Fictional Characters’ Secrets Revealed
It’s been an amazing week in the world of fictional characters with J. K. Rowling admitting to a crowd of young children and journalists that the wizard Dumbledore from her bestselling Harry Potter series of books was actually gay. While there have been those who have loudly applauded the outing of the loveable wizard, others have been more subdued in their praise remarking that it would have been nice to have brought this up in the books themselves. Or even hinted at it. In the slightest. Such as making his robes pink. Or arranging a disco every week. Or having nice curtains. Or sporting an erection whenever Malfoy was around. Still, Rowling wasn’t the first author to reveal an amazing secret about his or her characters after the publications of the stories. Dr Watson Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s narrator of the Sherlock Holmes books was not a real doctor after all, but instead a foot fetishist who hung around with Holmes because the Baker Street irregulars had such delightfully filthy trotters. Big Ears Enid Blyton confessed in later years that Noddy’s best friend was an active member of a hate group who targeted Jews and women with stickers on the soles of their shoes. Miss Marple The secret behind Agatha Christie’s doddery crime-solver’s spinsterhood turned out to be terribly itchy thrush which had plagued her all her life and put off would-be suitors. The Very Hungry Caterpillar After transforming into a butterfly the former caterpillar helped to spread a virulent haemorrhagic fever across two continents killing close to 800,000 people and maiming almost a million others. Bertie Wooster Although Wodehouse never completed the book before his death, the development of Bertie Wooster was to conclude with the loveable aristocrat becoming a Scientologist. Gandalf Tolkein had plans for a number of books set in Middle Earth exploring the history before and after the events of The Lord Of The Rings. The death of Gandalf was outlined in one such plan as being the result of trapping his foot in a rabbit hole and not coming up with an appropriate spell before hypothermia set in. Long John Silver At the end of Treasure Island Jim Hawkins speculates that Silver must have settled down in retirement with his share of the treasure but Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in a letter to the London Times many years later that he always considered the pirate would instead have been lured by the prospect of joining the professional golf circuit. Charlie Bucket Following on from the adventures in Charlie & The Great Glass Elevator, author Roald Dahl let slip that he envisaged Charlie dying from...
Strictly Come Dancing 2007
If you’re anything like me – and let’s all hope they find a cure for that and soon – then you just find yourself glued to the television screen on Saturday evenings watching the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing programme. It’s simply a perfect blend of elegant ballroom dancing, sexy latin dancing, judges who have become parodies of themselves, and laughing at celebrities with no natural rhythm and two or more left feet that forms a ratings winner. This year has seen the introduction of two new changes to the programme format in a bid to freshen the show up and get people talking about it. I’m talking about so it must have worked! First off is the voting results show being on a Sunday night instead of later on the Saturday. Far from enabling longer in the editing room to pad out the highlights clips and produce more programming hours for lower production costs whilst simultaneously trying to enforce channel loyalty and shift the ratings on Sunday evenings away from competitor channels, this move instead is due to "research" indicating that "the people" wanted their Sundays filled thusly. What people and what research? All will be revealed after Christmas in the new BBC TV series Strictly Come Dancing People And Research Secrets Revealed. Claudia Winkleman will also host the fanzine show It Takes Clipboards. The second change to the programme is in the way the dancers are now voted off the show. The old method of the judges’ scores being supplemented by the public licence fee-payers democratic phone votes was deemed to be unfair to those celebrities who the judges had taken a shine to early on and decided should progress despite their obvious failings and clear bias from the panel. The makers of Strictly Come Dancing decided that a system that didn’t allow viewers of the programme to overrule the predetermined wishes of the tuxedoed elite was more in keeping with the spirit of a light entertainment programme. The judges now have a veto. But enough bitterness, just who are the competitors (left at time of writing) in this year’s Strictly Come Dancing competition? Dominic Littlewood & Lilia Kopylova Dominic Littlewood is the cheekiest chappy known to mankind. It’s pretty near impossible to mention Dominic without using the word "cheeky" or some derivative in every sentence. His natural cheekiness is enhanced by dousing with Calvin Klein’s Eau Seau Cheeky on a daily basis. This envelops Dominic in a misty field of supercheeky particulates that scientists label "The Cheeky Zone". He fancies one of The Cheeky Girls; the gormless one. Lilia is the fiery Russian minx that nobody would...
Wembley, Giants, Dolphins, Tickets, Me
Image modified to remove seating information. Guess who’s going to Wembley to see the New York Giants versus the Miami Dolphins! You’ll never guess! No, go on! Guess! Give up? It’s me! I don’t even like any of the teams! I don’t care! I’m going to see the game! "Peyton, give us a wave, Peyton, Peyton give us a wave!" Eli will LOVE that! Look out for me on TV. I’ll be one of almost eighteen thousand people in the stadium wearing a Patriots Brady #12 top! You can’t miss...
