Rumour Has It

Lip reading experts have today revealed that having blasted Labour frontbencher Angela Eagle during the week, telling her smugly to "calm down dear" and "listen to the doctor", British Prime Minister David Cameron, having sat back down, can be then seen quietly mouthing the words "and go back to tha kitchen and make me a cappa you faaahhkinn sllaaaaahhhggg" to his equally smug fellow front benchers.

Bridezillas Across Britain And Ireland Curse “That Bitch”

Across the world yesterday millions tuned in to watch commoner garden waif Kate/Catherine Middleton fulfil her dream of becoming a princess by marrying dashing helicopter pilot and heir to the British throne William “Son of Diana, Don’t Mention Charles” Windsor.  But while the wide-eyed masses oohed and aahed at the lavish ceremony hosted at their expense, up and down the length and breadth of Britain and Ireland brides-to-be were clambering over themselves to decry this selfish act of wedding day terrorism.

Angela Lansbury, 26, was already six months into planning her nuptials when the date for the Royal Gala was announced.  “I was fucking sick!” Angela explained yesterday, as she was being doused in Victoria Beckham’s signature perfume just before being herded into a rented Renault Megane that would take her to her date with destiny, “I mean, what a bitch.  This day was supposed to be about me.  MEEE!!  But NOOOO.  I even caught me fuckin MA lookin’ at pictures on her phone during me vows.”

Angela’s howls of anguish were echoed by women across Britain and Ireland yesterday as their ‘big day’ was shown up as being really rather small, tawdry, and frankly insignificant.  Brides of Frank creator and professional wedding planner Paul Quinn, 52,  (“I can’t believe you printed that” [ed].) summed it up yesterday. “In wedding terms, the big RW is like an effing freight train, like in that film, Speed. NO, forget that.  It’s a tsu-nami, yah.  Completely fucking devastating to anything in its path, yah”.  While one of his clients demanded that all televisions in the hotel be removed, covered or at least swtitched to Songs Of Praise, another, PR guru Safi Tamara Piñata Hershey-O’Jones, 34, flatly refused to leave her hotel until something could be done about that “jumped up little stewardess”.  “She was hopping mad.  Like literally hopping”, explained Quinn, “She’s all, “I mean who does she think she is?  She’s not even proper posh!  There are 300 people arriving here in an hour, I have the doves the Beckhams used, I have KEITH BARRY booked to perform at eight, but it’ll be all Kate n’ Will this and Kate n’ Will that, just cause they got Elton bleedin’ John!!  She’s a fu...”, well you can guess the rest.  I was like, Jeez louise, take a fucking Valium love, it’s ONLY A WEDDING, yah know?  But she’s been planning it since the womb, so...”.

While emotions were understandably running high with Brides across the nations, even some of the bridesmaids were seen wearing looks of consternation during their respective ceremonies, with many having to ask, ‘just who the hell this Pippa girl’ was and ‘what was so bloody special’ about her that everyone felt the need to compare?  One embittered bridesmaid was even heard responding “I mean if she was that bloody special he’d be doffing her wouldn’t he?  Hmmm, makes you wonder, I mean, well, you know...”.

However,  while the brides and bridesmaids were pulling their expensively sculpted hair-dos out in fury yesterday the Best Men of the Britain and Ireland were collectively having a good laugh as they surveyed William’s brother, Harry “Son Of Diana, Don’t Mention Charles, No Really, Don’t” Windsor, standing by his rapidly balding brother in what appeared to be his Dad’s army uniform.  “He looked like he’d been shrunk in the wash”, one best man joked, “except his hair, which was still, like, massive!  But Will has, like, no hair.  Hmmm, funny that. Makes you wonder, I mean, well, you know...”.

Buckingham Palace was still too sloshed today to comment.

The Bite Size Blog Review Presents

Thor

Directed By Kenneth Branagh

Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Anthony Hopkins, 154mins

Hemsworth star shines bright, but irrelevant 3D, an overloaded script and a criminally underused Portman send this one back to the sketchbook.  It’s not all Branagh’s fault though, this is clearly a stepping stone to next year’s Marvel Mega Movie: Avengers.  Maybe then they’ll let the God Of Thunder roll.  6/10

Millions Of Facebook Users Shocked To Discover Their Every Move Is Not Being Tracked

Millions of users of the social networking site Facebook were shocked to discover this week that their every move is not being tracked.  While users of the site with a smartphone were told that hidden files had been secretly gathering location information on them for up to 12 months Facebook members who use a traditional PC or laptop device have apparently been left out in the technological cold.

