Article Archive for October 2006
Now that we know the 12 X Factor finalists this year, we've got a few days left to decide which of them are will be this year's Phillip McGee and which will be - no, wait, none of last year's X Factor finalists were very good, were they? This year will be better, it has to be - just look at the crappy groups that Louis Walsh decided weren't up to X Factor standards on Saturday. There was the group made entirely of screaming mothers, the boyband which more or less had a punch-up onstage and a group of girls who looked like they'd just been turfed out of their local Wetherspoons for looking a bit too generic. Surely the loss of those halfwits leaves Louis Walsh with a handful of world-beating groups to enter the X Factor finals with, right? Right? Anyone? Hello? Here are today's X Factor betting odds to find the group that will progress furthest through the series, with betting odds from PaddyPower...
If there's one thing that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie enjoy doing more than starring in films that are never quite as good as you expect - and annoying Jennifer Aniston - it's getting to lord it about in dusty hot countries.
Just a few months after Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie got back from their epic journey to have a nativity-style birth in Namibia, they've got back on a plane and zoomed over to India. This time, though, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have got a genuine reason for getting foreign paparazzi all in a tizzy - Angelina Jolie is making a film there. Needless to say, she'd have preferred it if the film could have been shot in Pakistan, because she generally thinks it sucks a bit less there than in India.
Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, myths, ancient artifacts, religion, strange facts or just the plain unexplainable.
This week: The Plain Unexplainable
The plausibility of other dimensions is purely speculative. On the one hand you have stories concerning people like David Lang, a Tennessee-dwelling man who vanished while walking across a field right in front of his family (a story that's been pretty thoroughly proven fictional). On the other hand, you have a tale like that of the Cumpstons, and elderly couple that almost got sucked into a weird black hole that formed in their hotel room floor - a story that was very well documented in its day.
The couple's actual account resulted in an arrest and a trial backed by a witness. Stranger stories have rarely been told.
Sunday morning TV is a truly terrifying thing to behold - if you're not subjected to 19 solid hours of Hollyoaks, you're forced to watch religious folk banging on how they can heal people with their hands.
Folk like - ooh, let's pick a name at random here - hatefully smug 1980s one-hit-wonder balladeer Chris De Burgh. Yeah, Lady In Red Chris De Burgh. Chronically unable to pronounce the word 'romance' without sounding like he's getting struck down with a debilitating stroke somewhere in between the first and second syllable Chris De Burgh. Yeah, him. Good job we picked Chris De Burgh as an example, really, because mulleted nobsack Chris De Burgh has only bloody well gone on Sunday morning TV and told the entire world that his hands can perform miracles like Jesus, hasn't he?
Few things manage to strike fear in the heart of hecklerspray anymore.
Anyway.
What we’re trying to say is that we’re a reasonably unshakable bunch. It would take something genuinely horrific to set our knees-a-quiverin’… something of such unbridled cultural terror and sheer artless drudgery as to make Adam Sandler’s Click look like Dekalog-era Kieslowski.
Something like the reformation of 80s boy-band nobsacks Wham!
Last week was a horrific week at the US weekend box office, with Ashton Kutcher inexplicably taking up the top two box office spaces in the form of a cartoon deer and an annoyingly smug coast guard.
This week, though, there's just one clear US weekend box office winner - it's Jack Nicholson, running around throughout the course of The Departed bopping a series of hookers and Matt Damon over the head with an especially large strap-on penis. In short, a big dildo is more famous than Ashton Kutcher, so things are as they should be again.
So now we know. Now we know which of the army of tear-stained goonish hopefuls have made it through to the X Factor live finals, where they'll sing some Whitney Houston songs and generally play second-fiddle to Sharon Osbourne's screeching hysteria. Saturday's X Factor told us everything we wanted to know; the remaining 24 contestants were shipped off to the homes of each X Factor judge - Simon Cowell's gigantic Miami estate! Louis Walsh's huge Irish castle! Er, some hotel in London that Sharon Osbourne is staying in! - where half of them made it through to the live X Factor finals and half of them were seemingly told to cry as hard as they can for the entire duration of whatever power ballad was playing in the background. This week, ahead of the live X Factor finals, we'll be seeing which singers will do best for their judges, and we're starting that off today with the X Factor betting odds for the 25 and over age-group, with help from PaddyPower.com...
One of the reasons hecklerspray doesn't have a driving licence is because we're so easily distracted; once we stopped craning our necks out of the car looking at interesting clouds during our driving test, we'd knocked down eight nuns and a bishop. So imagine how we fared at Distraction.Distraction is exactly the sort of game we love - simple game given a jolt ...
