ANYONE WHO says Hugh Hefner is only good at getting intimate with women a fifth of his age might need a rethink. News from the BBC reports the wrinkly Playboy supremo has coughed up $900,000 (£580,000) to save the famous Hollywood sign from demolition.

Shithead investors had wanted to turn the hills around it into a housing complex, but Hef’s donation completed a $12.5m fundraising campaign to save the space.

Arnie Schwarzenegger, unbelievably still California State’s governor, said: “Zis is ze Hollywood ending ve hoped for.” He then set off to take down the Chicago-based investors, dressed in a dirty vest, a headband and khakis, with a knife strapped to his leg.

Here’s HH on the red carpet groping young women while talking to the press:

CHECK OUT this gross misrepresentation of the facts from a Sky News infographic. The Daily Mail and The Sun both played similarly loose with the facts their own polls threw up. But surely, it’s all #nickcleggsfault.

Hat-tip to refpls on the spot.

WHENEVER YOU decide to dye your hair half-blue, buy some tight corduroy three-quarter length slacks and a t-shirt with purpose-poked holes in it and head down Shoreditch way to show those fuckers how cool you are, be sure to walk down Curtain Road to check out what the kids at Mutate Britain are doing.

Based opposite to a fashion college, the building is hive of artistry and creativity and certainly makes my walk to work more interesting, particularly when they revamp the wall art like the new Robin Hood Tax image above (and below).

The tax itself is an excellent idea, which would require arsehole bankers to pay a 0.05% levy of every transaction they broker, even if it was coined by Richard Curtis and the Red Nose brigade. Campaigners say it could raise £250bn a year. A pretty nicely shot propaganda video featuring Bill Nighy follows below.

A (Dutch)man's home is his castle... though it doesn't guarantee a league title

THERE’S THAT old phrase, ‘a man’s home is his castle’. (Not mine, mind; I live in a Victorian maisonette in West London.) Well, Ajax Amsterdam FC has taken that old wisdom and given it a modern sprucing by changing ‘castle’ to ‘fortress’. But despite an incredible league record of 16 wins out of 17 home games, 64 scored and only four against, the club isn’t topping the Dutch league.

The club’s home record is nothing short of astounding: What’s even more astounding is that Ajax are currently being held in second place by Steve McLaren’s Twente (below).

Twente’s home record actually matches it’s rivals, though its goal difference an incredible 33 goals worse (45 overall). Ajax are, how you schay… Underdogshs?

Of course, Chelsea went 86 matches unbeaten at home between March 2004 and October 2008 (including the whole of Jose Mourinho’s reign) and Arsenal and AC Milan have gone whole seasons without league defeat – though Steaua Bucharest holds the record run at 104 games. But none of them had a defence which had only conceded four home goals almost across a whole season, and certainly, none of them still failed to win their divisions. Martin Jol’s men have three games to come from behind on England’s worst ever manager.

THE VOLCANIC eruption over in Iceland – in the brilliantly named Eyjafjallajokull glacier region – is a local’s nightmare; a radio presenter based an hour’s drive away from the epicentre told Colin Murray today it was closest thing to the end of the world you could see, with the early morning sky pitch black with volcanic soot and all animal life seemingly disappearing from the face of the Earth.

But from a British journalistic perspective, the story is a godsend. Which is good, what with me being a British journalist and all.

I can’t think of a single publication which hasn’t run some kind of story on it. BBC 5Live searched desperately for the aforementioned eye witness DJ, while other news outlets went with the flights grounded angle. More niche publications, such as TV journals C21 (which I write for) and Broadcast Now both ran ‘TV execs stuck in Cannes market’ stories.

Those were the more sensible ones. Over on Twitter, an argument has broken out between fans of the #ukvolcano and #ukash (an ‘ash tag’) hashtags. No doubt news reporters are at this minute tracking down holiday-makers with Act of God cover for a good old insurers vs. the public feature, while Ben Marsh’s out-of-ten rating postcode vote on how ashy local British air is has shown the answer is  not very ashy at all.

The Icelandic volcano hashtag row breaks out into open warfare

So what do we we actually have at play here?

Major natural disaster/occurence. Check. Mass evacuation of Scandinavia, including slightly pervy Daily Mail school pyjamas saga. Check. Name of region of event like its made up by a toddler sitting on a laptop. Check. British air industry thrown into turmoil with the rest of Europe doomed? Check. Internet row over snappy hastag title? Check.

It’s explosive. It has mileage. Lovezing it over here.

PS Good luck to all those stuck coming in/getting out of the UK today or tomorrow.

THIS ARTICLE has a whiff of self-flagellation about it. It’s a public dressing down of myself, in front of you, the reader (all three of you) to purge myself of the incredible lack of activity on this blog in the past few months.

