RIP Paul Hadwen, The Reverend H. Goatboy

I first found out about this earlier today, but at the time could find little detail.

The Rev was well known on gossip websites, particularly Popbitch, where his conspiracy theories and humorous tales of his life as a roadie with Motorhead and Thin Lizzy were always a pleasure to read.

I'm still not sure what happened, but it appears that the news is indeed true.



I never met The Rev, but this has left me feeling very sad. It's strange how you can be affected by someone you've never met.

He even had an entry at the Urban Dictionary.

"After he left me disheveled and glowing, I realised the stories were true, he really is God's Gift to women!" - Tara Palmer-Tompkinson.

RIP Rev. The interweb won't be the same without you.

Have a nice day

The perils of taking too many drugs

Indoor team skydiving

Avalore Freefly team having fun at Airkix Milton Keynes, UK.

Kung fu master

A close-up photograph of a rainbow

Taken at Skógar in Iceland.



Found at Flickr.

Click on all sizes for a really big image.

Malaysian apartment buyer discovers dismembered corpse in refrigerator

A man found a rotting human corpse chopped into pieces in the refrigerator of his newly purchased apartment in an upscale Malaysian suburb.

The man made the discovery when he detected a stench Sunday while cleaning the apartment, which had been vacant for several months, said Ku Chin Wah, the police chief of criminal investigations in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's biggest city.

"He found the human remains chopped into pieces", Ku said. "We believe it had been in there for some time."

Police arrested a woman believed to be linked to the murder, he added.

"We believe we have solved the case," Ku said. He declined to elaborate, saying investigations were ongoing.

Pregnant Chinese ladies bare bellies for camera

Pregnant ladies stand in line to show the cartoon figures on their abdomens during a contest of coloured drawing for pregnant mothers at a hospital in Haikou, capital of south China's Hainan province.

Bolt from the blue as lightning strikes twice

While folklore may suggest that lightning demurs from striking the same place twice, it apparently shows no such restraint with people.

Don Frick might have been mulling over that distinction at the weekend after he was hit by a bolt from the heavens on Friday - 27 years to the day after first being struck by lightning.

Mr Frick emerged shaken, with only a burned zip and a hole in the back of his jeans, from his latest high-voltage experience.

The 68-year-old was attending a festival in Pennsylvania when a storm rapidly closed in. He and six others sought refuge in a shed shortly before lightning struck the ground nearby, with the strike sending a shock through him and four others.

"I'm lucky I'm alive. It put me up against the wall," Mr Frick said. "When I came to and realised I was alive, the first thing that came to my mind was that I'm pretty lucky." None of the other people in the shed were seriously injured, he said.

Twenty-seven years earlier, Mr Frick had been driving a tractor-trailer when its antenna was struck by lightning, injuring his left side.

Fake 'bird-scaring' owl becomes home for family of swallows

When migrating swallows turned her house and barn into a home from home, Vivien Reynolds thought she had hit upon the ideal deterrent.

She placed a model of a giant eagle owl high up in the barn, hoping the plastic predator's golden eyes and sharp talons would scare off the birds.



The swallows had other ideas. After two days eyeing up Ollie, the fake 3ft owl, a pair of the birds settled on its head.

They then built a nest out of mud and twigs - where they are now raising a family of five hungry chicks.



Mrs Reynolds, 58, of South Hams, Devon, said: "My husband and I adore the swallows and when they arrive we have them absolutely everywhere.

"But this year we needed some extra storage space in the barn so we put the owl in there to scare them off.

"Unfortunately it took the swallows about two days to work out it wasn't hostile."

Couple told garden is 'too pretty'

Council killjoys in Lancashire have ordered a green-fingered couple to remove flowers from their front garden - because they look "too pretty".

Lancaster Council has told Barry and Betty Atack, of Poulton, that their floral display "detracts from the architectural simplicity of the area" and "sets an unacceptable precedent."

But the defiant couple are refusing to bow to the madness and remove the flowers from their 200-year-old cottage in the village.



Mrs Atack said: "This council clearly don't want Morecambe to be 'in bloom'. They don't want flowers in the gardens? It's potty!

"It seems that we're being victimised because our property looks good. We rang up the council and the lady said our garden was 'too pretty'."

She added: "Our property is bought and paid for, and the council are acting like they own it."

Mystery beastie spotted on Dartmoor

Legend has it that a four-legged fiend with glowing eyes and a blood-curdling howl stalks this very spot.

Which makes these pictures of a mystery creature taken near Hound Tor on Dartmoor more intriguing than ever.


Click for bigger.

Seen only yards away from a party of schoolchildren, the animal has a thick, shaggy coat, rounded ears and large front limbs which would be powerful enough to tear human flesh.

Some say it is a wild dog or cat. More fanciful theories include wolverine or bear.



