Brokeback Mountain is producing a lot of jokes. Susanne Salkind, a leading American gay-rights champion, thinks these have generally “spurred positive conversation”. But the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force disagrees, worrying that humour about the gay-cowboy film is homophobic. Meanwhile, the US talk-show host David Letterman offers his Top Ten Signs You’re a Gay Cowboy. These include: preferring a salon to a saloon and Native Americans referring to you as “Dances With Men”.
Wind turbines could soon be sprouting from homes in Brighton under plans for promoting renewable energy, courtesy of Greens on the local council. Quite how charming turbines will look on top of the town’s famous Regency houses is best left to the imagination, or a nightmare.
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Devil’s Hole pupfish have clung to life in a desert rock pool 10ft (3m) wide and 70ft long since the Ice Age. But they could be extinct within a year. Only 80 of the inch-long fish remain in their Californian home. Scientists say that they’re unclear why things are going so wrong so suddenly. Draining the pool for irrigation, and researchers accidentally killing a third of them a couple of years ago, may not have helped, but those are just guesses.
Film directors, lawyers and bankers are the “sexiest dream dates” for women, according to the London-based dating agency Drawing Down The Moon. The claim is based on recent choices made by its clients. Men, apparently, are keener to date a doctor, journalist or, er, somebody in human resources. It must be all those inter-office personnel module harmonisation seminars.
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Congratulations to Uma Thurman on becoming a knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in France. The citation from Gilles Jacob, the director of the Cannes Film Festival, on behalf of the Ministry of Culture, was short on cultural specifics, but did zoom in on the key genius of the Kill Bill star. She is a “femme fatale” and a “dreamy creature”, not to mention a “classic and disconcerting beauty”. Sir Alan Sugar would never get a French knighthood.
Sources: ABC News, The (Brighton) Argus, Los Angeles Times, AP, Newsday