Blogging, as nearly anyone can tell you, is something that all aspiring journalists should be doing. Regularly. If Roger Ebert, the timeless Chicago Sun-Times film critic can tweet at 69, it shouldn’t be a task for me to stick up a post of note a few times a week. I mean, jesus, my mum is now on Facebook. There’s no excuse, besides the fact I really like drinking and watching crap TV when I’m not working, and that doesn’t leave much time for sober/intelligent/measured writing.

Now, feeling suitably whipped into shape, there is/are some news/excuses as to why you’ve seen such a lack of activity around theeeyse hurr parts recently…

I have actually been keeping busy between drinking sessions; the world of programme sales, cartoon forums and “really excited” executives in press releases does not stop, and there I have been camping. Should you be heading to Cannes to buy some new cartoons for your national broadcaster anytime soon, check out the C21Media material there and you’ll see what I’ve been writing.

I’m now also writing a weekly – more like bi-weekly – interview feature for Tim Clark’s Such Small Portions, which looks excellent after the relaunch I was touting at the end of 2009. Check out Hoot Comedy, the comedy website whose owners I met with in a pub in central London recently for what resembled a semi-coherent interview conducted over numerous glasses of beer, here.

Later this week, I’ll be back with something substantive and with more of a point than today’s ritual self-humiliation exercise. It’s what I imagine a recruit’s first week in the army is like, albeit a one-man army based in a kitchen off the Portobello Road.

THIS IS an actual piece of real journalism that I did. Quite incredible. I met with, asked questions to AND even got answers from a proper, like, well-famous comedian. I know, I’m reeling too.

A link to the published version of this article can be found here.

A few weeks ago a Guardian article by Brian Logan caused what could be considered to be ‘quite a fuss’ in the comedy world.

His article, ‘The new offenders of comedy’ accused Scott Capurro, along with Australian Brendan Burns, Richard Herring and Jim Jefferies specifically of creating the new offensive comedy movement by using provocative material in their shows.

The resounding uproar saw Logan chastised for what some consider a slanderous misrepresentation of the truth for pure journalistic benefit, but, while Herring et al rushed to protect their reputations the one man who was most viciously attacked for his outrageous style has stayed quiet. Until now…

CONTROVERSY and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival are never far away from each other. And to the cynic this is mainly because controversy often equals ticket sales. So when I ask Scott Capurro how he feels about his show being used as the fulcrum of Logan’s ‘new offenders’ article, he isn’t in the slightest bit, well, offended by it.

In fact, all he sees is more people talking about his act. We’re sitting in the downstairs bar of Mayfair’s Masons Arms pub, just off London’s Oxford Street after the regular comedy showcase ‘Upstairs at the Masons’ which the former stage actor has headlined.

Capurro, an athletically thin forty-something of over six foot, looks almost bored by the line of questioning, but he entertains them nevertheless.

What was the point of the ‘new offenders’ article I venture. He takes a second and begins his explanation.

“Logan was creating controversy,” Capurro says. “He was branding himself for Edinburgh. He talked about this in the interview I did with him for his piece.

“In the same way comics brand themselves, critics do too. But this means they lose their invisibility and that is bad because you know when they’re in the room and it ruins everything. It ruins the power and the strength of what the critic does and what the comic does as well. “We’re like locusts – we’re all feeding off one another.”

Controversy is like second nature to Capurro. Having been banned in clubs and from radio shows across the world, he was the also target of much criticism for a series of letters he exchanged with Eric Menendez, who, along with his brother, killed his parents in California twenty years ago. Therefore, he doesn’t see the same danger in Logan’s article that Burns and Herring did. In the furore following Logan’s article both men wrote to the Guardian to complain and, although many felt it justified, to Capurro it was just two overly sensitive comedians throwing their microphones out of the pram.

Burns’ faux racist comedian act was critiqued in the piece whilst Herring’s hotly-tipped Hitler Moustache routine was arguably given the most unfair treatment – Logan argued the show claims “racists have a point”, (read Richard Herring’s reaction here).

But for Capurro, Herring’s complaint irritated him: “He’s been doing this for 20 years. He knows you’re often misquoted and misinterpreted: You speak to journalists and you roll a dice. I read Richard’s response and I was like, ‘Lady, get off your box!’

“I think what Brian was trying to do was raise some interesting points. I don’t think he was saying anything definitive about anybody. He didn’t say anything which would change people’s minds about what I do.”

Logan later wrote back on the Guardian comedy blog that just as Herring and Burns credited their audience with enough intelligence to get their jokes, he took the same line with his readers. He did, however, say he regretted that people had taken his article as an attack.

