Random News Stories

[Randy Stankey]

That's an old term. I've heard it said and have used it, myself, at least, since I was a teenager.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/RUD#English

Noun

rapid unplanned disassembly (plural rapid unplanned disassemblies)

(engineering, euphemistic) An explosion or breakup of a vehicle, usually an airplane or a rocket.

Usage notes
(explosion): This is also formulated in slightly altered forms, as Rapid Unscheduled/Unexpected/Unplanned/Uncontrolled (self-)Dissassembly, with the "U" varying between forms, and "self" occurring in some variants.

[Leo Enticknap]

In that case, the SpaceX spokeshole must have had it rehearsed in advance.

Running it a close second would be a time in the 1990s when spokesholes for the British National Health Service were under strict orders to use the phrase "resulted in a negative patient outcome" instead of "the patient died," whenever they made a statement to the media. My aunt and uncle were NHS doctors at the time and were endlessly making jokes about it.

[Leo Enticknap]

On the criminal stupidity stakes, this is quite impressive.

Dutch police arrest fake ‘Boris Johnson’ for drink driving

Officers say they do not believe the real former British prime minister was in the country at the time of the alleged drink driving crash

Dutch police have revealed that a man arrested on suspicion of drink driving was found to have a driver's licence identifying him as Boris Johnson.

The fake Ukrainian document, complete with the former British prime minister's picture and correct birth date, was “issued” in 2019 and valid until the end of the year 3000.

Police spokesman Thijs Damstra said the discovery came after officers investigated a crash shortly after midnight on Sunday in which a car hit a pole near the Emma Bridge in the northern city of Groningen.

The car was abandoned but officers were later told that the driver was standing nearby on the bridge.

“The person could not identify himself and refused to undertake a breathalyser test,” Mr Damstra told news agency AFP.

The 35-year-old man, from the small town of Zuidhorn west of Groningen, was arrested and police searched his car.

“Inside, police found a fake driver's licence belonging to Boris Johnson,” Mr Damstra said.

“Unfortunately for this person, we did not fall for his forgery,” Groningen police added on its Instagram account.

Police could not say where the forged document was made but public broadcaster NOS journalist and former Russia correspondent Kysia Hekster wrote on Twitter that fake driver's licences could easily be bought in tourist shops in Ukraine.

Mr Damstra added: “As far as I'm aware, the real Mr Boris Johnson was not in the Netherlands at the time.”

bojo_pic.jpg

If I'm reading between the lines of the article correctly, it is easy (once you've figured out how to get in to Ukraine and then back out again without being shot or blown up) to purchase phony driver licenses in Ukraine that look pretty convincing, with whatever name, DoB, and photo on them you wish. So this idiot chose to buy, and then attempt to use, one in the name of a very high profile individual, and furthermore one that 99.9% of Europe's population know is (a) not Ukrainian, and (b) around three decades older than the fake license's owner.

[Frank Cox]

https://canoe.com/news/local-news/sn...7-fa81902d134e

SNAKE ATTACK: Snake-swinging man busted for beatdown in Toronto


The 45-year-old accused is charged with assault and causing suffering to an animal Snake that!

A man used a snake as a weapon during a street fight in the area of in the area of Dundas St. and Manning Ave. — west of Bathurst St. — just before midnight on Wednesday.

In a video posted to social media, one man can be seen swinging a python snake at another man who tries to defend himself.

A Toronto Police vehicle then pulls up and officers break up the fight and make the men lie down on the ground.

Toronto Video Of Year Contender ( man beats man with SNAKE)
Yes, you read that right, buddy is attacking another man in Toronto @ Dundas and Manning, it is believed with a snake….peak Toronto.#Toronto pic.twitter.com/Mo9UFjf5OR
— Kyle.Taylor (@livingbyyyz) May 12, 2023

“That was a weird one,” Const. Cindy Chung said.

In a statement released Saturday, police said they received a call about a man threatening people with a python snake and officers were dispatched to the area.

“It is alleged that a man was walking down the street holding a living python snake,” Const. Laura Brabant said. “The man approached the victim with the python.”

“There was a physical altercation and the man used the python to attack the victim,” she added.

Brabant said officers arrived on scene quickly and arrested a suspect.

Laurenio Avila, 45, of Toronto, faces charges of assault with a weapon and causing unnecessary pain and suffering to an animal.

The accused appeared in Old City Hall court via video link on Thursday and was remanded into custody.

It unclear what happened to the snake.