Falconer Martin Whitley, who photographed the creature, said: "It was walking along a path about 200 yards away from me.

"It was black and grey and comparable in size to a miniature pony. It had very thick shoulders, a long, thick tail with a blunt end and small round ears.

"Its movements appeared feline, then bear-like sprang to mind. There was a party climbing on the tor opposite making a racket but it ignored them completely."

Man walks free after sheep refuses to testify

A man who was accused of having sex with a sheep has walked free after the animal was unable to testify.

The man, from Haaksbergen, near Utrecht, the Netherlands, was reported to police after a farmer caught him having sex with a sheep.

But the case was thrown out of court as the sheep couldn't take to the stand to testify it didn't want to have sex and had suffered emotional stress.

Under Dutch law, bestiality is not a crime unless it can be proved the animal didn't want to have sex.

'Short of putting the sheep in the dock, at the moment these perverts cannot be prosecuted,' said animal rights campaigner Jos van Huisen.

Minister of Justice Ernst Hirsch Ballin has said he plans to change the law to make bestiality a criminal offence.

Corf-batters, arse-loops and bum-baillifs: Pitmatic gets it's lexicon

A dialect so dense that it held up social reforms has been rescued from obscurity by the publication of its first dictionary.

Thousands of terms used in Pitmatic, the oddly-named argot of north-east miners for more than 150 years, have been compiled through detailed research in archives and interviews with the last generation to talk of kips, corf-batters and arse-loops.

First recorded in Victorian newspapers, the language was part of the intense camaraderie of underground working which excluded even friendly outsiders such as the parliamentary commissioners pressing for better conditions in the pits in 1842.



Part-financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund, in a three-stage dialect study of the north-east called Wor Language, the dictionary reveals the deeply practical nature of Pitmatic. The dialect was originally called Pitmatical, and its curious name was a parallel to mathematics, intended to stress the skill, precision and craft of the colliers' work.

Term after term is related to mining practices, such as stappil, a shaft with steps beside the coal seam, or corf-batters, boys who scraped out filthy baskets used for hauling coal to the pithead.

Other words are more earthy: arse-loop is a rope chair used when repairing shafts and a candyman or bum-bailiff is a despised official who evicts strikers from company-owned homes.

There's a huge collection of regional dialects here and there's more information with audio clips here.

Naughty number-plates banned

The DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) have stepped in to ban a list of naughty number-plates before the new 57 registrations arrive.

They were forced to act to stop cheeky drivers using the number combination to "spell out" offensive or controversial words.

Officials feared the figures 5 and 7 - on new plates from September - may be used to represent letters S and T or S and Y.



That could have seen cars on the streets with registrations TE57 CLE (Testicle), EC57 ASY (Ecstasy), BA57 ARD (Bastard), MY57 ASH (My Stash), H057 AGE (hostage) and HE57 ABS (stabs). Also banned is EA57 GAL (Easy Gal).

A DVLA spokesman said the plates were blocked "to avoid causing "general offence or embarrassment".

But a spokesman for the Association of British Drivers said: "The DVLA should be setting their priorities on more worthwhile issues - like reviewing safety."

Woman, 108, must wait 18 months for hearing aid

A woman aged 108 has been told she must wait 18 months before the Health Service will give her the hearing aid she needs.

Former piano teacher Olive Beal, one of the oldest people in Britain, has poor eyesight and uses a wheelchair.

The delay could mean she will be unable to communicate and listen to the music she loves.



Now her family have said that realistically Mrs Beal is unlikely ever to receive the digital hearing aid that will save her from isolation.

The one-time suffragette is one of hundreds of thousands of older people made to wait up to two years and sometimes more for modern digital hearing aids that make a dramatic difference to their ability to hear and communicate.

Eastern and Coastal Kent Primary Care Trust have told her family she must wait 18 months before she gets one on the NHS. By then Mrs Beal will be aged 110. She said yesterday: 'I could be dead by then.'

Two more animals at Hindu centre have TB

Two more animals at the religious community where Shambo the sacred bull lived before he was slaughtered have tested positive for bovine TB.

An eight-month-old water buffalo calf named Dakshini and a 20-year-old Friesian bull called Bhakti now face the same fate as Shambo.

A spokesman for the Skanda Vale temple in Carmarthenshire said: 'We hope the Welsh Assembly takes a cooperative approach so we do not get the same outcome as with Shambo.

'Our arguments are still the same. We still believe in the sanctity of life. Killing is not an option for us.'

The community also has an elephant, ten ponies, 13 water buffalo, 12 goats, 40 cows and bulls, two llamas, 20 deer, about 300 poultry and waterfowl, more than 100 fish, five terrapins and more than 20 rabbits.

The monks consider the lives of all animals to be sacred and insist animals with TB can be treated without posing a risk to human health.