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LIVE AID: FORTY YEARS ON. BY SANDRA HARRIS.

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LIVE AID: FORTY YEARS ON. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © It’s been described as a ‘musical moon landing.’ It was certainly the defining musical moment for my generation, the way that, I don’t know, the Oasis reunion is probably the one for my son’s generation. Even then though, of course Live Aid was much bigger. Nothing before or since has ever come even remotely close. So, what was it exactly? Well, it was a pop-and-rock concert for famine relief in Africa, and it was the brainchild of Bob Geldof, former frontman of the Boomtown Rats. It was held in Wembley Stadium in London on the thirteenth of July, 1985, with a parallel concert taking place in JFK Stadium in Philadelphia on the same day. It was shown in one hundred and fifty countries round the world, some of which were holding their own obviously much smaller Live Aid concerts, and it was watched by an estimated 1.9 billion people, a good forty percent of the world’s population. Those are crazy numbers, lads. Over seventy artists ...
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HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, AMERICA! BY SANDRA HARRIS.

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  HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, AMERICA!  BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Ah, the Fourth of July! It’s a day to celebrate all things American, and my own personal way of commemorating it is to watch a typically American fillum or read something by an American author. This year, I went to see a screening of INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), one of the most American movies ever made, in a local library. It’s the story of an extra-terrestrial attack on the land of the free and the home of the brave in the run-up to the Fourth of July, culminating on the Big Day itself, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to be able to see it on the big screen, as the smaller one doesn’t really do it justice. The scenes showing the massive spaceship are extra-impressive on the big screen. I brought my adult son along to enjoy it with me, but he wandered off to the toilet early on and missed some of the best scenes in the whole thing: the gigantic spaceship casting an ominous shadow over various American landmark...
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BONNIE BLUE AND THE DEATH OF FEMINISM. BY SANDRA HARRIS.

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BONNIE BLUE AND THE DEATH OF FEMINISM. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Jesus, Mary and Joseph. What’s gone wrong in the world of women? This last week in particular hasn’t been a good one for feminism. Bonnie Blue, real name Tia Billinger, has received a permanent ban from subscription platform OnlyFans after the platform decided that her ‘extreme challenges’ were not permitted under their Acceptable Use Policy and Terms of Service. The twenty-six-year-old British woman ‘rose’ to ‘fame,’ or should that be infamy, after having sex with one-thousand-and-fifty-seven men in a twenty-four-hour period. Now, I still have difficulty believing that statement. Maybe, just maybe, it could be done if every guy in the queue was hard and ready to go- excuse my bluntness- but what about men who needed extra stimulation in the form of hand- or blow-jobs prior to actual penetration, as is often the case in real life? That would have slowed the whole process down by miles. Did she have someone else there ...
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FREDDIE MERCURY'S 'SECRET DAUGHTER'? PULL THE OTHER ONE... BY SANDRA HARRIS.

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FREDDIE MERCURY’S ‘SECRET DAUGHTER?’ PULL THE OTHER ONE… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Okay, so I’m delighted that the iconic Freddie Mercury, one of the greatest music frontmen of all time- who am I kidding, he’s the best- is still making newspaper headlines today, nearly thirty-four years after his agonising death from AIDS. However, M’lud, however, I find myself being deeply sceptical of claims in today’s newspapers that Freddie had a secret daughter no-one knew about, except for the child's mother and her husband, the other three members of the band QUEEN, Freddie’s parents and sister and Freddie’s ex-girlfriend and long-time friend, Mary Austin, and presumably her husband and the father of her own children. The revelations are due to be published in an upcoming book entitled LOVE, FREDDIE, penned by respected British rock biographer, Lesley-Ann Jones. I’ve read a couple of her other books about Freddie and Queen, and I’ve never known her to be anything but affectionate and respe...
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HABEMUS PAPAM: WE HAVE A POPE...! BY SANDRA HARRIS.

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HABEMUS PAPAM: WE HAVE A POPE! BY SANDRA HARRIS. © ‘I have to go to Rome, for an audience with the Holy Father.’ ‘Don’t worry, Len, they repeat those shows all the time.’ ‘An Audience with Lily Savage, that was good as well.’ Bishop Len Brennan in conversation with Father Dougal Maguire in sitcom FATHER TED. I never normally post about religion, but it’s not every day we elect a Pope to be the new head of the Catholic church, a church with roughly 1.406 billion members worldwide. The previous pope, Pope Francis, passed away on the twenty-first of April this year, Easter Monday of all days. A nice day to die if you’re a Pope, I think, because, in the Catholic Church, Easter is seen as even more of an important celebration than Christmas. I found this fact very strange when I was younger. Easter is great and all that, but you don’t get presents at Easter, only chocolate eggs, unlike Christmas, where you could technically come in for all manner of goodies, including chocol...
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ONLY SAY GOOD THINGS: SURVIVING PLAYBOY AND FINDING MYSELF BY CRYSTAL HEFNER. (2024) BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

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  ONLY SAY GOOD THINGS: SURVIVING PLAYBOY AND FINDING MYSELF BY CRYSTAL HEFNER. (2024) PUBLISHED BY EBURY SPOTLIGHT: AN IMPRINT OF EBURY PUBLISHING. BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © This memoir is a fascinating read. In 2008, Crystal Harris, then aged twenty-one, was an American beauty who didn’t know in what direction she should be heading in life. Her beloved father Ray, a musician, had died when she was a teenager and she felt lost without him for years afterwards. She was close to her mother, who remarried shortly after her husband Ray’s death, but she was conscious of having to make a life for herself, independent of family. In 2008, that fateful year, while working as a model, she was invited to a snazzy Halloween costume party at the Playboy Mansion in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles, California, an exclusive address for the super-rich. At the Mansion, she met Mr. Playboy himself, Hugh Hefner, who had founded the Playboy magazine in 1953 with a loan from his mother. The ...
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WHEN CELEBRITIES GO TO HEAVEN... BY SANDRA HARRIS.

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  WHEN CELEBRITIES GO TO HEAVEN… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © It’s always sad when anyone we know dies, but when celebrities die, even if we’ve never met them in the flesh, it gives us a special kind of shock. It’s usually because they’ve played such a big part in our lives, maybe even in those all-important formative years. We’ve bought their records and listened to their music and pondered over their lyrics during hard times and difficult years. We’ve been to see their movies in the cinema, then watched them again on television and later bought the DVD, which we then watched until it fell apart. When someone mentions a specific year, we’ll often be immediately transported back to that magical period in time when we listened to So-and-So’s album to death, or went to see So-and-So’s movie on that fabulous summer’s night when we lost our virginity down by the lake to the girl with the strawberry blonde hair and the braces on her teeth. I remember being devastated when Christopher L...
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