GOING VIRAL
Don’t panic now the white stuff has started falling: there are still ways to get around. A YouTuber was driving down a snowy street in Raleigh, North Carolina, when he saw a man on skis being towed by a car. Curious, he set off in pursuit and filmed the action. The unknown skier leapt on pavements and verges, narrowly managed to avoid traffic signs, and prompted the admiration of his audience: “Goddammit, this guy’s good.” (They had previously been urging: “Come on, give us the bust.”) To see just how good, follow the piste at tinyurl.com/CarolinaSkier.
FIGHTING TALK
Nancy Holten v Switzerland
An animal rights activist has been refused Swiss citizenship because she is just too irritating. Nancy Holten, 42, was born in Holland but has lived in Switzerland since the age of eight. She recently applied to become a Swiss citizen, but a committee of residents in the northern town of Gipf-Oberfrick — fed up with her strident campaigns against church bells, cowbells and piglet racing — objected to the application.
“If someone is so much in the spotlight and rebels against things that are accepted in the local community, it can cause the community to not want such a person in their midst,” said a spokesman for the town.
Gracious in defeat, Nancy admitted: “I think I was too strident and spoke my mind too often.”
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ANIMAL ANTICS
Aren’t pandas modern? They even know how to do selfies. A bear in the Chinese city of Chengdu has become a social media star after posing for photographs with a visitor to the Dujiangyan panda sanctuary.
The bear, called Meng Meng, not only looks straight at the camera and adopts a pose, but at one point takes the young woman’s hand to guide the selfie stick.
Meng Meng is not the sanctuary’s first social media sensation. A Dujiangyan panda cub went viral in March last year after kissing its keeper and posing for a photo.
RED TOPS
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True blue, baby, I love toyboys
Ever woken up in the middle of the night, fretting about Madonna’s latest lover? No, thought not. Does her penchant for younger men make you uncomfortable? No, thought not. Do you in fact have any interest in Madonna’s love life apart from the vague hope that she won’t discover you’re single?
“Madonna claims her penchant for men three decades her junior makes people feel uncomfortable,” reported the Daily Mail. “And she says her refusal to live a conventional life has led to her feeling oppressed.”
The oppressed, downtrodden multimillionaire singer, 58, said: “I feel like everything I do makes people feel really uncomfortable.” You wish, Madge. You wish.
Get your trousers on, you’re nicked
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Here’s a lesson for anybody who is thinking of canoodling in their car. “A woman caught romping with her lover in a car park told police she had only been looking for her gloves in the footwell,” the Daily Mirror reported.
Hayley Affleck, an NHS worker, was spotted “frolicking” with her lover late one January night in Whitley Bay. They were in a Peugeot with the door open, but she told officers that she merely “got out of the car and turned back to find my hat and gloves”.
A couple caught making love in a car would scarcely merit a mention in a local paper, but Hayley’s entertaining excuse meant the story made the pages of both the Mirror and The Sun.
So if you are caught “frolicking”, just stick to a polite apology. And certainly don’t tell the police that you’ll come quietly.
Trump that
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Headline of the week in The Sun, reporting Donald Trump’s angry denial that he cavorted with Russian prostitutes during a 2013 trip to Moscow: “Grumpy Trumpy gets the rumpy pumpy humpy”.
QUOTES OF THE WEEK
“Disrespect invites disrespect”
The actress Meryl Streep criticises Donald Trump as she accepts a Golden Globe award for outstanding achievement
“One of the most overrated actresses in Hollywood”
The president-elect doesn’t take Streep’s comments lying down
“A four-year-old might say that he’s a dog — do you go out and buy dog food?”
Children who say they are transgender may be wrong, says psychologist Kenneth Zucker
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“It would be folly for us further to demonise Russia”
But the foreign secretary Boris Johnson does warn that the Kremlin has been ‘up to all sorts of very dirty tricks’
“All religions are a bit wacky”
That’s my experience as a Christian, says Desmond Swayne, Conservative MP
“I have not been a little hurt; I have been very damaged”
Solitary confinement has made me even more radical, says the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik
LAST WORDS
Victor Lownes
Playboy Club executive who revelled in making money, dating women and hosting wild parties
From his penthouse eyrie above the Playboy Club on Park Lane, Victor Lownes introduced a seam of salacious American culture to Swinging London. At one time Britain’s highest-paid executive, he enjoyed making money and dating women. The Playboy empire — and his role as Hugh Hefner’s representative in Europe — allowed him to do both to excess. Lownes, who has died aged 88, was a modern-day Casanova who boasted of living with six women at a time. “Privately, publicly and commercially, I think sex is good,” he once declared.
One notorious party at Stocks, his mansion in Hertfordshire, was held in 1979 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Playboy magazine. It lasted 25 hours and involved a fairground, aerobatic displays, 8,000 bottles of champagne, 500 bottles of whisky and, according to those who could remember, naked romps in the bushes.
In 1984 he married Marilyn Cole, a former Playmate of the Year. Asked about plans for the night before his wedding, Lownes replied: “Why would I need a stag party? I’ve been having one for the past 40 years.”
— The Times
Graham Taylor
Football manager who took Watford from the Fourth to the First Division but was vilified as England coach
Graham Taylor spent three years in charge of the England football team in the 1990s, and they could hardly have been more fraught. His tenure was characterised by inept performances and humiliating failure to qualify for the World Cup finals — and personal vilification.
This inherently decent man was viciously caricatured in headlines that likened him to a root vegetable after his team lost to the Swedes. It was Turnip Taylor, Taylor’s Dummies and Norse Manure (after defeat to Norway).
Yet Taylor, who has died aged 72, was also one of the greatest club managers this country has produced. He took Watford from the then Fourth Division to the heights of the First in just five years.
His trusted companion on that odyssey was Elton John, the club’s owner. Once, Taylor had the guts to confront Elton about his drinking. He put a pint of beer on the table and rebuked the pop star by saying: “You had better have that for your breakfast because you need alcohol to get going every day, don’t you?”
— The Daily Mail