[John Craig]

some new news coming from me is that there is a new film called wait for me, that has been confirmed to be shown in the cinemas in the next few months, they even have some q&a screenings which i think i might go to as i like some of the actors featuring in this film the trailer really drew me to it ! https://www.waitforme-film.com/where-to-see-it/

[Leo Enticknap]

From Newsmax:

Lawsuit: Feds Hiding 'Grassy Knoll' Film

By Sandy Fitzgerald | Saturday, 27 May 2023 12:51 PM EDT

The heirs of a man who recorded the assassination of late President John F. Kennedy are suing to get the original film — which could reveal discrepencies in widely held views, such as if there were multiple shooters in the attack and not a lone gunman — back from the federal government, who they say has been hiding it for decades.

The footage, shot by Orville Nix, a Dallas maintenance man who died in 1972, was filmed from the center of Dealey Plaza while Kennedy's limousine drove into where the ambush was to take place on Dallas' Elm Street, and shows what is believed to be the only unobstructed view of the "grassy knoll" when the fatal shot was taken, reports The New York Post.

The Nixes not only are seeking the release of the film but $29.7 million in compensatory damages.

Some researchers claim that additional snipers were concealed on the knoll, and they believe the film will show that.

"It would be very significant if the original Nix film surfaced today," Jefferson Morley, author of "The Ghost" and other books about the CIA, told the Post, explaining that with modern digital image processing the film would become a new piece of evidence.

"There's a significant loss in quality between the first and second generation," when it comes to an analog film like Nix's, he added.

The original film was last examined in 1978 by photo experts whom the House Select Committee on Assassinations had hired, leading the panel to conclude that "two gunmen" likely fired at Kennedy and he was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy."

However, the experts were in doubt about whether the movie showed the other gunmen, and the complete film disappeared. There are some imperfect copies, including one used in Oliver Stone's movie "JFK."

But now, 45 years later, more advanced computer analysis of the original film could solve the mystery, so the Nixes are returning to court after a lawsuit they filed in 2015 was dismissed.

In their lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., the Nix family includes dozens of documents to trace the original film's path.

Back in 1963, just after the assassination, the press agency UPI paid Nix $5,000, or about $50,000 in current dollars, for a 25-year license on the film. The agency promised to return it to him in 1988, but Nix died in 1972 and the rights passed to his wife and son.

However, his family was not notified when the House committee subpoenaed the film in 1978, and their lawsuit claims the National Archives and Records Administration has lied to them, claiming never to have had the "out-of-camera original" film.

The committee's analysts, though, delivered the film directly to the Archives office in 1978, evidence in the filing shows.

Time may be running out for the film to be useful, however, as it is "at or near the end of its lifespan," and modern image processing should be completed, Kenneth Castleman, a former NASA senior scientist and prominent expert who studied the film in the early 1970s told the Post.

"Working directly from the original, assuming it's still in good shape, might reveal data that is not visible on the copies," he said."There are new techniques to bring up detail in an image that might possibly bring out new information that was not visible previously."

Castleman, who in 1973 analyzed an element seen in Nix's film that some believed showed a marksman with a raised rifle near the Dealey Plaza pergola, said the image "was definitely not a person" but three bright spots in some frames.

He doesn't think further analysis of the film will change his analysis.

Despite having devoured several books and documentaries about the JFK assassination, I have to confess to not having known of any home movie apart from Zapruder's having captured it, but at the same time being a little surprised: home movie cameras were becoming popular among the upper middle classes as the 1960s progressed, and I would have thought it unlikely that only one amateur cinematographer was among the crowds who went to see JFK's motorcade that day. I have for a long time wondered if others did shoot footage that might have contained significant evidence, but, having seen the media circus that developed around Zapruder (especially his interactions with the federal government and Time over the rights) and the interpretation of his film by conspiracy theorists, simply never revealed the existence of their movies beyond immediate family and confidantes.

Assuming that NARA has stored this reel in a temperature and humidity-controlled vault since they acquired it in 1978 (and the role of atmospheric control in conserving acetate and nitrate film was well understood by then), it should still be in physically good shape. Unless it's stored in tropical, rainforest-like conditions, vinegar syndrome is not going to do serious damage to acetate film in only 15 years.

If Nix's movie was shot on Regular 8 Kodachrome and through typical 1960s home movie camera optics, as Zapruder's was, I agree with Kenneth Castleman that it's unlikely to give us any revelations, even after scanning in 8K on a Spirit or an Oxberry and then digitally post-processing/enhancing it up the wazoo. But if it's 16, there might be significantly more detail there, as well as the different angle. I'll be intrigued to see it (and the experts' verdict on it), if it does enter the public domain.

[John Craig]

tickets for wait for me at HOME cinema in manchester this weekend are now out guys i've just bought mine https://homemcr.org/film/wait-for-me/

[Frank Cox]

https://canoe.com/news/national/farm...3-97ed5f1e26d1

SWIFT CURRENT, Sask. — A Saskatchewan judge says an emoji can amount to a contractual agreement and ordered a farmer pay more than $82,000 for not delivering product to a grain buyer after responding to a text message with a thumbs-up image.

