Christians v Dancing and Grand Theft Chocolate – The Week in Irrelevant News! by Nick Bryans
Hardly 'newsworthy', is he...
See, we could report on the big stories, like the Labour Party conference and the unrelenting downfall of western capitalism, but much more interesting stuff has happened…
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There has been a large scale robbery! Bank? Jeweller’s? The home of a Liverpool FC Footballer? No. A van full of chocolate.
POLICE are hunting conmen who stole £9,500 worth of chocolate bars.
A man duped a driver into taking his delivery of Milka and Toblerone bars to a different location after he arrived at the Paycocke Road industrial estate in Basildon, Essex.
When he arrived at the new location, two other suspects were waiting and unloaded the goods on to another lorry.
Now, you have a number of problems with stealing chocolate. Firstly, it’s perishable. You leave your loot too near a radiator and that’s 10k down the tube. Secondly, is doesn’t really have THAT high a street value. If people need a fix they can buy a number of classic confectionaries, like Curly Wurlys, Chomps and Dimes, all for the princely sum for 20p from a local shop. Hardly worth giving Dodgy Tom a ring to try and score an 8th of Double-Decker, is it?
Inspector Simon Gray said: “The suspects will obviously try to sell on their haul, so if you notice a large amount of Milka or Toblerone chocolates being sold anywhere untoward, contact police immediately.
Exactly what is an ‘untoward location’ for selling chocolate? My advice is that if you see some with a mackintosh full of Swiss sweets, be like Zammo from Grange Hill and JUST SAY NO! (note: I spent an hour trying to think up a joke incorporating stolen Swiss chocolate and the Swiss hiding stolen Nazi gold. The best I had was; ‘The Swiss know a few things about stolen bars, just ask the SS’. But it’s still probably a bit too soon.)
Is this an untoward location?
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Hey, I tell you what’s devoid of any original ideas; TV shows! Simon Cowell’s £15m extrava-mega-ganza ‘Red or Black’ was essentially coin-flipping on a mass scale, and now, deciding that this is too advanced for your average TV viewer, CW Productions in America have commissioned the next show to transform Saturday nights: EXTREME MUSICAL CHAIRS! Yeah that’s right, musical chairs. Deemed by most to be a dumbed down version of pass the parcel for hyperactive children at parties, it’s now getting its debut on the small screen.
Series would transform the popular children’s game into a physically demanding competition with multiple rounds of elimination set in an indoor obstacle course.
Now I don’t know much more about what the show entails, but I can only imagine it’ll be like Takeshi’s Castle meets Question Time, set in an old aircraft hanger. And it’s American, so they’ll shoe-horn tits into it somehow. They also shoe-horn tits into stuff.
Pretty extreme, tbf
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This week in Turkey, due to crowd trouble at a Fenerbache (major Istanbul based football team) match, the Turkish FA ruled that as punishment for one game only, just women and children would be allowed in the stadium. 40-odd thousand turned up and it was a joyous occasion.
After their fans had stormed the pitch during a pre-season friendly against Ukraine’s Shakhtar Donetsk, Fenerbahce were originally poised to be handed the more usual punishment of being forced to play two league games in an empty stadium. Courtesy of some nifty lateral thinking on the part of the Turkish FA, though, the rules were amended to allow women, girls and boys in, thereby ensuring the miscreants felt they were missing out.
Now call me a cynical twit, but is that not just very thinly veiled sexism? It’s like saying, ‘Yeah it’s alright, we’ll get the birds in for a game. They won’t do anything wrong. They’ll probably just sit there and applaud the slightly cute players.’ I understand that this was probably a way to ban the pissed up ‘ultras’ from the ground, but I would have loved it if the women had channelled the spirit of Kathleen Hanna and Joan Jett, and smashed the place up with vigour that their male fans, armed with piss weak lager and poxy flares, could only dream of. Not that I’m inciting violence or anything.
*insert female parking joke here*
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I’ll tell you what we haven’t had in a while; church groups moaning at something extraneous causing the downfall of humanity. Well they rarely leave you waiting for long! Dancing with the Stars, which is the American version of droll middle England fare Strictly Come Dancing, have included in its line up this year ‘Chaz Bono’; child of Cher and Sonny Bono. So what is the problem? Are people angry about nepotism in show business? No. Chaz Bono was born Chastity Bono. A girl. Chastity is now Chaz Bono. A pre-op trans-sexual. A bloke in all but, bits, basically. Chaz is competing as a male contestant, and the Christians are absolutely fucking fuming.
Now I didn’t know this, but it turns out that fringe celebrities doing a piss-poor Charlston is MASSIVE entertainment in Topeka, Kansas, but now they can’t watch it. Because, you know, God wouldn’t be happy. Or something. OneMillionMoms.com have started a petition calling for the boycott of the show from viewers and sponsors (and if there’s one this we hate at Fort Cows, it’s pointless petitions). In this petition, it states that Bono’s inclusion;
…is completely unacceptable and Christians should not watch the show, no excuses!…They made a platform for the LGBT community… Loving your child is to teach them right from wrong and help them find help when they need it. Someone has to want help and seek help though. A sin is a sin. We are all sinners, but we try to do better and get help when and where we need it. Thousands of Christian counselors and pastors are available all across the country to help anyone who is struggling and living in any kind of sin including homosexuality, gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria.
