The Second Serve // Hot’n’Cold Hamsters

Popbitch Popquiz // February Edition

Featuring eight brand new rounds of trivia, gossip, music and guesswork, inc. Rebekah Vardy: Text Offender, Celebrity Cupid, Guess The Lookalike, Real Housewives or Readers’ Wives? and more. Your Club Popbitch membership means you get it – and all other Play-At-Home Popquizzes – for free.

[Download it here]

“What passes for fearlessness is sometimes just naivety” – Margaret Atwood

A second serving of scandal and slander Subscribe

Email stories to us club@popbitch.com

* Stormy weekends at Downing St

* Phonehacking: the second decade

* PLUS: A lot of animal spunk

>> Tap / Out <<

The write stuff

News broke this weekend that Dua Lipa has binned her management company, Tap Music. According to reports, Dua is supposedly pissed off at the financial settlements her manager Ben Mawson had made on her behalf. Sounds like she’s not the only one who’s a bit disgruntled either.
Artists on his roster are apparently getting wind that he’s been strong-arming certain songwriters into giving him points on their songs, which would entitle him to take a slice of the royalties on top of his standard management fees.
Nice to see there’s still some life in the old “Change A Word, Take A Third” trick…

Kim Kardashian keeps a bag of hair that was cut from her head on April 11th 1988 (when she was 7).

>> Fight night <<

More leaks at Downing St

The exodus from No.10 that saw Boris Johnson’s loyal inner circle resign en masse has largely blown over now – but a whisper remains around Westminster that that fateful weekend led to more than just colleagues storming out of Downing Street. There’s talk that Carrie staged a walkout too.
In fairness, the atmosphere that weekend must have been rough. The Partygate accusations, the looming threat of Sue Gray, talk of police investigations, the serialisation of Michael Ashcroft’s Carrie biography running in the Mail On Sunday. With all of that heaped on top of tending to a two-month-old, we wouldn’t blame anyone for packing a bag and making for the exit.
The straw that supposedly did it for Carrie? A fight with Boris about Munira Mirza.

No.10 Communications Director Guto Harri had a nickname during his time at News UK: “Brent”. As in David.

>> Lyin’ enclosure <<

Someone’s telling tails

The London Zoo press office don’t appear to be particularly happy with us after we mentioned the stories that circulate around staff about how the lions have been known to find a way out of their enclosure. Someone at the Express put the story to ZSL this weekend, who responded that it was “categorically untrue” and “ridiculous”.
We don’t want to get into a big flame war with the London Zoo over this (which is why we’re only telling you, our beloved Club Popbitch members) but the lion story came from two different people who dealt with two different departments there – and it wasn’t the only thing we were told.
Apparently the animals that try most persistently to escape are the chimps, so they’ve got extra special Fort Knox-style security in their enclosure featuring airlock dead zones which kick in if any of them manage to breach the first layer.

Word from staff at Newquay Zoo is that their lions like to sit up on a high perch in their enclosure so that they can see the car park. They get particularly excited by toddlers and dogs.

>> Beef curtains <<

A whale of a time

London Zoo describing the lion claim as “ridiculous” reminded us of a story that tangentially involves man-of-the-moment Tommy Lee.
About ten years ago, when SeaWorld was facing loads of negative publicity over the death of one of their whale trainers, Tommy wrote an open letter to SeaWorld about the resort’s orca breeding programme – telling them that even in his wildest Motley Crue days he couldn’t have envisioned something so “sick and twisted” as the way he’d heard they procured sperm from whales.
The method that had shocked and appalled one of metal’s most notoriously debauched hellraisers? Filling a cow’s vagina with hot water and having their trainers work it on the whale like a sort of makeshift pocket pussy.
FYI: SeaWorld called Tommy’s claim “ludicrous”, although former employees have gone on record describing that as the process used in their early days – before they switched to the less extravagant lube’n’glove method of the modern day.

Blanket – the son that Michael Jackson famously dangled over that balcony – turns 20 today.

>> Furry fetish <<

Blowing hot and cold on hamsters

Seeing as we’ve crossed the animal spunk rubicon: things are getting very weird for Hong Kong hamsters.
You may remember a couple of weeks back that Hong Kong’s main medical expert announced there was some cause for concern that people could be catching Covid from hamsters. The authorities therefore initiated a huge citywide hamster cull, looking to exterminate 2,000 of the little critters. Owners – unwilling to hand their pets over to the death squads – instead turned hamsters loose into the city by their hundreds.
Now the same medical professor has just given a press conference that has made headlines suggesting that men’s fertility could be at risk if they catch Covid. His evidence for this comes from… you guessed it! Hamsters.
He noticed hamsters’ sex drives were lower a week after being infected with Covid, their sperm count reduced and their testicles became “smaller and lighter”.

Just in time to celebrate the cost of living crisis hitting, Richard Caring is opening a new Mayfair restaurant for the ultra-wealthy: Bacchanalia – approvingly modelled on a Vanity Fair hatchet job about Silicon Valley excess.

>> Hackathon <<

The neverending story

It’s been just over ten years since Popbitch was called to give evidence at the Leveson Inquiry, and still the phone-hacking case keeps rumbling on.
The latest chatter in legal circles suggests that News UK is likely to be batting off even more cases soon (probably at huge cost, on the steps of the Royal Courts) as yet more notebook evidence has been newly uncovered by claimants’ lawyers.
The cost to Murodch’s publishing business to date? Over a billion.

A big weekend for grim ends to dark, scandalous stories: Jeffrey Epstein’s fixer was found hanged in his jail cell, while Bernie Madoff’s sister and brother-in-law were found dead in a suspected murder-suicide.

>> Popquiz <<

This week’s audio rounds

Last week saw audio quizzes about gameshows, birds and strange time signatures. This week we’ve got another fifty songs, all freshly ground up and sprinkled across five 3-minute mixes. All you have to do is identify the ten songs and the ten artists in each.
Monday’s Theme: Rejected Hits – songs famously turned down by other artists.
If you fancy making it extra challenging for yourself, there are bonus ten points up for grabs in this one if you can name the megastar artists who initially turned each of these songs down first.
[Play it here]

There are 80 audio quizzes in the Club Popbitch archives now, all available for you to play at the click of a button. So if you’re new here, or just have a very boring evening ahead of you, you can play them whenever you like.

[The Audio Quiz Archive]

>> Hmmms <<

A few quick things

Dave Lee Travis’s wild celebrity photography

[Inexplicably weird]
Elmo in Dune

[Watch on YouTube]
Trump’s Twitter alternative went live last night

[If you fancy signing up]
A rabbit falling over eating a cranberry

[Simple, but effective]

Thanks to: danceswithmustelids, TP, monstris, ML, mrshoman, mount_st_nobody, NS, C, NJ, theabominablehoman

Old Jokes Home

Q/ What do you call people who hate pickles?

A/ Non-brinary

Fancy Another?