The Court of King’s Bench decision, released in June, found a thumbs-up emoji indicated Chris Achter agreed to a contract to deliver flax to South West Terminal in November 2021.

The company’s grain buyer had sent an image of a contract to Achter through a text message earlier in the year and the Swift Current farmer responded with an emoji.

The farmer argued that the emoji indicated only that he’d received the contract, not that he accepted its terms.

His lawyers argued that allowing an emoji to act as a signature for contracts would open the floodgates for cases interpreting the meaning of the images.

Justice Timothy Keene says in his decision that emojis are the new reality in Canadian society and courts must meet the new challenges that the images will bring.

[Leo Enticknap]

I guess the key to this is how reasonable it was for the vendor to assume that the emoji indicated acceptance of the contract. If they had swapped similar texts in the past and the business took place without any dispute, I'd say very reasonable. If the two parties were doing business for the first time, I would argue that this was the wrong decision.

Telegraph:

John Goodenough, Nobel laureate who helped to develop the lithium-ion rechargeable battery – obituary

He was the oldest Nobel Prize-winner for his work in doubling the lithium battery’s energy potential and making it less volatile

By Telegraph Obituaries 6 July 2023 • 7:00pm

John Goodenough, who has died aged 100, was a materials scientist who became the oldest winner of a Nobel Prize at 97, when he won a third of the £740,000 2019 Prize in Chemistry for his contribution to the development of the lithium-ion battery.

The rechargeable battery has helped to fuel the global revolution in portable electronics, transforming technology with power for devices ranging from cellphones, computers and pacemakers to electric cars – and its development, much of which took place at Oxford University, should have been a British success story.

Instead, like computers, the internet and civil nuclear power, it became an example of the country’s failure to commercialise its scientific innovations. British companies remain bit players in a global lithium battery industry dominated by Japan, South Korea and China.

It was Goodenough’s co-laureate, the Nottingham-born Stanley Whittingham who, in the early 1970s, managed to build the first rechargeable lithium battery. Much of Whittingham’s original research had been carried out at Oxford before he was lured to the US to take up a fellowship at Stanford University, and was later hired by Exxon Research.

Whittingham’s battery, however, suffered from safety issues. In 1980, working at Oxford, where he was head of inorganic chemistry, Goodenough doubled the lithium battery’s potential and made it less volatile by using lithium cobalt oxide as a cathode, creating the right conditions for a vastly more powerful and useful battery.

Subsequently, the third laureate, Akira Yoshino of Meijo University in Japan, succeeded in eliminating pure lithium from the battery, instead basing it wholly on lithium ions, which are safer. This made the battery workable in practice.

A plaque at Oxford University records the year Goodenough and two colleagues “identified the cathode material that enabled the development of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery ... This breakthrough ushered in the age of portable electronic devices.”

Goodenough continued to carry out important research at Oxford, but when he won the Nobel Prize he expressed his frustration that the university had forced him to retire in 1986 aged 65, after which he had moved to the University of Texas at Austin. “I fled,” he said. “I didn’t want to retire. They don’t make you retire at a certain age in Texas. It’s foolish... I’ve had 33 good years since I was forced to retire in England. That’s why I left. I’m working every day.”

John Bannister Goodenough was born on July 25 1922 in Jena, in the eastern part of Germany, the second of four children of American parents Erwin Goodenough, a postgraduate student at Oxford, and Helen, née Lewis. The family returned to the US when John was an infant and settled in Woodbridge, Connecticut, his father later becoming a professor of the history of religion at Yale University.

As he recalled in a memoir, Witness to Grace (2008), John had an unhappy childhood. His parents were emotionally distant and as a boy he suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia and was dismissed as backward at primary school.

Sent to the Groton School, a private boarding school, aged 12, he rarely heard from his parents, and when he went on to Yale to read mathematics, his father gave him just $35 even though his tuition fees were about $900. “I said I will never take another penny from home. I never did. I worked 21 hours a week for 21 meals during my undergraduate days,” he recalled. “I had a scholarship for my tuition. And I worked. My old headmaster had arranged for me to have jobs tutoring sons in wealthy homes in the summer.”

Through hard work and determination, supported by rigorous educational standards at Groton and Yale, Goodenough overcame his dyslexia. He left Groton top of his class and graduated from Yale after wartime service as an army meteorologist in Newfoundland and the Azores.

He then went on a government scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he studied physics under Clarence Zener, Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi, and took a master’s degree followed by a doctorate. After working briefly for Westinghouse, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, where he and fellow scientists helped to lay the groundwork for random access memory (RAM) in computers.

In 1976 he moved to Oxford, where he began his research on batteries. At first there was little interest in his lithium-ion battery. Oxford declined to patent it and, as Goodenough recalled, he and his fellow scientists regarded it as “just something to do ... I really didn’t anticipate cellphones, camcorders and everything else.”

