RIP Wes Craven and Oliver Sacks

But that's not what post number 1999 is about. Manchester United tasted defeat once again at the Liberty Stadium as Swansea City recorded a second successive 2-1 win over the Reds in South Wales. It was Swansea's fourth win in five league and cup matches over United in what turned out to be a disappointing 50th match in charge for Louis van Gaal. After a goalless first half, the Reds started the second period on top and went ahead through Juan Mata's close-range finish. The advantage was shortlived, however, when Garry Monk's side drew level 12 minutes later through Andre Ayew's header. The Swans took the lead five minutes later when Ayew set up Bafetimbi Gomis to slot home. This isn't good enough, but at least it's not as bad as the Bellend of the Month for August 2015, who will be revealed tomorrow.

There are rumours the iPhone 6S may be available in rose gold

But that's none of my business.

Android Wear to wear the Apple logo

Huawei’s long-awaited smartwatch briefly went up for preorders on Amazon on Friday before price and other details were eventually taken down. According to the listing, the Huawei Watch has a round 1.4-inch screen, comes in four different color and band combinations, and prices start at US$349.99 going up to US$799.99 for a gaudy gold version. It runs Android Wear - Google’s smartwatch operating system - and will be compatible with most smartphones running either Android or iOS. But wait a minute - Android Wear doesn’t work with iOS. It only works with smartphones running Android. There are workarounds, but at the moment, if you’re one of the millions with an iPhone, Huwaei Watch — and other Android Wear smartwatches — can’t easily sync with your phone. But if they manage to pull it off, its New Zealand release will surely be worth waiting for.

ONE-LINE CHALLENGE: September 9

Ask Siri to give you a hint.

McNo to the McWhopper

Burger King proposed the two fast-food giants come together to make a hybrid called the McWhopper for Peace Day. But McDonald's isn't lovin' it. In an open letter to McDonald's, Burger King proposed creating a burger that would include "all the tastiest bits of your Big Mac and our Whopper. McDonalds replied with a swift no, and end their public reply with "P.S. A simple phone call will do next time." But they should look into it as that would be a McWhopper of a burger.

Too noisy - it's just code for too black

The CEO of the Napa Valley Wine Train calls removing members of a book club for being too loud a “100 percent customer service fail.” The removal of the group of predominantly black women from the train sparked a firestorm on social media. Tony Giaccio is apologizing for the company kicking 11 members of the book club off the train for being disruptive. “It was 100 percent customer service fail on our part,” he said. Lisa Johnson and her 10 friends ranging from 39 to 85 years old boarded the wine train over the weekend expecting to have a good time. “We shouldn’t have been subjected to being ejected from a train for laughing while we were black, that’s pretty much what we firmly believe,” she said. The group was kicked off the train after being warned they were too loud and disturbing others. The story made national headlines. “It felt like stories I would hear my grandmother talk about and her experiences of not being able to go into places,” she said. “I don’t think we were loud I think that when you have a group of 11 there’s a certain amount of noise that comes with that.” Giaccio agrees. The CEO says his staff was in the wrong. “We didn’t afford them … enough space around them so they wouldn’t have interfered with somebody else,” he said. “At the same time we didn’t provide that space for our individual passengers so that they can have the experience they expected.” He has offered to have up to 50 members of the book club and their friends come back on the train in a reserved car as his personal guests. He says his staff will also undergo additional diversity training. My advice would be to hold off until said training has been completed, and invite me on board that car.

BAD IDEA OF THE WEEK: The end of the feature

No booze at the grocer's

Countdown's central Dunedin store will be banned from selling alcohol for three days next month, after offering illegally discounted alcohol as part of a nationwide promotion. The ruling by the Alcohol Regulatory and Licensing Authority was released today. It said General Distributors Ltd, which holds off-licences for 175 supermarkets including Countdown's central Dunedin store, accepted the findings and the punishment to be imposed from 7am on September 7 to 7am on September 10. It serves them right, as the company had twice offered discounts on wine in a way that was likely to lead people to believe a discount of 25% or more was available - an offence under the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act 2012. The authority had been told the discounts were offered on two occasions earlier this year.

No goals, no glory

Manchester United were forced to settle for a point as Louis van Gaal's former Dutch goalkeeper Tim Krul left his old manager frustrated and earned Newcastle United a goalless draw at Old Trafford. Krul made a host of top saves, including a brilliant one to deny Juan Mata in the first period and an even better one after the break to prevent substitute Javier Hernandez from snatching a winner. Van Gaal made just one change to the side that began the 3-1 Champions League play-off win over Club Brugge with Bastian Schweinsteiger starting his first competitive match for the Reds since his summer move, in place of Michael Carrick. A draw isn't good enough. The Reds need to keep putting the ball in the back of the net.

