Skip to main content

How those rich and famous, and tiresome, other half live

From today's The Guardian newspaper a background piece on how the rich and famous - vacuous, boring and tiresome to boot - live.  Well, they look at it as some sort of "life".

"We lay our scene in January 2010, in the waters surrounding the Tobago Cays, five tiny uninhabited islands in the Grenadines. Here, "a gaggle of billionaires' yachts" are anchored. There is David Geffen on Rising Sun, the world's biggest yacht. (Cowell is "depressed" by its size compared with his, Slipstream.) Then there's that nice Philip Green on Lionheart, while erstwhile M&S boss Stuart Rose is staying with Matthew Freud and Elisabeth Murdoch on their yacht. Next to them is Angle Share, James Murdoch's boat, and nearby is the floating holiday home of Carphone Warehouse boss Charlie Dunstone. Right in the middle is a craft whose precious cargo is Rupert Murdoch.

As is the way with the unimaginatively super-rich, they all adore one another's company, devising evening entertaininment such as a "public school vs showbiz" Trivial Pursuit game. The mornings sound still more delightful.

"Rupert Murdoch stopped by Slipstream on his tender," we learn, "delivering that morning's newspapers, published by News International in Britain, America and Australia. They had been reproduced on a printing press installed on Murdoch's yacht. 'The world's most expensive newspaper boy,' Stuart Rose had quipped, digging for a coin to tip the deliverer."

What to say? Other than: can the Bermuda Triangle please raise its bleeding game."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t

The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) goes on hold.....because of one non-Treaty member (Israel)

Isn't there something radically wrong here?    Israel, a non-signatory to the NPT has, evidently, been the cause for those countries that are Treaty members, notably Canada, the US and the UK, after 4 weeks of negotiation, effectively blocking off any meaningful progress in ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.    IPS reports ..... "After nearly four weeks of negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in a predictable outcome: a text overwhelmingly reflecting the views and interests of the nuclear-armed states and some of their nuclear-dependent allies. “The process to develop the draft Review Conference outcome document was anti-democratic and nontransparent,” Ray Acheson, director, Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS. “This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-dependent allies for l

#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas  stopped  him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed  behind his back  into their patrol car, where they say he  shot himself  in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story,  says in an interview  that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?