Thieves in Brazil have stolen two paintings said to be worth $100m (£50m) in a dawn raid on Latin America's most renowned museum…
Pablo Picasso's Portrait of Suzanne Bloch, and The Coffee Worker by Brazil's Candido Portinari, were taken from the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo…
A statement from museum officials said the institution had not suffered such a robbery in its 60-year history.
Without wishing to be pedantic, the institution quite clearly has suffered such a robbery in its 60-year history. Very recently, in fact.
Incidentally, I don't claim to know much about art, but I do know that Pablo Picasso was a total genius (and never got called an asshole). Let's hope the Brazilians recover this stuff soon.
Finally managed to get a photograph of WWII U-Boat U-534 before she leaves her current home in Birkenhead Docks for berths new.
U-534 was comissioned on 23rd December, 1942, carried out three patrols (failing to sink or damage any allied ships), and was sunk by a British Liberator aircraft off the coast of Denmark on 5th May, 1945. Three of her crew were killed, the other 49 survived. She was salvaged in 1993 and put on display on the Wirral, just across the Mersey from the former Western Approaches Command HQ in Liverpool.
U-534 is the same U-Boat that Carolyn and her kids somehow managed to get themselves trapped inside in 2003.
Whenever we get together, Stense and I like nothing better than to play the Paparazzo Game. It's dead easy to play, and great fun for almost both of the contestants.
Basically, the Paparazzo Game is a rôle-playing game in which one of you (in our case, Stense) plays an A-list celebrity chick who has got herself embroiled in some tawdry, titillating scandal, while the other player (in our case, yours truly) plays top paparazzo photographer and guttersnipe, Ricardo Carteri, who has been hired by failing Italian scandal rag Il Grutzia to get some exclusive shots of said chick for their website.
Speak to the hand… Stense is so good at this game.
The challenge for the celebrity chick is to avoid getting photographed altogether, or to spoil the paparazzo's photos by obscuring her face with anything that happens to come to hand (which, in most cases, is her actual hand). The challenge for the paparazzo is to obtain unobscured shots of said chick—preferably with her jugs out.
Apart from that, as with the real paparazzi, there are absolutely no rules: the paparazzo can use any sneaky, underhanded trick he likes to try to obtain the exclusive shots.
As luck would have it, after a fantastic day out in Conwy last Friday (photos here), Stense and I found ourselves in an exclusive yet discreet Chester hotel. Now, I know what you're thinking, but there might be a perfectly innocent explanation… But what better place to play the Paparazzo Game?
So play it we did. And, I am proud to announce, I rose to the occasion magnificently by coming up with two of the sneakiest, underhandedest tricks in the history of the game: I conveniently neglected to tell Stense that we were actually playing the game, and I waited until her hands were full before I pulled out my camera.
"That is so not fair!" complained Stense, immediately conceding defeat. But any tactic is fair in the Paparazzo Game—that's the whole point:
To cap it all, if you study the above footage from timestamp 00:01 to 00:04 very carefully, you can quite clearly see both of Stense's jugs, captured for posterity.
What is that unusual smell wafting into my flaring nostrils? Why, yes, I believe it must be none other than the sweet smell of VICTORY!
In August, radio astronomers announced that they had found an enormous hole in the universe. Nearly a billion light years across, the void lies in the constellation Eridanus and has far fewer stars, gas and galaxies than usual. It is bigger than anyone imagined possible and is beyond the present understanding of cosmology. What could cause such a gaping hole? One team of physicists has a breathtaking explanation: "It is the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own," says Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Interesting use of the word unmistakable, I thought.
Be honest now, did you ever suspect these scientist types were making it up as they went along?
Jen: Do you want one of these satsumas? Me: What? You're eating satsumas in my car! Jen: They're really good. Me: You'll stink the car out. I've only just got rid of the fish & chips smell from two months back! Jen: Don't be such a kill-joy! Satsumas aren't like fish & chips: they smell all Christmassy. Me: So does reindeer shit, but I don't want my car smelling of it!
I attended a former colleague's funeral service yesterday. Nice chap. He would have been amused to know that he was responsible for making me go to church. I sat right at the back and tried to ignore the vicar, who took advantage of his captive audience.
Half-way through the service, someone's mobile phone began to ring: [I fell into a burning] Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash. You couldn't make it up.
I'm sure my late colleague would have laughed his head off.
We're all guilty of making selective references. Oh yes we are. You can paraphrase me on part of that, if you like. It's a perfectly natural thing to do—especially if you're trying to prove some point.
There were some great examples of selective references in this week's Any Questions programme on Radio 4. When asked a question about climate change, each of the politicians on the show (apart from the Labour Party rep) referred to the valedictory speech of the UK government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, which was critical of certain government policies. The woman from the Green Party even took the opportunity to explain how Sir David had previously described climate change as a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism (which indeed he had), so shouldn't we be spending a lot more money on it than on some "illegal war"? [Cue applause.]
What all these politicians inexplicably neglected to mention, however, was what else Sir David said in his speech. Unfortunately, I have been unable to track down a transcript, so will selectively quote from the BBC's coverage to prove some sort of point of my own:
[Sir David] said: "I would love to see Britain back at the forefront of positive use of GM technology." He added: "The process of GM technology should not be banned. The products of GM technology should be clearly monitored one by one."
He believes there is a moral case for the UK and the rest of Europe to grow GM crops, and thinks Europe's backing would kick-start a technology that could help the world's poorest in Africa.
…or how about this one?
He told BBC News that he was disappointed that the UK government had not pushed forward with more [nuclear] power stations in the 2003 Energy White Paper; the government said that it wanted to see if renewables would fill the gap.
However, Sir David now says that he knew at the time he did not believe renewables on their own would be enough.
(I won't quote the bit about his thoughts on culling badgers, as I don't happen to agree with him on that one.)
