Latest news with #Chopper
Otago Daily Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Societal collapse deftly fought
Heath Franklin's Chopper was in Dunedin on Saturday night. PHOTO: SUPPLIED HEATH FRANKLIN'S CHOPPER The Last Hard B*stard on Earth Saturday, June 14 Regent Theatre Storming in with a chip on his shoulder, Heath Franklin's Chopper claims he has travelled back from a future where humanity has slithered into "giant pink slugs". The collapse, he warns, stems from an epidemic of arrested development: adult colouring-in books, budgie-brained influencers and drink bottles the size of "a submarine full of dead billionaires" all cop the blame. Dunedin, he concedes, might resist a little longer because locals still wander about in shorts when it is four degrees outside. Franklin controls this "bogan" mask with precision. The real Chopper Read's menace is dialled down to cartoon bravado, letting the comic satirise violence rather than trade on it. Years of touring means he now carries the character with nothing but a microphone and impeccable timing. That raucous facade grants licence to roam touchy ground. One minute he skewers woke fragility, the next he mocks apocalypse-hungry doomsayers. Some of his sharpest laughs arrive when the time-travel premise falls away and he attacks a simple irritation. A furious digression about men having to act as custodians of handbags in nightclubs soars precisely because it feels petty, real and unfiltered. An over-the-top detour into sex robots however shows how far he can push an absurd idea while still landing deft wordplay. Relentlessly profane yet linguistically nimble, Franklin's Chopper blends aggressive bluster with sly self-awareness. Beneath the swearing lies a plea for perspective: yes, you have problems, but so do 8 billion other people, and not every feeling needs a global broadcast. The profanity-averse may never be converted, yet for anyone who enjoys rough-edged satire, this foul-mouthed warning from the future proves the cult of Chopper is alive, mutating and very much in Franklin's hands.
NZ Herald
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
My Secret Auckland: Heath Franklin, aka Chopper, shares his favourite places in the city
In this Herald on Sunday series, we ask well-known Aucklanders for their favourite spots in the city. Sometimes even honorary Aucklanders like this week, when Heath Franklin aka Chopper takes us on a tour of his top places. Favourite beach? I'm rarely in Auckland in summer, unfortunately, but I did
Wales Online
13-06-2025
- General
- Wales Online
I used a Ouija Board for fun when I was a teenager and this is why I've never touched one since
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info As a child in the 70s and 80s I was fascinated by the supernatural, aliens, space - anything and everything outside the sphere of everyday normality. I would collect those series of magazines they did, like The Unexplained, which delved into mysteries no-one really understood. The 80s were the era of the original Poltergeist films, ET, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Popular culture was awash with the other-worldly and we all wanted to be Elliott and find a friendly alien in our garden shed, then be chased by police on our Grifter and Chopper bikes. But these things were always just fiction or someone else's story. I wanted things like aliens, ghosts and extrasensory perception to be real, but I'd had no first hand experience that they were. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here That all changed one night when I was a young teenager and I spent the evening with my parents at a relative's house. My parents had always been pretty straight-laced - as far as I was aware. My dad was a businessman, my mum a stay-at home parent at that time. They would mostly scoff or tease me when I'd regale them with stories I'd read about 'real-life' supernatural events, or UFO encounters. I had no reason to believe that they thought it was anything other than made-up nonsense. Then, that night, they decided to use a Ouija Board to contact the dead. It sounds dramatic, but it wasn't. It was a lark in their minds, a bit of fun after a few drinks. It was a popular thing to do in the 60s and 70s, despite the odd scary story - we weren't a family of occultists if that's what you were thinking - the reality is that we were oh so very normal. They had no 'board' as such - they just had squares of paper, each one with a letter of the alphabet or a number on, arranged in a circle with a tall glass in the centre and a piece of paper with 'yes' or 'no' on it either side. Everyone then put their finger on the top of the glass while one person asked, over and over, "is there anybody there". My older sister and I weren't allowed to partake and were shut out of the room. But we snuck into the garden to watch through the window. I don't recall fully how much we saw, but I don't think we saw what happened next. However, I do remember everyone returning to the room later, all still in high spirits (if you excuse the pun). All bar one, that is. There was one person there who was known for always making jokes and winding people up. But he was quiet for the rest of the evening, sat, seemingly staring into space, deep in thought. I was told that, for days afterwards, he would not return to the room where the event took place. I remember being surprised at that. We spoke to my parents after and I think they explained a little of