Celebs in the leaks too

Celebrities are desperately calling up experts to help them manage their reputations following the Ashley Madison leak. These include actor from a recent Hollywood action film, top NFL player, reality TV star, well-known Southern politician, and a Coca Cola executive. Understandably, they worry being publicly outed as cheats will destroy their reputations. One company, Reputation Management Consultants, has received record number of calls from celebrities panicking about the hack and data leak. One 'was so scared of his marriage falling apart he cried for five minutes,' and another feared family would actually kill him if they found out. It serves them right. Anyone whose info was part of the leak, I have only this to say to you: you shouldn't have cheated on the love of your life. If your relationship falls apart, it's your fault for being unfaithful.

THE FILM BEAT: Trainwreck

Seriously one of the funniest movies of 2015. If you haven't seen it yet, then you are really missing out.

HR to go all out

In response to accusations of an abusive workplace environment, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos assured employees Tuesday that the company’s human resources staff was working 100 hours a week to address their complaints. “I’ve heard your grievances, and I promise that HR is toiling 16 hours a day, plus weekends, until the problem is solved,” read a company-wide email from Bezos, who promised that members of the human resources department would not be allowed to rest for a single second until allegations of a cruel, backstabbing office culture at Amazon were fully dealt with. “Nothing matters more to me than the well-being of our employees, and our HR staff will continue to work their fingers to the bone — not seeing their families or friends or anything at all outside their offices — for as long as it takes to make this right.” Bezos added that any employee not fully committed to ensuring a healthy work-life balance should look for a job elsewhere. But he should be aware that a healthy work-life balance cannot be a balance without any balance. An abusive workplace culture may be a bad thing, but so is effectively detaining human resources over the issue. It is not the end of the world just because things are falling apart within the company.

Big disks and crappy consoles

Samsung Electronics has unveiled a new solid state drive - and the drive, known as PM1633a, has a skyrocketing storage capacity. With a never-been-seen-before capacity of nearly 16 TB, the SSD is small enough to fit perfectly in your modern laptops and desktops. It is that small – only 6.35cm (2.5 inches). The SSD was introduced at the Flash Memory Summit in California. As per the reports, the drive is capable of storing the data of 15.36 TB, which makes it break the record set by Western Digital (only 10 TB of flash storage). This much storage is enough for an average of 4 million songs or thousands of HD movies. This may seem to be a lot, but when compared with those that are running on servers, the storage capacity is pretty small. However, if combined, the new 16 TB SSD from Samsung can help servers become even more compact for the high performance it achieves. As for the other details, the South Korean giant had no word about the price, availability, or speed of these drives. One of those drives would, however, be great for game saves on the latest knock-off video game system. You heard right - another Chinese company has managed to rip off all the gaming consoles, including the Xbox, PlayStation, and Ouya, at once. This new console has its name taken from the Ouya and has the design from the top two consoles in the world – PlayStation and Xbox One. This new rip off has been named as Ouye, and is currently being funded at the Chinese site Jd.com. Apart from this, the makers of this console are not convinced that this is a rip off of the existing consoles in the market. Instead, the Ouye’s creator claimed that their team has spent nearly six months in fine-tuning the design that sets them apart from all of the consoles in the market. My advice to you is don't buy one - it won't be compatible with your current video game collection. But I will consider one if they port some of my childhood favourites (including but not limited to Spyro) to it.

BAD IDEA OF THE WEEK: Changing a perfectly good formula

From its commitment to the Italian coffeehouse tradition to its “Race Together” campaign, Starbucks has often tried to keep it real. And after an influential food blogger took action, one of the company’s heretofore ersatz offerings — Pumpkin Spice Latte, a.k.a. “PSL,” established in 2003 — will include actual pumpkin. “After hearing from customers and partners about ingredients, we took another look at this beverage and why we created it so many years ago,” Peter Dukes — Starbucks’s “Director of Espresso and Brewed Coffee Americas” — wrote in a blog post entitled “Big News for the Beloved Pumpkin Spice Latte.” “It was simple — espresso, perfectly steamed milk, warm fall spices with delicious flavor of pumpkin pie that reminds you of the cool, crisp days of autumn. So, with that great taste you know and love, the PSL returns this fall, and this time it will be made with real pumpkin and without caramel coloring.” Though Starbucks did not credit her with motivating the change, the PSL’s real pumpkin came after Vani Hari, a food blogger known as the “Food Babe,” targeted the drink in a post last year. Hari’s list of alleged problems with the PSL was long. Among her complaints: She took issue with the drink’s caramel coloring, an alleged carcinogen; objected to its high sugar content; decried Starbucks’s use of “Monsanto Milk,” or milk “from cows that are fed genetically modified feed all day long”; and she pointed out that it had no pumpkin. The PSL hasn't been available in New Zealand yet, but the new formula better not suck.

