For services to chauvinism...

P&O Cruises has won the annual 'Ernie Awards' for chauvinism in Australia for its oh-so-subtle 'Seamen Wanted' advert (see below). For more witlessness, read on though the link...



- Sydney Morning Herald, 25 August 2006

How lucky they just happened to be watching

When Ruth Byron told women’s magazines and television chat shows about a condition that caused her to experience up to 40 orgasms a day, the Department of Work and Pensions took a keen interest.

For the 50-year-old woman spoke not only about living with persistent sexual arousal syndrome — but also with a 22-year-old lodger. Benefit fraud investigators carefully monitored media coverage about Byron and realised that Simon Leach, the man she claimed was her lodger, was in fact her lover. They found that she had been overpaid £6,097 in housing and income benefits after lying to the department.

Yesterday Byron was sentenced to a two-year community rehabilitation order and told to pay £50 costs after she admitted four counts of benefit fraud.

- The Times, 24 August 2006

The importance of carrying spares

Wellington paralympic athlete Kate Horan has run (or rather, hopped?) into a spot of bother on the way to the world champs in Amsterdam - British Airways has lost her leg.

- Dominion Post, 29 August 2006

No movie is as full of perfect Zen emptiness

...in any form, seen in any direction, in any language, no movie is as full of perfect Zen emptiness as "M:i:III." It's the hole in the doughnut, the shoe that never drops, the sound of one hand clapping, the moon in reflection in the cold stream. It's there/not there at once. It's so... wonderful.

Shorn of its connection to the possibility of coherence, the movie was a giddy wonderland ride of primal joys and goober-instincts. It was so profoundly nothing, I fell in hopeless love with its gaudy surface, its glittery superficiality, its utter alienation from anything true about the world.

Cruise: Earnest, humorless, appearing to believe that which is before him (as nobody else could), he slides through the preposterous screenplay (some hugger-mugger about an arms dealer who's obtained the "Mousetrap," a WMD so terrifying the scriptwriters didn't even know what it was) with cosmetic cuts and bruises, attracting the love of all men and all women. Mentor, son, hero and jock, he's every man's ideal self and he's so... boring... he's wonderful. He's the perfect "O" in the center of all the shenanigans. You don't have to pay him a whisper of attention. His job was to say yes, attract the financing and let the movie go on about him.

- Stephen Hunter reviews Mission: Impossible III, Washington Post, 27 August 2006

[Courtesy of Louwrens. As of mid-July the film had grossed US$133m in America]

The Fast and the Furious, Invercargill style

'An unregistered, rusting, and virtually immobile wreck taken from vacant farmland in Otatara could be bound for the scrap metal yard, Invercargill police said last night'

Source: Southland Times, 5 September 2006

[Never a dull moment in Invy!]

Ever been had?

In Literary London, the Strange Case of the Steamy Letter

By SARAH LYALL

LONDON, Aug. 30 — To be duped into printing a made-up love letter in your latest biography is bad enough. But to discover that the ersatz document is actually a very rude insult aimed specifically at you: that is a rare kind of humiliation.

It happened recently to A. N. Wilson, one of London’s most visible and waspish literary figures, in “Betjeman” (Hutchinson), his book about the British poet laureate John Betjeman, who died in 1984. The document was a steamy letter purporting to be from Mr. Betjeman to a friend named Honor Tracy, and Mr. Wilson used it as evidence that the two had a passionate, if brief, affair.

But as it turns out, the first letters of each sentence, except the first, spell out an insulting sentence that starts with Mr. Wilson’s name and ends with a vulgarity [...]

Read on via the link, which includes a copy of the letter in question...

- New York Times, 31 August 2006

[Courtesy of Louwrens]

Middle East buddy list

Who hates who? Who's secretly best mates, when you get dowm to brass tacks? Check it out in this handy Middle East buddy list. It even includes the very handy category, "it's complicated"...

Source: Slate

Does VoIP offer proof-reading applications?

Linksys And Worldxchange To Market Voice-Over-IP Products To Consumers And Small Businesses In New Zealand

Press Release by Linksys at 11:15 am, 30 Aug 2006

WorldxChange to Offer Linksys VoIP Equipment to its Customers

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND - 30 August 2006 - Linksys(r), a Division of Cisco Systems, Inc., and the recognised leading provider of voice, wireless and networking hardware for the consumer, Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) and small business customers, and WorldxChange, New Zealand's first fully convergent IP carrier (is WorldXChange the first fully convergent IP carrier in NZ?) today announced that it has entered into a marketing relationship to promote voice-over-IP (VoIP) products and services to consumers and small businesses [...]

[Courtesy of Junglette]

Pesky zoo creatures

There's no point in explaining this game - you'll work it out straight away. Suffice it to say, it's still brilliant despite having been away from playing it for a couple of years. (It was featured in the glory days of the Very Friday Email, you see). As a rough guide for your progress, I've just had a stab and managed 15,510 points.

Zoo Keeper

[Requires Shockwave plugin. You also have to sit through a brief (15-second) Japanese cartoon ad for Shockwave. Warning: game is very addictive! Although you might want to turn off the slightly irritating music]

Live and sarcastic at the MTV awards

Fluxblog's Matthew Perpetua sarks it up a storm in his minute-by-minute rundown on the exploits of the glimmerati at this year's MTV awards in NYC.

8:42 We know that the guy on the left is 50 Cent because he has the number 50 written out on his chest with dimes. (Fiddy has trouble with currency.)

9:02 The Pussycat Dolls give Snoop Dogg a shout out from the stage, and he responds with a look suggesting that performing on their single was like getting married in Vegas. You can see him trying to mentally erase himself from that video, but you know that he will be doing the walk of shame through Radio City for the rest of the night.

11:08 Al Gore's looking a bit goth. He's just doing a bunch of jokes about gas or something.