Don’t we all feel pretty darn proud of ourselves when we can give a friend the truly perfect present? Who doesn’t just love that inner glow as their faces light up and you can metaphorically pat yourself on the back in the knowledge that this time you’ve got it spot on! Yet there seem to be a million obstacles standing in our way. I may have the perfect present in mind for a particular friend, but once I’ve added into the mental equation my student state of poverty, the finite nature of options in the local shops and my irritating lack of time, the prospect of my perfect present fantasy is shattered. Present buying seems like a small chore; something that can be slotted in during the short half hour slot between my 11 o’clock lecture and lunch at half twelve, but should it be? Everyone thinks that any present, however swiftly and cheaply picked up, is better than giving no present. I’m not so sure.

I speak from the heart here. Take my Christmas this year: my mother has a very large family and although this used to mean that I got loads of pressies, this year we decided to do a ‘family secret Santa’ to make it easier for everyone. You buy one present, you receive one present and the essence lies in putting time and personal thought into the one present you are responsible for. How do you think I felt then, when I opened my one present to reveal a puke coloured water proof satchel with a strap made out of the sort of material you pull on the side of a life jacket to tighten it up! Actually the whole thing was kind of like a bag shaped life jacket. We’ve all been there – that sinking feeling followed by the embarrassed flushes as you exclaim how great it is and how grateful you are, when really you’re not only bitterly disappointed but convinced your disappointment is conspicuous. There’s just nothing pretty about that sort of situation; it really is the definition of cringe for everyone there.

So what morals can we draw from this my friends? Alright, you might be rushed and skint and lacking in ideas, but persistence is the essence. If the light bulbs really aren’t clicking don’t just pick up something rubbish, save everyone the embarrassment and bide your time – trust me, it’s worth it!

St. Edmund Hall 27 – 12 University Teddy Hall emerged victorious on Wednesday in a game played under lights at Iffley Road. The strength of their performance, and the way in which they overwhelmed a strong Univ side, showed them to be real contenders in this year’s Cuppers competition. Credit must go to the OURFC as well as the players for the atmosphere and competitive edge to this match. With a large crowd who remained in full voice throughout, this game was an example of college sport at its very best. The game began at a great pace, Hall scoring an early try with a run directly up the middle. The conversion was hit, and this began a protracted period of pressure on the Univ line. However, some fantastic defence around the fringes, combined with some fantastic covering tackling, notably by Blues winger Jonan Boto, limited Hall to only scoring a further three points from a penalty ,converted by full back Will Stevens. Univ eventually broke the shackles with a spectacular try that saw the ball spread across the field from a quick penalty and the ball touched down in the corner. The conversion was a difficult one, but after a hurried early period Univ seemed to be settling into their game, and when Boto ran in their second try after a mistake by the Hall left wing, a Univ counter attack swept the length of the field. Univ suddenly looked on fire. Half time came at the right time for Hall, giving them a chance to pull themselves together and rethink their strategy. When the sides came out after the break, it became increasingly obvious that the referee was going to get in the way of making this the truly classic encounter it deserved to be. Having blown his whistle far too regularly in the first half, he continued to intervene too much in the second. This was not enough to stop a resurgent Hall, who quickly reestablished their lead with a breakout try in the far corner, followed swiftly after by a solid driving maul that Univ couldn’t live with. Suddenly, the score was 20-12, and things were looking far more comfortable for the nominal home side. Univ never looked likely to regain any foothold on the game, with the Hall backs starting to threaten every time they got the ball in hand. Particularly impressive was Sam Humphry-Baker, whose incisive running kept those watching riveted right up to the end. With a further Hall try in the left corner, this time converted, the lead was stretched to fifteen points and the game was over as a contest. However, there was still some entertainment to be had, as the referee went on a card-happy spree in the closing minutes. He sinbinned Boto, and then Hall captain Philip Satterthwaite, for maddeningly trivial offences, and then finished the game by sending off Boto just after he had returned to the field. Only this ridiculous end marred what had otherwise been a fantastic game of rugby, and one that leaves fans excited about the Teddy Hall’s chances in the final stages of Cuppers.by Jack Marsh