Thieves got game

The owner of a central Dunedin home disturbed a group of burglars when she arrived back at the property at the weekend. Initially confused about what the group of people were doing at her property on Saturday afternoon, she went inside to find four gaming consoles and about eight games missing, of which I hope none of them were Spyro. The woman managed to get a description of one of the alleged offenders as he ran off. He is described as a male Caucasian, 20-25 years of age, of skinny build, and with short brown hair. He was last seen wearing a maroon hoody with grey sleeves, and he is a very naughty boy.

Apple to get into the Netflix game

Apple is not months, but a year away from introducing its very own Internet-based TV streaming service on the Apple TV. Reports from the internal sources suggested that the Cupertino Giant was previously going to launch it on the exclusive iPhone 6S launch event in September but now has delayed it even further for the next year. Internal sources who agreed to share the details on condition of anonymity said that the licensing process with the telecom companies is very slow and hence is taking time for the Apple to establish a network for that. Talking about the term network, the company isn’t yet ready to launch the TV network service as it lacks the hardware and computation power it will require serving millions of users in the US. As of the reports, initially this service will be for the United States only. But there is a chance it will fail, for the SVoD market is already saturated.

This could be LVG's season... or not

Adnan Januzaj justified his recall to Louis van Gaal’s starting XI by scoring the only goal in Manchester United’s 1-0 win over Aston Villa in the Barclays Premier League. The Reds are now unbeaten in 20 top-flight matches at Villa Park in a run that stretches back to September 1996. The victory also means United have tallied six points from six available following two tricky opening fixtures, five points more than the total registered at this stage of the last campaign. The match was notably moved to Friday night local time due to a heavily-policed event in Birmingham the following day, and although many fans were late to the stadium following traffic issues, most supporters at Villa Park appeared to enjoy the novelty of the change in schedule judging by the raucous atmosphere. If they keep this up all season, then van Gaal will have definitely proven himself to be just as capable as Alex Ferguson was.

WHO DID IT BETTER: This stupid hairdo

Friday Night Fights in Jo'burg

A school fight in South Africa nearly turned tragic when a teenage girl was pushed into moving traffic by schoolmates who accused her of gossiping about them. The 15-year-old Grade 9 pupil, who can’t be identified, was thrown in front of a moving car when the five girls attacked her outside a high school in Allens Nek, west of Johannesburg. The girl’s uncle said that last Friday, five girls waited for his niece outside the school premises because she had allegedly “leaked” information about one of their boyfriends. “The girls attacked her and then threw her into oncoming traffic in the street. She was lucky she was able to get out of the way before being hit by a car. But the worst is, it turns out the group attacked the wrong girl. She wasn’t even involved in the issues they were fighting about,” the uncle said. Before throwing her into the traffic, the five girls, aged between 15 and 17, swore at her, then slapped, kicked, and punched her in front of a large crowd of other pupils. They also allegedly assaulted her with shoes. This is not called for, be it in South Africa or a more developed nation. Students getting into fights over things like that is just stupid. Everyone involved should just chill, find this post, and then click here and absorb the song's message.

Forced update means forced reboot

Windows 10's automatic updates are designed as a safety measure to stop users avoiding security patches, as a neglected computer can be dangerous not only for its users but for other machines to which it's connected. And with Windows 10 expected to reach one billion devices over its lifetime, the stakes are too high to expect Microsoft to perfectly vet every update on every potential combination of hardware to which it will be exposed. These two factors, when combined, can lead to some serious problems, like with a new update to Windows 10, designated KB3081424. This update is reportedly causing serious issues for a small number of users, seeming to validate those who criticised Microsoft's decision to make automatic updates mandatory. Issued last week, KB3081424 can hit a snag during installation that causes Windows to abandon it and reboot. Since updates are automatic and mandatory Windows will try to install the update again later, forcing another reboot and locking the user in a endless loop. Come on, guys - if Windows 10 is giving you grief, GET A MAC.

BAD IDEA OF THE WEEK: Suicidal comedians

Grown in Space!

This week on the menu for astronauts aboard the International Space Station: a purplish-green sample of romaine lettuce, the first plant ever to be grown and eaten in space. NASA’s plant experiment, called Veg-01, has been used to study the ability to produce crops while in-orbit over the last year, and scientists hope the result will be the chance for astronauts to be able to grow their own food in space during missions that take them far away from our planet — like to Mars. I still think Earth-grown food is better.

Reds claim early scalp

Manchester United have kicked off their 2015/16 Barclays Premier League campaign at Old Trafford with a 1-0 victory over Tottenham Hotspur thanks to a 22nd-minute own goal by Kyle Walker. The Reds were grateful to debutant goalkeeper Sergio Romero for preserving the slender advantage as the visitors showed few signs of tiredness after their midweek friendly exertions in Germany. And so am I because this means the right team is 1/38 of the way back to the top. And it means LVG is finally pulling his weight in the manager department.

