10 UP Drugs
Drugs news — and Reading and Leeds festivals have announced that, for the first time, “revellers” will be allowed to test their drugs on site. A tent run by the Loop — an organisation that usually conducts forensic testing for the police — will analyse any drugs brought in for inspection by festival-goers, before going on to destroy them.
CW has to say, around the point of “before going on to destroy them”, it did start to question just how useful a facility this will be: learning that, yes, your cocaine really is of a high quality, just before some boffin in a tent explodes it. That feels like the kind of thing you would only decide to do if you were already quite high. “Let’s . . . burn the cocaine! Blow it up! This is what the King of Drugs would do — and I am the King of Drugs! AHAHA!”
It all used to be different when CW was a youngling. There was more of a . . . DIY approach to drugs. Indeed it will admit, when it saw the headline “Drug Testing Kit Confirmed For Festivals” it thought: “Oh my God! I knew Drug Testing Kit! I didn’t know he made it out of 1995 alive! Nice one, Kit!”
9 DOWN Disney
CW doesn’t want to throw shade on a long-running family entertainment franchise — there are worse things, although anyone tits-deep in Alvin & The Chipmunks 4: The Road Chip may disagree — but there was an amusing moment this week when Disney issued a statement about a potential blackmail threat it faced.
Talking to Yahoo Finance, the Disney boss, Bob Iger, revealed that anonymous hackers had contacted them, claiming to have accessed the new Pirates of the Caribbean film and threatening to leak it online unless the studio paid a ransom. On further investigation, however, Disney decided that the hackers could not have accessed the film, refused the ransom and declared the whole thing a hoax.
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And CW is sure that is indeed what happened. But having watched all of the astonishingly similar Pirates of the Caribbean movies, CW also has a sneaking suspicion that Disney looked at the ransom note, had a ciggie, then said: “You know what — let them leak it. Most people watching it will just think they’re watching Pirates of the Caribbean IV again. Let’s face it — it’s just a pissed pirate who keeps falling over.”
8 UP Poldark
To CW’s Handsome Man-Tits Bureau where, since 2015, six people have worked full-time monitoring Aidan Turner, aka Poldark from Poldark, and his famous chest. Since Turner/Poldark took his jerkin off in series one, episode three, revealing what appeared to be a 20-pack, the stretch between his chin and his trouser top has been regarded as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty by millions of happy women.
This state of affairs, however, has not been without pressure on Turner. For the forthcoming third series, he explained in an interview: “I showed up a few pounds too heavy, and I think they had to split the back of the waistcoat . . . It was too tight around here [gesturing to his stomach] and not tight enough up here [pointing to his upper body].” Poldark is, apparently, not taking his top off in series three.
But why not? In CW’s understanding of female sexuality, the world is pretty evenly divided between women who want man-abs like a Toblerone and those who like a man built like a beer barrel and packing four handfuls of arse-chobble. CW suspects there would be a massive audience for a topless shot of Poldark looking like Father Christmas on a beach holiday — and, as licence payers, it’s our right to be given this.
7 DOWN Jon Snow
To the NME, and a discussion of the world’s biggest TV show, where a headline tempts with “Game of Thrones bosses explain why Jon Snow has a ‘tiny pecker’”. Might CW suggest it’s because he lives in a land of ice and snow? As soon as the plot shifts him to the more temperate King’s Landing, CW’s sure the problem will resolve itself.
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6 DOWN Vanity Fair
A new word was invented this week, when Vanity Fair ran a piece on the hotness of Nicole Kidman — who, at the age of 49, has four projects on the go, received an Oscar nomination for Lion and was executive producer on the HBO sensation Big Little Lies. The kudos was deserved, and Vanity Fair was on the money, until it dubbed her comeback “The Kidmanaissance”.
CW doesn’t want to teach Vanity Fair how to suck the word-egg, but “Kidmanaissance” just doesn’t work, fam. “Kidman” doesn’t sound like “Ren”. It’s a non-starter. It would work if they were writing about Renée Zellweger — because then you could have “The Renée-ssance” — but unfortunately Zellweger has done bugger all for six years apart from Bridget Jones’s Baby, so that doesn’t really fly. What Zellweger’s experiencing is some manner of hiatus, or lacuna — the latter of which could be excellently deployed if we were talking about Una Stubbs having a bit of a break, but she’s been dead busy with Sherlock.
Sometimes, language just won’t do what your headline needs it to.
5 DOWN Jaden Smith
The artistic progeny of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith — whose voicing of the hippopotamus in Madagascar was so excellent — has been experiencing an unusual rejection.
On Monday Smith tweeted in some fury about the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto: “[They] Spiked My Pancakes With Cheese, I’m Surprised I’m Still Alive” — the lactose seemingly inducing a state wherein every word began with a capital letter. As he is a vegan, this incident “Just Made Me Want to Throw Up On MySelf”.
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When various news sources dropped their coverage of the Nato summit to do some investigation into Cheesegate, an “insider” claimed that Smith wanted to extend his stay, but refused to leave after being told that no rooms were available. Cheesegate unfolded shortly thereafter.
Is this a new tactic in the hotel trade — to eschew sending up bouncers to remove recalcitrant vegan celebrities from their suites in favour of scaring them out with cheese instead? Like the opposite of a mousetrap? Presumably, had Smith dug his heels in, the Four Seasons would have escalated matters by replacing his tube of toothpaste with Primula. After that, it would have been a slice of ham under the door every 20 minutes until he left.