what had happened. The general gist was that you asked questions and the glass would move, with everyone's fingers still on it, either to reply 'yes' or 'no', to spell out some response using the letters, or count out one with the numbers. I recall they seemed fairly chilled about it, even my dad which surprised me, although I felt he was still pretty cynical. My mum had always claimed to have 'feelings' about certain places, especially if something bad had happened there, so was a little more spiritual, you might say, although neither were or still are religious in any way. My mum's advice was that, if you ever used a Ouija Board, or the DIY equivalent, you should never ask about the future, because you might learn something, true or not, that you'd rather not hear. Someone, maybe her, told me a story at the time about how some schoolchildren or students had once been using a Ouija Board in a classroom and how the glass had smashed the moment a particular girl had entered the room. I had no idea of the significance of that story, if it was just coincidence, or even if it was true, but it fuelled the feeling within me that people were messing with something they did not really understand, the stuff of myth and hushed conversations, something potentially powerful. Of course, being an acutely curious kid, the temptation was just too great. I think it was with my older sister that we first tried a DIY Ouija Board with the bits of paper and the glass. My memory has faded, but I recall something short-lived happening, but only after quite some time. But it was when I encouraged a friend to try it with me, that things really started to happen. The first evening we tried, nothing happened for what seemed like ages. We were on the verge of giving up, when suddenly there was movement. After that, it didn't stop. In fact, we just had to stop ourselves in the end as I had to leave, even though the 'conversation' on the board seemed set to continue all night. I can't recall everything we asked - we avoided questions about the future, as per my mum's advice - so i think it was mainly people's names, where they were from, where they were. Few of the answers have remained in my head. You would have thought that with something so momentous, I'd remember everything but, weirdly, I recall very little - although it is 40-odd years ago to be fair. The one thing I do recall with great clarity is the answer it (I'm using the word 'it' for ease right now - but I'll come back to that) gave to one particular question - as it stood out so much. That question was: "How long have you been there." I can't recall the exact context to that question, but I remember that we had established it was somewhere, shall we say, not of this world, and we wanted to find out for how long. If I was somehow controlling the glass myself, and I wanted to answer that question, I might have gone to some set number of years, like 50, 100, 364 - whatever. I have always thought that would be what most people would do. But it didn't do that. First it went to the 'zero', then to the number '1', then '2', then '3' and so on. When it got to '5' or '6', I asked: "Are you trying to say you have been there too long to remember". It shot, without hesitation, to 'Yes'. We dabbled with the Ouija Board a number of times after that, but with diminishing returns. It either took too long, or the response was so weak, that eventually we gave up. I've never done it since, although I thought about it a few times. I've never stopped thinking about what it all meant and whether there really was an 'it', a spirit of some kind, involved at all. The obvious possibility was that one of the two of us was pushing the glass. We suspected that at the time, even though I trusted my good friend and, I believe, she I, but to rule it out, we tried in turn to push the glass without the other knowing we were. It was impossible. Your finger would not slavishly follow wherever the glass was pushed. It either left the glass if it was pulled away from you. Or you stopped it if it was pushed towards you. Try it yourself - there is no way to push a glass around the table when two or more people have their finger on it, without both or all those present co-operating. The second thing was - we were using a small, traditional sherry glass with a long stem and a small area which held the sherry. Try and push it with your finger and the friction of the table would make it tip over. We just couldn't do it - it fell over every time, especially when you tried to move it towards you. So - one of us couldn't have faked it - it could only have been both of us co-operating, and I know for a fact I wasn't. There would have to have been a conversation between us to fake it and prior knowledge about how we would answer each question. There was neither of those things, and at the end of the day, what would have been the point? We were alone in the room, there was no-one to dupe except ourselves. Agreeing to push a glass around a table and try and pretend to ourselves it was neither of us would have been utterly pointless. Another possibility was that, somehow, our minds and actions became linked, that we pushed the glass around the table in subconscious coordination through some shared hypnosis which manifested physically through our co-operation in deciding where the glass would go and stopping it from falling over. That's a pretty weird explanation in itself - although shared hypnosis is a real-world thing. It happens, but