Goodenough received no royalties for his work on the battery. “You become well known when somebody makes money out of what you do, when somebody else becomes a billionaire,” he reflected ruefully in 2019. “Whatever I’ve done, the lawyers have managed to siphon it off. Keep your hands away from lawyers.”

But in any case he cared little about money, donating whatever came with his awards to fund research and scholarships.

In 1986, after retiring from Oxford, Goodenough was appointed Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he remained active well into his 90s, latterly working to find the “Holy Grail” of renewable energy – a battery that he hoped might one day store wind, solar and nuclear energy.

Goodenough’s honours included the US National Medal of Science, presented to him by President Barack Obama in 2011. On the day his Nobel Prize was announced he was in London to receive the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, the world’s oldest scientific award.

In 1951, John Goodenough married Irene Wiseman, who died in 2016. There were no children.

John Goodenough, born July 25 1922, died June 25 2023

Well he as a high achiever, to put it mildly! I'm guessing he must have realized that there is a hard limit to which li-ion can be scaled up (even in its variants, such as li-poly) before the barriers of cost, safety, end energy density become an insurmountable problem, given that after retiring, he worked on ways of high capacity energy storage: presumably, though the article doesn't say, based on fundamentally different chemistries.

[Frank Cox]

Apparently the price of the grain increased between the "signing" of the contract and the delivery date.

I suspect (without any proof, of course) that the farmer wanted his thumbs-up to be ambiguous so if the contract price was higher than the spot price he would deliver on the contract, otherwise he could sell on the spot market and say "what contract?"

[Leo Enticknap]

Meow!

Berliners warned to stay indoors as ‘lioness’ prowls the suburbs

Police issued an alert about an ‘escaped wild animal’ on Thursday morning as vets and hunters joined the search

By Our Foreign Staff
20 July 2023 • 9:20am

German authorities warned people in Berlin’s southern suburbs to watch out for a potentially dangerous animal, suspected to be a lioness, that was on the loose.

Police in Brandenburg state, which surrounds the capital, issued a warning in the early hours of Thursday of an “escaped wild animal” and asked people in and around Kleinmachnow, Teltow and Stahnsdorf - just outside Berlin’s city limits - not to leave their houses and to bring their pets indoors.

The warning was later extended to southern areas of Berlin and an alert was sent on an official warning app that the animal was suspected to be a lioness. Vets and hunters were participating in a search for the creature. Police had no immediate information on who owned it.

Two men reported seeing a big cat running after a wild boar, the latter common in and around Berlin, police spokesman Daniel Kiep told local public broadcaster rbb.

“The two gentlemen recorded a smartphone video and even experienced police officers had to confirm that it is probably a lioness,” he said, adding that there were various reported sightings.

Neither of Berlin’s two zoos nor any circuses were missing a lioness, he added.

Not that they admitted to, at any rate. I suspect that someone who decided to illegally import her as an exotic "pet" (as in the movie Alligator and an example of life imitating art that followed it) is to blame, and that when she outgrew that role, both in size and behavior, she was abandoned. This happens surprisingly frequently with tigers in these parts, so much so that cases rarely make it beyond the local news media.

[Frank Cox]

https://canoe.com/news/weird/b-c-rea...d-4309951d96b9

VANCOUVER — A British Columbia real estate agent has been fined $20,000 after being caught on camera drinking milk straight out of the jug at a home he was showing.

A consent order released by the BC Financial Services Authority last week says Mike Rose was alone in the home in Kamloops, B.C., in July last year as he waited for his clients, who were interested in buying the property.

Rose went to the refrigerator to find water, but instead swigged some milk straight from the container, which he then put back in the refrigerator.

The consent order, agreed by both the superintendent of real estate and Rose, says the owners of the home saw him drinking the milk when they reviewed footage from a surveillance camera, then confronted him about it two days later.

Rose, who apologized for his actions, was told he wasn’t welcome in the home and his clients replaced him in their purchase of the property.

He says in the order that his behaviour was out of character, and he was “unusually dehydrated” at the time because of a new medication, as well as being under “considerable stress.”

Rose, who is now working at a different brokerage, agreed to pay a disciplinary penalty of $20,000 to the authority for conduct unbecoming, and $2,500 in enforcement expenses.

[Leo Enticknap]

It's been an excellent week for Telegraph obituaries:

Jani Allan, South African-born journalist who lost ‘the libel case of the century’

She sued over claims that she had been sexually involved with the white supremacist Eugène Terreblanche

Jani Allan, who has died of cancer aged 70, was a star columnist of the liberal-leaning and influential Sunday Times of South Africa who in 1992 failed in her sensational attempt to sue Channel 4 for libel; she claimed that the documentary, The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (1991), falsely alleged that she had been sexually involved with the Right-wing supremacist Eugène Terreblanche.

