At first glance it looks like any other page in a family-friendly, local newspaper.
But lurking within the adverts lining the letters page of the Pembrokeshire Herald, is a decidedly top-shelf offer.
For as well as a quality range of cars and vans, Enterprise-Rent-A-Car appears to be promising free pick-ups AND “cock sucking”.
The advert, published in the 19 July issue, has since gone viral but bosses at the newspaper are urging the police to investigate, believing it was deliberately sabotaged – “A number of adverts… had additional copy inserted into them after they had been proofed and signed off” said the editor.
Sounds like a disaffected ex-employee’s parting shot to me… or on the other hand, perhaps it is genuine – hard times demand drastic marketing strategies.
Either way, I’m impressed they managed to avoid any reference to sheep.
Starlight Castle is a folly – or rather, the ruins of a folly, situated on the slopes of the north side of Holywell Dene, near Seaton Sluice in Northumberland and built in 1750.
Only and arch and a couple of bits of wall remain, but once it looked like this…
Legend has it that it was built overnight in order to win a wager
Massive unemployment, increasing homelessness, people reliant on foodbanks and other charities to survive, a viscious but inept government – but today the people of Britain were celebrating as the unelected mafia they call the Royal Family spawned another parasite. Joy ! Now we know who our betters are for the next three generations.
Spotted in the Newcastle Journal of 5th July 2013… a letter from one Arnold Laing of Newcastle –
Twice in recent days I have been approached in a Newcastle street and asked for 41p.
Does this figure have some special meaning ?
Its a shame it wasn’t 42p, because as I’m sure we all know, 42 is, inThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxyby Douglas Adams, “The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything“, calculated by an enormous supercomputer over a period of 7.5 million years. Unfortunately no one remembers what the question is.
But it wasn’t 42. So what significance 41 ?
Not much, it seems. It’s the international direct dialing code for Switzerland, but its probably pushing credibility to suggest that the beggars of Newcastle are making coded references to their Swiss bank accounts.
It’s an odd number to ask for, especially as it would require a number of coins – three minimum – when it would be so much easier all round to request 50p and get it (if lucky) in one coin.
So maybe its just one of those random bits of weird shit that happen…well, just because they can.
1631 – Mumtaz Mahal died during childbirth. Her husband, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan I, spent the next 17 years building her mausoleum, the Taj Mahal.
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1939 – Last public guillotining in France: Eugen Weidmann, a convicted murderer, was guillotined in Versailles, outside the Saint-Pierre prison.
The “hysterical behaviour” of spectators was so scandalous that French president Albert Lebrun immediately banned all future public executions.
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1958 – Jello Biafra born. Former lead singer and songwriter for San Francisco punk rock band Dead Kennedys, now focused primarily on spoken word. He is a staunch believer in a free society, who utilizes shock value and advocates direct action and pranksterism in the name of political causes, known to use absurdist media tactics in the leftist tradition of the Yippies, to highlight issues of civil rights and social justice.
1941 – Reg Presley born. English singer-songwriter.
He was best known as the lead singer with the 1960s rock and roll band The Troggs, whose best known hit was “Wild Thing“, though their only UK number one single was the follow-up “With a Girl Like You“.
He also wrote the song “Love Is All Around” which featured in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, and used his royalties from that to fund his research in subjects such as alien spacecraft, lost civilisations, alchemy, and crop circles. He outlined his findings in a book, Wild Things They Don’t Tell Us, published in October 2002.
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1963 – Medgar Evers died. American civil rights activist from Mississippi involved in efforts to overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi.
After returning from overseas military service in World War II and completing his secondary education, he became active in the civil rights movement and a field secretary for the NAACP.
Evers was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens’ Council (a white supremacist organization) .
As a veteran, Evers was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, and his murder and the resulting trials inspired civil rights protests, as well as numerous works of art, music, and film.
1184 BC – Trojan War: Troy was sacked and burned, according to calculations by Eratosthenes.
In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans (Greeks) after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus king of Sparta.
The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology and has been narrated through many works of Greek literature, most notably through Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad relates a part of the last year of the siege of Troy; the Odyssey describes Odysseus’s journey home.
Other parts of the war are described in a cycle of epic poems, which have survived through fragments. Episodes from the war provided material for Greek tragedy and other works of Greek literature, and for Roman poets including Virgil and Ovid.
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1936 – The International Surrealist Exhibition opened in London, from 11 June to 4 July 1936 at the New Burlington Galleries.
