Fyre! (I’ll take you to court)

Byrn!

Yeah, the guy behind Fyre Festival who isn’t Ja Rule is now promoting a sequel to his first event. You know, one of the most infamous debacles of its kind in history, for which he spent four years in jail and he still owes $26m, and the government of the Bahamas still considers him a fugitive from their justice system; during his trial he refused to pay his legal team and continued to commit fraud by selling tickets to events that didn’t exist or didn’t sell public tickets.

The question isn’t why you should be invited to part 2, the question is why should anyone believe McFarland is actually going to do part 2 at all, let alone get it right. He himself says “well duh, I’ve got to pay back that $26m somehow” and fair enough, he does, but… I’m assuming that setting up a festival of this sort would actually require several million dollars, so is he implying he already has that, or at least has access to it? Cos if he does, wouldn’t he be better using that to pay off his debt directly? It’d be a gesture of goodwill, and probably better than sinking it into an event that probably won’t actually make that money and leave him further in the hole, because people know of his history as a con artist (there are in fact two documentaries on Fyre Festival) and what happened first time round and only complete idiots and people who somehow missed the original shitshow would trust him with their money now. Surely. I’m all for redemption arcs, but not everyone gets one or deserves one, and I’m not sure Billy Z. does. In any case, if it does happen somehow, I hope the people at the festival take their own lunch with them…

The Voice fallout continues…

…With more of a whimper than a bang this time, though.

Liberal MP Julian Leeser has resigned as shadow attorney general and shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, less than a week after the Liberals confirmed they will oppose an Indigenous voice in the constitution.
Leeser, who is a supporter of an Indigenous voice, announced in a statement on Facebook on Tuesday morning he had resigned so as to campaign for a yes vote in the referendum.
Leeser’s move was welcomed by fellow Liberals who support the voice, including MP Bridget Archer and senator Andrew Bragg, but is considered unlikely to trigger further resignations from shadow cabinet despite several moderates expressing concern about the party’s position in that forum.
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, accepted the resignation, telling reporters in Brisbane it reflected that “his position is at odds with the overwhelming majority of the Liberal party members in our party room”.
Leeser told reporters in Sydney he hadn’t “been able to persuade” his colleagues to support a voice in the constitution.
“I resign without rancour or bitterness and remain a loyal Liberal, fully committed to the leadership of Peter Dutton,” he said.

And that’s why Julian Leeser can still go fuck himself, because apart from this one issue he’s still a toad for Dutton. And his own proposed model for the Voice involves removing its ability to actually advise parliament, so it’d have even less power than I think Labor will let it have. Quoth Julian also:

In the post, Leeser acknowledged “the support and good grace of Peter Dutton throughout the process and the faith he has shown in me”.
“However, on the voice referendum we find ourselves in different places. People of goodwill can disagree.”
At the press conference, Leeser added that Dutton came to the debate with an “open mind and a good heart” but claimed he had “not been able to engage” with the government because it had refused to answer 15 questions the opposition leader had posed.

This is Peter Dutton we’re talking about, a man with neither of those things and not a person of goodwill at all. I know Ken Wyatt’s resignation from the party over the Voice didn’t make any real difference to anyone except himself, but it felt like something, like an actual protest. Leeser’s bullshit is vacuous by comparison and I look forward to him going down with the ship.

In diabetes news, this is news somehow

I am frankly a bit confused by this article hailing a doctor in the UK:

A red-brick surgery in the seaside resort of Southport in the north-west of England is on the frontline of one of the biggest questions facing the NHS: what’s the best fix for our growing obesity crisis?
Dr David Unwin thinks he has the answer. He has championed a low-carb lifestyle that not only helps patients lose weight but also, in more than half of his patients who were on the diet, has even managed to reverse type 2 diabetes, once thought to be an irreversible and progressive disease.
Such results appear remarkable and will be scrutinised by NHS officials now rolling out a national low-calorie diet programme to treat obesity and type 2 diabetes, which can lead to serious health complications and early death.
Unwin also appears to have identified what one expert calls the “magic ingredients” that motivate his patients to adhere to lifestyle changes for several years.

