Prince Andrew's Teddy Bears 🧸
Mōrena lil shits!!
I’ll be honest with you all - there is a chance that I’m coming to you after having one too many margaritas last night at the opening of a new taco place that Rubes and I went to (ps if you’re after an EXCELLENT taco and equally excellent frozen marg, hit up Taco Medic up here in Tāmaki Makaurau!!!!!)
But I was celebrating because Nick and I had just recorded a really good episode of The Shit Show for you all + I was still trying to deal with the fact that Hong Kong are killing 2000 hamsters (OMG and every time I go to write hamsters I write hamPsters, I literally can’t help it.)
Help pay my rent?? 🥺 — www.getrevue.co
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In today’s newsletter:
Prince Andrew’s teddy bears
It’s snowing in the Sahara
A Czech singer died after catching Covid on purpose
Did you know that J.R.R Tolkien (Lord of The Rings) and C.S Lewis (Narnia) were mates?? And then had dramas?
You need to see the Happy Crying Dads subreddit
Toothpaste squeezing politics
When he doesn’t get his teddy bears, Prince Andrew is His Royal Cryness
I don’t want this to take away from the fact that this man is literally involved in a civil lawsuit in the US and has been stripped of his royal titles for allegedly sexually assaulting Virginia Roberts Giuffre - but amidst all the coverage on him is a weird side story about…. teddy bears.
So a former royal employee, Paul Page, let slip on a few details about Andrew’s very specific instructions when it came to his collection of teddy bears and other stuffed toys. He says Andrew kept laminated instructions in a bedside drawer that included a diagram on how to arrange his dozens of teddy bears.
“When the DOY [Douche Of York] is staying overnight, place one small teddy & cushion in the turn down.”
“When making the bed, place the teddy & cushion next to the teddy on the left-hand side with the necklaces on.”
He also says that some of the stuffed animals were reportedly emblazoned with words like “Daddy,” “Ducks,” and “Prince” (ew.)
“It had about 50 or 60 stuffed toys positioned on the bed and basically there was a card the inspector showed us in a drawer and it was a picture of these bears all in situ,” Page continued.
“The reason for the laminated picture was, if those bears weren’t put back in the right order by the maids, he would shout and scream.”
I reckon the palace learnt their distraction / PR tactics from the Kardashians.
A NEW CULTURE VULTURE EPISODE FOR YOU:
Keeping Up With The Kardashian's PR Machine - Culture Vulture — open.spotify.com
Happy 2022! We start the year off with a discussion about Molly Mae, Tom Holland and Zendaya, before discussing the Kardashian's carefully calculated (and annoyingly effective) PR strategy. From intentional photoshop fails, new relationships, pregnancies, song lyrics and cheating partners, a LOT happened over summer to distract from Astroworld.
It’s snowing… in the Sahara…
It’s currently snowing in the Sahara and I just wanted to show you some of these piccys:
A Czech Singer Died After Catching Covid On Purpose
Hana Horka (57) - a folk singer from the Czech Republic - was unvaccinated and had posted on social media that she was recovering after testing positive for Covid-19. Her son, Jan Rek, said she got infected on purpose when he and his father (both fully vaccinated) had the virus, saying that his mother had decided not to stay away from them, preferring instead to expose herself.
Rek goes on to say that his mother caught the virus so that she could get a recovery pass to enter certain venues, because proof of vaccination or recent infection from the virus is required in the Czech Republic to gain entry to many social and cultural venues, including cinemas, bars and cafes. Unfortunately, after returning from a walk complaining of a sore back, she went to bed & passed away shortly after.
This is a reminder to those who aren’t taking the necessary precautions to protect themselves and others, and want to just “get the virus” or “let it run wild because it’s inevitable” that it affects everyone differently (and have you SEEN the effects of long Covid??)
Did you know that J.R.R Tolkien (Lord of The Rings) and C.S Lewis (Narnia) were mates?? And then had dramas?