The proceedings attracted intense interest in both Britain and South Africa, with several character witnesses flown in from South Africa for what Private Eye called the “libel case of the century”. Jani Allan, who had engaged the libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck, was represented by Charles Gray QC, and Channel 4 by George Carman QC.

The story had its origins in 1987 when Jani Allan, a glamorous blonde social butterfly with glossy red lips and large brown eyes, was sent to interview Terreblanche, the charismatic leader of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). “Look, the man’s no mimsy. To be honest, he’s a hunk,” she wrote in her copy. “Right now I’ve got to remind myself to breathe. I’m impaled on the blue flames of his blowtorch eyes.”

Jani Allan regarded the assignment as a triumph. “Everything he said would make for great copy,” she recalled. “I had succeeded in penetrating the enemy camp.” A follow-up piece about an AWB training facility drew ugly threats, but Jani Allan was unrepentant, insisting it was her job to interview all players in the apartheid-ridden country.

When she was seen dining in a Pretoria steakhouse with Terreblanche, a married man, however, tongues began wagging. She was also with him when he was accused of ramming his car through the gate of an Afrikaner monument in the conservative town of Krugersdorp, near Johannesburg.

Shortly afterwards a wheel on her car was loosened and fell off while she was driving. Then her apartment was bombed. She was advised to leave the country and work from Britain. Soon afterwards her South African newspaper column was cancelled and she instead found occasional work on the Sunday Times in London.

Before long parts of the British press were repeating the insinuations about a relationship with Terreblanche. Options magazine and the Evening Standard settled her libel actions quickly but Channel 4 denied that its programme was libellous and chose to fight, setting the stage for a sordid but gripping libel trial presided over by Sir Humphry Potts.

The High Court heard that Jani Allan’s flatmate, Linda Shaw, had peeped through a keyhole and witnessed her having sex with Terreblanche. Responding to Carman’s cross-examination, Linda Shaw described seeing Jani Allan “flattened beneath a large white bottom … going up and down between her raised knees”. Jani Allan refuted the claim, saying she had thought Terreblanche “looked rather like a pig in a safari suit”.

The exchanges in court were frequently salacious. As The Daily Telegraph reported at length on Page 3, Andrew Broulidakis, a record producer who had known Jani Allan since childhood, told of meeting Linda Shaw for lunch to learn what information she was giving Channel 4: “Bearing in mind considerable quantities of alcohol had been consumed, there was a flirtatious aspect… If you want the exact words, she said to me, ‘I never trust a man until I’ve f----- him.’ With that in mind, we returned to her apartment.” Broulidakis added that they had sex three times in five hours.

Although Terreblanche submitted a sworn statement denying any relationship, Marlene Burger, Jani Allan’s former news editor, testified that the columnist had confided in her that the pair had been having an affair.

On the second day of the hearing Carman mysteriously produced Jani Allan’s 1984 diary. It contained her sexual fantasies about a married Italian airline pilot, casting doubt on her professed lack of sexual experience and her sworn testimony that she would never commit adultery.

Her own mother weighed in, saying of her daughter’s claim only ever to have slept with her former husband: “That’s precious little sex to have had at the age of 41. If it’s so, then she’s missed a lot in life. Some women have two partners a night.”

Carter-Ruck and Gray urged Jani Allan to drop the case, but she persisted. Meanwhile her medical records, stolen from a South African hospital, turned up in court showing that she used a contraceptive device.

So traumatised was Jani Allan by her cross-examination that she told Carman: “Whatever award is given for libel, being cross-examined by you would not make it enough money.” After the case she described him in The Spectator as “a small bewigged ferret”.

There was also drama outside the court. Anthony Travers, a former British representative of the AWB who had been attending the hearing, was stabbed in the street, possibly mistaken for Carter-Ruck. Meanwhile, Jani Allan’s London flat was burgled and she received a telephone death threat in the court ushers’ office.

On August 5 the jury decided, after four-and-a-half hours’ deliberation, that Channel 4 had not libelled Jani Allan, leaving her with costs in excess of £300,000 and her reputation destroyed. “I have always equated sex with punishment,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. “And now this has been proved conclusively.”

She was born on September 11 1952, the product of an unwanted pregnancy. She was adopted at a month old by John Allan, a Scot who became chief sub-editor of The Star in South Africa, and his wife Janet (née Henning). They named her Isobel Janet Allan, though she did not learn of her adoption until she was 18.

Her father died when she was 18 months old and her mother went to work at De Beers, leaving her with a Zulu male nanny named Dennis. Her mother remarried an English widower called Walter Fry and fostered three more children, one of whom sexually abused her.

