Arena parking concerns and famous spring tides
The Bristol Arena construction is worrying locals over the amount of parking that will be provided for the new 19,500 capacity venue. It is due to open in 2028, reports Bristol Live.
Gloucestershire Live has reported a new Marks & Spencer outlet is coming to Gloucestershire at the new Cotswolds Designer Outlet near Tewkesbury.
Keep up to date on the M5 with Somerset Live who are blogging about a crash between Bridgwater and Burnham-on-Sea.
Exmoor National Park has revealed the 'Coaster' open top bus will be returning for the summer season.
Woman, 32, completes solo Canadian island traverse
Motorcyclist injured in crash near airport
Schools to be shown anti-knife crime film
A woman in Bristol is spending her time 'pollinating' alleyways and sprucing them up with different plants and flowers. Watch Flora Beverly on TikTok.
On Facebook, Yeovil Town have announced their chairman, Martin Hellier is stepping down from the club.
The famous Severn bore tide has been getting a lot of love, as people have been gathering at the banks to watch surfers cruise by.
Our Wiltshire have asked people to think about how they dispose of old batteries and electricals after a Wiltshire waste collection caught fire.
Follow BBC West social channels in Bristol, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire. Send your story ideas to us on email or via WhatsApp on 0800 313 4630.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Justin Bieber impersonator tricks Vegas nightclub into letting him perform, runs up $10K bar tab
Un-belieb-able. A Justin Bieber impersonator ran up a $10,000 bar tab after he tricked staff at a Las Vegas nightclub into believing he was the Canadian pop star — even getting up on the stage for an impromptu performance. The bizarre incident took place at the five-star Wynn Las Vegas, where LA-based DJ Gryffin was performing at XS Nightclub. Gryffin was told that Bieber, 31, was in town and wanted to make a surprise appearance during his Saturday night show. Believing he was the real Biebs, he invited him into the DJ booth, TMZ reported. 4 A fake Justin Bieber fooled a Vegas nightclub into believing he was the real pop star. TikTok / @isaagonzalezz_ 4 The scammer got on stage to perform a song and allegedly ran up a $10k bar tab. Instagram / @gryffin Video posted on social media shows the shirtless, tattooed impersonator, wearing dark shades and low-slung blue jeans, belting out a version of Bieber's 2015 hit 'Sorry' in front of a packed nightclub crowd, all of whom appeared oblivious about the scam. The shameless scammer, identified as 29-year-old Dylan Desclos, sang a couple of Bieber's songs before Wynn staff realized the truth and kicked him off the stage. Gryffin jokingly dubbed the prank 'Beibergate' in an Instagram post, explaining that a 'dark venue and loud music didn't help.' 4 The real Justin Bieber was not in attendance. BACKGRID Gryffin shared a video showing him hyping up the French fake Bieber's performance before being told the news of the devastating dupe. 'I literally thought, 'he's put on a lot of weight since the album dropped,'' Gryffin said at the end of the video. Social media clips also show the Desclos posing for selfies and browsing stores with his 'security guards' during the Vegas trip. He and his entourage ran up an almost $10,000 bar tab during their stunt, which the fake Bieber eventually paid as he was kicked out, Neon reports. Desclos, who has shared a number of videos in recent years of him pretending to be Bieber, even got similar tattoos and a matching buzzcut as the real mega star. Last year, the impersonator caught the attention of Bieber's wife, Hailey Bieber, after he was spotted on a train in his native France. 'I'm scared…' Hailey commented on a TikTok of an impersonator. 4 The prank took place at Wynn Las Vegas on Saturday. eqroy – The nightclub has responded to the prank. 'After an elaborate and multi-step ruse by him and his advance team, a Justin Bieber impersonator was granted access to the XS stage,' a representative for Wynn and XS Nightclub told TMZ. 'As soon as the error was recognized, he was removed from the resort and denied future entry.' Representatives for Desclos did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
CNN
2 hours ago
- CNN
Aubrey Plaza opens up to Amy Poehler about grief over losing husband