4 DOWN Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne
This week’s biggest cognitive dissonance came courtesy of rock’s first family, when Sharon and Ozzy renewed their vows after Ozzy’s brief affair with a hairdresser last year.
With their partnership now back on course, after lots of therapy, the couple took the opportunity to start afresh in a secret ceremony attended only by themselves. Not even their children were notified.
“It was about me and Sharon,” said Ozzy. “With big weddings, you feel like you’re doing it for everybody else.” The exclusive coverage of the “secret” wedding was on pages 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 of Hello!
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3 UP Mary J Blige
Over to the Cannes Film Festival, where the world’s A-list come to walk the red carpet by day and drink the red wine by night. Or, if things get lairy, walk the red wine by day and drink the red carpet by night. You can suck quite a lot of spilt booze out of a carpet after 11pm, CW has found.
Anyway, at Naomi Campbell’s Fashion for Relief gala Kate Moss — a woman whose capacity for bacchanal makes Bacchus himself look like a lightweight on a donkey with some grapes — was reportedly “downing bottles of wine and throwing flower arrangements around” before another woman “started squaring up to her”. The same sources stated that a fight was averted when the R&B star Mary J Blige broke the pair up, as “it was about to get physical”.
That’s the thing about being a legend. It impels you to act honourably when others are spoiling for a fight. You must display noblesse O’Blige.
Thank you. Thank you for listening to CW’s joke.
2 DOWN Charlotte Crosby
To Charlotte Crosby and Stephen Bear, the stars of Just Tattoo of Us, who have been discussing the tattoos they chose for each other in OK! “Tell us about the tattoo Bear designed for you,” OK! asked Crosby.
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“I have half a cheetah and half a bear on my back,” she replied. When asked why, Crosby explained: “When I [met] Stephen, I was seeing someone [else], but it wasn’t serious. When I kissed Stephen during that time, I was a cheater, so Stephen picked a cheetah to go with the bear, because I cheated.”
Whoa, there. This is a twist on the old-fashioned scarlet “A”, then — but with a visual synonym, lest an illiterate adult or pre-school child knows not of Crosby’s shame.
CW is curious to know if this is a trend with legs — and if in the future we will see boyfriends designing their girlfriends’ inkings with other similarly insulting depictions of the animal kingdom. Perhaps the seabird Sula dactylatra — aka the masked booby — for any woman who’s had a facelift and a tit job; or Phalacrocorax aristotelis — the European shag — if she’s had it away with someone in Ibiza while “on a break”. The 21st century is exciting!
1 DOWN The Daily Mail
For most, this was the week the world debated the meaning of Donald Trump’s Tuesday-night tweet, in which the leader of the free world told his 30 million followers, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe” — the tweet ending there, seemingly mid-seizure.
Aside from the always disconcerting feeling that Trump is tweeting when on the loo, thus raising awful mental images of what would have made his fingers flail wildly on his phone before accidentally pressing send — beefy secret service agent knocking on the door: “Mr President? Sir? Do we need to call for Dr Bottom-Troubles again?” — the word “covfefe” seemed imbued with an indefinable menace. Within minutes, two new accounts under the names of the Wizard Covfefe and Covfefe the Strong were battling it out on Twitter, to lay claim to masterminding Trump’s uttering of the Dark Word, which opens the Hell Mouth and unleashes the furious dead. As 2017 goes, it was a perfectly normal day. CW presumes you are on as many beta blockers as it is.
With all this attention on the president, then, many will have missed the Daily Mail’s latest sortie against womankind. Always at the forefront of any issue surrounding female bodies — who can forget last week’s astonishing spread, headlined, “The wives who weigh exactly the same as their other half, pages 30-31”, in which the hitherto unchronicled “humiliation” of women who weigh the same as their husbands was given full, mad rein — this week, the Mail outdid itself.
Working on the presumption that women’s bodies — the things 52 per cent of the population live in — are either a humiliation (fat bodies) or a weapon (hot bodies) and little else, the Mail posited that Pippa Middleton’s wedding had been ruined by Vogue Williams, the model girlfriend of Middleton’s new brother-in-law. For those who had read about Pippa’s wedding, this came as a surprise — as Williams hadn’t actually attended the wedding. But this was a mere factual bagatelle to the Female Body Fear desk at the Mail.
“Vogue Williams steals the spotlight from Pippa Middleton as she poses in a skimpy nude bikini, whilst soaking up the sun in Marbella,” the headline roared, accompanied by a usefully illustrative picture of Williams on the beach in her bikini. This assumes a new and extraordinary level of power to a woman’s legs — to be capable of upstaging a wedding a week after the event while on another continent.
What is the statute of limitations on upstaging a bride at her wedding? Is Williams still in the danger zone now, two weeks later? What if, in a month’s time, she wears a much-admired hat to a party — is that still a threat to Pippa’s wedding? Does this logic work retrospectively? When Anita Ekberg frolicked in the Trevi fountain in La Dolce Vita in 1960, was that a spoiler for Pippa’s wedding?
How wide does the net go? If CW wears a zebra onesie to its mate’s birthday party next week, will that, somehow, ruin Pippa’s wedding? Are we all ruining Pippa’s wedding? God, women are such jealous, backstabbing bitches. No wonder one has never been the editor of the Mail. Imagine how much havoc that would cause!
