Crikey Team

a blog from the newsroom

The worst blogs in the whole wide world

May 8, 2009 – 4:57 pm, by Eleri Harris

I like awful blogs and by awful blogs I mean the kind with genuine awful pictures of people. Like these people here:

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I found them at AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com, thanks to my friend Mollie who likes to deliver all the best kinds of awful blogs, via Twitter, which is my main source of awful blogs. Awkward family has some really awesome shots of the coolest people to ever be related.

Here is another awful picture. I can’t remember where I got it from, but it is my favourite:

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I don’t know why this funny man is dressed like this, who he is or what on earth possessed him to sell those concrete “turdles” but I love him. He is rad in his Nike shorts. I want to be just like him. I can only dream of one day having such an awful picture of me pasted on someone’s blog.

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Fabulous Friday trash wrap: the devout in trouble

May 8, 2009 – 11:38 am, by Crikey Intern

Crikey intern Chris Kohler wraps the latest gossip.

Priest beached by topless scandal. A Miami TV Reverend, Alberto Cutié (pronounced Koo-tee-ay), is involved in a sexy scandal. Reports place him topless on a beach with an attractive woman. The controversy is reopening the debate over celibacy in the priesthood. The 40-year old Cutié has apologised to his followers saying he’s taking time for “personal reflection.”

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Oh Mel, surely not! Meanwhile, another story about a devout celeb being, perhaps, less than devout. This one is from the grassy knoll, or in magazine-speak, it’s being reported by The National Enquirer. Mel Gibson’s Russian girlfriend may be pregnant. His wife Robyn filed divorce papers on April 13.

Why Taylor digs Thirteen. In harder news, singer Taylor Swift tells MTV news why 13 is her lucky number. How’s this for spooky… One of her songs has a 13 second intro, she always sits in the 13th row at award shows AND she was born on the 13th, the list goes on. She paints 13 on her hand every day so nobody forgets (including her?)

Paris Hilton never fails to disappoint. This time, the media tart is making sure she gets headlines with comments about why she’s immune from Swine Flu (she doesn’t eat pork) and what she’d do if she were president (go to war torn countries and throw a party).

In this week’s GOOP. Makeup! Gwyneth gets some world class hair and make-up artists “to give us all (men and women alike) a few pointers for ways we can tighten up our programs.”  Ah, program, is that robot Gwyneth speak for appearance?

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Presenting the inaugural Crikey Logies lookalikes

May 4, 2009 – 5:43 pm, by Sophie Black

Roll out the red carpet, and hold off nipping down to the milk bar to buy a copy of TV Week — Crikey presents our comprehensive Logies coverage.

Inspired by Channel Nine’s Tracey Grimshaw, who this year played the part of Grimace from McDonaldland, we’ve google imaged terms like “upholstered pedastal”, “eight-year-old in leotard”, “kitten” and “sea cucumber” to bring you our cutting edge fashion commentary.

More comprehensive than The Age photo gallery,and infinitely more edifying than the Herald-Sun worst dressed slide show, we give you — the Logies lookalikes*….

[star wipe] :

Tracey Grimshaw, aka, Grimace:

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Sonia Kruger’s fashion forward train had accents of Bob from Aliens vs Monsters:

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That new girl from Neighbours was inspired by the nice smiling skater who plays the role of Nemo in Disney on Ice:

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Asher Keddie, star of Underbelly — A Tale of Two Cities, took her cues from a sea cucumber:

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Repeat offender Susie Eleman, in a nod to The Leopard Man:

090504_logoes_lookalikes51Lesbian of the hour Ruby-Rose, aka a dead crow:

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Julia Zemiro, moonlighting between gigs as the host of RockWiz and a slice of rainbow ripple cake:

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Kate Ritchie, Logie loser, in homage to a small calisthenics child in a blue leotard:

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Natalie Bassingthwaite, singer, TV host, fashion plate, Statue of Liberty:

natalieMyf Warhurst is a little blue teapot:

myfAnd finally, no wonder Gretel Killeen didn’t want to show the papparazzi her haircut. Hello lego man:

gretel

* props to Leigh for his stunning Logie nomination-worthy photoshopping. We feel like we were there.

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Stuff we like: Just how many laws did Ferris Bueller break in his day off?

May 4, 2009 – 12:45 pm, by Ruth Brown

Sites and links we love today:

Bueller? Bueller? MetaFilter are compiling a list of crimes comitted by Ferris Bueller in cult film classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Who knows why, but it’s a fun read, and naturally, things are getting pretty technical:

Breach of contract could work, but Cameron has a good looking cause of action for conversion against the garage. This can vary between states, but the kids’ leaving the car with the garage very likely creates a bailment relationship.* In such a relationship, the bailee may only perform the duties the bailor has assigned to it. Bailees who go beyond these duties are strictly liable for conversion**. An enclosed garage with security personnel was held to have a bailment relationship with a customer who parked his car there in Allen v. Hyatt-Regency Hotel. The court here will have to determine (1) if there was a bailment and (2) if the attendants are liable for conversion. Allen was a Tennessee case, but IL courts are likely to see it that way, especially since our case looks even more bailment-like than Allen: Ferris had to hand the keys to the attendant, who was supposed to take it to a parking spot Ferris & co. wouldn’t be able to see, when the garage in Allen was the kind where you park it yourself and take a ticket. The garage is only allowed to park the car under the relationship. When the attendants took a joyride, they went beyond their duties and took it for their personal use, which brings up a claim for conversion in Cameron.

