The funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

Let me say this: that boy has no business on the back of that donkey. None whatsoever. At one point – when they both go careering into the bushes – I’m seriously thinking, if this video gets any funnier, I might actually die laughing. (Spoiler alter: it then gets even funnier.)

Of all the juice bars in all the world…

“Barkeep. Hit me with a Blueberry Burst – and don’t spare the blueberry!” Read the rest of this article here.

This is funny

Hello, is it me you’re looking for?

On the Palestine Papers

A few years ago, a friend and I were discussing conspiracy theories. We both dismissed the vast majority of them out of hand. But I was willing to entertain the remote possibility that Diana, Princess of Wales, might have been assassinated by British intelligence officers.

I don’t for a second believe that she was murdered. I was merely acknowledging that this far-fetched plot, unlike the moon landings, or 9/11, would at least have had a coherent motive and required the complicity (and subsequent silence) of a managably small number of conspirators. Read the rest of this entry »

I Wasn’t The Devil’s Double. I Made the Whole Thing Up. [UPDATED]

There’s an interesting story by Ed Caesar in tomorrow’s Sunday Times. It concerns a man named Latif Yahia, who is the subject of a new $20m film called The Devil’s Double, starring Dominic Cooper (Mamma Mia!, The History Boys.) Yahia first came to my attention four years ago, when I was on the staff of an independent magazine called Mongrel.

I had come across the story of an Iraqi exile living in Ireland. The guy seemed to have been through hell. He had been taken out of the Iraqi army, in which he served as a captain during the Iran-Iraq war, and forced to work as a body-double for Uday Hussein. He had been tortured and even forced to undergo cosmetic surgery that he might more closely resemble Saddam’s psychotic son. Read the rest of this entry »

Before they were famous: Sugababes

In one of their earliest incarnations, the Sugababes were a successful Sunday league football team with Archie Burnside the star turn at inside-right.
[NB: I’ve just posted an important public service announcement in the comments.]

If Lupus means “a penis”, then yes, most probably.

Keep seeing this ad here.

Let’s light a fire, girl. Pour some wine. Lay your body down next to mine. We’ll bump and grind the whole night through.

And then I’ll take your purse and maybe steal your car keys too. Yee-haw!

The girl with the black eye

To be a man is to be a suspect. Years ago, on a J1 in America, my girlfriend and I were swimming in a backyard pool. We were only kids. I was showing off, doing backflips and somersaults. She attempted a backflip, but contrived somehow to knee herself in the face. She was okay, maybe a little shaken. But as she resurfaced, an enormous ugly bruise was already becoming visible.

At the time, we were sharing rented accommodation with some other J1 students. Ours was tempestuous relationship and we were living in quite close quarters with relative strangers. Read the rest of this entry »

“When soldiers got back from Vietnam, they got debriefed. Well, my head was like a warzone. But who was going to debrief me?”

The council flat is a modest affair. There’s a yoga poster on the wall and a laptop computer sitting open on a desk. The living space otherwise is frugal almost to the point of ostentatiousness. The thin, white-haired man who answers the door still has the rolling gait of a boxer, which he was in his youth, several lifetimes ago now.

In the early 1990s, the press dubbed this man a “smiling psychopath” and he was shunned by polite society. But at 67, whatever menace he once exuded has long since faded. As he fills the kettle to make tea, he seems a pretty unremarkable London-Irish pensioner. Actually, he is anything but. Read the rest of this article here.