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The pop wars are hotting up again! But move over colas, there’s a tropical fruity battle happening on supermarket shelves.


With Lilt officially changing its name to Fanta pineapple & grapefruit on the stroke of midnight on the fifteenth of February, like a bottled Cinderella with bubbles, shoppers have now noticed it contains grapefruit and some have said “urrgh!”.


Grapefruit can be reminiscent of fad diets, being squirted in the eye, nibbling half a cherry which looks a bit like a nipple due to the central placement on top of half a grapefruit and being hungry after breakfast.


Enter the Pineappleade! It’s the new popular kid on the block of pop. Big in Northern Ireland where Maine Soft Drinks have been delighting residents and tourists alike with it for decades, and also available in cans from Barr,


Pineappleade is smug because it knows it tastes lovely and now is its time to shine since shoppers have been alerted to the presence of fizzy grapefruit. A two-litre bottle of Pineappleade in a newsagents has been overheard saying “A Lilt by any other name wouldn’t taste as sweet” and inviting shoppers to take part in a thought experiment in which they imagine a pizza topped with ham, pineapple and grapefruit.


The Lilt faithful are unmoved and say that pineappleade is a less sophisticated beverage, without the maturity that grapefruit adds.




First published 17 Feb 2023


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Bob deVilder has spent decades transforming a ruined farm building into an ornately-decorated home which has been dubbed the Hobbit house.


Bob, 90, was told in a letter to stop all use of the Lord of the Rings designs and features.


He has been ordered to remove the ornate decoration which adorns the house plus any structures or designs relating to a building from any of the films in the Lord of the Rings series.


This includes the rounded front door, stained glass windows and upper window surrounds. He is also ordered to "cease and desist" from locating the house partly within the hillside at the back.


Lawyers for a top legal team have accused Bob of riding on the reputation of the world-renowned franchise. He has been told to take action immediately.


The property had originally belonged to a local storyteller. Over the years, previous residents of the byre had included a cow, a dragon and a pig. Bob, a skilled builder, decided to convert the byre.


Lawyers who represent Middle Earth Enterprises, which has stage, film and merchandising rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, contacted Bob deVilder.


Bob has never seen the films based on JRR Tolkien's books. He told our reporter this was "just a coincidence".






First published 15 Feb 2023


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