Ah, nostalgia! And then the heroes of your youth pop their clogs! The actor David Warner has died at the age of 80! Back in 1965 my A-Level English Literature class went to Stratford, quite a long way for a day trip from the Northwest of England but I don’t remember our staying overnight. We visited Anne Hathaway’s cottage, which from photos looks to have been substantially extended from the three roomed cottage they reckon it originally was. My friend Jenny impressed us with her sunshine sneezes every time we came out of a shady interior into the sunny outdoors. And, more importantly, we saw David Warner play Hamlet, just one of the works of literature we were studying. I fell instantly in love with his long, languid Prince of Denmark. My boyfriend of the time was less than impressed when I insisted on going to see my hero in “Morgan, a suitable case for treatment”.
Ah! nostalgia! I suppose nowadays I would be following him on social media!
I wrote yesterday about there being more Big Boys’ Toys around than there used to be, especially Ferraris - which, by the way, should always be red! Some years ago I knew a small boy in Spain who insisted, mistakenly but determinedly, that his father’s car must be a Ferrari because … it was bright red! Anyway, here’s a little news item regarding a Ferrari:
“Police in the Czech Republic have turned a high-powered Ferrari they seized from criminals into a patrol car capable of chasing down joyriders at speeds of up to 200mph.
The 2011 Ferrari 458 Italia was formerly coloured racing red, but the authorities painted it with yellow and blue reflective stripes and mounted a panel of lights on top. It will be used to chase stolen cars and to crack down on illegal road races, police said in a statement.”
Is that what regularly happens to goods “seized” by the police? Can they do with them as they like? Who knew?
As wife of a chess-player, over the years I have learnt quite a lot about the game I don’t play, including the untoward tactics sometimes used to discombobulate opponents: blowing smoke across the board (no longer possible of course), various nervous tics such as jiggling a knee, clicking your retractable ballpoint pen, obsessively tidying up the pieces you have taken, slamming the controls of the chess clock, even playing super fast to make your opponent follow suit and make an error - the list goes on and on. Somehow you’d think chess-playing robots would be above such things but here’s the story of one which broke its young opponent’s finger:
“A chess-playing robot, apparently unsettled by the quick responses of a seven-year-old boy, grabbed and broke his finger during a match at the Moscow Open last week, Russian media outlets have reported.
“The robot broke the child’s finger,” Sergey Lazarev, president of the Moscow Chess Federation, told the TASS news agency after the incident, adding that the machine had played many previous exhibitions without upset. “This is of course bad.”
Video of the 19 July incident published by the Baza Telegram channel shows the boy’s finger being pinched by the robotic arm for several seconds before a woman followed by three men rush in, eventually freeing him and ushering him away.”
Really! You’d expect AI to be better than that. The small boy concerned, I am glad to say, carried on playing the next day - that’s the resilience of youth!
Maybe it’s all a deliberate attempt to add excitement for the spectator - after all it seems that they have been doing that with the Tour de France:
“Fifteen years have passed since the new Tour de France organiser, Christian Prudhomme, announced his intention of “sexing up” the race – my words not his – after watching a dramatic stage across Burgundy. Since then the Tour has gone in one direction: shorter stages, more hilltop finishes, the odd gravel road, cobbles, a search for routes where crosswinds may affect the peloton, fewer and shorter time trials; a search for ways to create tension and excitement, to avoid the race becoming predictable.
The 2022 Tour looks like the culmination of that process. Barring accidents or illness – not an idle statement in a Tour where Covid-19 has played a lead role – Jonas Vingegaard will ride up the Champs-Élysées on Sunday having won the fastest ever Tour, one which has seen only two conventional bunch sprints as of Saturday.”
Signs of the modern age!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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