I want to wish you all ...

 

The best 2020 news

 We all know that the year we are about to leave behind has been a "dark" one. The Covid-19 has really marked our lives and has reminded us how vulnerable we really are. But despite the bad moments, despite the people who are not with us anymore, despite the weird way of life we have to live now, we have to remember the good moments we have experienced and the good things that surround us and were unnoticed until now. 

I have to say that along the lockdown and thanks to the time to spent every evening applauding to support our health staff and trying to cheer up our neighbours, we got to know a lot of fantastic people who live close to us but we had never had a chance to meet before. That's something really positive that will remain with us for ever.

I'm sure you also have lots of positive things to remember this year 2020. Let's try to stick to them and remember the good moments instead of crying over the bad experiences. Remember that every cloud has a silver lining!

Click here to remember or maybe get to know some good news. I'm sure you'll face the new year in a better mood: 

Best of 2020

I want to wish you ...

 

Why The Muppet Christmas Carol is the perfect festive film

Read this article and maybe you'll feel like watching this old film over and over again. I do!

With songs written by a former addict, the tale of redemption is sincere. And its heartfelt goofiness awakens your inner child

Forget It’s a Wonderful Life. Forget Miracle on 34th Street. Forget (please God, forget) The Holiday. There is only one definitive Christmas movie, and that is The Muppet Christmas Carol. Not only is it the best Christmas film, but it is the best screen adaptation of the Charles Dickens novella – though this has had the unfortunate side-effect of convincing a generation of children that Marley had a brother called Robert.

“The Marleys were dead, to begin with,” that’s how Gonzo, our self-professed “omniscient” narrator (this film really doesn’t talk down to children), begins the metanarrative. His companion Rizzo the rat, meanwhile, is mainly “here for the food”, and says what we are all thinking: “A blue, furry Charles Dickens who hangs out with a rat?” Yes, indeed, that is the setup. In a postmodern stroke of genius, Rizzo acts as a sort of Greek chorus with a New York accent, enduring a series of slapstick mishaps that include being set on fire, thrown from windowsills, and falling down a chimney on to a red-hot goose.

The Muppet Christmas Carol is one my brother’s favourite films. My brother is autistic and tends to watch things he likes repeatedly, so I have worked out that over the course of my childhood, assuming he watched it three times a week – a low estimate – I have seen it more than 1,000 times. I know every line by heart, from “no cheeses for us meeces” via “LIGHT THE LAMP, NOT THE RAT” to “He is odious, stingy, wicked and unfeeling, and badly dressed.” I know all the songs, too: Scrooge (“if they gave a prize for being mean, the winner would be him”), It Feels Like Christmas (“It’s in the giving of a gift to another / A pair of mittens that were made by your mother”) and the recently rediscovered When Love Is Gone.

(This ballad, which sees Scrooge jilted by his fiancee, featured on the original VHS release but was cut because it was thought five-year-olds wouldn’t respond to it. Fans have been calling for its reinstatement ever since, but the original tape had been lost. Until earlier this month.)

I have, for quite some time, been trying to put my finger on what makes The Muppet Christmas Carol so enduring – as I have grown older, it has become a viral meme. Watching it again this week, I can only conclude that it is because it is, quite simply, an excellent film. It’s beautifully made, the script is hilarious, the sets are magical, the puppeteering incredible, and the acting an amazing feat, when you consider how the human performers were playing it entirely straight alongside a bunch of all-singing all-dancing furry Muppets. Michael Caine completely embodies Scrooge, portraying his conversion from nasty old miser to Captain Christmas with touching sensitivity and a small pinch of cockney charm. To this day, no actor ever feels quite right in the role.

As for the Muppets, the casting is genius. Kermit is perfect as Bob Cratchit, the gentle, kind, loving father whose froggy son, Tiny Tim (who, we are hilariously informed at the end “DOES NOT DIE”) captures our hearts. Miss Piggy is thrillingly furious as Mrs Cratchitt, the only character in the film who is so blatantly sick of Scrooge’s shit, and therefore a socialist hero. Statler and Waldorf are evilly brilliant as Marley and Marley, basically your typical cartoon Tories, cackling evilly about evicting children from orphanages.

It’s ridiculous, really, to carry so much affection for a children’s puppet film. Strangely, several critics really didn’t get it at the time, and I feel almost offended reading their faint praise. Part of the reason that this film continues to be so beloved, I think, is because it doesn’t have a bad or cynical bone in its body. Its heart is so firmly in the right place, and yet it is never saccharine because any sweetness is undercut with humour. It is a film made with the purest of intentions – to entertain children and tell them a story about how it is better to be kind. The songs were written by Paul Williams, a recovering drug addict who had spent much of the 1980s blitzed on vodka and cocaine. Williams poured his feelings about the miracle of recovery and redemption into the music, especially Scrooge’s song Thankful Heart. (“Stop and look around you. The glory that you see / Is born again each day. Don’t let it slip away / How precious life can be.”)