Nigel Holden, 37, on-line diarist and beardy founder of the Track Me I’m Yours blog is just one of Facebook’s bitterly disappointed PC-based users.  He had this to say, “Frankly I’m pissed.  I mean there I am, night and day updating my status, posting pictures, tagging friends so that everyone knows what I’m up to, and now, just because I don’t have a “so-called” smartphone I’m not going to be able to let people constantly know where I am.  I mean how is a traditional PC user like me supposed to keep up?”

Many smartphone users on the other hand were delighted at the news that their handsets were continuously monitoring their movements.  Bianca French, 21, a student and model in Dublin was overjoyed by the discovery.  “I mean it’s just, like, fab, ya know, it like, oh my God, sooo random, cause, like I was just saying to Jess in Krystle last night, like, that I’m sooo over having to like check in everywhere on FB to let, like everyone know where you are and stuff, and like when you’ve got into Krystle cause the doorguy who looks just like Brian O Driscoll, like, nodded at you, but Cat and Leslie are stuck outside cause they wore Uggs to the pub like total plebs, but you’re, like in, so you check in on FB and they can’t and they’re like soooo jealous.  But it’s, like a total pain cause I’m so over checking in, but now, like my phone just tells everyone where I am, so that’s like soooooooo.... ya know?”

Apple and Google, the handset providers at the centre of the controversy have yet to make an official statement, safe in the knowledge that they will soon release something new and shiny and the furore will die down.  A spokesperson for Facebook, however told reporters today that “while the ability of many smartphones to record their users movements is a little creepy and worryingly Orwellian it’s not really going to make that much difference in a world where people post status updates from the toilet”.

Hollywood Experiences Déjà Vu. Again.

Hollywood, Ca.  The release of Jake Gyllenhaal Sci-Fi Actioner Source Code has been marred by controversy this week, as it appears that the memo that prompted its development was meant as a joke.

Producers and executives at the film’s production company were wishing they could turn back the clock for real yesterday as it was revealed that on April 1^st last year Development Executive David Birnbaum had circulated a memo suggesting that the 2006 Tony Scott/Denzel Washington Sci-Fi Actioner Déjà Vu was ripe for a remake.  The reasons he said, were clear.  “We made a few mistakes last time round”, the lawyer turned entertainer states in the memo, “I mean casting a black lead AND a black love interest!?  What were we thinking!?  And Val Kilmer!  I mean come on!  This time out all we need to do is switch the older black couple for a hot young white couple, swap out the crazy white soldier bad guy for a weird, smug black doctor bad guy and switch the exploding boat for some other kind of big exploding vehicle, something fast, like a train.  And hey presto!  $100 mill, guaranteed!  While we’re at it we should drop the French name in case people in Iowa think it’s a foreign movie, they hate those.  Call it something meaningless like Source:Code, only you know, better.  They’ll lap it up!”  Birnbaum also went on to suggest that the writers watch at least one season of classic 80s Sci-Fi Comedy Quantum Leap before putting anything down on paper, and that “the science” behind the Source Code should make absolutely no sense at all.

Executives at the company, apparently unable to tell a good idea from a side of ham rushed the movie into production in order to meet Birnbaum’s proposed release date of April 1^st, 2011, April Fool’s Day, without copping that they were being had.

Speaking through his lawyer Mr. Birnbaum was resistant to the idea that he had put the financial future of the entire company in jeopardy with his stunt, “The movie I was suggesting remaking was called Déjà Vu, it means Seen Before!  It’s a TONY SCOTT MOVIE!  How could they not realise I was joking!

Mr. Birnbaum, however rather than being run out of the company has been promoted to President, as in a post script to his April Fools Memo he also jokingly suggested making a fourth Pirates Of The Caribbean movie, a movie mash-up between High Noon and Independence Day, and remaking “that Jap motorbike cartoon Akira with the kid from Twilight”.

Source Code is expected to top the US box office this weekend.