I mean, bravo for him if he has, but… I’ve always been under the impression ever since I was diagnosed with diabetes myself back in 2004 that diet was a big part of diabetic maintenance (certainly one of my first meetings with anyone at the Randwick hospital’s diabetes clinic was with their nutritionist, an off-putting man I didn’t like but that’s not really relevant), that the poorness of my diet was a substantial part of why mine was so out of control (and, frankly, why it’s still not as well controlled as it should be). And I have a very limited range of things I actually like (one of the things that makes me wonder if I have some flavour of autism, but let’s not go there now), and, frankly, an attempt at dietary change when I was diagnosed with diabetes just depressed me terribly and didn’t actually make much difference anyway, so back to the things I enjoy I went… sigh.

And, frankly again, most of what I do like is carbohydrate-y, so whatever’s in Dr Unwin’s diet sheet probably isn’t going to interest me that much. It is, incidentally, curious that the article says nothing about that:

Dr Simon Tobin, the senior partner at the Norwood Surgery in Southport, who is a keen runner and follows a low-carb lifestyle, said: “Many of our patients have been low carb for six, eight or 10 years, so it is completely sustainable. If you had a drug that did half of what we have done with the low-carb approach, it would be worth an absolute fortune. No one is shouting about it because it is not a drug that’s making a profit for a big pharmaceutical company.”

So if no one stands to make money, why doesn’t the article specify the “magic ingredients” beyond just the vague mention of them being “low-carb”? Give people some ideas for themselves, maybe even I might see something of interest… The article seems to be withholding a lot of information; if, as I said, dietary considerations have always been important in controlling diabetes, I’m left puzzled by the end as to quite why Unwin in particular is getting this sort of attention. Also:

Dr David Oliver and Dr Kim Andrews set up the Freshwell Low Carb Project at the Freshwell Health Centre, near Braintree in Essex, and have reported significant weight loss in patients.
An observational study published in October 2021 reported 774 patients were given dietary advice, out of whom 339 attended a review and had their weight measured. They lost a total of 1,103kg, with a median weight loss of 2.5kg.

That… doesn’t actually seem like much. If the 10-20kg losses Unwin’s patients reported are accurate, that’s significant. 2.5kg doesn’t strike me in anywhere near the same way. Plus those figures mean 435 patients, i.e. nearly a hundred more than those who did the review, didn’t do it. I’d be very curious as to how those people went and how that may or may not affect their results…

Somehow Celtics is still a thing

For reasons I don’t understand, Michael (Mehul) Kingsbury is still at it:

What is this “Irish whisky” of which he speaks? Even in the US, where this clown lives, they spell it with an “e”…

Anyway, back in those long distant days (October 2021) when I still operated a Youtube channel, I actually did a video about Mehul and his absurd proposed TV show/racist propaganda nonsense. If you don’t want to listen to me droning on for 16 minutes however (and who could blame you?), I’ll boil the story down… basically around 18 months ago, Mehul started attracting attention on Twitter for a show he envisaged called Celtics, and for mass-blocking thousands of Irish and Scottish people who actually know about history before they could criticise him for the numerous things wrong with his idea. Some of which included:

— The title. “Celtics” is not a word (unless you’re referring to the basketball team);
— In his promotional art, he included a goddess called Aeronwen, who may not actually have existed in the first place and if she did then she was Welsh and therefore outside Irish mythology. Also he praised the actress playing Aeronwen for her natural Irish accent, which a putative Welsh goddess surely wouldn’t have had in the first place;
— Plus he said the show would be using Gaulish accents for “authenticity”, despite the fact we don’t know what a Gaulish accent would’ve sounded like, and despite the fact that a putative Welsh goddess wouldn’t have had one of those either;
— The “Book of Danu” isn’t an actual thing and there are no known myths about Danu, and I gather her very name is a linguistic reconstruction that’s not universally agreed upon;
— He also uses Belenus, who was indeed worshipped in Britain, but his actual cult centre was in Italy, and he was a national god in Noricum, a kingdom around what is now Austria and Slovenia and which was then an ally of the Roman republic and later part of the Roman empire.

