing, lorries that won't go, shells that fall too near and boots that pinch too tight...” Who can forget the soldier looking up at an approaching missile and observing: “Oh look, here comes your Easter Egg.” Or the GI bride taken home with a baby, but horrified to find that her Wally lives not in a skyscraper but a hillbilly shack?
In 1944 he was a correspondent at Arnhem; he drew pictures of cells and gallows at Breendonck transit camp, and went into Belsen with the liberators. But here he flatly refused to draw, saying that photographs alone must tell the story that 50 years later was still to “haunt and horrify” him. Yet out of this grew the warmth and gaiety of Giles's postwar work. His Britons - stumpy, impudent, longsuffering, domestic, anti-authoritarian - cluster in the Giles Family, at whose head stands the baleful circular black figure of Grandma, a mouthpiece for every bracingly incorrect view: a fan of Lenin, hanger and flogger, hedonistic gambler and drinker, keen on violence. She smells of embrocation and mothballs yet is beadily on the ball.
She links the postwar tribe with its history: her mother “helped wash up at a Fete attended by Queen Victoria”. On a Christmas album we find her playing poker with an equally grumpy Santa in her nightie, while his presents go undelivered.
Astronauts hope they have a solution for getting a pivotal piece of equipment working so it can convert urine and sweat into drinkable water and allow the international space station to grow to six crew members.You don't find many workplaces in which the employees are queuing up to get to work so they can drink urine and sweat, do you? (Although to be fair the water apparently tastes perfectly normal when the system works properly).Flight controllers asked station commander Michael Fincke on Sunday to change how a centrifuge is mounted in the $154 million water recycling system. The centrifuge is on mounts and Mission Control asked Fincke to remove them.
"Fantastic! That is something we can do," Fincke told Mission Control.
The astronauts have been working for the past three days to get the system running so that it can generate samples for testing back on Earth, but the urine processor only operates for two hours at a time before shutting down.
Russell Brand (RB):
… and could I take this opportunity to apologise to British institution and Manuel actor from Fawlty Towers, Andrew Sachs, whose answerphone message I besmirched … or more importantly, Jonathan Ross who I know was problematic when he came on your show Chris … He was … I phoned up Andrew Sachs to apologise for a matter live on radio and Jonathan Ross blurted out an expletive regarding Andrew Sachs’s grand-daughter who I’d in inverted commas recently “met”.
RB:
I met her brains out.
Chris Moyles (CM):
Wow ..
RB:
Right
CM:
What a … wow.
Male:
And she’s in the hot tub?
RB:
There was a hot tub incident, but remember, that hot tub in a way is like Lourdes – people come there to be cleansed … and play cricket.
...his attention was arrested by the facade of one of the Christian sects. They were travelling seated on one of the swift upper ways, the place leapt upon them at a bend and advanced rapidly towards them. It was covered with inscriptions from top to base, in vivid white and blue, save where a coarse and glaring kinematograph transparency presented a realistic New Testament scene[...] Graham had already become familiar with the phonotype writing and these inscriptions arrested him, being to his sense for the most part almost incredible blasphemy. Among the less offensive were 'Salvation on the First Floor and turn to the Right', 'Put your Money on your Maker', 'The Sharpest Conversion in London, Expert Operators! Look Slippy!', What Christ would say to the Sleeper - Join the Up-to-date Saints!', 'Be a Christian - without hindrance to your present Occupation', 'All the Brightest Bishops on the Bench tonight and Prices as Usual', 'Brisk Blessings for Busy Businessmen'.
'Gosh. Poor old George Bush. He's having a rough time, isn't he? He has the worst presidential approval ratings in US history. Under his stalwart leadership, the country has taken an economic, social and emotional nosedive. His own party attempts to distance themselves from him on a daily basis. And to top it all off, can you believe that nobody wants to buy his memoirs? To add insult to injury, publishers are courting his wife with fervour, each clamouring for the opportunity to bid on her memoirs. It has to burn at least a little, right?
On his birthday in June, Mr Mathias told the Otago Daily Times he had "not yet" been tempted to get married, and when asked yesterday if he had asked any of the nurses to marry him, he replied, sharp as a tack, "Not yet."
...encouraging Dunedinites and cricket watchers to use the catch-cry, "it's all white here" and dress in white for the occasion. The Dunedin City Council and the Otago Cricket Association say the concept mirrors "black-outs" created during the All Blacks' [rugby] games in the city.
Attempted Assassination of the QueenGod prosper long our noble Queen,
And long may she reign!