Music was ever present and young Isobel, known to her mother as Juliette, took to the piano, performing with the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra at the age of 10. She read Chaucer at night and had lessons in ballet, art, elocution and Scottish dancing.

By 13 she had a pony called Prince, but when she fell off her mother made her get straight back on, saying: “Cease this detestable boo-hooing.” Her mother’s other advice included the rule that if she must sit on a man’s knee, “put a telephone directory on his lap.”

She was educated at Greenside High School, studied Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, worked as a photographer’s model, wrote film and classical music reviews for newspapers, and taught English and art at Bryanston High School.

On the basis of her reviews she was offered a column on the Sunday Times called “Just Jani” because “Janet” would not fit on the page; thereafter she was known as Jani. Within weeks she had been dispatched to Corfu to interview Roger Moore on the set of For Your Eyes Only.

In 1987 a Gallup poll commissioned by the paper named Jani Allan “the most admired person in South Africa”. She was certainly among the best known. “I could delay the take-off of an aeroplane. I remember I was a bit late for a flight to, I think, Durban. I went like this to the pilot,” she told the South African Mail & Guardian, waving flirtatiously, “and they held it”.

Then came her fateful meeting with Terreblanche.

After the court case Jani Allan wrote occasional pieces for British newspapers including The Daily Telegraph. Trouble seemed to follow her and for a time she found herself being inadvertently used to spy on the African National Congress’s enemies in Britain.

Returning to South Africa, Jani Allan became a born-again Christian and a speechwriter for Chief Buthelezi, the former leader of the KwaZulu government. She also had a late-night radio show, Jani’s World, but that was cancelled after she interviewed another rightwing extremist. Meanwhile, Terreblanche was murdered by a black farm worker in 2010.

Fleeing to America, Jani Allan wound up as an anonymous waitress in the small town of Lambertville, New Jersey, going by her former nickname Juliette. In 2013 she started a blog, demonstrating that she had not lost her readable style and wit. “There is also a chance of collateral windfall,” she wrote of her new life. “An arguing couple once stormed out of the restaurant forgetting a bottle of Dom Pérignon.”

Jani Allan married Gordon Schachat, a South African businessman, in 1982. When the marriage was dissolved in 1984 she blamed her own lack of interest in sex. In 2002 she married Peter Kulish, an American advocate of the controversial biomagnetic therapy; that too was dissolved.

Jani Allan, born September 11 1952, died July 25 2023

One wonders how she could have come up with that description if she hadn't seen him without the safari suit on?!

Arthur Boyt, roadkill enthusiast who waxed lyrical about polecat, badger ham – and dog

His motto was ‘just because it doesn’t have a label, doesn’t mean it’s not edible’ and putrefaction was no barrier to enjoyment

Arthur Boyt, the roadkill enthusiast who has died aged 83, became an accidental fixture in British newspapers, with journalists ringing him up each year to quiz him on his eccentric Christmas lunch.

Sometimes it was badger ham, or a polecat (which he claimed could serve four); more sensationally, there was beached sperm whale casserole with brussel sprouts, and his Christmas 2015 dish of dolphin, which he sautéed live on air on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show. The dolphin caused a minor scandal as it was technically property of the Crown; Boyt retorted that he was simply disposing of the dead body, which was within the law, and nobody had stipulated that the disposal should not be via his mouth.

But if he was mischievous and unrepentant about his eating habits, it was because he believed passionately that they were ethical. He would never kill an animal, and was revolted by factory farming.

For Boyt roads were a deli counter, and of all the meats he scraped off the tarmac, his favourite was dog. “DELICIOUS… tender as veal with the consistency of lamb,” he recorded, having first tried it in January 1978. Dog was only ever an occasional treat, however, because if the collar had a name on it, Boyt would do his utmost to reunite the deceased with its owner.

Unclaimed, a large dog could furnish 15 meals and plenty of sandwiches. “I once had four sandwiches for lunch, three of which were dog and one was hare,” Boyt wrote in his memoir. “I ate the hare first to give it time to get away before I sent the dog down after it.”

Cat he found bland, but much improved by redcurrant jelly. Once, he served cat fat from his dripping bowl to his unsuspecting sister, a fact he revealed to her only much later, in a speech at her son’s wedding; in front of all the guests, the infuriated sister tried to beat him up.

Swan was muddy, bat was odd, and fox repeated on him – “it tastes like it smells: a mixture of diesel and onions” – but most other species, from otters to squirrels to stoats, he praised with an eloquence worthy of Elizabeth David. He even published his own recipes, for dishes such as hedgehog carbonara.

“What a race of spoilt fusspots we have become!” Boyt said, demanding to know why Britons were so revolted by a rabbit, garnered from a roadside, that had “grown up eating grass and wildflowers, the epitome of an organic existence” and yet were perfectly happy to consume beef that had been “standing all winter in its own excrement, fed on heavily fertilised fodder, supplemented with growth hormones and injected with antibiotics”.

