What Notts #5

Monday 04 May 2015
reading time: min, words
Find out what's been going off around and about the city over the past month
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Image: British Transport Police

Breaking Barriers
Desperate times call for desperate measures in times of austerity. One lad who clearly couldn’t afford a gym membership was spotted topping up his weight training using a car park barrier at the train station. Little did the thrifty bogger know, he was caught on CCTV causing a hell of a lot of damage, and the coppers are after him and his sculpted arms. Next time lad, just use a couple of tins of beans out yer mam’s cupboard.

Free Wi-Fi
Good news, good people of Nottingham. Gone are the days of rinsing your data. You’ll now be able to tweet about the size of the Greggs queue and post your Market Square selfies in the comfort of complimentary internet. Thanks to the boffs over at BT, you’ll now have access to free Wi-Fi in the city centre, so you’ll never have to talk to yer mates in person again. Thank God for that, eh?

Eye Spy
Never did we expect our smartest, most hard working students to be punished for being brainier than your average Hood Town rat, but that’s exactly what’s happened to poor Laura Sumner. The History PhD student from University of Nottingham was accused of visiting Russia as a spy, and has had to leave her work at an archiving department. Paranoid much?

Owls About an Adventure?
Somebody bell up Miss Marple, there’s been a kidnap! Ollie the ornamental owl has been nicked from his home in the Admiral Rodney pub, Calverton. No need to panic, though, cos he’s been having a whale of a time. His kidnappers have been treating him to a round the world trip, with destinations including Belfast, Benidorm and Tunisia, and have set the ransom as a donation to a charity of the landlord’s choice.

Fag Ends
Fittingly, a former fag factory is now nothing more than a large pile of ash, thanks to a riotous blaze that persisted for ten days. The building had recently been transformed into student flats, all of which were destroyed in the flames. The university took the homeless students in, but evacuated families from nearby terraced houses had to stay in the John Carroll Leisure Centre. Poor bleeders.

How Now Antibiotic Cow
If you’ve just had some snap, maybe save this one for later. Them lot in the white coats (scientists, some may say) have found a cure for MRSA and other superbugs in an Anglo-Saxon treatment for eye infections, translated by Dr Christina Lee of UoN. The medieval concoction includes garlic, onion, wine and cow bile. Nice. We don’t really fancy drinking it, but if it’s gonna save lives, then good on our bovine chums.

Killer Bees
We have been warned. Following on from sightings, and even deaths in France, we are to expect hordes of killer Asian hornets. Apparently. The buzzing murderers have been responsible for six deaths in the last eleven years in France, and are capable of killing 30,000 bees in one go. There’s only one thing for it. Stay indoors, hide yer mam, hide yer missus and keep your pets close, Nottinghamians. And don’t trust anything that buzzes.

Game Face
The gaming wizards at Dambuster Studios are immortalising a few lucky models in the follow-up to invasion-era game, Homefront: The Revolution. Set in an occupied Philadelphia, USA, the game will feature lifelike characters, created using hundreds of photographs of real human faces. The Notts-based company have been so inundated with applications to model for the game that their servers have collapsed. The gap between virtual and reality just got a little more blurred, folks.

 

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Image: Alex Stevens

NOT NOTTS

Teething Problems on the 45
We know, we shouldn’t have been so surprised when we heard. It is Derby, after all, but the sheep romancers have reached new lows with this one. A bus driver on the Arriva 45 bit a bus punter on the chest after a disagreement over ticket prices. That’s right, he bit him. Right on the boobie. The laughable offence apparently stemmed from a disagreement on ticket prices. A £1.50 disagreement. Bit extreme.

Holographic Revolution
An almost unbelievable law enforced on the residents of Spain now restricts civilian rights to oppose government decisions by enforcing a fine of up to €30,000 on all who participate in peaceful protests. So the Spaniards have taken matters into their own hands. After nicknaming it the ‘Gag Law,’ they’ve kicked up a right fuss, put their heads together and created the world’s first holographic protest. Scary, genius and downright awesome all rolled into one.

Quad Film Festival
It’s not all beastiality and chest chompers down Derby ends. They’re chucking on a pretty sweet film festival from 1 - 10 May at the Quad. Of course, they couldn’t quite manage it on their own, and had to call in the experts (us) to provide them with some proper good film talent. Get yersens on that Red Arrow and support the brave Notts filmmakers who’ve crossed the border into unchartered Derbyshire film territory...

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