Hot Gossip!

The Hot Gossip dancers were one of the highlights of the Kenny Everett Television Show. Here's a typical transcript:

[Hot Gossip dancers are interrupted mid-shimmy by Kenny Everett]

Kenny: "Stop! Stop this heathen-ness. It's too turny-onny! It's too hot and wobbly. Stop, do you hear? [Chucks a bucket of water over Hot Gossip] Next time it'll be boiling lead!"

[Dancers squeal a bit. Cut to the next sketch, probably Angry of Mayfair berating the viewer for enjoying the programme too much]

...

[Kenny standing on his stage set in front of 25 TV monitors]

Kenny: "You may remember earlier on in the show we had to pour cold water on Hot Gossip. That's because they were... wobbling too much. Getting over-filthy. And they measured 200 decibels on the Hot-o-meter. Well, they've promised to behave now, and they've had a cold shower each - they've promised not to be naughty any more. Somehow I don't believe them...

[Cut to silver-clad Hot Gossip dancers writhing to the Theme From Shaft by Isaac Hayes...]

[Courtesy of KL]

Odyssey explained

You don't have to agree with the interpretation of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey - but this Flash animation is very stylish and convincing.

[Courtesy of Louwrens]

Movie-plot threat contest!

'Take trained lab rats with ricin-laced teeth, wrap them in foam rubber balls, drop them from low-flying airplanes over the streets of Hollywood and what have you got? The seeds of a movie plot. So maybe it's a B-grade movie plot, but you get the idea. That is just one of the entries in the Movie-Plot Threat Contest being held this month by a security specialist, Bruce Schneier. Forget bombs in the baby carriage or anthrax-spreading crop dusters. Mr Schneier wants contestants to think outside the box'

- Meg Cieply Peterson in the New York Times, 23 April 2006.

[Courtesy of Louwrens]

Now that's something to be proud of

'It's not twinned with anywhere, but it does have a suicide pact with Dagenham'

- Comedian Linda Smith, who died aged 48 on 27 February 2006, describes her hometown of Erith, south-east London. She was voted Wittiest Living Person by Radio 4 listeners in 2002. (Quoted in Guardian Weekly, 10 March 2006)

Microwaves in 1968

'Both the kitchen and the bakery use four 1.5-kilowatt magnetrons, operating on a frequency of 2450 megahertz. Cooking is said to be up to seven times faster than with a conventional cooker. Another advantage is that with microwave cooking the sides of the cooker remain cool: no thermal insulation is needed and the oven is much smaller and lighter at 2.5 tons. Cooking is cleaner and there is far less danger of fire. Moreover, dishes can be prepared in throwaway paper or plastic trays or dishes.

The morale of troops sheltering in foxholes may be expected to benefit greatly from the new cookers. Fresh meals will be prepared within smelling distance, and utensils will be incinerated by the oven after use or cleaned in an ultrasonic sink'

- New Scientist, 14 March 1968, on US Army experiments with microwave ovens

NZ First broadens its appeal to senior citizens

Apparently the party is also casting its net wider to encompass the support of elderly greyhounds, because party leader Winston Peters has announced an adoption programme for retired racing dogs. If only they could vote...

Peters Launches Greyhounds As Pets Adoption Programme

'The Fat Slags': legitimate topic for academic discourse

English A-level student Rachel Spence scored 38 out of 40 with her Media Studies essay on Viz magazine cartoon characters Tracy and Sandra, a.k.a. 'The Fat Slags'. Worth a read, even if she does manage to slip the phrase 'body fascist' in there. Viz killed off the Slags in 2004 because they'd passed their use-by date.

Is 'Old Stomach Bloke Infected with Plague' the best insult you can manage?

The Times' Tokyo correspondent spills the beans on his harshest critic (a Japanese blogger), and discusses the curious mildness of insults in the Japanese vocabulary.

This is a country in which someone who is incandescent with rage will, as a very last resort, denounce his antagonist as baka — a word no stronger than the word “fool”. While an English speaker can choose between “Put a sock in it”, “Shut your mush” or “Zip it”, Japanese is restricted to the anaemic urusai, which means nothing more than “You are noisy”. It is claustrophobic to find oneself in a country without insults — or that is what I thought until I encountered the work of Ryunosuke Kita.

The Times, 25 April 2006

Dying old and leaving a beautiful corpse

A Greek Orthodox monk who died 15 years ago is attracting huge crowds of worshippers hailing a "miracle" because his body is largely preserved. Vissarionas Korkoliakos, clad in his robes and the Book of the Gospels clutched in his hands, was discovered intact last month when he was disinterred during repairs to his crypt at Agathonos monastery, near the central Greek city of Lamia.

"Even [his] soft parts are intact," a senior cleric said as the Orthodox Church called it "a celestial sign, a message for our people and our time".

Medical experts said that the body of Korkoliakos, who died in 1991 aged 83, was only partially decomposed because of low humidity in his tomb.

The Times, 25 April 2006

[Far be it from me to be a Doubting Thomas, but in this news report from Samara, he doesn't look too flash. Even for a dead person. But it's just super that his 'soft parts are intact', isn't it?]

The pillows do the talking in Southland

Three thousand, six hundred and fifty-nine people turned out last weekend in Invercargill to make a world record attempt for the largest pillow-fight ever. The streets of Invy must've been even more deserted than usual!

There were no injuries, other than to the pillows.

Source: Southland Times, 24 April 2006