Play With Words

Guardian’s Michael White explains Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn’s 2020 Vision website is about to those uninitiated:

Does yesterday’s call by Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn for a wholesome debate on Labour’s future policy direction mean what it says on the website tin. Or is it really a surrogate leadership campaign, one in which Corporal David Miliband is pushed up out of the Flanders trench by a couple of grizzled old sergeants who want someone else to test the machine guns?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2023852,00.html

The Times’s restaurant critics Giles Coren:

But English film critics are not red-blooded. And that is why most of them didn’t get Rocky Balboa. They kvetched about believability, sneered at sentimentality and mocked Stallone’s muscular, monosyllabic conception of masculinity. This is because English critics are a snide, whey-faced, nerdy bunch, who at the age when I was grinding out press-ups to Eye of the Tiger, were getting hard-ons for Belle de Jour and pinning another Morrissey poster to the wall.

American critics are not like that. It’s why they have Updike, Roth, Clint Eastwood, Joe DiMaggio and Champion the Wonder Horse while we have Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Hugh Grant, Mark Ramprakash and Muffin the Mule.

And he is supposed to review a restaurant. Who are Morrissey, Updike, Roth, Philip Pullman, and Mark Ramprakash anyway?

kvetch: To complain persistently and whiningly

snide: Derogatory in a malicious, superior way

whey: The watery part of milk that separates from the curds

whey-faced: with a pale face

Guardian’s Dan Glaister described the loss of Britney Spears’s hairs:

The one-time pop princess shocked paparazzi, minders, passersby and hard-bitten veterans of the hairdressing industry when she visited a Los Angeles hair salon on Friday night, dressed in a scruffy sweat shirt, and demanded that her famous golden locks, recently dyed black, be shorn off. When the salon owner cited the hairdressers’ Hippocratic oath, the troubled star took the clippers into her own hands.

一个 hairdressers’s Hippocratic oath, 作者不动声色中表明了自己的立场。

Guardian article: It’s back to her roots as Britney takes charge

Guardian’s Simon Hoggart recorded what Shilpa Shetty thought about the House of Commons:

Shilpa was asked if the House of Commons was like the Big Brother house. “No,” she said, “they are more polite in parliament, they can leave when they want, and they know what is going on in the outside world.”

Do they? Really? Possibly she hadn’t spent long enough there.

Mark Lawson 发表在今天 (2007-01-26) 《卫报》上的 Hollywood in the mirror 的开场白：

Since Elizabeth II’s advisers started working to make her seem more in tune with the public mood, it has become customary for her to send congratulations to Britain’s Academy Award nominees. But this harmless gesture of modernity will have had the flunkeys in a kerfuffle this year because the UK’s nominations for a movie about the attempts by Elizabeth’s advisers to make her seem more in tune with the public mood.

Hollywood in the mirror
flunkeys: servants
kerfuffle: commotion or disturbance