And the ‘experts’ are having their say aswell! Dr Keith Ablow on Fox news compared Bono’s inclusion on DWTS to ‘celebrating Heroin abuse and Anorexia’. Yes, he ACTUALLY said this. Ablow’s concern was that Bono is “on a campaign to mainstream trasngenderism,” and promoting him as an LGBT icon would convince teenagers to get a sex-change. Cause a sex-change is the next hot fashion trend to sweep the teen market (to be fair to Ablow, I never thought glasses without lenses would come into fashion, so stranger things have happened). Ablow states;
“People model their behavior after another. Having children watch Bono would make them think transgenderism is possibly a viable alternative to how they were born. We wouldn’t invite people with anorexia on a fashion show…this is an exact parallel.”
Now naturally, nothing the Christian church does can surprise you. We could be attacked by aliens from a far off planet, leaving Earth at a point of total destruction, and they’d most likely blame it on condoms. But the thing with this case is that historically, DWTS has been a pool for reprobates and some of the most god awful members of society, yet onemillionmoms.com has found that someone after a sex-change is just the most deplorable character they could imagine.
As Lewis Black on The Daily Show stated:
“I’m surprised at the concern, because nobody seemed to have any trouble explaining the dancing alcoholic [referring to David Hasselhoff], the dancing pornographer’s concubine [Holly Madison] … the dancing convicted purger [Lil ‘Kim] … the dancing convicted money launderer [Tom DeLay] … the dancing drug convicted under age whore monger [Lawrence Taylor] … the dancing sleaze peddler [Jerry Springer] … and this douchebag in the bow tie [Tucker Carlson (much maligned right-wing ‘shock jock’].”
But hey, after all, what did Jesus ever say about money laundering and greed…………oh, wait……
If we're talking "bad role models for kids", surely Mike 'The Situation' Sorrentino trumps all?
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And finally…
You know who doesn’t own enough outlets for his own ego? Richard Desmond. Not enough to merely run a string of downmarket newspapers and a downmarket TV station, Desmond has now set his sights on a downmarket national lottery.
Richard Desmond, the owner of Channel 5 and the Express newspapers, is to launch a new draw-based lottery game to rival the National Lottery next week.
The Health Lottery draw will be aired every Saturday night on ITV1 and Channel 5 and will raise money for health-related causes in local communities. It will operate as a series of 51 lotteries, each representing a local authority area in Great Britain.
The big promotional idea of his lottery is this theme about charity first, hamming up all the good it will do for local causes (even going so far as to naming it the Health Lottery, thought that does sound a bit like a load of people with failing kidneys entering into a raffle to win a dialysis machine).
So is this more evidence of the ‘Charity Crusader’ (not my words, the headline of a double page spread he ran about himself in one of his newspapers) giving a bit back to the community? No, it’s actually more evidence of the porn baron being an arsehole of indescribable proportions.
Top charity experts have described his lottery as a “disgrace”. Why? Because the amount promised to charity is the absolute minimum regulators allow to be donated by ticket sales; just 20p per pound. Even the national lottery, whose main advertising slogan is essentially ‘ENTER THIS AND YOU MIGHT BECOME MINTED!’ donate more (28.3p).
Sir Stephen Bubb of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations told the Guardian it was a “disgraceful new development”.
He pointed out that the operator would raise only £50m a year – compared with National Lottery operator Camelot, which gave £270m to health causes a few years ago. Given that Camelot announced record ticket sales of £5.8bn last year, it is estimated the amount going to health charities is now closer to £350m.
“This whole thing is deeply unhelpful,” said Bubb. “[Richard Desmond] is giving less to charity and also can make a profit from people who think they are giving to charity. They will force charities to duplicate a whole bureaucracy that has grown up after 17 years of the National Lottery. It will just take away business from Camelot’s lottery which gives more money to health.”
To be fair to Richard Desmond, it’s not totally his fault. He is a twat, after all.
'The Charity Crusader' in full, erm, crusading, mode.
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Join us next week for more stories you won’t see on the 10 o’clock news. But as the old saying goes, ‘fuck the 10 o’clock’. I think that’s the saying, anyway…
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© 2012
Sexism doesn’t count as sexism if it’s against men because men should be strong enough to not give a damn. ;)
Religious fanatics would do well to consider that there is a tiny possibility of there not being a ‘god’ and they just might be making complete tits of themselves.
As for the transgender’s; i tend to prefer them over gays as they know what they want to be and act accordingly, i think this is a much better thing to expose the masses to over ‘queens’ who try to be a bit of everything and end up being nothing.
I had a look at the onemillionmoms site, it’s hilarious. An utter gem of a website with stories like; “New Show on Bunnies Not Safe for Children” – A Playboy show that airs at 9/10pm.
Bookmarked!
“the dancing convicted purger [Lil ‘Kim]”
Purger = perjurer?
Is a f’king good piece besides.
… and religious fundamentalists don’t seem good with anything outside their own experience, whether it’s by-the-Book sinful or not. I grew up with an intersexed friend (i.e., born with attributes of both genders) who used to get a load of shit from people who thought ‘his’ feminine appearance meant… well, what that daft fucker said. FWIW, the local pastor was quite horrified by that viewpoint when asked for advice.
But here’s the other rotten thing about the Health Lottery. It’s apparently been set up as a social lottery which allows it to be exempt from tax. The National Lottery pays 12p in the pound to tax.
So if people choose to play this instead of the National Lottery, this lottery is not only taking 8p away from charities, they also take 12p out of the NHS.
I know, it’s tax and it’s for everything, but NHS is how I’m spinning it. So much for ‘Health’ Lottery. :)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15070628