Coops’ changes his (tiny little) mind.
Turns out we may prefer Cheese and Onion “French Fries”, Just a thought.
Yours, cowering in shame.
Coops
Recent few days
Some brief time off from the tour. We all hugged and wished each other excellent weekends, and then disappeared into our other lives for a few days to do laundry, lie in and snuggle with other halves. Friday morning I pottered about the place, noting with amusement the legacy of six weeks or however long on the road: I walked into a couple of things in my cluttered home, having forgotten they were there, and when talking to a friend about going to the theatre that night, kept calling it a ‘hotel’ (on tour one is for ever going from one to another, referring to one or the other; sometimes verbally confusing the two, in a way that sounds very daft when there are no hotels around of which to speak). Around lunchtime I was picked up for filming: I was part of a Kevin Bishop sketch where he was playing his character Darren Brown, my resentful and less successful twin brother. There’s a clip of the character in a different sketch here. I arrived at a delightful residential house that had been lent to Kevin’s crew as a set for the day, and after a few wides, mid-shots and close-ups, we had the sketch done and dusted. As a curious piece of trivia, you might like to note when you watch the sketch, that the house we were in belonged to a Christian family, and the bookshelves (although they probably won’t be caught on screen) were stock full of religious titles (such as Knowing God, which I imagined would be thicker), and there’s a Christian magazine on the table in front of us. None of that plays any role in the sketch, and neither was the magazine placed there by any of us, but if it amuses you to know that these two characters are sitting surrounded so densely by such things, then there we go. The sketch was very well written by, I believe, Nico Tatarowicz, so thank you Nico, and I hope I came some way to doing my part justice. It’s for the huge C4 comedy gala night, which is a live event at the 02 on March 30th, and which airs on TV on the evening of April 5th. So, as one twitterer pointed out, it’s a filmed piece for a live event which will be filmed: I hope that’s clear.
Friday evening I went to the always brilliant Menier Chocolate Factory to watch and hear Hannah Waddingham – multi-award winning musical star, outstanding singer, actress and I imagine all-round Gay Man’s Best Friend – melt and excite us with her excellent, excellent work. She possesses an incredible range: able to sing Nina Simone as Simone would, and then switch to her devastating Send In the Clowns, via Thriller and any number of madly inspired songs (including an awesome rendition of Judas’ belter Heaven On Their Minds from Jesus Christ Superstar). Her CD is coming out soon, and if you’ve missed her show-stopping performances in London (I first saw her as the Lady in the Lake in Spamalot), then this will be a great way of at least hearing her work. Her sell-out run at the Chocolate Factory is now over, but hopefully she’ll return, or repeat elsewhere.
Saturday, after a trip to the cinema, I took a group for a fantastic but too-quickly-bolted-down dinner at the River Cafe and then went on to see my co-creator Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson’s Ghost Stories at the nearby Lyric Hammersmith. The atmosphere in the auditorium is electric and it’s a fun, sharp show; scary and well-performed. Definitely worth seeing, particularly if you’re a horror fan. It plays until 17th April at that theatre but I can only imagine will see plenty of life beyond that.
Sunday I started a new painting: a new 5′ x 5′ Judi Dench, and part of a new, ‘straight portrait’ route I’m taking. Sadly I won’t get to finish it for a month or so until I’m back in town. In the early evening we headed off to the Olivier Awards for a genuinely fun night. Jodie Prenger as Nancy (from Oliver!) and Hannah Waddingham (twice in one weekend!) outshone, In My Humble Opinion, some great performers taking the stage that night to sing in-between the handing out of awards. The Mountaintop and Spring Awakening triumphed, and personal highlights were talking to Mark Rylance and his wife Claire (Mark won richly deserved Best Actor for Jerusalem), Jez Butterworth and Ian Rickson (writer and director of the same astonishing play, now on at the Apollo), and meeting Tim Whitnall and the truly lovely Bob Golding, whose hugely acclaimed Morecambe rightly won Best Entertainment. I’m desperately hoping to catch it on tour – details are here.
Monday I painted until the last minute and then nearly missed my train to Leicester, for last night’s first performance at the De Montfort Hall. I was, as tends to happen after a few days off, a little scatty and not quite as on form as I would have liked, but it was nonetheless a fun night. My voice was a little croaky and I found myself reaching for the water more often than normal. It’ll take a night or two to warm the old voice back up again. I had a drink afterwards with a friend who is an art teacher at a local school, and whose pupils seemed to be constituting most of the volunteers on stage. I’m now sat in a very pleasant, empty hotel lounge, feet up; bemused that I have more time to relax when on tour, than I do in the breaks. But I must get on with m’book editing, which is happening piecemeal in lounges like this across the country.