Maclean he tried to shoot her,
But it was all in vain.For God He turned the ball aside
Maclean aimed at her head;
And he felt very angry
Because he didn't shoot her dead.There's a divinity that hedges a king,
And so it does seem,
And my opinion is, it has hedged
Our most gracious Queen.Maclean must be a madman,
Which is obvious to be seen,
Or else he wouldn't have tried to shoot
Our most beloved Queen.Victoria is a good Queen,
Which all her subjects know,
And for that God has protected her
From all her deadly foes.She is noble and generous,
Her subjects must confess;
There hasn't been her equal
Since the days of good Queen Bess.Long may she be spared to roam
Among the bonnie Highland floral,
And spend many a happy day
In the palace of Balmoral.Because she is very kind
To the old women there,
And allows them bread, tea, and sugar,
And each one get a share.And when they know of her coming,
Their hearts feel overjoy'd,
Because, in general, she finds work
For men that's unemploy'd.And she also gives the gipsies money
While at Balmoral, I've been told,
And, mind ye, seldom silver,
But very often gold.I hope God will protect her
By night and by day,
At home and abroad,
When she's far away.May He be as a hedge around her,
As he's been all along,
And let her live and die in peace
Is the end of my song
I turned to the Little Black Book section, which turned out to be an authoritative A-Z of overprivileged arseholes (most of them still in their early 20s), plus the occasional celeb, rated and compiled by the single biggest group of wankers in the universe. You're supposed to want to sleep with these people, and the text attempts to explain why. It's the ultimate in self-celebratory nothingness, 2,000 times worse than the worst ever article in Heat magazine. It includes five lords, six ladies, four princes, five princesses, two viscounts, three earls, a marquess, and 16 tittering poshos whose names are prefixed with the phrase "The Hon" (which, I've just discovered, means they're the son or daughter of a viscount or baron). Names like Cressida, Archie, Guy, Blaise and Freddie feature heavily. How annoying is it? Put it this way: James Blunt is also on the list, and he's the least objectionable person there.
Each entry takes the form of a chortling mini-biog guaranteed to make you want to punch the person it describes flat in the face. Thus, we learn that "Jakie Warren" is "the heartthrob who lives in the coolest house in Edinburgh and has the initials of all his best friends tattooed on his thigh. You can touch them but he'll make you buy shares in the racing syndicate he co-owns with Ed Sackville ... Good in bed, we hear."
Or consider "The Hon Wenty Beaumont": "The growl, the growl - girls go weak for the growl ... Utterly divine Christie's kid who enjoys nothing more than playing Pass the Pig during weekends at the family estate in Northumberland or in Saint-Tropez."
In other words, the only thing these waddling bags of arseflesh have going for them is unrestricted access to a vast and unwarranted fortune. Strip away the coins and it reads like a list of the most boring people in Britain.
As an additional poke in the ribs, each entry is accompanied by a tiny photograph, so you can squint into the eyes of the cosseted stranger you've suddenly decided to hate. The girls are technically pretty in a uniform, Sloaney kind of way, while the men are more varied, falling into three main categories: dull preening James Blunt types, dull preening indie types, and simpering ruddy-cheeked oafs who look like they're about to pull a pair of underpants over their head and run around snorting like a hog in a bid to impress a blind-drunk debutante.
In summary, it's an entire alternate dimension of shit, a galaxy of streaming-eye fart gas, compressed into a few glossy pages. It will have you alternating between rage, jealousy, bewilderment and distress, before dumping you in a bottomless slough of despond. Buy a copy. No, don't. Stand in a shop flipping through the pages, deliberately fraying each corner as you go. Drink it in. Feel your impotent anger levels peaking. The headrush is good for you. Try it. You'll hate it. Thanks for the recommendation. I'm off for a cry.
Do not make challenges you cannot back up. For example, never say in your "Hamlet 2" review, "I challenge anyone who goes to see the movie not to sing the words to 'Rock Me, Sexy Jesus' for years to come." When Gene Siskel predicted that "Hakuna Matata" from "The Lion King" would become a national catch-phrase, he later gracefully acknowledged he was wrong, after only a little prodding from me. [Note: A reader informs me that Gene was right. I believe the jury is still out on "Rock Me, Sexy Jesus."]Sit down, shut up, and pay attention. No cellphone use. No texting during the movie. No talking out loud. No sucking up the last Coke out of the Kidney-Buster. It is permitted to laugh, or to scream when a movie scares the crap out of you. It's okay to join in the general chuckle after the It's only a cat! moment is over. There was a special amendment forgiving Pauline Kael for saying "Oh! Oh! Oh!" in astonishment. We eagerly awaited her "ohs!" and took care to note when she uttered them. It is acceptable, but rarely, to join in a general audience uproar, as at the first Cannes press screening of "The Brown Bunny." Even then, no cupping your hand under your armpit and producing fart noises.
