Posts from December, 2006

If you have ever been squeezed from the womb of a dog, chances are you are one such creature, and have a small non-myriad of doggy options with which to live your life.

Either you were born domesticated - in which case you'll likely be fine - or you were born in the urban-wild, in in which case you'll likely still be fine. If, so help you, as a puppy, the first time you open your little eyes you find yourself a whisker's-length away from Britney Spears' pupils, nostrils and teeth - you friend, are un-poetically boned!

Well, that's according to two recent dog-related magazine polls anyway. Spears has just been crowned 'worst celebrity dog owner,' and a pox has been placed on both her and her house.

We made up the pox part. The truth feels good, but not habit forming.

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Joseph Barbera - the more creative half of the immensely talented and successful animation partnership Hanna-Barbera - died in his home yesterday aged 95; with Joseph Barbera's cause of death probably linked to him being 95 years old.

In the 68 years since Joseph Barbera - along with partner Bill Hanna - first began to put pen to paper, he's created so many iconic cartoon creations loved by generations of children that it's almost too difficult to pinpoint Joseph Barbera's one true defining work. Was it co-creating Tom and Jerry in 1939? Was it helping to turn The Flintstones into one of the most successful TV comedies of all time? Everyone has their own favourite Joseph Barbera show, and we can't decide whether ours is Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, The New Scooby Doo Movies, The Scooby-Doo/ Dynomutt Hour, Scooby's All-Star Laff-A-Lympics, Scooby-Doo And Scrappy-Doo, The Richie Rich/Scooby-Doo Show, The Scooby-Doo/ Scrappy-Doo/ Puppy Hour, The All-New Scooby And Scrappy-Doo Show, The 13 Ghosts Of Scooby Doo, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, What's New, Scooby-Doo? or Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get A Clue! 

Nah, it was probably The Jetsons.

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Christmas is a dangerous time; if you don't keep your guard up 100% then the festive wave of nauseatingly cute, over-sentimental gushing will infect you and turn you into one of them.

We were doing alright, too - tutting and hurrumphing any time that we saw, heard or thought about anything even vaguely involved with Christmas. Then Winterbells came along and got us. Of course it would - Winterbells is a Ferry Halim Orisinal game, and they tend to be so unbearably cute that they'd even make hardened Heather Mills-threatening gangsters go "awwww". Winterbells is disarmingly simple - you play a cuddly white rabbit that has to jump higher and higher up a series of chiming bells - and so overwhelmingly endearing that your heart will melt the instant you see it. Winterbells gets a little bit less cute when you mistime a jump and the fluffy rabbit falls to its death, but let's just brush over that bit, shall we?

Play Winterbells now

We'd just like to double-check that everyone got the memo regarding it being the season to be jolly tra la la la la la la la la - because Robbie Williams seems to have got the memo saying it's the season to be really really unusually miserable.

Whether you spend this week making your home look beautiful and seasonal, or basically teaching your children that if they sit on the laps of a succession of creepy old men without crying or struggling they'll be given sparkly presents instead of years of therapy and marriage-destroying intimacy issues, spare a thought for Robbie Williams - because he's deeply miserable. In an interview with The Big Issue, Robbie Williams says that he's never going to have children, because any child of his will have to endure a lifetime of pain, Pain, PAIN!

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It's day two of our three-day Christmas number one betting extravaganza, where we spend three days vainly pretending that Leona Lewis out of X Factor won't be number one on Sunday before eventually realising that she will.

The history of the Christmas number one is littered with classics, from Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer to Mistletoe And Wine to Merry Christmas Everyone, but no Christmas number one has ever captured the spirit of Christmas quite so succinctly as Can We Fix It? by Bob The Builder, a song that perfectly encapsulates the traditional Christmas Day scene of your Mum knackering the turkey by forgetting to take the giblets out, your dog knocking the Christmas tree over and your Dad slowly losing his temper with whatever loud bleepy toy your drunk grandparents have bought you as revenge for never visiting them. Christmas is so magical isn't it?  

But what about the songs in the running for Christmas number one this year? Here are the Christmas number one betting odds for All Angels, Ricky Tomlinson and McFly…

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If we were married to Ringo Starr - and who's to say that one day we won't be - we'd be cacking it. Just days after Yoko Ono allegedly got a death threat from her driver, Heather Mills has been given a panic alarm by police after getting threats too.

Admittedly the threats that Heather Mills aren't quite as frightening as Yoko's - nobody has been boasting about injecting poison into her body while she sleeps, for instance - but the police are treating Heather Mills' threats as non-specific and not especially imminent. But - hey - who knew that monoped former naked models that divorce Beatles in bitter and high-profile ways were so disliked. As well as helping to install security equipment in the home of Heather Mills after the threats, police have also spoke to Paul McCartney about the matter, who is thought to have replied "It weren't me copper, you can't prove anything copper" before throwing a smoke bomb to the ground and mysteriously vanishing into the ether.

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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

Right now in our pocket, hecklerspray's got two suckers, a half-eaten hamburger and four or five food stamps. Unless we were to put our contents on the table, there's really no way you could know that. Unless you were Natasha Demkina, a 19-year-old Russian girl who can reportedly see through things.

Now when we say 'see through things,' it's important to note we're not talking about useless info like the pocket contents we just splurbed on about - we're talking about a girl that seem pretty darn proficient at seeing your actual innards - intestines, skeletal structure, your beating heart… get the picture?

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When you look back on on 2006, you'll probably think something like "Cuh, it was rubbish when our gutter split" or "I wish I hadn't developed that ingrown toenail" but, regardless of who you are, you won't have had a weirder 2006 than Mel Gibson.

So far this year, Mel Gibson has hit the headlines for making a film so relentlessly filled with monumental violence that cinema staff have to wear crash helmets in case the more easily influenced members of the audience instinctively try to batter their skulls in with a rock on the way out and - more importantly - said something unforgivably stupid to a policeman while being arrested for drink-driving. While that'd be enough to tide most people over for a year, Mel Gibson wants more - and that's why an Australian woman has come forward claiming that she is the secret lovechild of Mel Gibson. And her own mother, presumably.

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In many ways, they're both national treasures. On one hand you have Miss USA, famed for her flawless apple pie good looks and impeccable manners, and on the other hand you have crazy-haired bellowing rich bloke Donald Trump.

Neither Miss USA or Donald Trump appear to have particularly hard jobs - from what we've seen, Donald Trump has to read pre-scripted voice-overs unconvincingly, yell down mobile phones in a limousine and say "you're fired" with an increasing look of weariness on his face. On the other hand Miss USA has to turn up to stuff and wave. However, the current Miss USA Tara Conner would rather do other stuff than just wave - like hang out at bars all the time, have it off with any man she can find and snort so much cocaine that Donald Trump looks sure to fire her in the very near future. Oh, and wakeboarding.

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Christmas is starting to do our heads in. Christmas day is still a whole week away, and yet everyone's already become so sentimental that they're letting a nauseatingly cute film about Will Smith hugging his own son top the US weekend box office.

It's strange to see how the US weekend box office reacts against itself sometimes. Last week Mel Gibson's Apocalypto - a couple of hours of blood-splattered violence that managed to out-shock even Saw 3 - was the number one weekend box office movie, and this week The Pursuit Of Happyness - an insufferably twee film about how much Will Smith's love for his son can even overcome obstacles such as being sack, becoming homeless and having the woman from Mission: Impossible II walk out on them both. We'd be happy to describe The Pursuit Of Happyness further, but thinking about it has made us cry vomit out of our arses.

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