Right, onwards and upwards.
x
Humans’ Early Tree-Dwelling Ancestors Probably Bipedal
“More than three million years ago, the ancestors of modern humans were still spending a considerable amount of their lives in trees, but something new was happening.
David Raichlen, an assistant professor in the University of Arizona School of Anthropology, and his colleagues at the University at Albany and City University of New York’s Lehman College have developed new experimental evidence indicating that these early hominins were walking with a human-like striding gait as long as 3.6 million years ago.
The results of their research appears in Monday’s edition of PLoS ONE, a journal from the Public Library of Science.
A trackway of fossil footprints preserved in volcanic ash deposited 3.6 million years ago was uncovered in Laetoli, Tanzania, more than 30 years ago. The significance of those prints for human evolution has been debated ever since. The most likely individuals to have produced these footprints, which show clear evidence of bipedalism, or walking on two legs, would have been members of the only bipedal species alive in the area at that time, Australopithecus afarensis. That species includes ‘Lucy,’ whose skeletal remains are the most complete of any individual A. afarensis found to date.”
Read more at Physorg.com
Schindler’s List Goes On Sale For £1.5 Million
“The famous Schindler’s List of Jews saved from the Nazi Holocaust during the World War Two is being offered up for private sale for £1.5 million.
The list of 801 Jewish men, women and children, which belongs to the family of Oskar Schindler’s right-hand man, Itzhak Stern, is one of only five known to exist.
Being sold through the website Momentsintime.com, the old and tattered manuscript dated from the 18/04/1945, is being handled on a first come first served basis.
The Stern family, whose patriarch, Itzhak was played by Ben Kingsley in the Oscar winning Spielberg epic ‘Schindler’s List’, have been in negotiation with Momentsintime.com for over two years.
‘There are five known examples of Schindler’s List preserved in the world today,’ said a spokesperson for Momentsintime.com.
‘This is one out of a reputed list of seven made by in total Oskar Schindler.
‘Two are in the hands of Israeli Holocaust Museum’s, one is in Koblenz in Germany and the other is in the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.
‘The other two are unaccounted for.’”
Read more at the Daily Mail
Daylight Saving Time A Waste Of Energy
“The US state of Indiana has 92 counties, but until 2006 only 15 of them adjusted their clocks for daylight saving time, with the remainder keeping standard time all year, at least partly to appease farmers who did not want the change. Then in 2006 the Indiana Legislature decided the entire state should adopt daylight saving time, beginning that spring.
This unique situation enabled professor of economics Matthew Kotchen and his PhD student Laura E. Grant, both from the University of California at Santa Barbara, to study how the adoption of daylight saving affected energy use. They studied over seven million electricity meter readings in southern Indiana every month for three years, and compared the energy consumption before and after the change. The 15 counties that had adopted daylight saving time much earlier were the control group, which allowed them to adjust for the effects of weather extremes over the period.
The result of the study showed that electricity use went up in the counties adopting daylight saving time in 2006, costing $8.6 million more in household electricity bills. The conclusion reached by Kotchen and Grant was that while the lighting costs were reduced in the afternoons by daylight saving, the greater heating costs in the mornings, and more use of air-conditioners on hot afternoons more than offset these savings. Kotchen said the results were more ‘clear and unambiguous’ than results in any other paper he had presented.”
Read more at Physorg.com
Man Had Sex Change To Escape Debt Collectors
“A man from the West Midlands, who was believed to have debts of up to £50,000, had a sex change in a desperate bid to avoid debt collectors.
The man, who cannot be named, had got into so much debt that he decided to switch identities completely.
Actress Sarah Thom revealed that she found out about the man after speaking to workers at the Wolverhampton Credit Union to research her role playing a debt-ridden cleaner in a touring play called Forever in Your Debt.
She said that she met up with workers at the union – which provides financial advice and loans to members – who revealed its most extreme cases of debt to her.
One was the case of man from the West Midlands area who decided to have a sex change in a bid to dodge debt collectors.
The man is believed to have gone through with the operation, but is now thought to be in the process of sorting out his debts and paying off his creditors.”
Read more at The Telegraph (thanks, SuZi)
‘Invisibility Cloak’ Prototype Created By Scientists
“A prototype ‘invisibility cloak’, similar to those worn by fictional wizard Harry Potter, has been developed by European scientists.
British and German researchers have created the three-dimensional that can hide objects by bending light waves, which could pave the way for larger objects to be made invisible.
While the cloak of invisibility has played a major role in fiction and movies, it appears that scientists have taken a small, but important new step, toward making it reality.
In their study, researchers from the German Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Imperial College London used the cloak, made using photonic crystals with a structure resembling piles of wood, to conceal a small bump on a gold surface.