Stacking it. Sugar Stacks shows items of food with the amount of sugar in them displayed in sugar cubes. A great, simple way of visualising things.

Bling alert. The Most Expensive Journal tracks stupidly expensive products that make us a little nauseous, but we can’t look away from things like the most expensive suit in the world or a US$143,020 bottle of whisky.

Two awesome tumble blogs:

1. Look at this fucking hipster collects photos of stupid hispters looking stupid in their stupid high-wasted jeans and fluro hoodies.

2. On Hospital Food, people share photos of their hospital meals and where they had them. Mental note: do not get sick in Poland.

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The fabulous Friday trash wrap: Mr T does jury duty

May 1, 2009 – 11:41 am, by Ruth Brown

Our favourite trashy news for the week:

How many starving African kids could celebrity engagement rings feed? A question I’m sure we’ve all pondered at some point – Cat Walk Cat Fight has a visual guide, and it’s both wonderful and depressing. Nicole Richie’s is quite modest, expensive enough for only 200 kids, while Beyonce could feed 100,000.

Couple have sex on Windsor Castle lawn. Ah, the British: a randy couple were caught making the beast with two backs on Liz’s lawn, in front of quite an audience, no less. Charming.

Mr T does jury duty. Mr T took time out of his busy schedule promoting Snickers and the FlavorWave (if you haven’t seen this full infomercial, I implore you to stay up into the wee hours one night and watch it on Channel Ten. You won’t regret it!*) to do his civic duty, reporting for jury duty.

“If you’re innocent, I’m your best man,” he said. “But if you’re guilty, I pity that fool.”

Paris Hilton on swine flu:

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GOOP-watch: Food (and kids) again. Gwyneth shares her favourite “kid-friendly” restaurants — ones that are “good for them and delish for us”. Gag. I wonder how “friendly” the other customers feel when she brings her spawn into adult restaurants?

Hard to pick just one highlight, but try this on for size:

My kids were in heaven with the menu (tater tots, pancakes, the biggest ice cream sundae on the planet) and so was I (chopped salad, gravlax, beet risotto)

CHOPPED SALAD?!?! MMMM, dreamy.

* You may, in fact, regret it

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Stuff we like: character rip-off revelations

April 30, 2009 – 11:21 am, by Jane Nethercote

Today’s “stuff we like” edition is caught on film.

What guys can learn from Matthew McConaughey in rom-coms. A lot apparently. Like “Don’t be afraid to leave your wife for the hired help” and “Date high school girls”. The Independent’s Tim Walker watches the movies — and draws pithy love advice — so we don’t have to.

6 Famous Characters You Didn’t Know Were Shameless Rip Offs. There’s nothing new under the sun. Cracked reveals: “It’s hard not to feel betrayed when you find out that some of the stories around which your entire childhood revolved were, for the most part, copied and pasted in with a cavalier attitude of, ‘the little bastards will never know the difference!’” We’re looking at you X-Men. And more.

Architecture on film. Flavorwire wraps the 8 best films for building design, starting with the classic “architecture in the movies” movie: Blade Runner.

The best trailers. Maybe it’s all the talk of Swine Flu flooding the airwaves that has me in a pandemic frame of mind, writes Jessica Barnes on Cinematical, “but when Erik asked us to think about some of our favorite summer movie trailers, my mind wandered from the obvious blockbusters and instead, I came up with Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.”

Watch here:

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A pair of very smart spectacles

April 29, 2009 – 3:31 pm, by Sophie Black

Ordered a pair of spectacles on Ebay. They were meant to look like Elvis Costello meets Janine Haines, sans perm. Or this. Or maybe even this.

They don’t.

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They look like  Stuart Littlemore with a hint of Jenny Kee.

So they’ve gone straight to the pool room. The Crikey pool room consists of a shelf full of shit souvenirs that people bring back from their various holidays along with other assorted items. There’s a Coffs Harbour Big Banana water pistol (in the shape of a banana), a pink dolphin holding a surfboard (Lombok), a picaninny doll (Thailand, inexplicably), a Day of the Dead tableau (Mexico), a wrestling mask (same place), and a rubber chicken (don’t ask.) There’s also a framed fax from Venise Alstergren that reads:

My Computer crashed but had to send this

Dear First Dog,

You’ve done it again.

I lurve ‘Mother Theresa in a can!’!

Did you strike some magic mushrooms under your MacDog mansion? Two strikes in two days. Fantastic.