Aubrey Plaza opens up to Amy Poehler about grief over losing husband Aubrey Plaza spoke about her grief after losing her late husband Jeff Baena on "The Good Hang with Amy Poehler" podcast. In the episode she used "The Gorge" film as an analogy to describe her grief. 00:56 - Source: CNN Vertical Trending Now 12 videos Aubrey Plaza opens up to Amy Poehler about grief over losing husband Aubrey Plaza spoke about her grief after losing her late husband Jeff Baena on "The Good Hang with Amy Poehler" podcast. In the episode she used "The Gorge" film as an analogy to describe her grief. 00:56 - Source: CNN Federal immigration agents open fire on a family's vehicle Federal immigration agents opened fire on a family's vehicle during a targeted operation in San Bernardino, California. The Department of Homeland Security says that it was an act of self-defense after a man "struck two CBP officers with his vehicle." 01:45 - Source: CNN Nationwide demonstrations across Israel demanding hostage deal A planned nationwide strike in Israel on Sunday saw hundreds of thousands take part to call on the government to bring the remaining hostages in Gaza home. CNN's Oren Liebermann reports from Tel Aviv. 01:23 - Source: CNN Zines not hashtags: Gen-Z's new protest playbook Gen-Z activists are rethinking protest tools. Opting to go offline over concerns of misinformation and surveillance, zines offer another way to organize. For the latest "The Assignment" podcast episode, CNN's Audie Cornish speaks with artist and organizer Kennedy McDaniel about what's prompting the shift from hashtag activism. 01:51 - Source: CNN Canadian government orders end to Air Canada strike After more than 10,000 Air Canada flight attendants went on strike seeking wage increases and paid compensation for work when planes are on the ground, the Canada Industrial Relations Board has ordered them to return to work according to an announcement by Canadian Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu. 01:05 - Source: CNN Spike Lee's Reaction to Trump's Smithsonian Orders 'To roll back the clock' says Director Spike Lee to CNN's Victor Blackwell in response to President Donald Trump's Smithsonian orders. 01:14 - Source: CNN Russian media reacts positively to Trump-Putin Summit Russian state TV gave a positive coverage of the outcome of the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, celebrating the handshake between the two leaders. Russian officials also stated that the meeting resulted in progress on sanctions and opened up room for future negotiations. CNN's Fred Pleitgen reports. 01:23 - Source: CNN London's toxic trash 'volcano' Arnolds Field landfill on Launders Lane in east London is better known to locals as the 'Rainham volcano.' The site was used as an illegal dump for years and now, every summer, it bursts into flames, sending plumes of acrid smoke over nearby homes, parks and schools. CNN's Laura Paddison speaks to residents who feel abandoned and trapped. 02:05 - Source: CNN Hong Kong twin pandas turn one Giant panda twins Jia Jia and De De celebrated their first birthdays in Hong Kong on Friday. The cubs were born last August to Ying Ying, who became the oldest giant panda on record to give birth. 00:43 - Source: CNN Football player's emotional press conference sparks conversation University of Nebraska freshman punter, Archie Wilson, left his home in Australia to play for the Cornhuskers. During a press conference, a reporter asked Wilson how he was doing being so far away from his family and his emotional reaction sparked a conversation around masculinity. Writer and philosopher Ryan Holiday joined CNN's Boris Sanchez to discuss. 01:29 - Source: CNN McDonald's Japan causes Pokémon food waste frenzy Piles of untouched Happy Meals littered sidewalks outside McDonald's restaurants in Japan over the weekend, as frenzied customers scrambled to buy limited-edition sets with Pokémon cards. CNN International Correspondent Hanako Montgomery has the story. 00:55 - Source: CNN Taylor Swift unveils album details on boyfriend Travis Kelce's podcast Taylor Swift announced her 12th studio album 'The Life of a Showgirl' will be released on October 3rd. Swift made an appearance on the podcast 'New Heights,' hosted by her boyfriend Travis Kelce and his brother Jason Kelce where they discussed the album 00:48 - Source: CNN
Eater
2 hours ago
- Eater
What Was Epic Meal Time?
