News, Views Etc . . . Christmas Cuttings

A lot of 'News Views' stuff has accumulated since the end of October and hopefully I'll be processing it in a few posts over the next couple of weeks, but as this is the penultimate day of Christmas, these need to go ahead and both light the way for the forthcoming posts and help draw a curtain on Christmas!

These two figural baubles were available from John Lewis, I particularly like the Elephant! And - of course - the two nicer ones are more expensive!

While Habitat on-line was offering these three robot baubles @ 20-quid for the set of three, they are too cool for mech-school!

Paperchase have had a set of three robot glass baubles for the last few years, but they are also about £20 and they're half the size, so I'm waiting 'till they appear in a charity shop . . . and they will!

I haven't the faintest idea what's going on here, suffice to say the Elf on a Shelf is not "A Christmas Tradition", he only started to be mentioned here (in the UK) a few years ago and like Halloween is - I suspect - some marketing-driven import from the New World, he's an ugly little shit, making the sternest nutcracker look cuddly!

They're so excited!

The advert seems to be a marketing ploy to get maximum personal details from dim-witted readers as possible in exchange for ten 'things' which the small print makes clear won't look anything like the illustration . . . who falls for this crap? 'But he's rather sweet, and the kiddies like him!' Fuck-off - you simpering simple-minded simpletons; you'd buy a polished turd if the tabloids told you it was this season's retro-cool, or that 'Eurocrats' don't want you have one, are planning to ban them or make them all a standard length!

I dare say most of the UK readers and a fair number of overseas viewers will know exactly what this is, but I'll plow-on regardless; to tick a box!

Ladies and gentlemen - this is the image that launched a thousand, nay, nay and thrice nay  . . . TEN-thousand tabloid column-inches back in Mid-November. Being the last picture in a 24 (not 25!) window advent calendar issued by Gregg's, our national bakery and snack/sandwich-shop chain.

Yes, that is the Little Baby Jesus depicted as a sausage-roll*, and yes, he's had his head (or feet? It's hard to tell from this angle!) bitten-off by a hungry, lunching, office-worker!

Really it was a storm in a tea-cup and the usual twisted, protestant-outrage of the tabloids, no one has complained about the other 23 images (Cheops' Great Pyramid fashioned of a giant crashed space-sandwich, shepherd's flock-hills of buns, that sort of thing), nor the 24 vouchers  for cheap snacks and breads hidden behind/attached to the windows! I'm more interested in the three figures!

Pugh's take on the 'scandal' (Gregg's apologised profusely, but the publicity is unlikely to have hurt them one bit!) seen in the Daily Wail on November the 16th.

* For visitors to the blog who may not be familiar with the item, a sausage-roll - especially a cheap one from a high-street chain - is a machine-extruded tube of processed sawdust bound-together with rusk and a bit of gypsum, flavoured with road-kill and too-much pepper, the whole contained within an egg or milk-glazed, hot, damp, cardboard tube - we built an Empire on them!