A Bloody Great Octopus
I was diving among the coral reefs around Greenland recently. They’re my favourite coral reefs in the world, mostly due to nobody else realising they’re there. I do like a bit of solitude when I’m diving. That’s mostly due to my love of nude diving though. Avoids the need to carry around waterproof signs with "It’s bigger than that usually!" and "The water causes shrinkage!" written upon them. Other divers can be so cruel. There is one drawback to solitary diving, however, and that is, of course, the danger that comes with getting into trouble. On this recent dive I got into trouble. While hitting an anemone with a hammer (it’s for a thesis I’m working on) my foot became lodged in a crack along the seabed. Distracted momentarily by my predicament I was unaware of the anemone sending out a call for help using its wiggly appendages (appendix wigglia for you latin boffs) and in the blink of a surprised eye I found myself suddenly hammerless and watching the rear end of an Emergency Distress Cod vanishing into the gloom with my tool in its clutches. Blast! I thought. I did not want to die a shrivelled corpse. And then a watery miracle occurred. Walking along a ridge of particularly hammerable anemone an octopus suddenly appeared. It was a large octopus – its beak was the size of my chest – but I didn’t want to say anything at the time as anyone who knows octopuses can tell you they can be touchy about that sort of thing. A good thing I’d recently received my diploma in Cephalopod Knowingness from the nearly fully-accredited University of Puerto Aguirre in Bolivia. I could not tell you its colour as, sadly, I was wearing my shades only just acquired from the Horatio Caine Online Memorabilia Store. It was stripey, though, and eyebrowless too. The octopus eyed me for a while and I kept perfectly still. Your average octopus will not normally attack a naked diver I believe, but then I’m not privy to how many it usually comes across. Nevertheless, it never hurts to be cautious, I thought. Admittedly, that thought would have been of more use had it occurred before I started walking around the cracked seabed of a Greenland coral reef. Tentacles from the octopus snaked out and probed my trapped limb for several moments. I was curious as to its intentions as I’m sure you can imagine. I had also opened my bowels in terror as I’m sure you’re trying not to imagine. Luckily, as it turned out, the octopus was not overly concerned with the newly-stained local...
I Shagged Princess Diana
I’d wanted to keep this a secret out of respect for the children involved and a genuine fear of Mohamed al Fayed’s Harrods’ Kill Squad, but there’s something about the opening of the inquest into Diana and Dodi’s deaths at the High Court that has broken my resolve and compelled me to come forward finally. Maybe it’s the realisation that the truth known is more important than the secret locked away. Perhaps it’s the eroding away of any institution – be it mental or physical – that takes place over time, like the pebbles on the beach that were once meteors or mountains or mountains made out of meteors shaped like mountains. There’s also quite possibly something in the rumour that I’m merely hoping to cash in on news about the inquest with search engine traffic. Who knows? I shagged Princess Diana. Of course, this was a long time ago. Before she was a Princess. Before she was even a Diana. She was a Desmond at the time. But in my mind she’ll still always be the People’s Princess. I met Diana while working on the oil rigs in the North Sea. Do you know the Klingon proverb that tells us revenge is a dish best served cold? Let me tell you: it is very cold in the North Sea. Also, mainly fish dishes. You seek warmth where you can; anything to counter the indifferent touch of your chilled grey steel home-from-home erect in the deathly grey of the sea under the icy slightly-different-grey of the cloud cover. You bump against your fellow riggers whenever you pass in the narrow corridors. You growl about it because you’re men but you all secretly cherish the fleeting pressing of a fellow human with human heat almost palpable in that environment. And then, one day, I saw her. The light from a bare bulb glinted off her oil-covered face and I was instantly entranced. She turned her head coyly to the side; you know the way she did that. I was mesmerised. Across a crowded elevator she coughed violently and spat out a wad of phlegm onto the wall. She gripped the bars of the elevator cage with arms like iron, a tattoo of a Russ Meyer SuperVixen spreading its immense cleavage over the contours of her bicep. I fought the urge to push through and grapple with her right there and then. Over the next few days Diana and I got to talking; small talk mainly. Where was she born? How long had she spent in Borstal? How many bareknuckle fights had she won? I even caught the birth of her...
Police Shift Blame In Menezes Investigation
The Metropolitan Police have been quick to shift the focus of blame after a court heard today that it was they who were at fault for the fatal shooting of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes in July 2005. The Old Bailey jury were told that the police were guilty of a series of fundamental failures in the planning and execution of their duties on that day that put members of the public at risk and did more to harm Latin American and British relations than Bruce Forsyth’s 1979 marriage to the former Miss Puerto Rico, Wilnelia Merced. In response, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police today released what he referred to as "a highly-contributing cause" of the mistakes of the day. The evidential publication – Dusky Foreign Types And You – forms part of every London policeman’s training, and the edition from 2005 appears to include an unfortunate printing mix-up on pages 218 and 219. In their prepared defence speech the Metropolitan Police accept that "this in no way absolves all of the blame" from them, but that "it’s got to count for something,...
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