His motto was “just because it doesn’t have a label doesn’t mean it’s not edible.”

Putrefaction was no barrier to enjoyment, either. “I’ve eaten stuff that is dark green and stinks,” he said, claiming that roadkill – because he cooked it for long enough – never made him ill, whereas “buffet food like sandwiches and scotch eggs” had given him stomach bugs.

The only bit of the animal he was too squeamish to eat was the eye’s gelatinous lens, which turned into a hard white ball when cooked.

Obsessively parsimonious, Boyt did not just dine from the roads, he dressed from them, too, washing encrusted vomit off fleeces he found discarded on the A39. A pioneer “freegan”, he was so notorious for supplementing his lunch from the skip outside his workplace that he nearly ate a white bap filled with spit and sand, left for him by some builders as a prank.

As a romantic gesture, he gave up eating dog in 1996, when he married his second wife, Sue, a vegetarian, but their marriage was still tested by the prank callers who rang up at 2am, pretending to be the ghosts of animals Boyt had eaten, and by the badger heads he always had bubbling on the stove.

To reduce the smell, he started to casserole them instead of pressure-cooking them, but his preference for a “greenish” carcass drove Sue to have dinner in her bedroom, to avoid a row. “I have to be discreet because I don’t want her to rush off and leave me,” Boyt told a journalist. “I’d sooner have her than the badgers.”

Arthur Boyt and his twin brother Dennis were born at Watford on September 3 1939, the day that Britain declared war on Germany, to William Boyt, a solicitor, and Bessie, née Legg. There were two older siblings, John and Naomi.

The family were Exclusive Brethren, a sect of the evangelical Plymouth Brethren; there was no television, no Christmas festivities and no black pudding (the consumption of blood is forbidden in Acts). Their mother, a keen botanist, encouraged the twins’ fascination with foraging outdoors; soon, they had a Wunderkammer of bleached skulls, glass bottles and Roman tesserae from nearby Verulamium.

The twins’ father died of a heart attack two days after their 10th birthday. They attended Brodick School, then Watford Grammar, where Arthur saw Whiskey Galore! Not having seen a film before, he believed everything in it was real.

He got his taste for roadkill aged 13, when the twins, on one of their 100-mile cycle trips, came across a dead pheasant in Windsor Great Park. They liked the idea of dining at the monarch’s expense, so asked their mother to roast it.

In 1957 she died of a stroke. The now-orphaned Arthur read biology at university, then worked for seven years as an entomologist for Cooper, McDougal and Robertson, before joining the Fire Research Station as a librarian and researcher, making money on the side as a coach driver for Haberdashers’ Aske’s school.

He married another of the Exclusive Brethren, Patricia, but in 1977 he was excommunicated for dissent; his wife left him and his twin brother cut him off.

Indefatigable, he cycled across the United States, across Canada, and from Cairo to Khartoum, and twice ran the London Marathon in under three hours. But his passion was orienteering, for which he represented England well into old age, freely sharing his badger sandwiches with those he met on the way; for although he was pathologically averse to spending money, he had a Christian generosity to waifs and strays.

Nature absorbed him. He took up bird-song recording, then ringing birds’ legs. Snares drove him wild – he once found an emaciated badger that had been left, illegally, ensnared for two weeks – and he campaigned to have them consigned to the dustbin of history.

His run-ins with “legal” hunts trying to hide fox carcasses were legion (and often came to blows); and he harangued the RSPB, for which he worked as a surveyor, for tolerating the shooting of snipe, woodcock and golden plover.

He achieved his mild celebrity only in retirement, entertaining film crews from around the world in his house at Davidstow, Cornwall. In 2022 he published his memoir-cum-cookbook Roadkill, which aimed to fill the carnivorous gap left between Wild Food by Ray Mears and Richard Mabey’s Food for Free. Roadkill offered such startling tips as not to be alarmed, when you defrost weasels in the microwave, to hear them whistle: this is just the steam escaping from their mouths.

The last two years of his life were spent at Exmouth. His wife Sue survives him.

Arthur Boyt, born September 3 1939, died July 4 2023

Talk about opposites attracting!

[Leo Enticknap]

This reads like Laurel and Hardy's The Music Box, but in the other direction!

Girl Power?: Woman Who Said ‘I Don’t Need No Man’ Calls Firemen When Trapped Under Couch

A woman in England who thought she was more capable than a man recently found herself in a predicament in which she needed help from the opposite sex.

When 30-year-old Sara Aziz of Colchester, Essex, decided to move a couch from her first floor down a flight of stairs, things did not go according to plan, the Daily Mail reported Tuesday.