OUSU has distributed a guide to college rent negotiations that is almost entirely copied, despite having vowed to change it in Trinity last year. In May the 2007 edition of the rent document was removed from the OUSU website after it was revealed that four-fifths of it was taken from the equivalent guide produced by Cambridge University Student’s Union (CUSU).The guide is intended to help JCRs successfully negotiate with colleges to keep student rents down, and contains legal and tactical advice for organising rent strikes.Anti-plagiarism software reveals that the new version, circulated to JCR treasurers on Tuesday, is 78 percent identical to the CUSU guide, and still does not accredit the Cambridge original.The edition of the rent pack taken down in May contained repeated references to CUSU. OUSU claimed that the wrong version of the pack had been uploaded to their website, and said that a new one would be released. However, the new pack is almost identical to the one removed last year. Dom Weinberg, the OUSU Rent and Accommodation Officer who updated the rent pack, said that he was aware that OUSU had been criticised last year for plagiarising the CUSU document, but “didn’t see it necessary” to attribute it to CUSU.He said, “I worked on what I had last year. Not a huge amount has been changed but some has. I added in bits on making sure the whole college is involved in the negotiations. I deleted the references to Cambridge. I also changed the order of the guide and made an overview page,” Weinberg said.He said that there were no plans to create a new document or take the current one down, and maintained that the inclusion of CUSU’s advice was beneficial to Oxford JCRs.“Surely it’s inevitable that a lot of the negotiation processes are to be similar to those at Cambridge,” he said.OUSU President Martin McCluskey said that he had been largely unaware of the controversy when it erupted in Trinity as he had been studying for Finals, and that the new guide was only a slightly revised version of the 2007 edition. “I’ve basically got the documents I’ve inherited,” he said. A reference to a non-existent appendix, left over from the CUSU original, had still not been removed from the new document. McCluskey admitted that this was an example of “sloppy drafting.” But he said that the rent pack was still broadly useful, and that it was only part of the help OUSU provided to JCRs fighting rent increases.“I don’t see why it’s an issue,” he said. “We’ve got a basic rent document that JCR and MCR Presidents seem broadly satisfied with.”“OUSU also provides support to JCRs in one-on-one meetings. We also provide co-ordination across colleges,” he added.The 2007 document repeatedly referred to ‘College Councils’, bodies which do not exist in Oxford but do in Cambridge. It had been available for four months before OUSU removed it from the website.Maanas Jain, President of Worcester JCR, said that OUSU should have acknowledged that CUSU had provided most of the material for the pack, saying, “I think there should be some tentative recognition that they were going to be similar.”But he defended OUSU’s role in helping JCRs to fight college rent increases, saying, “The whole process this was an extensive one. All JCR Presidents gave in their rent details to the OUSU committee.”