Squint and the flesh is almost beautiful, an ombre splattered on the counter. Pale peach bleeds into a deeper brick red, crossed with bands of pink and champagne. I didn't know body parts could come in such an array. I feel ill and awed at once as each muscle is sewn together. When Julia Child did it to a goose, it felt elegant, but here there is no covering up the maniacal mashing together of dead bodies like Barbie dolls. It's so wet. And through it all, a dark chanting: 'Bacon strips. Bacon strips. Bacon strips.' Uploaded to YouTube in 2010, 'TurBaconEpic Thanksgiving' was Epic Meal Time's fourth video, garnering more than 19 million views since. In two and a half minutes, the team of bros, led by host Harley Morenstein, stuffs a quail, a Cornish hen, a duck, and a chicken into a turkey, then stuffs that into a pig, layers it all with bacon, and then smokes the whole thing. They calculate it's 79,046 calories worth of food. I have no idea how to fact check them. In the early 2010s, this was food culture. It doesn't matter if you've never seen an Epic Meal Time video in your life; this group of Canadian boys, cooking like they were single-handedly trying to cause an international bacon shortage, was both the ultimate distillation of a moment in cooking and a riotous inspiration for everything that was to come. This was food as entertainment, just as everyone was beginning to realize entertainment could be born or grossly manufactured online. 'We were basically the Jackass of food.' The concept was stupidly simple. In each episode, Morenstein (who did not respond to interview requests) and his band of friends — co-creator and cameraman Sterling Toth, Josh Elkin, Alex Perrault, Dave Heuff, Ameer Atari, and others, whose appearances fluctuated over time — would attempt to make the most outlandish, meat-laden dishes possible. Sometimes this was accomplished by layering Big Macs into a lasagna; other times, by making chili with Four Loko and pouring the whole thing into a bacon trough. Every recipe included bacon, and most involved Jack Daniel's. Yes, they'd eat it, but that wasn't really the point. It was the mounting tension of seeing whether their unholy ideas — a candy pizza, an 84-egg sandwich, a 'meat car' — could be realized. Even the name was a joke, a leetspeak-adjacent brand at home on an internet full of lolcats and pwnage. 'We were basically the Jackass of food,' says Elkin, a member of Epic Meal Time from 2010 to 2015. Following the rampant success of the documentary Super Size Me, the prevalence of weight-loss reality-competition shows like The Biggest Loser, and the publication of rehashed dieting guides like Eat This Not That!, who wouldn't welcome a half-hour reprieve of the most ridiculous guys you 'know' intentionally bucking the obsessive dieting that defined the '90s and 2000s, going so far as to note even the projected calorie count of each dish? Finally, cooking content that valued punchlines and antics over tracking trans fats. Just as any strip of glossy, crispy-topped pork belly has to come from a less-than-glamorous processing facility somewhere, Epic Meal Time, too, was a product of the larger pork industry's influence. In the early 2000s, the National Pork Board had instigated a specific mission to move its reserves of pork belly, after the anti-fat diets of the '90s had made fattier cuts all but unsellable. 'A few Pork Board marketers … came up with a plan to reposition bacon as a 'flavor enhancer' to the restaurant industry, because there was a greater chance of diners accepting bacon when they ate out,' wrote David Sax in 2014. They lobbied restaurants to add bacon to their menus and switched their motto from 'The Other White Meat' to 'Bacon Makes It Better.' It worked — 'pork bellies, long dormant, began moving up in price, from under 30¢ per pound in 1989 to almost a dollar in 2006.' The sudden omnipresence of bacon on fast food and restaurant menus (hello, Wendy's Baconator), paired with the Great Recession, the birth of the social internet, and a backlash to the flavorless Snackwells every 20-year-old had been raised on, kick-started a craze for all foods, cheap and indulgent. In 2008, Corey James launched a shrine to all things edible and swine-centric. And Dave Heuff, another former member of Epic Meal Time, says the inspiration for the group's first video came from browsing a single-serving blog launched in 2009 that chronicled outlandish menu offerings like deep-fried s'mores and hot dog pie. 'I just turned the computer around to the group, and they're like, 'Oh, man, we should get a pizza and put burgers on and fries and like, wouldn't that just be hilarious?'' he says. That's exactly what they did. To millions of fans, it was. For a time, it seemed like there was no limit to the absurdity of Epic Meal Time's creations, and with Elkin as the de facto chef (around Episode 4, they start filming in his apartment), they got slightly more complicated than just throwing burgers on a pizza. There was a Cerberus of lambs' heads and burgers, or fresh pasta stuffed with Chef Boyardee. There was also the truly horrendous Turbaconepicentipede, inspired by the gross-out horror flick The Human Centipede, which involved sewing 10 pigs, ass-to-mouth, down the dining table, each of course stuffed with turkey. And the more these creators leaned into the sheer madness of their creations, the more it worked. Elkin recalls making a 'meat salad,' essentially a bowl of various meats. 'We thought, This is the end of us. This is the stupidest thing ever. And it became so popular. There were so many memes,' he says. Morenstein's threatening deadpan delivery was rife with the comically self-serious intensity of a man cursed to communicate only via wrestling promos. 