Local food production does not always produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the 2005 DEFRA study found that British tomato growers emit 2.4 metric tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of tomatoes grown compared to 0.6 tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of Spanish tomatoes. The difference is British tomatoes are produced in heated greenhouses. Another study found that cold storage of British apples produced more carbon dioxide than shipping New Zealand apples by sea to London. In addition, U.K. dairy farmers use twice as much energy to produce a metric ton of milk solids than do New Zealand farmers. Other researchers have determined that Kenyan cut rose growers emit 6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per 12,000 roses compared to the 35 tons of carbon dioxide emitted by their Dutch competitors. Kenyan roses grow in sunny fields whereas Dutch roses grow in heated greenhouses.
[Courtesy of AL Daily]
A typical story about him, probably apocryphal, has him attending an official reception in Peru, and, very inebriated, approaching a willowy figure in scarlet for a dance. Brown is repulsed and protests grandly that he is Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs; why could he not have a nice dance? The reply comes: for three reasons, Mr Brown. First because you are disgustingly drunk, second because that music is not a dance but our national anthem, and third because I am the cardinal-archbishop of Lima.
...in Q World (a dull place full of accountants and estate agents) the biggest band in the world are Coldplay: music for grown-up teenage emos, who, when not crying and writing bad poetry about sad colours, are giving a few pounds to Amnesty International charity workers, because that is what Chris Martin would do (weeping bitter tears for the world as he did so). Of course, Coldplay went onto win best album and why not? We are in Q World now...If depression, blandness, and boredom would ever manifest itself in physical form, it would be the Q Awards. Someone actually said "there are no losers tonight, only people full of win!". No, there is one big loser: music. The Q Awards are the meaningless musical equivalent of Homer Simpson "winning" the First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.
An unknown man has approached three women in the last two weeks, made inappropriate comments and belched in their faces before going on his way. Senior constable Paul McKenzie, of Picton, said the man entered a shop in High St, Picton and carried on verbally at the retailer, again ending his performance with a belch. "He badgers them with inappropriate comments of a non-sexual nature, but it is offensive to someone not expecting it," Mr McKenzie said.
Finally, she girded her loins, leaned forward in a haze of pheremones and Chanel, and purred,
“So, what exactly do you think of when you answer the call of nature?”
It took a few seconds to work out what she meant, and I decided the only fair response was to respond with perfect media-trained skill to which I felt sure she could relate - I answered her question with a question.
“Sitting, or standing?”
At which, she suddenly became confused, blushed, started to stammer, gathered her audio recording device and hurriedly left.
Council business services director Chris Upton summarised past feeling about the city in a report put out for public consultation. "Upper Hutt has been tagged with a negative perception for many years," he wrote. "This is not just from people who live in Wellington, or people that knew somebody who drove a [Holden] Torana and wore a black jersey". Poor perceptions had spread to "many developers, investors and retailers who carry negative connotations of our city - that is, if they even have a reason to think about Upper Hutt".
Diane Taylor-Wallace, owner of the Snail Mail shop, said: "I'm still a bit shocked, it got nasty really quickly. I was in the shop chatting and I heard the noise of balloons popping and automatically thought some kids had got hold of them. So I went out with my best stern granny look but to my amazement I saw all these grown men bursting the balloons"
'...the most fruitful of the Mercury missions was the last, the 22-orbit flight of Gordon Cooper in May 1963. Cooper was equipped with a hand-held 70mm Hasselblad [camera] and with incredibly acute vision, 20/12 instead of the normal 20/20. Because of the weather conditions below and the configuration of his orbit, nearly all of the best colour pictures Cooper took were of Tibet. He passed over that country several times, travelling at an altitude of more than 160 kilometres and a speed of 28,000 kilometres an hour.Cooper's report after the mission astonished everyone. "I could detect individual houses and streets," the astronaut said, "in the low-humidity and cloudless areas such as the Himalaya ... area, the Tibetan plain, and the southwestern desert area of the US. I saw several individual houses [probably large lamaseries] with smoke coming from the chimneys in the high country around the Himalayas ... I saw what I took to be a vehicle along a road in the Himalaya area and in the west Texas-Arizona area. I could first see the dust blowing off the road, then could see the road clearly, and when the light was right, an object that was probably a vehicle"Could this really be possible? Or was Cooper seeing things? Since the physiological effects of space flight were at that time largely unknown, a number of scientists suspected that Cooper, under the influence of prolonged weightlessness, had suffered hallucinations. But subsequent investigation revealed that a large white-topped truck had indeed driven along that rather deserted southwestern highway at the exact time and place Cooper had reported.
Sheriff Kenneth Hogg said the matter "could be best described as exceptionally unchivalrous. The lady concerned was entitled to her privacy and not to have a passing stranger take a photograph," said the sheriff.
His predictions for this month are a lot of rain on October 24 and if you have something planned for the first 11 days of February 2009, cancel them and prepare for flooding.