St. Anne's 4 – 1 Oriel St Anne’s comfortably beat Oriel today to overtake Teddy Hall and go second in the JCR Premiership. With the season drawing to its close, a ding-dong battle is developing between these two in pursuit of Worcester, who lead Anne’s by only two points, albeit with a game in hand. Oriel, only just behind Anne’s before today’s match, now languish in mid-table, licking their wounds alongside Wadham as the top three fight it out in a potentially thrilling season finale. On a perfect afternoon for football, both teams set out their stall to attack, Anne’s playing an intricate passing game, and Oriel ready to break with speed. Oriel’s striker Kris Burnage had the first chance of the match, latching onto a long ball to volley wide from outside the box. Anne’s hit back with a flowing move down the left, full-back Andy Royle exchanging passes with winger Mc- Donald before firing his shot past the far post. Soon after this, Anne’s took the lead through a moment of pure class from striker Jacob Lloyd, deftly cushioning down a long ball with his head before hitting a low, controlled volley from outside the box across the Oriel keeper and into the far corner. It didn’t take long for Anne’s to add a second, this time as a result of shambolic defending. A routine long ball was poorly dealt with, allowing Anne’s midfielder Joe Galbraith to direct the ball towards Mc- Donald six yards out, who shinned his shot unerringly into the bottom corner. Oriel came close to a quick response, heading narrowly wide from a corner, only to concede a third to another moment of quality from Anne’s – McDonald’s crisply chipped through-ball put Ed Border away, who slid the ball home with trademark composure, cool as an oversized cucumber. Anne’s passing game was looking as good as it had all season, with a stylish commitment to keeping it on the ground and letting the ball do the work that saw several players revelling in the opportunity to strut their stuff. Oriel still looked dangerous, and could probably count themselves unlucky to be three down at this point. Central midfielder and Blue, Cameron Knight, twice went close from outside the box, and Qais Hammad sent a dangerous-looking free kick narrowly over the bar. Knight’s return to the Oriel side was spoilt by the constant harrying of the two Anne’s centre mids, Stu Clark and Steve Clarke, who dominated the physical battle to control the game. Harry Hoare and Burnage looked sharp up front for Oriel, with Burnage’s impressive pace carving out a half-chance, only to be stopped by a brave last-ditch block from Anne’s captain Ryan Fox, and then Hoare bringing a good low save from Anne’s keeper Mike Butler. On the stroke of half-time, Butler was called into action again to dive at the feet of Hammad – one of several occasions where the Anne’s keeper’s speed off his line proved a crucial last line of defence. At half-time the score remained 3-0 to St Anne’s. The second half started in similar fashion to the end of the first, with Anne’s perhaps over-complicating their passing but producing flashes of real skill, Oriel favouring a direct approach as they chased the game. Both sides went close from corners, Anne’s defender Chris Hollindale twice heading wide under pressure, either side of a powerful effort from Oriel’s Ettenfield, whose header was also off-target after a superb ball from Hammad. At this point both sides made substitutions. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, Oriel immediately grabbed a goal back, a nice passing move putting Knight in to slide home and give the visitors a lifeline. With twenty minutes to go, Oriel began to pile on the pressure, throwing caution to the winds with a 4-3-3 formation as Anne’s switched to 4-5-1. Oriel forced several corners but were unable to capitalise on any of them as Anne’s held firm, determined not to let their lead slip. Both sides had chances, Oriel forcing a series of desperate blocks on the edge of the Anne’s box and then Hollindale having a header cleared off the line from yet another corner. At last, with five minutes left, Anne’s put the game beyond doubt, Kynaston, Clarke and Border combining to feed McDonald on the edge of the box, who nonchalantly fired the ball into the far corner to seal the victory. The final whistle wasn’t long coming, leaving both teams to reflect on a somewhat flattering score line for St Anne’s. With only a handful of games to go, Anne’s find themselves very much still in the hunt for the title, particularly with Worcester still to play their re-arranged match with Teddy Hall. It seems likely that this season will go right down to the wire: Wednesday 5 March, when Anne’s host Teddy Hall in their final game, is a date that should be circled in everyone’s calendar.by George Kynaston

Star Wars, in a sense, is an easy target. Sure, it’s a ‘classic’, credited with revolutionising cinema, one of the most loved films of all time, eminently quotable and filled with iconic scenes and characters. But still (and this is the crux of my argument), it’s a bit naff.This may seem a somewhat churlish reason to take offence at a film which is so honest about its low-budget TV-serial roots. It’s all part of the charm, right? Well, it seems that line of reasoning has made Star Wars impervious to rational criticism. There’s the awful dialogue – ‘Travelling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy!’ – which most critics are unusually happy to gloss over, attributing it to part of the film’s charm. The acting is similarly acknowledged to be weak, verging on atrocious, but guess what? It’s got charm! Like Prince Charming’s lucky charm at a charm convention!Consider the plot itself, so riddled with contrivances that one wonders if George Lucas started off with just the plot holes, and cleverly weaved a story around them. The most obvious hole is the most literal one, which is that if you’re going to build a planetsized machine of terror, you’re not going to leave a tiny gap on the outside which leads directly to the ‘reactor core’. Forget missiles: what about stray birds?On the subject of Imperial stupidity, how on earth do our heroes escape stormtroopers by jumping into a ‘trash compactor’? Sure, the Empire’s elite would be incapable of hitting a barn door with a cannon that actually fired barn doors, but does it not occur to them to look in the trash compactor or wait by its only exit? And how does C-3PO manage to hide by locking a door? There’s really only one response to the stormtrooper who actually says ‘It’s locked, let’s move on!’ and that’s for the entire audience to collectively bang their heads on the seats in front of them.The editing is similarly dodgy, but cunningly disguised by the masterful soundtrack. Take away the music and you’re left with numerous awkward pauses and endless shots of robots walking into deserts. Then there’s the ‘Special Edition’, which is roughly the same as the original, except it contains small computer-generated creatures falling off larger computer-generated creatures, undoubtedly thought up in a moment of ‘hilarious’ ‘genius’.Finally, there’s the blatant Wookie racism. As if it isn’t enough that Chewie doesn’t get a medal at the end, he’s continually treated like an amusing pet/ slave, despite being the only one with enough common sense to question the sanity of deliberately falling down a ‘garbage chute’. So there. Star Wars condones slavery. And that’s really the crux of my argument.By Jonathan Tan 