'We're catering to an Internet, ADD generation that's into cooking shows that are fast and in your face,' Morenstein said in 2011. But Epic Meal Time wasn't really a cooking show as much as a parody of one, which could only exist if food entertainment was prevalent enough to be fully mainstream. Which, by 2010, it was: Top Chef had been running for four years, Guy Fieri was eating every big sandwich in his way, and contestants had just started having to cook through mystery boxes on Chopped. 'The whole concept of Epic Meal Time was we don't know anything about cooking,' says Elkin, 'but we're making the most popular cooking videos in the world.' Like Jackass, Epic Meal Time was more complicated than it appeared. 'There were skits and scripts behind how we were presenting things,' Heuff says. 'It was very music-driven in how we edited things. It made it feel like you were watching a story.' Those hypermasculine characters and personae all hinged on Morenstein's threatening deadpan delivery, rife with the comically self-serious intensity of a man cursed to communicate only via wrestling promos. But under the bravado and copiously layered and stuffed proteins was a group of guys just kind of bro-ing out at no one's expense but their own. Like any good reality TV, it felt somehow more honest, even if there was a script. 'Part of the secret sauce at the beginning was [that] it was a bunch of bros that loved each other,' Elkin says. There's an XKCD comic published in 2006 that became the blueprint for how every millennial viewed adulthood. A stick figure explains to another that their house is filled with playpen balls 'because we're grown-ups now, and it's our turn to decide what that means.' The two tumble into the ball pit together, completely in love with the idea that adulthood could just mean the ability to lean into one's silliest compulsions. As millennials came of age, the idea that we shouldn't adhere to the expectations of adulthood was prevalent, especially if we'd reap none of the rewards. There was no reason to abandon childish joys for responsibility if the Great Recession meant no one could get a job or buy a house anyway. Epic Meal Time was a conduit for that unfettered millennial id, this idea that you can and should retain the tastes and humor of a (white, male) teen because, fuck it, why not? This was not aspirational in that you wanted to cook what they were making (though some certainly tried), but the aspiration that getting drunk and refusing to eat vegetables in your mid-20s could be some sort of viable career. And for a moment, it was! Suddenly, you could monetize dicking around with your friends. 'It was a pivotal moment in food, but it was a pivotal moment in YouTube, as well,' says Heuff. Within a few months of launching, Epic Meal Time was approved for YouTube monetization, a significantly rare occurrence in 2010. They were raking in 'millions,' says Elkin, from Adsense and brand sponsorships (in 2014, Hormel signed on to be the official bacon supplier for a year), and according to Mashed, the brand earned $5 million in its first year. 'We were, I think, one of the first YouTubers to have merch,' Heuff says. They weren't the only ones out there trying to monetize the bros, but 'I think we really paved the way for a lot of bigger YouTubers afterwards.' As millennials came of age, the idea that we shouldn't adhere to the expectations of adulthood was prevalent, especially if we'd reap none of the rewards. But if they were pioneers of YouTube's riches, then they too were the earliest examples of the social video app's most iconic draws: the content creator breakup. Perhaps it's best not to mix friendship and business. In 2011, Sterling Toth filed a lawsuit against Morenstein and says he was subsequently pushed out of the company. Other featured players — like Alex Perrault, aka 'Muscles Glasses' — trickled out. Elkin and Heuff both left in 2015. 'I kind of saw the writing on the wall,' says Elkin. 'There was just no future in Epic Meal Time. The views were decreasing, the attention to detail was decreasing, and the love for it was just not there anymore. The creativity was completely shot in the ass.' Aside from the interpersonal disputes, Epic Meal Time's decline is a tale as old as the media industry — underdog gets a hit, and a big dog comes in and strips it for all it's worth before the trend goes stale. In 2024, Morenstein explained to Joblo that the team 'couldn't keep up with these mega [corporate] companies that were literally banging out 50 food videos a week, some of which were ideas that we'd already done before, but they were getting 10 times more views as they had insight into the algorithm.' Companies like Buzzfeed or Vice could flood the zone with outlandish food content. And mostly, the joke got old. There's only so many times you can watch a group of drunk guys wrap bacon around some other cholesterol-laden food, and once you know what's going to happen, why bother? These days on Epic Meal Time's YouTube, Morenstein occasionally creates a monstrosity like a 25-pound caffeinated doughnut, but he has mostly pivoted to food challenges and, ultimately, a podcast. According to Heuff, who now helps YouTube creators grow their audiences, the greatest legacy of Epic Meal Time is that it proved that 'average dudes could just start something. You have an idea, and you put it out there, and it could be the thing that carries you.' What sounds like an excerpt from The Secret is ultimately the lesson of the whole internet, with a little Ratatouille thrown in: You didn't have to be a professional or know anything at all about a subject, frankly, to make a career out of it. Liking bacon was enough to become a star. Because the stars, they're just like us. Copy edited by Leilah Bernstein Sign up for Eater's newsletter The freshest news from the food world every day Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
