Swansea in the News

Before we moved here, I had never heard of Swansea.

But since then, our Welsh home town has been mentioned six times in the international news.

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First:

In June 2009, Swansea set the World Record for the most people dressed as Smurfs (2,510 of them) in one place:

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Second:

In August, two drunken thugs attacked two men in dresses – men who also happened to be trained cage fighters.

Favorite line from the article link above:

Bare-chested Gardener was caught on CCTV confronting one of the men in a pink wig, black skirt and boob tube – then seen swinging a punch, a court heard. But the other cage fighter, wearing a sparkling black dress and matching long wig, sprang to his friend’s help, delivering two lightning-quick punches to the two stunned yobs. The cage fighters were then seen teetering away in their high heels, stopping only to pick up a clutch bag they dropped during the melee.

Favorite comment from same article (especially because it’s from “Lady Marmalade”):

Seeing stuff like this warms my heart to the core. There’s nothing like a hefty serving of poetic justice to restore one’s faith in humanity. Men should be able to wear whatever they want without being harassed by other men, and seeing those two idiots get OWNED by two fabulously dressed men in drag made my day!  - Lady Marmalade, Western Canada, 09/10/2009

And now the video (it’s a bit long, so don’t watch it unless you’re bored):

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Third:

In November, a man wanted for burglary didn’t like the quality of his mug shot and so sent the newspaper a better picture of himself.

Needless to say (and obviously so), he was arrested a few hours later.

Of course, we were excited to hear the incident made it all the way to Chicago as a question on NPR’s Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!

The mind boggles at what could be next.

And we didn’t have to wait long …

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Fourth:

In March 2010, a new documentary launched and was written about on CNN, called Swansea Love Story.

Here’s the summary from the CNN article:

In spring of last year we discovered that the small South Wales city of Swansea had recorded an 180 percent rise in registered heroin users. This happened in just four years, with young people making up the bulk of the increase.

It used to be one of the biggest ports in the world, but when Margaret Thatcher helped bring about the end of heavy industry in Britain, the social implications for places like Swansea were dire.

Funnily enough, it was Thatcher who signed off on a program that meant heroin addicts would be given access to free, sterile needles. This was after she’d closed down the mines, docks, and factories. Mass unemployment and heroin addiction have always made fine bedfellows.

And so we went to Swansea and lived with a gang of young addicts for a few months and found out just why addiction to heroin in Britain continues to rise at such an alarming rate.

We found out about love, death, the organized sexual abuse of children and the collapse of the family. We stumbled into a race riot, met old sailors, and listened to a wonderful Welsh male choir. We learned about why dragging yourself out of addiction is such a struggle, especially if you’re a teenager who’s the product of two generations of heroin addicts and whose great-grandfathers were miners, sailors, and steelworkers.

Mainly, though, we filmed the young people from Swansea who make up the statistics about drug use in modern Britain.

The poor young souls in tattered clothes you cross the street to avoid? This film is all about them. We called it Swansea Love Story.

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Fifth:

This is a discouraging bit of Swansea news that happened in May 2010 (though we didn’t hear about it until 2011).

But as it affects people from California and is representative of some of the organizational challenges we’ve seen with other groups in Swansea, we felt we ought to include it.

A number of independent filmmakers were invited to the Swansea Bay “International” Film Festival where, over the course of a few days, they were given the run-around with regard to when their film would be shown – with some showings occurring in a closet with folding chairs & the movie projected onto a wall. Finally, to add insult to injury, they were relegated to watching the awards ceremony on a TV in another room because they didn’t cough up the £50 each to sit in the dining room. In an inspiring twist at the end, though, some of them crashed the party to denounce their poor treatment.

Pay special attention to the main organizer – Binda Singh – he’s about the nastiest person you could ever meet. If we ever see him on the streets of Swansea …

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Sixth:

Then, in April 2011 – an internet sensation that started with a tweet made by a 22-year-old about a Swansea house that looks like Hitler took off.

Here’s the side-by-side comparison:

This, of course, sparked a wave of house doppelgangers that we also encourage you to check out.

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