you'd really need a trained hypnotist in the room to carry it out. Neither of us were hypnotists at the time or since, as far as I am aware, and there was no-one else in the room. But, still a possibility I guess, if unlikely. As I've got older, my interest in science has deepened. I'm fascinated by theoretical physics, the quantum world, all the weird quantum effects that have been discovered in experiments. I know about theories of parallel universes, hidden dimensions - the stuff of science fiction you might think, but all actually established theories of reality explored by some of our greatest minds. One such scientifically observed phenomenon is called quantum entanglement which basically means the properties of two particles can be intrinsically linked even if they are separated by a vast distance. Albert Einstein called it 'spooky action at a distance'. The term 'spooky' is not one you will come across much in science but its use by one of the most famous and cleverest scientists ever is an indication that there's plenty we didn't understand when Einstein was around and still don't. I'm not religious. Lately, I've thought of myself as more of an atheist. But I'm also open-minded to the idea that there are things out there we don't understand. People once looked at the sky and saw lightning and thought the gods were angry. Perhaps one day people will look back on our scientific theories and observations of the 21st century with the same bemusement. There is no proven scientific evidence for the existence of ghosts or spirits, I know that. But until we can explain everything, it's difficult to 100% rule out anything. Maybe it was all some shared hypnosis, or an elaborate hoax that I or both of use fell hook, line and sinker for. Maybe someone is still having a quiet chuckle at our expense. Perhaps we live, as some scientists postulate, in some kind of simulation and someone 'up there' pushing all the buttons like we're in one big game of The Sims thought it would be fun to play a little prank on these two gullible kids with their Ouija Board. Whatever the reason, I can't explain it. I've gone through it over and over in my mind, like I did at the time, and I've never cracked the mystery. It makes me question everything I know. And that's why I've never done it since. Because, if those really were spirits of the dead, or some kind of floating souls, voices from a parallel universe and so on... then they were there, in that house with us, or occupying our minds. If that was the case, my thinking ever since has been, "why would I want to invite them into my home". I don't really like ghost horror films, that sort of thing - they freak me out and I end up spooked in my own home, afraid of dark unseen corners. But, if by using a Ouija Board you welcome in things that wouldn't have been there otherwise - how do you know they have gone when you finish. And how do you know their intentions are good? It's a freaky thought, and that's why you'll never (probably) find me asking that question ever again: "Is there anybody there". I'd genuinely really like to know the answer to that question. Is there anybody there? But until someone can definitively prove whether there is or there isn't - I'd very much rather not take the risk of potentially welcoming them into my life.
Scotsman
11-06-2025
- Automotive
- Scotsman
Raleigh Chopper returns in Fizzy Lemon and Space Blue
It's back! And yours for £999. | Raleigh This article contains affiliate links. We may earn a small commission on items purchased through this article, but that does not affect our editorial judgement. The Raleigh Chopper has made a spectacular return in two bold retro colourways – and for this childhood fan, it's a dream come true. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... I was the proud owner of a gleaming purple Raleigh Chopper back in 1975. Aged ten, I ruled the neighbourhood – or so it felt – perched high on that elongated seat, arms aloft as if hanging from those crazy handlebars, I pedalled with all the confidence of Evel Knievel about to hit the ramp. The Chopper wasn't just a bike – it was a rite of passage. How any of us survived childhood is anyone's guess. There was the time I gave my mate Dave a 'backie' on the rear basket (facing backwards, of course), and we hurtled down the steepest hill in town, narrowly avoiding a Ford Cortina and an angry dog. Or the afternoon I built a ramp from bricks and plywood in a bid to launch skyward like Evel zooming over ten London buses – and came crashing back to Earth with the skin scraped clean off my knees. Now, Raleigh has brought the legend back – and this time it's available in two mouth-watering retro shades: Fizzy Lemon and Space Blue. Just like the originals, these are the real deal. From the oversized banana seat and sissy bar to the bold U-shaped handlebars and working 3-speed shifter, they've recreated the MK2 Chopper almost exactly – with just a few modern safety tweaks. The new Raleigh Chopper stays true to its roots with a retro 3-speed shifter and classic 70s styling. | Raleigh They're so coveted, you can only order one of each colour. And at £999, this is no toy – it's a carefully crafted tribute to an icon. The Fizzy Lemon Chopper is especially eye-catching, with that sunshine yellow frame and burnt orange accents screaming 'summer of '75'. And I'm not the only one feeling the nostalgia. One proud owner wrote: 'Wow, what can I say. What a fantastic bike. I never believed I would own