No matter how full a woman’s wardrobe, there inevitably comes a point when she feels she has nothing to wear. Expensive, fashionable new purchases that just somehow don’t look right are cast aside in the frantic search. It is at times like these that a woman turns to her saviour: the Little Black Dress (LBD). The LBD is widely regarded as an essential part of any woman’s repertoire. It can be dressed up with chic accessories: Audrey Hepburn wore a pearl choker with her Givenchy LBD in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Equally, it can be dressed down for day-to-day wear; perhaps teamed with ballet pumps and a cropped jacket.

Not that the LBD is Plan B when all else fails. Rather, as Wallis Simpson once declared, ‘When the little black dress is right, there is nothing else to wear in its place.’ And it’s popular with both men and women: a survey found that 96% of women owned an LBD, and 31% of men stated that it was the outfit they would most like to see their partner wearing. It is now even used as a metaphor: a new mobile phone may be described as ‘the little black dress of mobile phones’, implying that its design is timeless, elegant, and iconic.

The first LBD was designed by Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel in 1926: a plain, short silk dress with simple diagonal pin-tucks. Prior to this, black had been reserved for mourning. In the new Jazz Era, however, Chanel’s simple LBD was embraced as liberating. Throughout the 20th century, starlets continued to favour the LBD both in movies and on the red carpet. Marilyn Monroe became an object of desire in a low-cut LBD in Some Like It Hot; Edie Sedgwick was the epitome of glamorous rebellion in an LBD in the 1960s; and Liz Hurley was catapulted to stardom almost purely as a result of the daring Versace safety-pin LBD she wore to a film premiere in 1994. The Season One Sex and the City DVD featured the four female stars, idolised by millions for their fashion savoir-faire, in LBDs, and thousands were either online or queuing at Topshop stores at 4am on May 1st 2007 in a bid to own the LBD in Kate Moss’ first collection for Topshop.

Current catwalk trends often have fashionistas and starlets adorning themselves like birds of paradise in garish colours and elaborate designs. Within a few years these all look dated. You can be confident, however, that when looking back at photos of yourself at university, the ones that won’t make you blush with embarrassment are those where you were wearing a Little Black Dress.