"Please tell your children to stop worrying. The planet is fine. Enjoy the planet. That what it is here for". He said the planet's weather systems could never be affected by carbon dioxide emissions and it would not make any difference if all the CO2 currently stored in wood, coal and fossil fuels was released in the atmosphere all at once. Even if it did, he said a warmer planet was not something to be afraid of. "We have a moral responsibility to create global warming because we need a warmer planet. We really do. A warmer world is better. Really. Life likes warmth."
I was presenting an evening show across several northern local radio stations, combining news and sport. My guest was the former Liberal MP Michael Meadowcroft, newly returned from former Yugoslavia, where he had been advising on how democracy could be brought to the region.Alongside my conversation with Meadowcroft, I was to take regular reports from numerous midweek football matches across the north. While I was lining up the football reports, I half-listened to the internationally renowned expert on democracy explaining how unstable the situation is in the Balkans, and how it was essential for the future of Europe that a lasting peace was achieved.
"The Balkans," he said, "is where the flame was lit that ignited the Great War, and it is no exaggeration to say that if we do not get this right, it could lead to a confrontation from which the world might not recover." To which I responded with the immortal words: "I'm afraid I'm going to have to interrupt you there, there's been a goal at Chesterfield."
- Guardian, 29 September 2008
[I]n Invercargill, 24-year-old travel consultant Rob Wilson said he was switching to National because Labour had simply "had their day".
"New Zealand needs a strong leader to get it economically focused and Labour is not providing that," he said.
"Neither is National really, but change is as good as a holiday."
In 2006, researchers from the Institute of Public Health at the University of Southern Denmark examined a range of possible factors, from genes to cycling habits to cuisine. In a charming report, they offered two explanations: the Danes have never got over their rapture at winning the European football championships in 1992 (their happiness rose to new peaks that year, and has stayed on a plateau since), and—the main finding—Danes, unlike the woeful Greeks and Italians, have very low expectations of the immediate future. "Year after year," the researchers write, "they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark."
Presenter: Hello and welcome to 'Coverage of People Running a Safari Park' and I'm talking to John who looks after the zebras which you can't see because they ran away from the camera. John, what are you doing?
John: I'm getting the zebras their zebra food.
Presenter: Do the zebras find it colder here in Wiltshire than in Africa?
John: They do, because it is.
Presenter: Well, while we let John who you don't know get on with his job which he does every day, Jilly has been talking to Head Tree-counter Mike.
[Cross to Jilly]
Mike: Fifteen thousand, fifteen thousand and one...
Jilly: So Mike, we're getting coverage of you counting trees, is that right?
Mike: Yeah... Oh, I've lost count. [Starts again] One, two, three, four...
So, no-one apart from the three people, that is? Those little numbers are so fiddly, after all.Peter Dunne came to talk but no one came to listen.
The United Future leader didn't pull the punters to a public meeting yesterday with just three members of the public attending.
- Timaru Herald, 18 September 2008
As with the flight attendants I worked with earlier, my new companions described their job as being one where they constantly had to calibrate the mood of the passengers. "Over a typical month," said Tim, "I will be a teacher, I will be a pastor, I will be a counselor, I will be a mediator." As he slid his 5-foot-11-inch frame into the sliver of space between the cockpit and the first-class bathroom, he slumped into the jump seat and let out a barely audible sigh. "I'll have to tell people that a two-and-a-half-foot-deep bag will not fit in a one-and-a-half-foot hole," he said."People need to understand that the rules of social order do not go away when you get on an airplane," Tim added, his Texan twang kicking up a notch as he laid down his commandments. "You cannot have sex on an airplane. When you purchase a ticket, that does not give you the privilege of yelling at me. It does not give you the privilege of sitting anywhere you want to sit. They assign you a seat. I do not have an extra airplane in my pocket if my flight's delayed."
...there are too many reports of you in your underwear for me to ignore.
It was bad enough that he targeted the Napier District Court building, worse that it was broad daylight, and still worse that it was in front of a security camera.
'...wanting a slightly anaemic-looking accountant as leader seems to be the watermark of all peaceful, civilised countries. The election of a buff leader almost invariably leads to trouble. Ólafur Grimsson, President of Iceland, for instance, looks like someone who eschews the viscerality of tea in favour of a weak, lemony drink. In New Zealand, Helen Clark had her most controversial moment when, at a charity auction, she attempted to pass off another person's watercolour sketch as her own. As for Pascal Couchepin of Switzerland, he might - just - be able fight his way out of a single wet paper bag. But if two were to come at him at once - game over.Russia elects Vladimir Putin, on the other hand - a man who releases topless, buff shots of himself - and suddenly there's nuclear and Chechnya and Cold War all over the place. It's almost as if, should you vote in a leader who appears to have a "surviving a geo-political meltdown, merely with the power of his fists" function, you shouldn't be surprised if, one day, he wants to test it'
