Good Boys Finish First

People of London, you may soon find yourself running into RuPaul on the street. He’s in town shooting Drag Race UK at the moment and isn’t shying away from the public (he and Michelle Visage were spotted having an earlybird dinner in Leon near the Adelphi Theatre).

But be warned: if you’re thinking of asking for a selfie, you’d better have cash on you. Someone who approached him was told, before they’d even so much as opened their mouth, “It’ll be 25 dollars, kid…”

FYI: At today’s exchange rate that works out at about £19.22 and Ru doesn’t strike us as the type to carry a float, so make sure you have exact change.

Andrea Leadsom is hosting a big event this weekend. A marquee complete with glitterballs and an LED-starlit ceiling awaits as Andrea’s son celebrates his 21st birthday with a Great Gatsby themed party.

There’s a lot of competing theories as to what The Great Gatsby is supposed to be about. Some believe Jay Gatsby’s love for Daisy represents a longing for a perfect past that didn’t actually exist. Some think the decadence is supposed to depict the American Dream disintegrating for ordinary folk, while a rich and powerful class lie their way through life, remaining untouchable.

Scott Fitzgerald describes the characters as “careless people”, who smash things up and “let other people clean up the mess they made.”

Anyway, we digress… Have fun at your party!

There’s an interesting production of Shakespeare’s Richard II on at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the moment (the intimate, candlelit space at the Globe) where the play’s entire cast and crew is made up exclusively of women of colour.

It clearly wasn’t interesting enough to grab Diane Abbott’s attention though, as when she went to see a showing of it last week she spent the whole of the first half tapping away on her mobile, until the ushers had to step in and tell her to stop.

And then spent the second half letting it buzz away noisily in her bag.

It’s been a while since we last checked in with the weird world of luxury pet accessories but, as April is National Pet Month and many of you will no doubt be looking to treat your puppy pal to a little special something to mark the occasion, here’s a humble suggestion that we saw this week.

The hottest dog gift going: a doggy sex doll.

[NB: You can’t unsee this]

The Writers Guild of America is currently suing a raft of huge Hollywood talent agencies in a new fight over writers’ wages. Though this might seem like tedious industry business, we’ve written before about the far-reaching, real world catastrophes that occur whenever the WGA has cause to strike.

Last time they downed tools, in 2007, the strike was a leading factor in the rehabilitation of Donald Trump’s career – paving the way for him to transmute his TV profile into a successful run for president.

The strike before that, in 1988, was instrumental in spawning reality TV, the genre which saved Rupert Murdoch’s fledgling Fox network from dying on the vine.

The world is dangling by too fine a thread for the WGA to call another strike. So we’re hoping and praying that the former Jimmy Kimmel writer who is currently accusing James Corden of attending a WGA meeting without any of his writers to advocate for a lower pay-grade to be introduced is somehow misremembering a critical detail.

Because if he’s right, and James fucking Corden is the one who ends up ushering in the apocalypse, then humanity deserves its fate.

As things start shutting down in preparation for the four-day Easter weekend, when it’s traditional for people to break the fast of Lent and gorge on eggs, a quick reminder that the record to beat belongs to Nigella Lawson.

The comedian Arthur Smith once bet Nigella 200 quid that she couldn’t eat a dozen pickled eggs in a row.

Needless to say, he lost.

Russia famously declared that the Eurovision Song Contest had become a “hotbed of sodomy” when Conchita Wurst won in 2014, so we’re really looking forward to seeing what they make of Iceland’s BDSM leather-fetish electro-growlers, Hatari.

Hatari are proving to be so popular with primary school kids in Iceland that entire classes are now singing their song at their school concerts.

[See the little angels singing]

FYI: In case your Icelandic is a little rusty, the song’s title is ‘Hate Will Prevail’ and the opening lines roughly translate as “Debauchery unconstrained! / Hangover uncontained!”

You may have seen that EDM fans at Miami’s recent Ultra festival were forced to endure an absolutely piss-poor bit of guerrilla advertising last month as a bloke in a Frank Sidebottom-style Colonel Sanders head took a five minute slot in between acts, where he pretended to DJ a terrible tune about KFC being finger lickin’ good.

People got a little sniffy about this cynical hijacking of the music scene (and with good reason; it was fucking shit) but KFC actually has some pretty big credentials in the industry – in Indonesia.

U2’s former producer Steve Lillywhite now lives in Jakarta and he teamed up with KFC in order to sell CDs through their restaurants. So now when you go to get your family bucket in Indonesia you get asked if you want to buy a CD with it. In a country with few record shops and a slow pivot to streaming, millions of people take them up on it – making KFC one of the biggest names in music there.

As well as being a huge pop icon across the Middle East in the late 80s and 90s, it seems that Sam Fox has had a lasting effect in the Balkans too.

Owing to her vague resemblance to Ms Fox, the Serbian folk singer Gordana Miletić was given the nickname ‘Folk Samanta’ in the press there. If you squint at her video for Ja Nisam Devojka Za Jednu Noc (“I’m Not A One-Night Girl”) you can maybe see it for yourself.

Miletić was so flattered by the comparison that she dropped her own name and began performing under ‘Folk Samanta’ instead – a name she has continued to use professionally for more than 30 years.

[Here’s Folk Samanta in 2016]

Shop the Steve Bannon look
[Get it on Bannon Fashion]

Taxidermy mouse chess board
[Snap it up on Etsy]

The signs of the BBC
[Good Twitter thread]

Local news of the week: piss breaks with the Prime Minister
[Read on Shropshire Star]

Cute story about GCHQ cracking the code of Frank Sidebottom
[Read on BBC]

Someone tried to reenact the Aristocrats joke at Walmart…
[See on WGME]

Still Bored?
Excellent dive into life at Facebook
[Read on Wired]