An image shows Aziz with the couch in question:

I tried to move my sofa alone because I 'didn't need a man' to help me – but I got pinned underneath it and firefighters had to rescue me https://t.co/9t3cXMazau pic.twitter.com/4fsH3tCjEs

— Daily Mail U.K. (@DailyMailUK) August 29, 2023

While trying to push it through a tight space, the couch became wedged between the banister and the wall. So Aziz crawled underneath it to try and free it.

Moments later, Aziz slipped, fell backward, hurt herself, and became trapped underneath the couch. She was stuck there for approximately 90 minutes with no way out unless someone came to her rescue.

She was getting rid of her old couch to replace it with another one. Before attempting to move it, she said, “‘I thought ‘You know what? I can do this, I’m an adult, I don’t need no man, girl power’ kind of thing.”

Desperate for help, she contacted family members on her cell phone, which was still tucked into her bra. However, no one could come to her aid at the moment, so she dialed 999, and dispatchers sent out fire crews to rescue the frustrated young woman.

Sara Aziz ficou embaixo de sofá por uma hora e meia e precisou da ajuda dos bombeiros para sair da situação. https://t.co/0LvyuQTgpl

— Metro Jornal (@MetroJornal) August 28, 2023

“The firemen were very handsome but I was lying there looking like a slug so I don’t think I looked as good,” she recalled of the first responders who freed her after a few minutes of trying.

Aziz, who suffered a bruise on her chest during the ordeal, admitted she was relieved when the rescuers arrived at her home, adding, “It was the most embarrassing situation of my life. The fire brigade were at my house to lift a sofa off me when they should be putting out fires.”

Social media users had a lot to say about the young woman’s predicament, one person writing, “So you did need a man.”

“God works in mysterious ways,” another replied.

In 2018, cultural commentator Camille Paglia said that while second-wave feminism was trying to destroy men, it was also destroying women and culture, Breitbart News reported:

The feminist icon – who prefers the original brand of feminism that won women the right to vote and raised up heroines such as Katharine Hepburn, Amelia Earhart, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh – said the more recent second wave of feminism is “an absolute poison that has spread worldwide.”

“Paglia said the original feminists ‘admired what men had done – there was no male-bashing – as became systemic to second-wave feminism,'” the outlet stated.

[Leo Enticknap]

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the theater...

Cinemagoers covered with bedbug bites after alleged infestation

Visitors to Parisian multiplexes believe the country’s insect problem, previously confined to hotels, has reached film theatres

By Vivian Song in Paris 3 September 2023 • 5:43pm

Blood-sucking monsters are usually confined to the screen in horror movies, but in Paris they have been breaking out for real, biting and stinging cinemagoers in their seats.

People have been posting photos online of their red and blotchy skin – the hallmark of bedbug bites – which they claim to have discovered after leaving the cinema.

It follows a mass outbreak in the country that has seen homes and hotels infested with the insects.

Nawal was one of the first people to go public over the infestation in the cinemas after a visit to a UGC multiplex in Paris.

She said that while she was in the theatre she could feel little stings but it didn’t occur to her that they might be bedbugs.

“The seat I had reserved was very damaged. I thought maybe it was just fleas,” she told Le Parisien.

It was only after she came out that she realised from the telltale linear bites that she had been feasted on by bedbugs.

After she complained to the cinema and received only a word of acknowledgement but no apology, she took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to post photos of the bite marks:

#Cinema Les salles impaires en bas, @UGCcinemas @ugcdistribution de #Bercy Village sont infestées de punaises de lit, ATTENTION ‼️‼️‼️#Paris12
En DM ici, on vous remercie de l’info, mais PAS un mot de regret, ni aucune excuse. RIEN.
La direction du ciné ne traite PAS les salles. pic.twitter.com/VwPkBNlwEF
— Nawal ⚡️ (@Nawal_) August 26, 2023

“The cinema management does NOT treat the rooms,” she said.

“[I received] NOT a word of regret, nor any apology,” she added.

Since then others have come forward with similar complaints from half a dozen cinemas in and around Paris.

One man shared photos of bite marks on his neck and back following a screening at the same UGC Bercy theatre, while another woman posted photos of angry red splotches on her shoulder after watching a film at MK2 Beaubourg.

It follows a government report that revealed 11 per cent of all French households had faced an outbreak of bed bugs between 2017-2022. The rise of international travel and hotels were identified as the primary sources of infestation.

Bedbugs are reddish-brown and wingless and often live in old bedding or furniture.

Cinema chain MK2 sought to reassure customers, saying that the rooms had been treated and “there is no more risk in our rooms than in any other public place in Paris.”

UGC has yet to respond to the claims and could not be reached by The Telegraph for comment.

I don't find the MK2 spokeshole's reassurance very reassuring. If the whole of Paris is crawling with the little gits, claiming that there is no more risk in your theater than anywhere else in the city translates as "You're gonna get munched, folks ... enjoy!"