Yesterday Rubes told me that these two literary legends were friends and for some reason I was shook. In my head, successful people live in a vacuum and if their friends are also successful then it’s either not fair or just blows my mind. Anyway, the two met at Oxford, where initially, Lewis noted some apprehension: In his diary, he wrote of the “smooth, pale, fluent little chap” that there was “no harm in him: only needs a smack or so.”
Despite wanting to give him a smack, the two became besties and “in their fledgling efforts as novelists, they served as each others first readers.”
“The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not influence but sheer encouragement,” Tolkien wrote decades later. “He was for long my only audience.”
They met up on Monday’s and Lewis wrote in his letters: “This is one of the pleasantest spots in the week. Sometimes we talk English school politics: sometimes we criticize one another’s poems: other days we drift into theology or the state of the nation; rarely we fly no higher than bawdy and puns.”
Their friendship expanded into a group of writers, known as the Inklings, who would share their work, and this was fine for a while, but then… things took a little turn. Despite Lewis being a source of encouragement for Tolkien, when Lewis first read a draft of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" aloud to the Inklings, "Tolkien was horrified" NPR reports.
According to The Literary Traveller, Their differing writing paces also became a source of stress.
“While Tolkien wrestled over The Lord of the Rings for some 17 years, Lewis rushed his Narnia series to publication, composing the entire seven part series in seven years, and churning out book after book of what Tolkien considered Christian apologist works — Allegory of Love, Surprised by Joy— at what was to him an alarming rate (a sentiment fueled, perhaps, by Tolkien’s frustration with his own snail’s pace). In 1967, four years after Lewis’ death, Tolkien wrote, “To tell the truth, [Jack] never really liked hobbits very much.”
There were other personal and religious rifts that I won’t go into (you should read this and this if you’re interested), but according to Tolkien's letters, by the time C.S. Lewis died from kidney failure on November 22, 1963, the two literary giants hadn't spoken in a decade.
When he found out, Tolkien wrote: "This feels like an axe-blow near the roots. Very sad that we should have been so separated in the last years: but our time of close communion endured in memory for both of us."
The more you know eh!?
You need to see the Happy Crying Dads subreddit
At a time when male displays of emotion are still rarer than not, this tear-filled sub has become a literal watering hole for guys who need to let it out.
If you're in need of a wholesome part of the internet I would highly recommend the subreddit for happy crying dads. It’s exactly what the name suggests, and this article from MEL takes us a lil deeper:
Scroll through the top posts and you’ll see teary, middle-aged men greeting long-lost relatives, dog dads crying at thoughtful memorial gifts and guys discovering they’re about to become grandfathers for the first time. With every emotional post, it’s a subreddit that calls bullshit on the corrosive trope that “real men don’t cry” — which research has already debunked anyway.
It’s just real wholesome, and I reckon it calls for more men crying on the internet please <3
How do you squeeze your toothpaste?
In a perfect world I'm sure we'd all love to say that we squeeze or roll it up from the bottom. The reality is that 53% of us are chaotic and just squeeze from the middle, while the other 47% of us are calm, and squeeze from the bottom. Closer than I thought to be honest!
‘World’s first’ vegan violin replaces animal hide glue with wild berries (Classic FM)
HARRY STYLES IS GOING BACK ON TOUR (The Music Universe)
Our thoughts on the Molly-Mae situation (Culture Vulture)
Wordle’s Creator Thinks He Knows Why the Game Has Gone So Viral - IT’S BECAUSE OF NEW ZEALAND (Slate)
“Bambi” Is Even Bleaker Than You Thought (The New Yorker)
XXX-Files: Who Torched the Pornhub Palace? (Vanity Fair)
How the Kardashians successfully distracted us from Astroworld (Culture Vulture)
You can listen to us talk about all things pop culture on Culture Vulture, about THE WORLD on The Shit Show or watch us explain the internet on Extremely Online.
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