Joshua Freedman talks to lastminute.com creator Martha Lane Fox Talk about last minute. Martha Lane Fox was lucky to make it. The entrepreneur was meant to be popping up to Oxford to judge a bunch of Varsity Pitch contestants at the Said Business School, and, damn me but she cut it fine. ‘I didn’t know what time train I was going to take to get here until ten minutes before I left,’ she admits.It takes someone like this to make a fortune out of a site that has a section called ‘Go last second.’
She got there on time, of course. It was one rather minor gamble in a life of gutsy risks. She gave up easier careers for a bit of entrepreneurial fun, and ended up with a £5m bank balance at the age of 31. Life in the fast lane has its dangers — Lane Fox was almost killed in 2004 when her Moroccan jeep overturned, leaving her with half a body made of metal — but she’s proof, if it exists, that you don’t have to live life out of a filofax to get success.Hers is no story of rags to riches. In fact, her upbringing is one that plenty find difficult to shrug off. The daughter of Old Etonian and Oxford don Robin Lane Fox, she went to Oxford High School and then Westminster, before reading History at Magdalen. She worked for Spectrum, a strategy consultancy firm, and then moved to Carlton, the TV network, where she helped develop the firm’s internet plans and new digital channels.Most people would have been satisfied with a cushy creative job in the media. Lane Fox thought differently. ‘It was too corporate. I was quite excited to get out of that.’She was right to be. She co-founded Lastminute.com in 1998 with fellow Oxford graduate Brent Hoberman (‘probably one of the most last-minute people I’ve ever met’), but she insists it was unquestionably his idea. Hoberman seems to have fitted the bill perfectly. ‘Everything happened at the last minute, from going to meetings when we were working together, to organising dates with his millions of girlfriends,’ she says.Taking his own hectic life as a model, he suggested setting up a website that would let people buy theatre tickets, book flights and reserve hotel rooms by clicking buttons and receiving electronic mail. And, with the help of the Real Time revolution, people could do this whenever they bloody well felt like it. ‘The first time he told me, I said I think that sounds like an absolutely awful idea,’ she admits. ‘He then explained in more detail how the internet enabled you to do something like that. He convinced me that you could do this business that would be very, very, very complicated in the real world.‘If you’re trying to organise a weekend away at the last minute, you have to call up hotels, call up airlines, put it all together yourself, whereas the web enables you to have this incredible live availability and book it in real time.‘So, eventually, he convinced me and we set about raising money, writing a business plan, going to venture capitalists, being told everything from “sod off” to “OK, we’ll give you 50p” to “OK, we’ll invest.”’ The last of the three came eventually. They raised £600k.You don’t have to spend long looking at the site, or reading the mailing list e-mails, to gather that Lastminute.com is the definition of the 21st-century cyberbusiness. It’s all pink, for one thing. One panel on the site alerts you to ‘Newsletters ‘n’ things.’ The ‘a’ and the ‘d’ got left somewhere in the mid-’90s.There was a great eureka moment when she decided pink would do it, and, as she says, the ‘brand was forever born.’ Why pink? ‘I was just trying to create a brand that I liked myself, because I think that that’s where you have to start — if you go with your own gut instinct.’ The branding, she says, ‘was friendly and on the customer’s side’, a rarity at the time. ‘In our day, it was very unusual to write in a chatty way on a website. We had a weekly email that was very chatty. That’s made us stand out a bit I think.’It took the others a while to catch up. ‘Not because of Lastminute.com, but since Lastminute.com,’ she notes, ‘it’s become a lot more common parlance to talk to customers in a friendly tone — Innocent smoothie drinks, for example.’ The intro to the ‘Our Story’ section of their site is ‘We had good jobs before we started Innocent. Why did we change?’‘As it grew,’ she goes on, ‘the products on there appealed to everybody. You want to get on a flight, someone else wants to stay in a hotel, other people buy theatre tickets. It’s very, very broad-ranging. The site turns over $2 1/2 billion of revenue, so you have to appeal to everybody to get to that.’
At first sight, Lane Fox and Hoberman were lucky with timing. The site did exactly what she says — it appealed to all sorts — and it came to fruition at the peak of the late-’90s internet boom.

