Image via zeeky.net.
It’s been a hell of a year, people. But while touched upon by the mainstream UK media in between the wars, famines, natural disasters and revelations that the media are as corrupt as financiers, one story of burgeoning evil eluded close attention.
Continue reading “2011 Year In Review: The Ginger Seal Of Doom”
Image: DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images.
Being a woman myself, I don’t usually find myself shaking my head in sympathy as my male friends stare miserably into their pint glasses and ask ‘What the hell do women want?’.
Continue reading “Ann Sinclair: Another Triumph In The Battle For Equality”
Because sometimes, you just have to.
(Yes, I know it’s not about poultry. But that interpretation is funnier.)
Image via imdb
Crime specialists maintain that their job is made appreciably harder by the number of police procedurals on TV that are essentially ‘how-to’ guides for budding villains. Despite this, plus an advertising industry with a global spend of approximately $503 billion per year, a persistent school of thought still insists that violent & sexualised games, films, TV and adverts do not cause psychological problems.
Image: REUTERS/KCNA.
This isn’t quite what I envisioned the ‘handcart’ to look like in the old phrase, but under the circumstances, it’ll do.
A selection of ‘lads mags’. Very empowering, apparently.
I may be a totally unreliable servant to the feminist ideal, rarely available for campaigning purposes or placard waving due to prior drinking commitments, but I’ve always maintained a belief that equality can and should be achieved without emasculating men. Indeed, the two should be wholly separate, which is why I have no time for ‘girl power’, ‘ladette-ism‘ and women who insist their boob jobs are ‘for them’ and then pop them out all the time for pecuniary gain. All these things create images of women that a majority of men feel comfortable with, which kind of misses the point for me.
However, over the last week I have been forced to reconsider the viability of my views. Maybe empowerment cannot exist without emasculation?
Continue reading “Implausible Deniability: Oh, Lighten Up, Love. It’s Just A Joke.”
Controversial author and journalist Christopher Hitchens died yesterday after a long battle with esophageal cancer. During his career, he managed to piss off pretty much everyone with his refusal to allow a commitment to one political ideology to prevent him from speaking out against it, plus, of course, his vehement opposition to organised religion in any form.
In 2008, in preparation for an article in Vanity Fair, Hitchens allowed himself to be subjected to waterboarding. He sought to learn whether the technique, which was used and defended as a tool of interrogation by the US government in the War On Terror, could indeed be described as torture. After wards, he said:
…if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
He will be missed.
Images: AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert, thisislondon.
What’s going to be playing on David Cameron’s mind this morning? The fact that Nicolas Sarkozy swerved his handshake after Cam vetoed an EU Treaty change? Or that he is now five degrees closer to Chelsea footballer and alleged philanderer John Terry in the public conciousness?
It’s a close run thing.
Likelihood of Trent being allowed into the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party after picking up the Best Soundtrack statue for ‘The Social Network’: 97.6%. Image: Getty Images, Daylife.
How exactly did Trent Reznor go from being a serial killer in waiting to the darling of the mainstream movie soundtrack? Did he undergo a personality bypass, or did we?
Image via metro.co.uk
The first episode of Charlie Brooker’s social networking satire ‘Black Mirror’ aired on Sunday night. It has, among other things, been described as ‘daring‘, ‘brilliantly twisted’ and ‘genius’. The ‘daring’ part is understandable – the premise being a ransom demand for the safe return of a popular British princess involving the Prime Minister having full sex on live TV with a pig.
The rest? I’m too depressed to know.
Kelly Welles 