According to a story on sky.com, about 2 weeks ago in the UK an illegal cannabis farm, containing around 826 cannabis plants, was discovered in a building, in London, and two suspects were arrested. No big surprise there, but what is interesting is the building the farm was discovered in was close to to the Bank of England. Apparently, the police were tipped off about a strong smell of cannabis in the area. (I bet that was an anonymous tip off.)
The Mirror features a story about a Monopoly collector who has spent over £150,000 on different versions of the famous board game. He has collected over 3,000 different Monopoly sets, and says he wants to have a copy of every version ever created. I guess that would give him a monopoly on Monopoly. He keeps all the games in their original packaging, to preserve their collector value, and that is what makes it even stranger: he doesn’t even play Monopoly.
A while ago we ran a session about strange job titles. and in the Sun under the headline “A very PC clod”, is a story that the West Midlands police force wishes to recruit an ‘assistant director of fairness and belonging’. The pay? A measly £74,000 a year, which by the way is twice the average pay of a policeman across all ranks. The catch? Nobody seems to know what the job would entail, but at £74,000 a year I doubt anyone would care.
In another story in the Daily Mail it seems that Radox the bath salts company has removed labels that advertise their latest product as being “for men”. The witty headline reads “Radox pulls the plug on their bath soak for men”. Allegedly, the company defended their original choice of name by saying that they didn’t think women would like the smell, which kind of makes a nonsense of getting men to try and smell like that, unless they want to repel women.
The Times reports on the Bowie biopic film, Stardust, which is set during the 1971 American tour, during which Bowie concocted his Ziggy Stardust alter ego. Seemingly the film has upset Bowie’s family and his fans. Why? Well the family say it doesn’t reflect him, and the fans are upset as seemingly the film doesn’t feature any of his music. I might watch it anyway and make up my own mind.
The Times also reported on a strange new kind of chat bot that will use AI to let loved ones speak from beyond the grave. The idea is you could “speak” to your dear departed, and the bot will use social media and other content in an attempt to recreate what the person might have said, or how the person might have reacted were they still alive.
Before you write this off as pure SciFi, Microsoft has patented the tech already.
Maybe it is the pandemic that is driving an obsession with perpetual existence: a recent TV program, Ghost, was billed as a ‘profoundly moving television first’, and gave a number of terminally-ill people the chance to record messages for their friends and family using cutting edge holographic technology. You can have your own hologram created, and seemingly Kanye West bought his Kardashian wife a hologram of her recently deceased father for her birthday:
https://mashable.com/article/kim-kardashian-dad-hologram-kanye-present
One has to wonder if it all led to this story in Vanity Fair.-
It seems we’re getting very clever in our use of technology, however it goes to show that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
And finally you may be under the impression that we’re currently in January, but you’d be wrong. Seemingly we are in Veganuary. It appears that half a million people around the world have signed up to go vegan in January, and a quarter of them are from the UK. Everyone is getting involved including the food manufacturers who are pushing plant-based foods, and even posh food pushers, Marks and Spencer’s, have come up with a 30-day vegan menu plan.
I wonder what it looks like:-
Monday – beans – Tuesday – beans – Wednesday – beans Thursday – beans Friday – beans – Saturday – beans Sunday – beans – repeat.
Sources:
- The Times
- sky.com
- The Daily Mail
- The Sun
- The Daily Mirror