The film reminds me so potently of being a child that this time I welled up during One More Sleep ‘Til Christmas. My brother lives in a care home now, and I haven’t seen him all year. His carers have told him that it will be “lots of sleeps” until he sees me. It’s been a horrendous year for everybody, and I think that’s why we all need to watch this film. It allows us, for a tight one hour and 29 minutes, to become children again. And to remember that most important of life lessons: never eat singing food.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

The Guardian, 21 Dec 2020

 

Deal or no deal: where is Brexit heading?

 A very interesting podcast about the situation of the Brexit right now and its consequences.

Click here to listen to it: Brexit_podcast

John le Carré - the master of spy novels

 Admired all over the world for being the writer who was able to "teach" so much about the hidden world of spies. R.I.P.

John le Carré was the pseudonym of the author David Cornwell, judged by many to be the master of the spy novel.

Meticulously researched, and elegantly written, many of his books reached a wider audience through TV and film adaptations.

Le Carré stripped away the glamour and romance that were a feature of the James Bond novels and instead examined the real dark and seedy life of the professional spy.

In the twilight world of le Carré's characters the distinction between good and bad, right and wrong was never that clear cut.

David John Moore Cornwell was born on 19 Oct 1931 in Poole, Dorset.

His father, known as Ronnie, was a fraudster, described by one biographer as "an epic con man of little education, immense charm, extravagant tastes, but no social values".

Those exploits gave the young Cornwell an early introduction to the arts of deception and double-dealing which would form the core of his writing.

His mother walked out when he was five and the young David invented the fiction that his father was in the secret service to explain his many absences from home.

After attending Sherborne School he went on to the University of Berne to study foreign languages.

He did his military service in the Army Intelligence Corps, running low grade agents into the eastern bloc before going to Lincoln College, Oxford, where he gained a BA.

After teaching at Eton for two years he joined the Foreign Office, initially as Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn.

During his time there he worked in the intelligence records department and began scribbling down ideas for spy stories on his trips between work and home.

'Excellence in his profession'

His first novel, Call For The Dead, appeared in 1961 while he was working for the intelligence service.

He adopted the pen name, John le Carré, to get around a ban on Foreign Office employees publishing books under their own name.

The story introduced characters who would reappear in subsequent novels including his most famous creation, George Smiley.

After attending Sherborne School he went on to the University of Berne to study foreign languages.

He did his military service in the Army Intelligence Corps, running low grade agents into the eastern bloc before going to Lincoln College, Oxford, where he gained a BA.

After teaching at Eton for two years he joined the Foreign Office, initially as Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Bonn.

During his time there he worked in the intelligence records department and began scribbling down ideas for spy stories on his trips between work and home.

'Excellence in his profession'

His first novel, Call For The Dead, appeared in 1961 while he was working for the intelligence service.

He adopted the pen name, John le Carré, to get around a ban on Foreign Office employees publishing books under their own name.

The story introduced characters who would reappear in subsequent novels including his most famous creation, George Smiley.

Le Carré believed that The Looking Glass War, published in 1965, was his most realistic description of the intelligence world in which he had worked, and cited that as the main reason for its lack of success.

The follow up, A Small Town in Germany, was set in Bonn, where le Carré had worked, and warned of the dangers posed by a revival of the far right in German politics.

In 1971 he published an autobiographical novel The Naïve And Sentimental Lover, based on the break up of his first marriage to Alison Sharp.

His character, George Smiley, re-emerged in his trilogy, Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People.

Well-hidden expertise

The books took his readers deep into "the circus" with jargon such as "honey trap", "mole" and "lamplighter" becoming common parlance.

They also raised serious questions about the lengths to which even democracies would go to preserve their own secrets, something that exercised le Carré greatly.

He argued that in a world where official secrecy is all-pervasive, the spy novel performed a necessary democratic function. To hold up a mirror, however distorted, to the secret world and demonstrate the monster it could become.

Ironically, he delighted in maintaining secrecy in his own personal life, refusing for many years to even acknowledge that he had been a spy himself.

He jealously guarded his privacy, travelling alone and incognito when he set off to research his novels.

For years he refused invitations to do any interviews, maintaining that what he wrote was "the stuff of dreams, not reality" and he was not, as the press seemed to imply, an expert on espionage.