This latter point is kind of important and deeply ironic, considering this description of the show from Mehul’s website:

Continue reading “Somehow Celtics is still a thing”

Art brutal

I’ve seen a bunch of these things lately via some of the Tumblr accounts I follow that post vintage horror content, “these things” being the covers of various comics published by Eerie Publications from the late 60s through the start of the 80s… Eerie Publications is not to be confused with Eerie, the actual comic of that name which they didn’t actually publish; that came instead from Warren Publishing, who discovered Eerie P. were about to use that title and hastily trademarked it themselves. What Eerie did publish appears to have mostly been reworkings of older horror comic stories from before the advent of the Comics Code in 1954, and from what I can see Eerie’s stuff seems to have been poorly regarded in its day. Mind you, I do see one online vendor asking $150 for this particular issue, so something’s changed in more recent times…

What fascinates me is that several of these Eerie covers follow the sort of scenario this one depicts (I only picked this as a somewhat random example), i.e. monsters attacking other monsters… in this instance, what appears to be a gang of vampires being wiped out by whatever the fuck that thing’s supposed to be. Here’s another Eerie publication of the same date, for comparison…

…in which an apparently not entirely human corpse throws his own head at a vampire woman. It’s a novel choice of weapon, if nothing else (and I suppose when you’re already dead there’s no point worrying about inflicting brain damage on yourself). And the vampire woman, or ghoul woman or whatever the hell she is, is wielding an axe, so did she cut the head off in the first place? I just wonder what the reasoning was for the monsters-vs-monsters theme… I know Universal had done their “monster rally” films in the 40s where they put their classic monsters (wolf man, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster) in the same film but they weren’t at war with each other, and there was another 40s horror film called Return of the Vampire with Bela Lugosi as the titular vampire and it also has a werewolf in it, but the werewolf is the vampire’s assistant. So I don’t think they were exactly ripping off the movies, so I’m just left wondering where the idea did come from, cos like I said, this was something they apparently did at least often-ish…

…another example from 1968 (wonder what the werewolf’s part in this situation was supposed to be)…

…and from November 1974, a bunch of ghouls challenging a vampire for the attractive brunette in the coffin…

…and from 1980, so this was something Eerie did with their cover art across their range and their lifetime. I wonder if this was more because of the artist, though? From what I can gather, the artist for these Tales of Voodoo and Weird Vampire Tales covers was one Bill Alexander, who I’m guessing (though can’t currently find confirmation) also did the rest of these, and a stack of other Eerie covers. Maybe this was his particular thing? I don’t know. I just find it kind of odd and fascinating in any case…

Quack love! (whatever that is)

Never actually seen this film (partly because it was actually lost for some decades), but this ad for it (which I’m guessing was aimed at theatre owners?) has one of my favourite promotional tools ever: brutal honesty. Basically it just comes right out and says “yeah, we know it’s a bit shit, but hey, people will watch it anyway”, none of the usual nonsense you get in exploitation cinema promotion… some of which is great, of course, but sometimes you have to appreciate this sort of bluntness too…

…And Ken Wyatt answers back

As a follow-up to the previous post: there’s already been some opposition from within the Liberal Party to Peter Dutton’s opposition to the Indigenous Voice, but that’s been compounded by the resignation of Ken Wyatt from the party over the matter. Given that he more or less kicked off the Voice process while he was the minister for indigenous affairs in the Morrison “government”, that’s a pretty bad look for Dutton… although I don’t suppose he cares much, it’s one less moderate to get in his way, and it won’t actually affect the Libs’ numbers in the lower house since he lost his seat at the last election anyway. Still, like I say, not a good look…