Pop Culture

Quick, stock up the shed with booze: a champagne which costs just £12.99 from Aldi has beaten loads of other fancy champagnes in a blind taste test at the International Wine Challenge 2013. And that includes Veuve Cliquot, which retails at £130. Wine boffins and spittoon filling tossers gathered at the event and tasted several vintages. One of the best was Aldi’s Champagne Veuve Monsigny by Philizot and Fils. The judges said it was ‘classy and complex’ – which sounds like a ghost written novel by Kim Kardashian – but apparently that’s wine speak for ‘ace.’ The champagne won the silver medal at the Wine Challenge – with the panel decreeing that it offered ‘an intense nose of baked apple, brioche and stone fruits with gorgeous flavours of apples, red fruit and minerality on the palate.’ (But does it get you pissed?) Last month Aldi’s £10 own label gin also scored highly in a similar taste test at the International Spirits Challenge, beating brands that cost five times as much. So if you’re a booze enthusiast – or just a common or garden alcoholic – get down to Aldi today with an articulated lorry.

In the Star Trek canon, the United Federation of Planets was formed in San Francisco, California. Starfleet maintains its headquarters there. Starfleet Academy lies within sight of the bay. Much of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home takes place in that city. More than any other city, San Francisco is the center of the Star Trek universe.Why San Francisco as opposed to, say, Lubbock? Or Dallas, Brownsville, San Antonio, Longview or other excellent options? Ted Trautman of Wired examined why that city was important to Gene Roddenberry and a symbol of Star Trek. San Francisco was a Navy town, a site of technological innovation and a diverse, international city. Trautman writes:Plenty of science fiction is city-specific: it’s impossible to imagine RoboCop anywhere but Detroit, or Blade Runner outside of Los Angeles. What sets Star Trek apart is the attention it pays to one little city, barely seven miles across, when the other points on its journey are not cities or countries, but planets and star systems. Many of Star Trek’s struggles take place not long ago in a galaxy far, far away, but in a city we have already built, just a couple centuries down the road. And it’s a city whose culture of curiosity, craftsmanship and tolerance have left an indelible mark on one of the world’s most successful sci-fi franchises.What other cities on Earth do you think would represent Star Trek well? Link(Image: CBS)

CILF'sCONVICTS I'D LIKE TO FUCK#1#2#3#4VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITECILF poll by twiigs.com Polls close after 7 days.Voting ends after 30 days.LAST WEEK'SPAROLEEHe's your winner with 44% of your votes.CLICK HERE TO SEE ALL THE RESULTSBETTER LUCKNEXT TIMEYour runner-up with 34% of your votes.DRUGS ARE BADDON'T DO DRUGSGLAMOROUSMUG SHOTSArrested for impersonating a woman.CELEBRITYMUG SHOTSSAM WORTHINGTONCLASH OF THE TITANSAVATARTERMINATOR SALVATIONMACBETH

Photo: Francisco MignoranceFrancisco Mingorance snapped this photo of a fennec fox walking against the wind in the Sahara Desert in Morocco, and submitted it to the 2013 National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest. Link - via In Focus

Three men have been convicted of forging £1 coins. The London Police Detective Inspector even got all quippy about the sentencing ("These three men are organised criminals who were intent on undermining the UK monetary system. There is nothing fake about the reality they must now face of life behind bars." -- yes, yes, very clever DI South) but what fascinates me about the story is that it can somehow be profitable to forge £1 coins. I got passed a fake pound shortly after I first moved to the UK, almost ten years go; it was a foil-wrapped plastic slug. Not realizing it was fake, I tried to buy something with it at a corner shop and the cashier pressed it edge-on on his counter and the foil split open, revealing the green plastic disc inside. From the sound of this article, these fakes were solid metal, which, I think, would make them more expensive than the fake I got. When you add the costs of the materials, the wages for the manufacturing process, warehousing, the discount for counterfeit cash, etc, it's hard to believe that this was worth anyone's while. On the other hand, it's probably easier to go on counterfeiting when you're passing very small denominations as most people (me included) won't bother going to the cops over a mere pound; and it's much harder to remember where a given pound coin came from than a £20 note. The court heard Fisher, of Rags Lane in Goffs Oak, Hertfordshire, Sullivan, of Bancroft Chase in Hornchurch, east London, and Abbott were arrested during an undercover police operation in Essex last May. Police found a storage container with 1.6 million metal discs inside and fake coins equivalent to £20,000. Fake coins equivalent to a further £30,000 were found in a nearby car. Three men jailed over 'largest' fake £1 coin plot [BBC] (Image: Yet another forged pound coin, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from pahudson's photostream)

Created by Kathrina Manalac who wrote "Shhh! We're uncovering secret menu items at your favorite restaurants and showing you the most awesome real life Easter Eggs." I'll have some of that. Alas, that's the good news. The bad news is that the most recent post appeared on April 5, 2013. Oh, well: great idea while it lasted. Pictured up top is Kimchi Stew from Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York City, featured on March 5 as follows: Want something hidden and wonderful in my Podunk town? Try the Haricot Vert Tempura at TEN during Sushi Hour Monday through Thursday 5–6:30 p.m. in the Bar & Lounge: ultra-delicate and just perfectly done. FunFact: Tempura must be eaten within minutes after leaving the cooking surface; once it cools to room temperature you might as well call it something else.

“Sex? No ta.” Apparently, the majority of you lot would rather go without sex than go without your mobile phone. Two thirds of young Britons reckon that they “couldn’t live without their phone” and, astonishingly, 9% said they’d rather part with their own children than part with their gadgets. The survey by Mobileinsurance.co.uk found that 94% of people in the UK would rather live without sex than their mobile phones while almost a quarter of those polled said they were ‘very dependent’ on their handset, while 10 per cent felt they could ‘take or leave’ their device. Remarkably, the poll also found out that nearly half of the survey would rather live without ‘basic meals’. Either people weren’t taking the survey very seriously or we, as a nation, have reached a stage where we’re so jaded that only our phones are our friends and we’d actually rather die than face that realisation. Which is nice.

Movie posters are pretty important to the overall success of a film. They go through different drafts of different visions before the final product is released. What didn't make the cut gives us a glimpse into the creative process. In this collection at Flavorwire, you will see that changing and refining the initial concept is usually a good idea. Link