Even so, bars and Green rooms across Edinburgh have braced themselves for some very icy encounters and if Herring or Burns are ever to be in the same room as the Guardian critic, it will be more than toys that are thrown.

Capurro says he found the whole debate a pointless exercise because to him deconstructing a joke is to essentially kill it dead. Capurro’s act reflects this – often with his most outrageous material it isn’t the joke he cares about: it is the initial, human reaction to it. “The more you talk about it,” he says, “the less funny it gets.”

And, with Edinburgh in full swing, Capurro sees any press garnered as only a good thing. “My name was in the beginning of the article and there’s a photo, and [Logan] said he liked my set, which is all I really care about.”

The worst thing that can happen to a comedian before Edinburgh is to be ignored by the press. Historically, acts that fill up the column space in the Guardian and The Scotsman gain a healthy stream of bookings in the following year. Capurro gives a damn about bookings, but not such much about a comedian’s feelings.

But The San Franciscan’s confrontational style can go wrong. Capurro was included in Logan’s article primarily due to an incident at a gig in Sheffield two weeks ago where a Madeline McCann gag backfired, leading to a heated argument between Capurro and an audience member. Logan and his girlfriend were in the crowd and later interviewed the audience members who had left about their feelings towards the comic. (This was left out of the article.)

Ever the one shock, Capurro smiles, sips his water and discloses: “Most audiences are fine with the race and religion jokes but even now you can’t tell a Maddy joke in the UK!”

Up to fifteen people walked out that night, an indication that some audiences can only be pushed so far. Capurro himself reacted badly, and would probably do the same again, although would always regret it afterwards: “Some audiences like it to stay light and fluffy.

The minute it starts to get heavy, I becoming very menacing. I don’t like that and they don’t like that and I don’t want to be that guy.”

Interestingly, for a man for who tells jokes about giving fellatio to Jesus and peppers his set with deliberately offensive racial, sexual and political slurs, he doesn’t have any real vices off stage. He doesn’t drink, smoke or do drugs and rarely stays late after gigs.

In fact, when the comedy cape comes off, Capurro has a very different passion. “A lot of comics stay in the game for the drugs and the pussy.

“Well, those aren’t a thing for me so I just go home early because I get up early to do yoga.”

Capurro was playing at the ‘Upstairs at the Masons’ stand-up show that is held weekly at the Masons Arms pub on Maddox Street, near Oxford Street in central London.

I’M NOT working or interning at the moment. I start a project in a few weeks and then, fingers, toes and laces crossed, should start at business-to-business television magazine. But at the moment, I’m broke and bored. I get by blagging freebies here and there, blogging and posting on Twitter and drinking in Sam Smith pubs – I’ve been to an impressive seven in the past two weeks – but essentially I’m always looking for something to so I’ve taken to entertaining myself any way I can.

This week I’ve been in supermarkets more than I’d more normally choose to. Supermarkets are rubbish places in the grand scheme of things. So how do you make a daily or weekly shop bareable? I’ll tell you. Watch. Don’t shop. Watch people. They are brilliant. Humans do weird things in supermarkets. Weird humans go to supermarkets. Weird supermarkets make normal humans weird. Enjoy them.

In my local Tesco – the Portobello Road branch (the one that Dave Cameron got his bike nicked from for a bit of context) –  I have witnessed the following in the past few days…

• A fat tatooed Canadian guy the shape of egg with a silver half-bullring through his nose arguing with a Latina mum about who accidentally opened her son’s colouring book pack.
• An old man possibly escaped from the mental health ward down the road dressed in red baggy trousers, a blazer (no t-shirt underneath) and a stetson hat with a red bandana tied round it arguing with customers to let him go the wrong way through a 10 Items or Less checkout.
• Three young women, probably first-year students, standing at the entrance looking bemused as a big (I mean BIG) African woman shouts at them to move in a voice deeper than Barry White trapped in a well. They didn’t hear her.
• A man being questioned by the duty manager about why he’s cleaned them out of cut-price Edam – his basket glows yellow like ‘the great whatsit’ in Kiss Me, Deadly with the mound of cheese.
• I was also given a lecture about the evils of drinking ANY TYPE of booze by a guy called Ian in the wine and spirits section. Ian is a deeply religious man who I’ve had pleasure of receiving the same rant from before… in a pub, while he downed three pints of Guiness and a clutched a single page of the Bible, soggy from stout spillage.

I promise to do some proper investigative work at some point in the future.

This you may have seen before, it’s a couple of years old and is a Youtube phenomena, but I like it enough to want it available on my site at all time. Enjoy the wonders of the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain peforming Isaac Hayes’ classic Shaft at the 2007 Cambridge Folk Festival…