Photo: ALPHA PRESS via Daily Telegraph
I did another Sky News internet stories round-up last night, which is nerve-wrackingly exciting. While at the Sky studio I saw a couple of women walking ahead of me who were dressed in Charlie Chaplin hats and shorts. Funny, I thought. Women are already copying Shabby, the beautiful lesbian tantrum-queen from this last series of Big Brother who walked out the other night. Then I realised, hey, this WAS Shabby and friend doing the media rounds for the five minutes that she’s still hot. She’s unique and very, very bright so I expect we haven’t seen the last of her. She’s also much taller and leaner than she looks on the telly. O crikey! What’s it doing to me, then?
My round-up stories in no particular order:
Ridley Scott, a brit who’s huge in Hollywood, has a million films in development but still has time for an interesting new one. He’s joined forces with YouTube for a mass global film experiment. On July 24th — 24/7 in Americanese — they want you and me to film ourselves doing something ordinary and everyday. It could be brushing your teeth, washing up, putting out the rubbish, just a moment from a normal day. Then upload it to YouTube where clips will be selected from submissions from around the world to typify the global day. Developing countries are included and NGOs are handing out cameras and equipment in preparation for the world event. I wonder if walking miles for a container of water or mopping up oil spills from your front yard will feature.
Napoleon said we were a nation of shopkeepers but that may change. Move over Sainsbury and Tesco. You are about to get a taste of your own medicine as Amazon launches its UK online grocery service. For a fee of £49 per year, you can get one-day delivery of groceries just as you do books, household goods, fashion, beauty and, from last week, musical instruments. This directly challenges Ocado at the very moment it is looking for shareholders to invest. As you can bulk buy, too, I doubt Costco will be pleased. You can buy online via a computer or a smart phone, and Apple has an application so you can shop through your iPhone or iPod.
Talking of Apple, fans are going nuts for the new iPhone 4 despite reports of reception problems that can only be remedied by the application of nail polish or sticky-tape. Owners of iPhones are trading in their older new models for cash sums up to £170, making the Apple 3G the most recycled phone last month. Even the third generation 3S is being offloaded in favour of the 4th gen. Me, I’m sticking to my Nokia 5800 until Apple sort out the reception problem or else make the nail polish application downloadable.
The internet is dead. Long live the internet. Prince has declared the net to be so over “like MTV. MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.” Prince may be a bit of a King Canute in his attempt to hold back the tide of technology but this may be explained by his run-in with iTunes who refuse to pay artists upfront. He is again releasing an album — the latest is called 20Ten — for free via a newspaper: in this Saturday’s Daily Mirror and its sister paper in Scotland, The Daily Record. I will be getting mine.
Bong! We leave you with an inspiring animal story: The Great Escape but with monkeys. A group of monkeys escaped from their forest enclosure at a laboratory in Kyoto University by catapulting themselves over a 17 foot electrified fence using branches of a tree ten feet away. How smart is that? Unfortunately, once they were out, they didn’t know what to do and hung around the gates like bored kids until lured back by food. Just like us: we want to escape the system but will come back for peanuts. Hey, monkey, don’tcha know you have to change the world not describe it? Oh no, that’s philosophers, not baboons. Close but no peanut.
Anna’s food blog here:
http://annacheneats.blogspot.com/