Cheers

Venise

And finally, a football card featuring the Western Bulldog’s Mitch Hahn.

These glasses will sit on the pool room shelf until a team member needs to look very smart, ie during any kind of television appearance. Kind of like the funky black rimmed glasses that anyone from The Australian likes to wear when they talk to David Speers on Sky only much, much bigger.

Today Andrew Crook of the Sackwatch desk was interviewed by ABC 2 Australia Network* for an item about Sackwatch.

Unfortunately he refused to wear the smart spectacles and/or pose with a calculator, so our editor wore them in the background.

Watch for further appearances of the very smart spectacles in future.

*Andrew Crook can be seen on ABC 2’s Australia Network on Sunday morning at 11am.

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Stuff we like: Animals and the GFC

April 29, 2009 – 11:33 am, by Jane Nethercote

When we talk about “stuff we like”, it’s as if the Crikey Team moves borg-like, with a universal opinion about what is amusing and what is cool.

Not so. Today, First Dog on the Moon has marked a dog with a fig on his nose as “stuff we like”. But it is more “stuff he likes”.

Then again, he also pointed to a story in Wired about the Georgia Guidestones, the strangest monument in America. No-one knows quite how they got there, but everyone’s intrigued by the message they seem to convey: an eight-language instruction manual in enormous granite slabs about how to rebuild after an apocalypse.

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Randall Sullivan writes:

Whoever the anonymous architects of the Guidestones were, they knew what they were doing: The monument is a highly engineered structure that flawlessly tracks the sun. It also manages to engender endless fascination, thanks to a carefully orchestrated aura of mystery. And the stones have attracted plenty of devotees to defend against folks who would like them destroyed. Clearly, whoever had the monument placed here understood one thing very well: People prize what they don’t understand at least as much as what they do.

Eleri has marked to our attention a story about bionic penguins that can fly through the air.  But it was this story find with the lot (pet psychics and Chihuahuas) that had us blown away:

Tinker Bell has been reunited with her owners after a 70-mph gust of wind picked up the six-pound Chihuahua and tossed her out of sight. Dorothy and Lavern Utley credit a pet psychic for guiding them on Monday to a wooded area nearly a mile from where 8-month-old Tinker Bell had been last seen.

Ms Black, in editor mode, has selected the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks as her pick of the blogs. Though for sheer mind-bending one-themed blogs, scanwiches is still a solid favourite.

Editor Jonathan Green, meanwhile, likes Paul Gilding’s argument in the Cockatoo Chronicles that the GFC is the wake up call we need. As Gilding points out: “Without the global financial crisis we may never have got Barack Obama.”

And there’s one “stuff we like” that we agree on: the Pres.

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Stuff we like: Home funerals and feminist weddings

April 28, 2009 – 12:47 pm, by Ruth Brown

Good things to read and look at today:

We’re all Trekkies now. Star Trek is cool again (again?), according to, uh, Newsweek (those well-known arbiters of all that is hip. Ah well). There’s some tenuous Obama-administration link in there, too. Apparently the new film is pretty good, though.

Play with your food. Food art!

Sci-Fi, black and white. A lovely collection of Penguin’s sci-fi novels through time. Some freaky things happening in the late ’60s and ’70s there.

The surprising satisfactions of a home funeral. You can be born and get married in your home, so why not have your funeral there too? It can be done (in America, at least) — but it’s hard work.

Can you have a feminist wedding? Feminist Jessica Valenti is getting married, and it’s pissing people off. People are stupid.

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Stuff we like: MORE Hairy Angel and lots of stuff about food

April 27, 2009 – 11:57 am, by Ruth Brown

Stuff we like today:

Fast food reality. Pictures of real fast food products compared with how they’re shown in ads. Ew.

The best-selling beer in the world. Ever knocked back an icy-cold can of Snow beer? No?  Believe it or not, this Chinese lager is the best-selling beer in the world, recently knocking Bud off the top spot.

We’re right to judge Susan Boyle’s looks. Scientists reckon humans can’t help judging a book by its cover, so while our snap judgements about Susan “Hairy Angel” Boyle may have revealed how shallow we are (and, in fairness, also how responsive we are to reality TV editing), it’s just how we are.

How Jack Daniels is made. We’re quite obsessed with videos of things being made. Especially in factories. I can’t speak for the rest of the Crikey team, but my personal addiction goes back to that footage they would show through the windows (go arched!) on Playschool of the ’70s Ansell rubber glove factory when I was a kid. Anyway, this is how they make Jack Daniels.

A whole chicken in a can. That’s right:

The verdict?

The white meat was a bit more cottony than the dark meat, but it all tasted like all the flavor had been cooked out. Sort of like the little bits of chicken in condensed chicken noodle soup. I thought before cooking it that I might use the meat in some sort of chicken salad, like you’d use canned chunk chicken breast but this is seriously lacking and I don’t think anyone would eat it.

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