Joker spared due to one juror

The jury deciding whether Aurora movie theater shooter James Holmes should be sentenced to death ended deliberations after it became apparent one juror would not budge from her opposition to a death sentence, a juror told reporters. Because the jury could not reach a unanimous decision, Holmes will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for opening fire during a screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" on July 20, 2012, killing 12 people and wounding 70 others. "We ended our deliberations when one absolutely would not move," the juror, who only identified herself as "juror 17," told reporters after the verdict. Whoever the naysayer is, I hope you're proud of yourself. Because of your decision to be a hero, that sicko gets to live while 12 of his victims don't. The only suitable form of justice in such a case is the chair.

THE BIG REVIEW: Office for Mac 2016 (as promised)

It's actually a really good product. You need to try it.

Microsoft looking for undeserved megagreen

Users of the latest version of Microsoft's Windows operating system are being slugged almost US$20 - just to play DVDs. While previous versions of Windows could play DVDs for free, Windows 10 users are being asked to pay US$18.39 for a standalone app. The cost is likely to irritate many users, given the operating system itself is free for most users. For those wishing to play DVDs without spending a cent, many tech blogs are recommending the free VLC Player, and so am I. DVDs are expensive enough without having to pay out the ass for a special app. In fact, it's even cheaper to just download the movie you want via BitTorrent and watch it on your computer.

Fly Away? More like Fly Undone!

Lenny Kravitz's trousers split open on stage on Monday leading to the 'Fly Away' hitmaker accidentally exposing himself to the whole crowd as he wasn't wearing any underpants. The 51-year-old rocker was left red-faced following his performance in Stockholm, Sweden, when his leather trousers ripped open along the crotch revealing he was wearing no underwear and showing his bare genitalia to thousands of fans. So what? At least he has balls unlike James Holmes.

BAD IDEA OF THE WEEK: Meth

Guess who's back, back again? Zoolander's back, tell a friend!

It's been a long time coming, more than a decade in fact, but Zoolander 2 is in the making and fans have finally seen a glimpse of what's to come. Paramount Pictures has released the first trailer for the long awaited sequel to Zoolander, the 2001 film that brought the dim-witted but adored male model onto their screens. At first it seems more like a scientific lecture into the workings of the brain with a Steven Hawking-style voice over, but then words like 'Eugoogly' pop up and a 'no left turn' sign followed by a merman - things any Zoolander fan would recognise from the original film. Then comes Derek Zoolander, played by Ben Stiller, pondering life's big questions such as 'If God exists, then why did he make ugly people?' It's hard to believe it's been that long, or that my favourite use of free time back then was manoeuvring a little purple dragon. And speaking of drag, a drag king bar has opened in Britain. That's right - Sue Northover and wife Frankie Du Mongh have unveiled the UK’s first karaoke bar aimed at male impersonators. The pair say the the venue – Kings Bar, in Blackpool – has proven extremely popular since its opening. But what I'm really looking forward to is the upcoming Premiership season, because this is the year that LVG will win.

Trainwreck not a trainwreck

Amy Schumer is moved people like her new movie 'Trainwreck', which is based on her embarrassing dating experiences. The 34-year-old comic's romantic comedy, which is based on her own unfortunate dating experiences, has almost reached $30 million with its US box office release and she is overwhelmed by its success. The stand-up star said: "I'm so moved that people like the movie". The 'Inside Amy Schumer' star, who has been nominated for seven Emmys this September, is clearly keeping her head on the ground amidst all the box office commotion. And Amy is "super grateful" to her writing and production team, including her brother and sister, Kim and Jason. She added to People magazine: "Making them laugh is the still the best feeling in the world." Wrong. The best feeling in the world will be when it gets released in New Zealand on the 13th.

ONE-LION CHALLENGE: Bring Walter Palmer to Zimbabwe

As we had a One-Line Challenge (VERY short posts that I try to fit on one line, hence the name) last night, we couldn't bring you the Bellend of the Month as originally planned. But now, we can. And the Bellend of the Month for July 2015 is Walter Palmer, a dentist and big-game hunter who killed Cecil the lion. He is facing extradition to Zimbabwe, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's own investigation into the hunt could lead to charges under U.S. law. If Palmer is charged with similar offenses by Zimbabwe, that would clear the way for him to be extradited to that country under a treaty Zimbabwe entered into with the United States in July 1997. It calls for persons of interest to be extradited between the two countries in cases that include a conspiracy or attempt to commit a crime, aiding and abetting a crime, or being an accessory. So remember this, Walter Palmer: Zimbabwe is looking for you. You shouldn't have killed that lion.