The exhibition was opened in the presence of about two thousand people by André Breton. The average attendance for the whole of the Exhibition was about a thousand people per day.
During the course of the Exhibition, the following lectures were delivered to large audiences:
June 16 — André Breton — Limites non-frontières du Surréalisme. June 19 — Herbert Read — Art and the Unconscious. June 24 — Paul Éluard — La Poésie surréaliste. June 26 — Hugh Sykes Davies — Biology and Surrealism. July 1 — Salvador Dalí — Fantômes paranoïaques authentiques.
Dali’s lecture was delivered whilst wearing a deep-sea diving suit. Nearly suffocating during the presentation, Dali had to be rescued by the young poet David Gascoyne, who arrived with a spanner to release him from the diving helmet.
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1963 – Alabama Governor George Wallace stood at the door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in an attempt to block two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from attending that school.
Later in the day, accompanied by federalized National Guard troops, they are able to register.
1938 – Prince Buster born. Jamaican singer-songwriter, producer and sound system operator.
He is regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of ska and rocksteady music. The records he released in the 1960s influenced and shaped the course of Jamaican contemporary music and created a legacy of work that later reggae and ska artists would draw upon.
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1944 – Gladys Knight born. American singer-songwriter, actress, businesswoman, humanitarian, and author, best known for the hits she recorded during the 1960s and 1970s, for both the Motown and Buddah Records labels, with her group Gladys Knight & the Pips.
1725 – Jonathan Wild died. He was perhaps the most infamous criminal of London — and possibly Great Britain — during the 18th century, both because of his own actions and the uses novelists, playwrights, and political satirists made of them.
He invented a scheme which allowed him to run one of the most successful gangs of thieves of the era, all the while appearing to be the nation’s leading policeman. He manipulated the press and the nation’s fears to become the most loved public figure of the 1720s; this love turned to hatred when his villainy was exposed. After his death, he became a symbol of corruption and hypocrisy.
When Wild was taken for execution to the gallows at Tyburn , Daniel Defoe said that the crowd was far larger than any they had seen before and that, instead of any celebration or commiseration with the condemned,
“wherever he came, there was nothing but hollowing and huzzas, as if it had been upon a triumph.”
Wild’s hanging was a great event, and tickets were sold in advance for the best vantage points. Even in a year with a great many macabre spectacles, Wild drew an especially large and boisterous crowd. The hangman, Richard Arnet, had been a guest at Wild’s wedding.
In the dead of night, Wild’s body was buried in secret at the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church next to Elizabeth Mann, his third wife. His burial was only temporary.
In the 18th century, autopsies and dissections were performed on the most notorious criminals, and consequently Wild’s body was exhumed and sold to the Royal College of Surgeons for dissection. His skeleton remains on public display in the Royal College’s Hunterian Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
1701 – Captain William Kidd hanged for piracy, at Execution Dock, Wapping, in London. During the execution, the hangman’s rope broke and Kidd was hanged on the second attempt. His body was gibbeted over the River Thames at Tilbury Point as a warning to would-be pirates.
Some modern historians deem his piratical reputation unjust, as there is evidence that Kidd acted only as a privateer. Kidd’s fame springs largely from the sensational circumstances of his questioning before the English Parliament and the ensuing trial.
His actual depredations on the high seas, whether piratical or not, were both less destructive and less lucrative than those of many other contemporary pirates and privateers
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1934 – American bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were ambushed by police and killed in Black Lake, Louisiana.
Even during their lifetimes, the couple’s depiction in the press was at considerable odds with the hardscrabble reality of their life on the road—particularly in the case of Parker.
Though she was present at a hundred or more felonies during her two years as Barrow’s companion, she was not the machine gun-wielding cartoon killer portrayed in the newspapers, newsreels, and pulp detective magazines of the day. Gang member W. D. Jones was unsure whether he had ever seen her fire at officers.
Parker’s reputation as a cigar-smoking gun moll grew out of a playful snapshot found by police at an abandoned hideout, released to the press, and published nationwide; while she did chain-smoke Camel cigarettes, she was not a cigar smoker.
Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were wild and young, and supposedly slept together. Without Bonnie, the media outside Texas might have dismissed Clyde as a gun-toting punk, if it ever considered him at all. With her sassy photographs, Bonnie supplied the sex-appeal, the oomph, that allowed the two of them to transcend the small-scale thefts and needless killings that actually comprised their criminal careers.
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1943 – General Johnson born. American soul songwriter and record producer, and frontman of Chairmen Of The Board.
