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