This, though, had its setbacks. The only way was down, even if people didn’t want to admit it at the time, and Lastminute.com’s share price took a notorious plunge, from a peak of 555p in 2000, to just 17p two years later. It was sold in a £577m deal in 2005, which saw her pocket a reported £13.5m. But, in true clichéd style, she dismisses the importance of money. ‘I think it’s a bit of a slippery slope when you start doing things for money,’ she says.Maybe we should take with one big pinch of cybersalt her claim that cash isn’t all. After all, she was in lucky enough straits to start with to be able to risk giving up her job to start a business just for fun. She owned her own home and, so she says, wasn’t even giving money a thought. ‘I didn’t ever even imagine that we would make so much money,’ she concedes. ‘I think you can separate out people who are driven purely by money, and people who are driven by great ideas and a passion for making them succeed.’Surely what made Lane Fox succeed, though, was a lifestyle that married her perfectly to the role of running a website that capitalises on the modern man’s lack of foresight. She calls herself ‘spontaneous’, but says she’s not really a last-minute person herself, and doesn’t like leaving things to chance. What do we think that means? That she books important things (holidays, theatre tickets…) six months in advance, maybe? Plenty would agree on that as a fair definition of advanced planning.Not so for her. ‘I probably know that I’m going to go away for the weekend in the next month, but I haven’t done anything about it.’ It’s relative, you see. ‘Last minute for me might be different from what last minute for you is,’ she ventures. For her, it means ‘today, tomorrow or next weekend. That’s kind of what I think of as last minute. But actually lots of people on the website still book six weeks ahead, two months ahead… You can book anything up to a year ahead if you feel like it and you’re particularly anally retentive.’ Anyone born before 1970 has permission to weep.

There has been outrage among Oxford students at the promotional tactics employed by the PR team behind an upcoming student production of John Ford’s “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore”.Students complained after being pidged condoms and women’s underwear. One student from Magdalen College described the promotional tactic as “in bad taste” and having “offended a lot of people”.She said, “Other people I know think it’s a pretty disgraceful thing to do, as they’re a bit more conservative and Christian and don’t think condoms should be flying around people’s pidges.”However the play’s director, Sam Pritchard, was keen to defend the decision to pidge condoms. He said, “I don’t much care if people have been offended by our marketing.“While I understand that some people might find this a bit confrontational, I think it’s ridiculous that someone would be offended by a plastic packet appearing in their pidge.“The idea is certainly not a marketing gimmick; our interpretation of the play confronts issues of sexual consent and unwanted pregnancy. The condom acts as the perfect symbol of these issues.”John Ford’s Jacobean tragedy is known as one of the most controversial works in English literature. The production will feature hardcore pornography presented on an onstage television set.Elle Graham-Dixon, in charge of marketing for the play, was also keen to defend their strategies. She said, “The initial concept behind both the play and the pidge condoms was to confront issues of sex, violence and degradation head on. The marketing reflects this.“If people are shocked by the material, then it will probably be representative of how they would feel about the play,” she said. “This is certainly not a case of using sex as a selling tactic. There is nothing sexy about big white pants with the word ‘whore’ emblazoned across them. If I receive promotional material that does not fit in with my personal beliefs, I throw it in the bin. I suggest they do the same.”However, one student, who wished to remain anonymous said, “They’ve been using welfare condoms, so are basically wasting college resources on a prank which most people don’t even find amusing.”

The caption for Rob Reiner’s (of When Harry Met Sally) new film The Bucket List is ‘Find the Joy’. Unfortunately there is very little joy to be found in this film, and unless you are a middle- aged man with similar mortality issues it is rather unlikely that you will find anything in it at all.The story is simple: Carter Richards (Morgan Freeman), an auto mechanic, and Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson), a corporate billionaire, share a room in a hospital where they are being treated for cancer. The doctors give both of them no more than a year to live. Predictably enough, Mr. Nice and Mr. Snob become friends and decide to live out their dreams before they ‘kick the bucket.’ Together they compose a list of things to do, like skydiving, getting a tattoo, and kissing beautiful women. Clearly the makers of the film were very concerned with showing the process of how both men eventually overcome the delusions they had about themselves and their lives and realise what really matters.This sounds more promising than it is. From the very first scene predictability guides the story. Imagine all the clichés and platitudes about love, friendship, family and religion thrown into one bucket and you will understand the tone of the picaresque voyage the two dying men embark on. The screenplay is mediocre, the level of conversation is sentimental bordering on trivial, and the supporting cast is embarrassingly weak. The only truly impressive feature is how Freeman and Nicholson still manage to convey emotions through even the most simplistic lines, yet the acting genius of the film’s two stars seems wasted in this one-dimensional film.So if you are in fact looking to ‘find the joy’ this week, you’ll have to look some place other than this dreary tale about two old men confronting death. By Marina Zarubin