Elbow Take The Point

Elbow, The O2 Arena, Dublin, 31^st of March, 2010

I’ve seen Elbow four times now, and they’ve never failed to surprise.  When they first came to my attention five years ago I was on a hillock somewhere in Laois and a friend of mine told me that they would be bigger and more influential than Radiohead.  I scoffed.  It was the Celtic Tiger, scoffing was what we did back then.  The songs were slow and little needy.  Where was the swagger?  I didn’t get it.  Turns out Elbow were just ahead of the curve.

Six months later I was a rabid fan and caught both the Ambassador show and the “Deck Of The Cutty Sark” show at Oxegen six months after that.  Both were revelatory for entirely different reasons.  In two utterly different venues the band held steady and embraced the audience with a warm devotion that was completely lacking in any other act of their size.   Of course by now The Seldom Seen Kid and One Day Like This were everywhere.  The tea leaves were clear: these guys were going to be major stadium filling rock stars.

Then came Build A Rocket Boys! (complete with exclamation mark).  No doubt a beautiful, elegiac and solid follow up to their biggest album to date.  But anthemic?  Not so much.  My first taste of the album was Lippy Kids, a six minute, percussion free, ode to ASBOs.  Hmph, something wasn’t quite right here.  When I got my hands on the album it became clear that the slower, needier Elbow of Asleep At The Wheel and Cast Of Thousands was back.  Only now, I got it.  It wasn’t slow, it was thoughtful.  And it wasn’t needy, it just required the listeners attention.  It was what it was, take it or leave it, mate.  Ok, great.  But live?  I had my doubts.  Of course Elbow were still ahead of the curve.

From opener The Birds to sing-a-long closer Open Arms the new songs soared in a live setting, while the quieter moments of Lippy Kids and The Night Will Always Win held the audience in a rapt, reverential awe.  Probably the punchiest track on the new album, Neat Little Rows, took on a new life of its own, Mark Potter’s guitar, while restrained and couched on the album, exploded on the stage, threatening to blow the roof of the place right off.  And of the new tracks it was only With Love, that never quite found its feet. 

But it didn’t matter.  Whatever magic that I’d seen at previous Elbow shows just became magnified in the O2 arena.  Somehow the band made the 8,000 capacity auditorium seem like a cramped, sweaty, intimate cellar bar.  Of course much of the credit for this goes, quite deservedly as it happens, to Guy Garvey.  Shambling amiably from the main stage to the smaller, middle of the crowd “B-Stage” like your favourite uncle after a few pints, Garvey invites you in: telling stories, sharing banter, high-fives and hats with the audience, and generally just having the craic.  And in case you were sitting in the Gods and felt a little forgotten about he had a special standing ovation for the row furthest from the stage.  EVERYONE was made to feel included.  Then there are the striking relationships within the band itself.  As Garvey revealed, they’ll have been a band for twenty years in June, and it shows.  No matter what size a venue they perform in the band have taken to performing one or two songs huddled tightly together, sharing the space with each other, bringing them, and more importantly, us, back to the days of “One little room and the biggest of plans”.  It’s always an almost unsettlingly intimate moment and even in the cavernous, new-look Point Depot, it loses none of its potency.  And that is their greatest strength as a live unit.  Their ability to bring you inside that huddle.  When he tells us “Mark Potter on guitar, ladies and gentlemen, he’s my mate”, you just want to be in there gang, and you are, because an Elbow show is an incredibly inclusive experience, as 8,000 people realised last night while singing Open Arms coda “Everyone’s here”.

Despite having more salt than pepper in their hair Elbow are clearly a band looking to the future however.  While much of the main set was made up of the new material, back catalogue standards from Seldom Seen Kid and Leaders Of The Free World did feature.  A no-holds barred rendition of Grounds For Divorce has become an Elbow mainstay while that albums quieter moments Some Riot, Lonliness Of A Tower Crane Driver and Weather To Fly also made the grade.  Previous live favourites Leaders Of The Free World and Forget Myself didn’t however and only Great Expectations, Station Approach and Puncture Repair were there to represent the band prior to their Mercury Prize winning breakthrough.  It’s a sign of the complete confidence the band have in their material and their audience that they can drop two of the foot-slamming, fingers in the air crowd pleasers in favour of a quieter set and still lift the entire room to rapture.  Of course when you can round off the evening with One Day Like This you can be sure that the audience will go home hoarse and happy.  And at least we beat Glasgow in the Sing Off.