a brand new version based on an earlier design… It's like I have been transported back to the 70s. Congratulations Raleigh.' Another customer added: 'Better than expected – looks exactly like the one I had when I was 10 years old. Mine was stolen when I was 11… I won't lose this one!' For collectors, it's proving just as irresistible. One reviewer, who's had his original 1969 Chopper since new, said the new version is 'simply a fantastic icon' that now sits proudly alongside his vintage model. Another lifelong fan was just as impressed: 'The quality of the craftsmanship and the build is very neat – they're definitely worthy in any bicycle collection or as a bike to use.' The Fizzy Lemon Chopper brings back the original Raleigh branding, complete with retro decals and bold 70s colour. | Raleigh It's not just the styling that's winning people over. Owners are calling out the 'incredible engineering and craftsmanship' behind the new MK IV, praising it as a labour of love that captures everything that made the original a legend. These bikes aren't hanging around for long. So if, like me, you've got a Chopper-shaped hole in your soul, now's the time to fill it. Butlin's just opened its biggest-ever Soft Play – and your kids will go wild Looking for a family getaway that delivers maximum kid-energy burn-off and a bit of peace for the grown-ups? 🎉 Butlin's has just opened its biggest-ever Soft Play centre – and it's a whopper. 🧸 Four storeys tall, 3,000 square feet wide, and filled with colourful themed zones inspired by the Skyline Gang – it's all included in the price of your day pass or break. 👟 Ready to dive in? Click here to book your Butlins break and let the little ones loose 🌈
Scotsman
11-06-2025
- Automotive
- Scotsman
Raleigh Chopper returns in Fizzy Lemon and Space Blue
It's back! And yours for £999. | Raleigh This article contains affiliate links. We may earn a small commission on items purchased through this article, but that does not affect our editorial judgement. The Raleigh Chopper has made a spectacular return in two bold retro colourways – and for this childhood fan, it's a dream come true. Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... I was the proud owner of a gleaming purple Raleigh Chopper back in 1975. Aged ten, I ruled the neighbourhood – or so it felt – perched high on that elongated seat, arms aloft as if hanging from those crazy handlebars, I pedalled with all the confidence of Evel Knievel about to hit the ramp. The Chopper wasn't just a bike – it was a rite of passage. How any of us survived childhood is anyone's guess. There was the time I gave my mate Dave a 'backie' on the rear basket (facing backwards, of course), and we hurtled down the steepest hill in town, narrowly avoiding a Ford Cortina and an angry dog. Or the afternoon I built a ramp from bricks and plywood in a bid to launch skyward like Evel zooming over ten London buses – and came crashing back to Earth with the skin scraped clean off my knees. Now, Raleigh has brought the legend back – and this time it's available in two mouth-watering retro shades: Fizzy Lemon and Space Blue. Just like the originals, these are the real deal. From the oversized banana seat and sissy bar to the bold U-shaped handlebars and working 3-speed shifter, they've recreated the MK2 Chopper almost exactly – with just a few modern safety tweaks. The new Raleigh Chopper stays true to its roots with a retro 3-speed shifter and classic 70s styling. | Raleigh They're so coveted, you can only order one of each colour. And at £999, this is no toy – it's a carefully crafted tribute to an icon. The Fizzy Lemon Chopper is especially eye-catching, with that sunshine yellow frame and burnt orange accents screaming 'summer of '75'. And I'm not the only one feeling the nostalgia. One proud owner wrote: 'Wow, what can I say. What a fantastic bike. I never believed I would own a brand new version based on an earlier design… It's like I have been transported back to the 70s. Congratulations Raleigh.' Another customer added: 'Better than expected – looks exactly like the one I had when I was 10 years old. Mine was stolen when I was 11… I won't lose this one!' For collectors, it's proving just as irresistible. One reviewer, who's had his original 1969 Chopper since new, said the new version is 'simply a fantastic icon' that now sits proudly alongside his vintage model. Another lifelong fan was just as impressed: 'The quality of the craftsmanship and the build is very neat – they're definitely worthy in any bicycle collection or as a bike to use.' The Fizzy Lemon Chopper brings back the original Raleigh branding, complete with retro decals and bold 70s colour. | Raleigh It's not just the styling that's winning people over. Owners are calling out the 'incredible engineering and craftsmanship' behind the new MK IV, praising it as a labour of love that captures everything that made the original a legend. These bikes aren't hanging around for long. So if, like me, you've got a Chopper-shaped hole in your soul, now's the time to fill it. Butlin's just opened its biggest-ever Soft Play – and your kids will go wild Looking for a family getaway that delivers maximum kid-energy burn-off and a bit of peace for the grown-ups? 🎉 Butlin's has just opened its biggest-ever Soft Play centre – and it's a whopper. 🧸 Four storeys tall, 3,000 square feet wide, and filled with colourful themed zones inspired by the Skyline Gang – it's all included in the price of your day pass or break.
