No money worries! Or no money worries? (Punctuation matters!)
This week's Venue (in all good newsagents shops now) is excellent value for money. For just £1.50 you get a great read, AND when you've finished with it you can burn it to keep warm for maybe as long as three minutes! It's got:
Going Cheap - January, eh? Back to work, back to winter, back to crediat card bills with pay-day still ages away. That's why we've gone out and found loads of ideas for frugal living.
Slapstick - Slapstick 2010 returns with more silent movie-celebrating shenanigans and a slab of sleb supporters including Michael Palin, Barry Cryer, Graeme Garden and more.
PLUS - Win a £150 trip to the hairdresser's! ... Controversial environmentalist Stewart Brand interviewed ... Clive Owen stars in 'The Boys Are Back' ... The West's best Thai restaurants ... Job ads ... And loads more, including your complete ten-day local entertainment guide.
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For the Love of it
What three things would you save if your house was on fire? - Monkey (I've had him since I was born), my laptop (I feel like my life's on there at the moment) and my housemates (they'd go up like marshmallows).
If you could instantly remove anyone from the earth, who would you choose? - People who don't respect the age-old British tradition of queuing.
Pet hates? - Sensational bad news stories: "Eating a sausage a day gives you cancer", "Man severs fellow commuter's head", "Woman puts baby in bin" - I don't want to know.
What was your first job? - Store assistant for a lingerie shop in Rochdale. For £1.25/hour I fitted bras for the larger lady and one or two post-op transsexuals.
- Jo Tinsley, effervescent mastermind behindwww.theloveofit.co.ukinterviewed this issue
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Clean your Teeth the Freeconomy Way!
"The toothpaste is really simple actually," says Mark, "with two ingredients. 1. Cuttlefish bone - grind out the bone with a cut-throat razor so it becomes a fine powder, into a bowl. This acts as the abrasive element of the paste. 2. Add to it wild fennel seeds ground up using a pestle and mortar. The fennel seeds make your breathe fresher than any conventional toothpaste I've found and has all the cleaning properties of normal toothpaste. The recipe came from a foraging mate called Fergus Drennan, who you may know from a series on the BBC called 'The Roadkill Chef'."
- Frugal freeconomist Mark Boyle on how to make your own toothpaste. Only in this week's Venue.
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Positive Letting
I currently trade living in a three-bedroom converted barn cottage in rural Somerset with electricity and half the heating paid, as well as a regular salary, for 25 hours of cleaning and childcare per week for the owners of the grand house next door. Yeah, you knew there would be a catch, but I still think I'm getting a sweet deal, especially considering I used to cycle in all weathers to jobs that were just as mundane and menial, such as admin or waitressing, and then have to come up with over £500 for living expenses to fund someone else's mortgage. I'm left with plenty of hours free for more stimulating brain work and ample time to think through freelance writing ideas when polishing 300 stair-rail posts.
Service roles such as housekeeper, nanny, cook, gardener, handyman and caretaker often advertise separate accommodation, salary and other perks and can be in either urban or rural locations. Some are more Jeeves and Wooster than others, and your suitability for these posts can depend on how high your bullshit threshold is set. Sure, I lose my sense of grace and self-righteousness when scraping animal and human cack off various surfaces (why, oh why, can't an 8-year-old flush the toilet?) but, in general, most families seem to be mindful of the possible issues such an arrangement can impose.
- Erin Hensley looks at some ways of paying less - sometimes nothing - for your accommodation, in this week's Venue.
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Jokes
All the customers of the King's Head, the pub in a small English village, loved the landlord's little dog. When it died, they were all very upset.
They had a meeting to decide how best to remember the little dog.
"He was always happy," said Old George. "His tail was always wagging. Why don't we cut off his tail and stick it behind the bar!" Everyone agreed this was a good idea.
Meanwhile, the dog arrived in heaven and was about to run through the Pearly Gates when he was stopped by Saint Peter, who questioned the little dog as to where he was going.
The little dog said "I have been a good dog, so I am going into heaven where I belong!"
Saint Peter replied "You can not come into heaven without a tail. Where is your tail"?