In their study, published Thursday in the American journal Science, they rendered almost entirely invisible the bump that measured 0.00004 inches high by 0.00005 inches across, by ‘cloaking’ it in a new material.
Invisibility cloaks have already been developed but they only worked on two dimensions.
In other words, the objects that were supposed to be made invisible were immediately visible from the third dimension, the study said.”
Read more at The Telegraph (thanks, Tiram)
Britain’s rarest wildflower returns from the dead after 23 years
“It is the most mysterious wildflower in Britain, the strangest, the rarest, the hardest to see, and it was given up for lost. But like a wandering phantom, the ghost orchid has reappeared. After an absence of 23 years, during which it was declared extinct, this pale, diminutive flower, the most enigmatic of all Britain’s wild plants, rematerialised last autumn in an oak wood in Herefordshire.
Its sighting, initially kept a close secret, has electrified the British botanical community. Forget your black tulip. This has been British botany’s holy grail, searched for annually and ardently by a small army of enthusiasts for more than two decades, but never found. Its eventual rediscovery was due to the painstaking detective work of an amateur botanist, Mark Jannink, who identified 10 possible sites in the Welsh borders and visited them regularly throughout the summer, until on 20 September he found a single example of Epigogium aphyllum, bearing a single white flower on a white stem only five centimetres tall.
The plant was so unobtrusive that it was invisible from a few yards away. On spotting it, Mr Jannink exclaimed: “Hello you – so there you are!” There had been no previous ghost orchid sighting in Britain since a single plant was found in Buckinghamshire in 1986. It was officially declared extinct in Britain’s Red Data List in 2005.”
Read more at The Independent
Happy Birthday Gary Oldman
Gary Leonard Oldman born 21 March 1958 is an English actor, writer, director, producer, voice-over artist and occasional musician who is well known for his roles as Sid Vicious in 1986 biopic Sid & Nancy and The Count in the 1992 blockbuster adaptation of Dracula. He has garnered critical acclaim for his diverse performances and portrayals of real-life historical figures and is noted for his avoidance of the Hollywood celebrity scene, often being referred to as an “actor’s actor”.
After coming to prominence for his award-winning portrayal of ill-fated rocker Sid Vicious in 1986 biopic Sid & Nancy, which was featured in Premiere Magazine‘s “100 Greatest Performances of All Time”, Oldman found further recognition during the late 1980s and early 1990s via starring roles in films such as Prick Up Your Ears, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and State of Grace.
During this time he earned considerable critical respect, with Janet Maslin referring to his work as “phenomenal” and Roger Ebert calling him “the best young British actor around.” Oldman subsequently starred in one of his best-known roles as Lee Harvey Oswald in 1991′s JFK. Since leading Dracula the following year, he has starred in such popular motion pictures as: True Romance, Immortal Beloved, Léon: The Professional, Murder in the First, The Fifth Element, The Contender and Hannibal.
In recent years Oldman has become well known to younger audiences as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter film series and James Gordon in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. In 1997, Oldman directed, produced, and wrote the award-winning Nil by Mouth, a movie partially based on his own childhood.
Oldman has received various awards and honours throughout his career but has at various times expressed his lack of regard for the Oscar and the presenting Academy. Several of his roles – particularly Sheldon Runyon in The Contender – have brought forth predictions of an Oscar nomination, but to date he has yet to be nominated for such an award despite a critically acclaimed film career spanning three decades.
The above painting by Derren from 2008 is available as a limited edition print in the art store.
For One Tiny Instant, Physicists May Have Broken A Law Of Nature
“For a brief instant, it appears, scientists at Brook haven National Laboratory on Long Island recently discovered a law of nature had been broken.
Action still resulted in an equal and opposite reaction, gravity kept the Earth circling the Sun, and conservation of energy remained intact. But for the tiniest fraction of a second at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), physicists created a symmetry-breaking bubble of space where parity no longer existed.
Parity was long thought to be a fundamental law of nature. It essentially states that the universe is neither right- nor left-handed — that the laws of physics remain unchanged when expressed in inverted coordinates. In the early 1950s it was found that the so-called weak force, which is responsible for nuclear radioactivity, breaks the parity law. However, the strong force, which holds together subatomic particles, was thought to adhere to the law of parity, at least under normal circumstances.
Now this law appears to have been broken by a team of about a dozen particle physicists, including Jack Sandweiss, Yale’s Donner Professor of Physics. Since 2000, Sandweiss has been smashing the nuclei of gold atoms together as part of the STAR experiment at RHIC, a 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator, to study the law of parity under the resulting extreme conditions.”
Read more at Physorg.com (thanks, SuZi)
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