As the Soviet bloc began to implode le Carré switched his attention to the conflict in Palestine with his 1983 novel The Little Drummer Girl.

Political engagement

Three years later he finally managed to exorcise the memory of his father with the publication of A Perfect Spy, which many critics consider his most accomplished work.

The life of the spy, Magnus Pym, is dominated by memories of his father Rick, a rogue and con-man whose character is firmly based on Ronnie Cornwell.

In 1987, after years of being ostracised by the Soviet authorities, le Carré was given permission to spend two weeks in Russia, as a guest of the Soviet Writers' Union.

It was rumoured that the wife of the Russian leader, Raisa Gorbachev, was a fan of le Carré's books and that she had a hand in gaining the necessary Kremlin approval for the trip.

His output continued to be prolific with a 1989 novel, The Russia House, marking the end of the Cold War, and the reappearance of George Smiley in The Secret Pilgrim in 1991.

The 1996 novel, Tailor of Panama was inspired by the Graham Greene story, Our Man in Havana, while The Constant Gardener, published in 2000, saw him switch his attention to corruption in Africa.

In 2003 he joined a number of writers attacking the US led invasion of Iraq in an essay entitled, The United States of America Has Gone Mad.

"How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history", he wrote.

His remarks probably contributed to accusations of anti-American bias in his 2004 book Absolute Friends, an examination of the lives of two radicals from 1960s America, coming to terms with advancing age.

In 2006 his 20th novel, Mission Song, detailed the sometimes complex relationships between business and politics in the Congo.

Notably self-disparaging about his own achievements he consistently refused honours, insisting that there would never be a Sir David Cornwell.

"A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself", he once said. "And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue".

BBC News

Gitanjali Rao: Time magazine names teenage inventor its first ‘kid of the year’

 The 15-year-old scientist has used technology to address contaminated drinking water, opioid addiction and cyberbullying

A 15-year-old scientist and inventor has been named as Time magazine’s first “kid of the year”.

Gitanjali Rao, from Denver, Colorado, has invented new technologies across a range of fields, including a device that can identify lead in drinking water, and an app and Chrome extension that uses artificial intelligence to detect cyberbullying.

She said she hoped she could inspire others to dream up ideas to “solve the world’s problems”.

Gitanjali was chosen from a field of 5,000 US-based nominees, which was whittled down to five finalists by a committee of young people alongside comedian and TV presenter Trevor Noah.

She and the other four finalists will be honoured in a TV special next Friday.

In an interview with actor and humanitarian Angelina Jolie, Gitanjali said: “I don’t look like your typical scientist. Everything I see on TV is that it’s an older, usually white, man as a scientist.

“My goal has really shifted, not only from creating my own devices to solve the world’s problems, but inspiring others to do the same as well.

“Because, from personal experience, it’s not easy when you don’t see anyone else like you.

“So I really want to put out that message: If I can do it, you can do it, and anyone can do it.”

Time began awarding its man of the year honour in 1927, later updating it to person of the year, but this is the first time it has named a kid of the year. Time, which also produces the child-friendly Time For Kids, teamed up with children’s TV channel Nickelodeon for the new award.

Last year, climate activist Greta Thunberg became the youngest ever person of the year when she was given the honour at age 16.

The Guardian, 4th Dec 2020

Musical Test

 If you like music, try this quiz (Merriam-Webster). And then you'll have the chance to access more funny quizes and improve your vocabulary.

Give it a try!

Click here: Musical words

Incredible Cave Paintings 8 Miles-Long Discovered Deep in Amazon Forest: The Sistine Chapel of Ancients

 An awesome discovery! You won't believe your eyes!

Read more about this amazing cave paintings discovered in Colombia: Cave paintings discovery

NHS to enlist 'sensible' celebrities to persuade people to take coronavirus vaccine

 It's apparently becoming a worldwide problem. The fact that most people will have to be persuaded to have a Covid vaccine has forced the British government to think about effective and imaginative ways to change people's minds.

Read this very interesting article by The Guardian: Celebrities & Covid vaccine

 

43 Embarrassing Grammar Mistakes Even Smart People Make

Read this article and learn to use better English.

Have you ever made any of these mistakes? 

43 mistakes

Happy Thanksgiving Day!

 

There's more to life than being happy

 An interesting video.

Sir John Major's Treasurer's Lecture

 Watch this interesting speech held last November 9th which deals with Brexit and Covid. He seems to be so right!

"Brexit was sold to our electors on false premises..."

"... it will be a painful ball and chain on our national well-being"

"... for the first time in our history, ministers have proposed legislation giving them powers to break the law. This is a slippering slope down which no democratic government should ever travel."

