Dog’s biscuit binge nearly proved fatal
A 15-WEEK-OLD puppy had to undergo life-saving treatment after she wolfed down a double pack of bourbon biscuits.
Jo Higgs returned home to find rottweiler Zeena had eaten all of the biscuits.
She sought help from her local PDSA Pet Hospital after the puppy was poisoned by theobromine, the chemical in chocolate that can be fatally toxic to pets.
Miss Higgs, 44, from Bournemouth, said: “I didn’t realise bourbon biscuits could be so dangerous for dogs.”
Meanwhile, a heartbroken dog lover has offered her £15,000 life savings in a last-ditch bid to get her chihuahua Luna back almost two years after it was stolen.
Kathleen Easton, 52, of Bradford, said: “My life is in tatters, it is like having your child taken. I felt I had no other choice.
“It would mean the world to get Luna back.”
JUST a few weeks before his death, a depressed Elvis Presley told one of his backing singers, a former girlfriend, that he didn’t believe he would be long remembered after his death. It was 1977 and, lonely and sleepless in a hotel room while on tour of smaller US cities, he fretted that he hadn’t done anything of lasting value in his life.
He had always wanted to make at least one good film, he told her, but knew that would never now happen. The tragedy of his career, from brilliant, musical revolutionary at 21, to pill-addled, singing packhorse at 42, was tormenting him.
But while he was being morbidly prophetic to be even thinking about the end of his life, he couldn’t have been more wrong about how history would remember him.
Because it is undeniable that in inventing, albeit by accident, the very species of the rock star, he is still universally recognised as having played a giant part in changing the musical shape of his time.
As for being forgotten, he is probably as well-known today, ahead of what would have been his 85th birthday on Wednesday, as he was on the day of his death.
Fortunately for him, his movies are rarely shown on TV, which has helped salvage his reputation because they were largely cheap and tuneless. But his greatest hits albums remain in supermarkets, together with remixed modern versions of his recordings, while his name and image continue to be recognised the world over.
POP STARS come and go, but Elvis remains a bedrock in our shared consciousness, a cultural phenomenon like Mickey Mouse or the Coca-Cola logo. But why would a singer who was a fading star be so fondly remembered?
Let’s be honest, by 1977 his outsized, white, sequined jumpsuits and gluttonous diet had become snide targets for easy gags from comedians.
Also, why should a singer who has had only one hit in four decades, the remixed version of A Little Less Conversation created for a Nike commercial in 2002, a man who was dead before half the people in the UK were even born, still endure?
Put simply, why hasn’t Elvis been long forgotten?
I believe it was because of his voice. Many singers have good voices, but was there something special in his tones, something in his delivery of a lyric, perhaps something subliminally appealing?
As a young man he was a tenor who sang a hepped-up version of the blues on his faster songs, but whose natural vibrato could give the lyrics a plaintive feel. Able to sing in all manner of styles, when he turned to love songs – think of Love Me Tender – he sang so quietly it sounded as though he was simply talking to his girl in the back seat of his car.
Then when he was a little older and came out of the US Army in 1960 at the age of 25, he wandered between anglicised versions of old Italian melodies, such as It’s Now Or Never, German folk song Wooden Heart, the hymn Crying In The Chapel and a rocker Little Sister for his biggest hits. So, obviously that two-and-a-half octave voice that was immediately recognisably Elvis, no matter what he might be singing, was paramount in his appeal. But there had to have been more than a voice to get him noticed. There was.The camera loved him. In his mind, Elvis, always vain, was probably a star before anyone even noticed him. With that Greek god profile, mascara to accentuate his sleepy eyes, and his luxurious tawny hair dyed black for effect, he was massively photogenic.
Carl Perkins wrote and recorded the first version of Blue Suede Shoes, but old-time rockers apart, not many people connect that song with the big, boney, friendly face of its writer. Elvis was a looker from the start, and, though his manager, the phoney “Colonel” Tom Parker, couldn’t tell a good song from a bucket of baked beans, he was shrewd enough to get his client on