Friday, June 03, 2016

It turns out there is one piece of London property with affordable rents

There's cutting a deal, and there's cutting a deal:


The annual rent on the Brixton Academy was set in 1929, and won't be reviewed until 2029. £8,0002,600 a year.


Thursday, June 02, 2016

Miley Cyrus: If you have tears, prepare to shed them now

Poor Carl McCoid. He used to like Miley Cyrus. He used to like her a lot.

So much so, he got 29 Miley Cyrus tattoos, all over his body.

The problem? Oh, Carl:

He said: "People can't seem to see past the tattoos and it was having a very negative effect on my life where I felt trapped by them. I've just gone off her."
Carl is trapped in a cell of his own making. A skin cell, if you will.

He's blaming the tattoos for his inability to get a girlfriend - which might be confusing symptoms with the problem.

Still, was Miley impressed with his efforts?
Miley said in an interview last year that Carl's tattoos were "ugly" and "creepy", but Carl, a dad-of-three, insists her comments are not the main reason he wants to get them removed.
Carl appears to believe that Miley is too raunchy. And:
Carl, who runs his own ironing business from home, realised his obsession had gone too far when he stood in front of the mirror and was shocked by the sight of his Miley-covered torso.
Potential girlfriends don't like them. Miley Cyrus doesn't like them. He doesn't like them.

Oh, Carl.
He has spent £2,700 on the tattoos, which he says seem to be the only talking point when he goes on dates. He said: "The conversation just seems to be centred around them and it just gets boring. I feel like I can't move on."
He's having some of the tatts removed, and others will be covered over with other designs. Presumably meaning on future dates the conversation will be centred on why he has a tattoo of Miley Cyrus wearing a Groucho Marx face mask.


Bpop rearranges line-up

The troubled BPop live event - the gig encouraging people to vote leave in this month's referendum - has struggled with a line up after 5ive and Alesha Dixon discovered what they'd been signed up for and, well, voted to leave the bill.

But people are rushing in to fill the gap. They've got an Elvis Impersonator and, erm, whatever cadaver the bits of flesh that used to be Bucks Fizz are stitched into these days:


Not the real Elvis. Not the real Bucks Fizz. For the campaign without any grounding in reality. It all makes sense now.


Krist Novoselic has made his presidential choice

Krist Novoselic - very much the other one out of Nirvana - has decided he's going to through his weight behind the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. The Libertarian party, of course, is very much the Kirst Novoselic of US parties.

Novoselic has also defended Citizens United, says Politico:

Novoselic then tweeted a link to a blog post written last Thursday in which he laid out his thoughts on the landmark 2010 Citizens United case and the history of campaign finance law in general.
"The best one can do to serve democracy is to understand and study issues," he wrote in the nearly 3,700-word treatise. "Don’t believe the hype about Citizens United. It was a good ruling that protected the right of people to hear information without the government picking and choosing who could speak."
It's not, but you can see why extremely rich people like to believe that.


Sunday, May 29, 2016

Where is Robbie Williams playing these days?

I suppose if you're Robbie Williams, you'd be lucky to get a gig anywhere these days, but what a surprise to discover him headlining a gig in Tblisi. Not any old gig, either - one paid for the government.

Maroon Five and Jose Carreras are also taking part in the - let's call them "celebrations", shall we?

And that's not all:

In addition to the Government-organised activities, Check in Georgia will also include events and activities hosted by private companies. Furthermore, agricultural and product displays including wine and cheese festivals will offer the best of local production to visitors.
It's a wonder they could keep Alex James away from it all.

So, Robbie Williams getting a payday from the Georgian government. That's alright, isn't it?

I mean, the Georgian government isn't terrible. They even endorsed a queer pride event last year, as Amnesty reports:
The International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHOT) proceeded peacefully in Tbilisi in a discreet location on 17 May
Well, that's lovely. Although... why was it discreet?
The authorities had refused to guarantee the event’s safety unless it was held at a specific location without any prior public announcement.
Perhaps not entirely in keeping with the spirit of the day.

Now, you could say that it's not Williams beef. Why should he decide where to play based on attitudes to queer people?

But his Georgian government paymasters are problematic in other ways, too:
On 15 March, approximately 50 supporters of the Georgian Dream ruling coalition forcibly entered the local offices of [opposition party] UNM and an affiliated group in Zugdidi, armed with wooden sticks, throwing stones and smashing windows. Nine people were reported injured, including one of the police officers who tried to intervene but were outnumbered by the attackers.

Concerns over freedom of expression were voiced by local NGOs and political commentators who believed that a lawsuit by a former shareholder of Rustavi 2 against its current owners was prompted by the government to deprive the opposition of its main mouthpiece. On 21 October, the director of Rustavi 2 reported having been blackmailed, claiming that the security services threatened to release intimate footage of him unless he resigned. The Tbilisi City Court found in favour of the former shareholder, and Rustavi 2 managers were forcibly replaced with pro-government caretakers on 5 November, against the Constitutional Court ruling that an appeal had to be heard first.

On 17 September, the Constitutional Court ruled to release Gigi Ugulava, an opposition activist and former Mayor of the capital, Tbilisi. It deemed his pre-trial detention since 2013 – on charges of misappropriation of public funds and money laundering – illegal as it exceeded the nine-month legal limit. The Court’s judges came under heavy criticism from senior government officials for this decision and were threatened with violence by some pro-government groups. On 18 September, Gigi Ugulava was sentenced to four-and-a-half years’ imprisonment on account of these charges, and rearrested the same day.
But Maroon 5 and Robbie Williams, almost certainly, wouldn't find themselves on the hard end of this dodgy justice.

To be fair to Williams, it's possible he didn't entirely feel thrilled at his new bosses. The English language Agenda.ge tried to talk up his enthusiasm:
The British singer shared his thoughts about his Tbilisi performance to his social media followers on Twitter on Thursday:
Under this, they reproduce this tweet to illustrate Williams' sharing:

So the best example Agenda could find of Williams' thoughts was a photo of him looking like a middle aged man waiting for his wife to emerge from a BHS restaurant toilet and a slew of hashtags that read like a particularly weak contestant on Catchphrase trying to work out what Mr Chips is telling them.


Harry Styles: This is probably a better review than they realise

"How is Harry Style's acting?"
"Well, his haircut is fabulous."