Karl Pilkington once claimed, in a Monkey News, that a woman working at an animal sanctuary was fired from her job, because a chimpanzee wanted to play with her breasts and she refused. The 'foreman' apparently demanded that she comply with the wishes of the 'monkey', and when she didn't she was summarily sacked.

Ricky and Steve ridiculed the story ( Read more... )

Without doubt, my favourite director is Werner Herzog. One of my pet hates in any artistic form is people trying to be weird - being deliberately eccentric - which is why I appreciate a true original like Herzog: a mad, weird visionary who never appears to be doing anything less than what he considers he should be doing. There's no artifice in the ( Read more... )

Generally, I have no interest in celebrities, celebrity gossip, or celebrity reality TV shows. The very idea of 'celebrity' is horrible, appalling, and any number of other derogatory comments, and the fact that people should pay real money to read about the exploits of the unjustly famous is something I find weird beyond measure. People like Paris ( Read more... )

One of the most annoying things about life in a foreign country is, I think, the fact that you're marked out as different and become treated as such, unavoidably. This is especially true if you're of different ethnic origin to the native population, but it happens even in situations where the 'foreigner' is extremely similar to the 'host' - like ( Read more... )

I find US presidential elections very interesting. Partly it's because in Britain we don't vote for our Prime Ministers - only the party - so the idea of actually voting for a person is a sort of novelty. Also, to an outsider, the whole process seems so wonderfully Byzantine; full of terms like "caucus" and "primary" and "electoral college" - it ( Read more... )

So for the first time in history a regular, competitive NFL game was played in London today. Some gang of jokers called the New York Giants against a bunch of wankers called the Miami Dolphins. Yeah, I hadn't heard of either of them either.

(I'm just kidding. When I was a boy a friend of mine got into American football, and his favourite team was ( Read more... )

Yes, it's true, everybody. Our worst fears are to be realised. In 100,000 years' time there will be two races of human beings on planet earth, just like H. G. Wells predicted.

Well, this is according to "evolutionary theorist" Oliver Curry at LSE, anyway. Apparently, people will become "choosier" in their sexual partners in the next 1,000 years, ( Read more... )

Apparently there is big danger now for the Springboks: despite being the strongest team in the world, it seems that politicians and politicking might be about the seriously undermine their success by imposing racial quotas on team selection.

Let me come right out and say: I understand the arguments both for and against affirmative action, and I ( Read more... )

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I hate the idea of Blog Action Day with every fibre of my being. Why? Because all it achieves is a sense of self-congratulation: "I posted about how we should save the environment, thereby doing my bit." Well, here's the truth, everyone - nobody who doesn't care about the environment is going to be motivated to change by reading some angsty 17-year ( Read more... )