..."this is a wretched betrayal of what our electors were led to believe when they voted for Brexit."

"... the problem is politics."

"...they (ministers) cannot be above the law."

Tiny Atlantic island takes giant leap towards protecting world's oceans

 A community of 250 people on one of the most remote inhabited islands on Earth has made a significant contribution to marine wildlife conservation by banning bottom-trawling fishing, deep-sea mining and other harmful activities from its waters.

The government of Tristan da Cunha, a volcanic archipelago in the south Atlantic and part of the UK’s overseas territories, has announced that almost 700,000 sq km of its waters will become a marine protected area (MPA), the fourth largest such sanctuary in the world.

In doing so, the community will safeguard the area’s wealth of wildlife, including sevengill sharks, the globally threatened yellow-nosed albatross and Atlantic petrel, rockhopper penguins and other birds that live there, and help the UK government achieve its target of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.

The UK, which has a duty to protect wildlife found in all its territories, will be responsible for the long-term monitoring and enforcement of this vast area – three times the size of Britain and 2,400km from the nearest habitation, Saint Helena.

James Glass, Tristan da Cunha chief islander, said: “Our life on Tristan da Cunha has always been based around our relationship with the sea, and that continues today. The Tristan community is deeply committed to conservation: on land, we’ve already declared protected status for more than half our territory.

“But the sea is our vital resource, for our economy and ultimately for our long-term survival. That’s why we’re fully protecting 90% of our waters – and we’re proud that we can play a key role in preserving the health of the oceans.”

Click here to read more about this interesting topic: Proctecting world's ocean

First passengers travel in Virgin's levitating hyperloop pod system

 High-speed pods could eventually make New York-Washington trip in 30 minutes

Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop has completed the world’s first passenger ride on a high-speed levitating pod system, a key safety test for technology it hopes will transform human and cargo transportation.

The Virgin Hyperloop executives, Josh Giegel, its chief technology officer, and Sara Luchian, the director of passenger experience, reached speeds of up to 107mph (172 km/h) at the company’s DevLoop test site in Las Vegas, Nevada, the company said on Sunday.

“I had the true pleasure of seeing history made before my very eyes,” said Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the chairman of Virgin Hyperloop and the group chairman and chief executive of DP World.

The Los Angeles-based Hyperloop envisions a future where floating pods packed with passengers and cargo hurtle through vacuum tubes at 600mph (966 km/h) or faster.In a hyperloop system, which uses magnetic levitation to allow near-silent travel, a trip between New York and Washington would take just 30 minutes. That would be twice as fast as a commercial jet flight and four times faster than a high-speed train.

The company has already run more than 400 tests without human passengers at the Nevada site.

The test comes a month after Reuters first reported that Virgin Hyperloop picked the US state of West Virginia to host a $500m (£380m) certification centre and test track that will serve as a proving ground for its technology.

The company is working towards safety certification by 2025 and commercial operations by 2030, it has said.

Canada’s TransPod and Spain’s Zeleros also aim to upend traditional passenger and freight networks with similar technology they say will slash travel times, congestion and environmental harm linked with petrol-fuelled machines.

What happens to humans when we can't touch?

The pandemic has changed a lot of habits in our lives. Watch this interesting video by BBC Ideas:

Let's go back to 1605. Guy Fawkes Day.

 

Remember, remember

The fifth of November

Gunpowder, treason and plot

There seems no reason

Why gunpowder treason

            Should ever be forgot

Why food allergies are on the rise

We currently see there are more and more people we know who are allergic to some food. And it seems that apart from the number of allergy sufferers, the types of food which provoke it are also increasing dramatically. 

Read this very interesting article about it:

BBC_allergies

Covid: Spain imposes national night-time curfew to curb infections

Spain has declared a national state of emergency and imposed a night-time curfew in an effort to help control a new spike in Covid-19 infections.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said the curfew, which came into force on Sunday night, would be in place between the hours of 23:00 and 06:00

Under the measures, local authorities can also ban travel between regions.

Mr Sánchez said he would ask parliament to extend the new rules, initially in force for 15 days, to six months.

Spain was hit hard during the first wave of the pandemic earlier this year and at the time imposed a much more restrictive lockdown - one of the toughest in the world.

Like many other European regions, however, it has been hit by a second wave of infections.

In Italy, new restrictions were also announced on Sunday. The government said the steady rise in cases there was causing a huge strain on the country's health services.

Meanwhile France has reported a record number of new daily infections. A total of 52,010 infections were reported on Sunday, up from just over 45,000 on Saturday.