The little dog explained what had happened back on Earth. Saint Peter told the little dog to go back down to Earth and retrieve his tail. The little dog protested that it was now the middle of the night back at the pub, but Saint Peter would not change his mind. So the little dog went back down to Earth and scratched on the door of the pub until the landlord, who lived upstairs, came down and opened the door.
"My goodness, it is the spirit of the little dog. What can I do for you"? said the landlord.
The little dog explained that he wasn't allowed into heaven without his tail, and he needed it back.
The landlord replied: "I would really like to help you, but my license doesn't allow me to ... re-tail spirits after hours!" (Thanks Marie)
When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bike. Then I realized that God doesn't work that way, so I stole a bike and asked him to forgive me. (Thanks Jack)
Q. How do you make five pounds of ugly fat look beautiful? A. Put a nipple on it! (Thanks Mark)
My girlfriend is a porn star.
Boy is she going to be furious when she finds out! (Thanks (other) Mark - You win this week's star prize Mail us a postal address and we'll sort you with a couple of travel games.)
Please send us jokes. Best one each week wins some stuff. Don't delay - email editor@venue.co.uk now and slide your funnyness into our eager inbox.
Fed up with crappy cinema awards that always give the gongs to the wrong films? Well now you can do something about it as Venue has its own Film of the Year category in the Richard Attenborough Film Awards 2010. It's not an entirely free vote, as they forced us to produce a shortlist of ten films. But we've made some effort to ensure all tastes are covered, from blockbusters to arthouse flicks and animation to documentary. If you're wondering why 'Slumdog Millionaire' isn't in there, that's because the eligibility rules are the same as those for the Oscars, so Danny Boyle's film counts as Last Year's Thing. Here, in no particular order, is the shortlist:
Star Trek
The Hurt Locker
Up
A Serious Man
An Education
Antichrist
Anvil! The Story of Anvil
Avatar
Fish Tank
Let the Right One In
To vote, all you have to do is go to http://www.filmoftheyear.co.uk/votevenuefilmoftheyear.php
Simple as that. Invite all your chums to join in too, safe in the knowledge that their votes won't be jumbled up with those cast by readers of Uncritical Blockbuster Worship Monthly or Giggly Teenage Girl Weekly.
Voting is open from Jan 4-22. The results will be announced by Sir Dickie himself on Jan 28.
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Severn Bore
Back in the good old days, the humble journalist's workload was far lighter, as public relations people had to pay the price of a stamp to send you a bit of paper telling you something (un)exciting about their clients. Nowadays, they can take the scattergun approach and send all hacks all their nonsense by email.
Because of the relatively long Christmas break, and a few days more recently because of snow, Bore has a particularly bulging inbox of completely irrelevant and uninteresting pseudo-spam, and now you're going to share my pain.
Here's one headed LONELY THIS CHRISTMAS? YOUR FRIENDS CAN NOW BE BOUGHT. No, really. There's some firm selling Facebook fans and friends to businesses who want to look popular. But now individuals can use the service to feel popular.
Here's another. Some holiday firm did a poll of which celebrities Bristolians would most like to go on holiday with. Cheryl Cole, Peter Andre, Adam Sandler and Simon Cowell, since you ask (which you probably didn't).
And here Wedding TV (no, me neither) is launching the second series of 'Celebrity Hens and Stags' in which Z-listers get to organise the hen or stag parties of some undignified idiots who for some reason believe that making fools of themselves on some godawful cable channel will somehow validate their desperate, hollow, pointless lives. Danielle Lloyd (who?) is doing the Bristol one, but some lucky couple elsewhere in the country get Neil and Christine Hamilton.
And finally, as I have lost the will to live, here's one plugging some online solicitors firm. Surely there is a special place in hell reserved for the sort of cynical, sleazy hucksters who put out press releases headed: RECORD DIVORCE LEVELS EXPECTED AS CONFIDENCE RETURNS TO THE ECONOMY.
- More cynicism from this week's Newshound pages
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Please remember...
Please remember to buy this week's Venue. If you don't, the management will keep making us pull them around on sledges, even when the snow's gone..