What are Spain's emergency measures?

Mr Sánchez said different regions would have up to an hour of flexibility if they wanted to modify the duration of the overnight curfew.

Restrictions on movement between districts would be determined by regional leaders and was likely to be dependent on work and medical needs, he added.

The new measures announced include a limit on public and private gatherings of different households to a maximum of six people.

"The situation we are going through is extreme," Mr Sánchez said in a televised address on Sunday, adding: "It is the most serious in the past half century."

More than half of Spain's 17 regions had been calling for tighter restrictions, and the latest measures will apply to all regions except the Canary Islands.

The same level of emergency was introduced during the first wave of the pandemic in April.

Spain has passed one million cases since it began and nearly 35,000 people have died.

 

If you're pinning your hopes on a Covid vaccine, here's a dose of realism

 Should we be less optimistic? 

For those holding on to hope of an imminent Covid-19 vaccine, the news this weekend that the first could be rolled out as early as “just after Christmas” will have likely lifted the spirits.

The UK’s deputy chief medical officer, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, reportedly told MPs a vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca could be ready for deployment in January, while Sir Jeremy Farrar, Sage scientific advisory group member and a director of the Wellcome Trust, has said at least one of a portfolio of UK vaccines could be ready by spring.

Much has been said about how the world will return to normal when a vaccine is widely available. But that really won’t be true. It is important that we are realistic about what vaccines can and can’t do.

Vaccines protect individuals against disease and hopefully also against infection, but no vaccine is 100% effective. To know what proportion of a community would be immune after a vaccination programme is a numbers game – we must multiply the proportion of a population vaccinated by how effective the vaccine is.

The UK currently has among the highest national coverage of flu vaccine in the world, vaccinating around 75% of the over-65s against flu every year; most countries either do worse or have no vaccination programmes for older people. It is reasonable to expect that this level of coverage could be achieved for a Covid-19 vaccine in that age group in the UK.

Therefore, if the Covid-19 vaccine is 75% effective – meaning that 75% of those vaccinated become immune – then we would actually only protect 56% of that target population (75% of 75%). This would not be enough to stop the virus circulating. Almost half of our highest risk group would remain susceptible, and we won’t know who they are. Relaxing social distancing rules when facing those risks seems a bit like Russian roulette.

Now let’s look at people younger than 65 in medical risk groups. In a good year, the UK vaccinates 50% of them against flu. That means just over a third of them are going to be protected (50% of 75%). Just to make matters worse, regulators such as the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency have said that they would accept a 50% lower level for efficacy for candidate Covid-19 vaccines. If that efficacy level is fulfilled, we have to multiply coverage by 50% efficacy, not 75%, and suddenly it all gets more concerning.

As well as protecting individuals, vaccines can protect communities, through the interruption of transmission. One of the best examples comes from the UK meningitis C vaccination campaign of the late 1990s. There was a 67% reduction in the number of cases in unvaccinated children and young people because they were being protected by their contacts who had been vaccinated and were no longer transmitting infection.

If we want to see population protection from a Covid-19 vaccination, we are going to need high levels of protection (coverage x efficacy) across all ages – vaccinating not just the at-risk groups, as is being planned.

To stop transmission, we must vaccinate anyone who can transmit infection. Anything less means that our goal is only individual protection and not the interruption of transmission. A recent announcement from the head of the UK vaccine taskforce, that the strategy will be targeted vaccination, makes it abundantly clear that the UK vaccine strategy at the moment is not to try to interrupt transmission, despite having hundreds of millions of Covid-19 vaccine doses on contract. With less than 10% of the population showing evidence of having been infected, targeted vaccination will not allow “life as previously usual” to return.

Even if countries do decide to switch from a personal-protection policy to a transmission-interruption strategy, obstacles remain. Much will depend on the successful vaccination (probably with two doses) of people who have not previously seen themselves to be at elevated risk. The challenge will be persuading the young, for example, to be vaccinated, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of others.

Adherence to recommendations for any Covid-19 interventions – social distancing, lockdowns, home working, cancelled holidays or vaccinations – depend on trust. If politicians are telling us that the present impositions on our lives are only going to last until we have vaccines, then the reality is that a false hope is being promulgated.

Vaccines are probably the most powerful public health intervention available to us. But unless their benefits are communicated with realism, confidence in all recommendations will be put at risk.

While hope and optimism are much needed in these dark times, it is important to be transparent. We need to communicate the clear message that although targeted vaccination may offer some protection, it will not simply deliver “life as we used to know it”.

David Salisbury

The Guardian, Wed 21 Oct 2020