Big Bang characters decoded L-R: Howard is dressed as an evil member of the Borg, Raj as the Klingon security chief Lt Worf, Leonard as the intrepid Capt Jean-Luc Picard, and Sheldon as the android Lt Commander Data. (© Monty Brinton/CBS © 2012 CBS Broadcasting, Inc)
➢ Big Bang Theory guys boldly go out in Star Trek costumes – from Entertainment Weekly – Supremely awesome photo from this week’s episode of The Big Bang Theory (aired in the USA). Click on for further explanation
Tyler James: destined to make mischief one day
❚ BRITISH POP’S NEXT JUSTIN TIMBALIKE, according to PopJustice, is Tyler James, the slick-suited Mr Fit who amazingly did NOT win The Voice TV talent show last year, despite a brilliant soulful voice and emotive falsetto. This week he swaggers through the video [below] for his new single Worry About You, featuring British rapper Kano to underline hard-man East London cred. It’s the second heartfelt tune to be released from his recent album A Place I Go, some songs on which reflect his turbulent past as a best buddy of the tragic Amy Winehouse who died last summer.
In the softly porny video for his last release Single Tear we see Tyler as a ho-master. In the new video for Worry About You he moves up to scarfaced power player in gangland. What is it with casting white boys as gangstas? It doesn’t wash. Nor does it square with the songwriter’s yearning in lyrics such as “I haven’t cried a single tear whole year” and “Worry about you baby, I worry about you”. This dude cares about people.
OK, his album is a ballad-led tearjerker but among 14 tracks it contains only two upbeat numbers: we hear none of the mischief we can see in those bright blue eyes. The reviews have been mixed and a consensus feels his handlers have yet to grasp how to project Tyler’s simmering matinee-idol charisma. What is it with today’s pop-biz shapers that they no longer know how to assess a talent and play to his strengths?
Tagged pop music, singles, The Voice, Tyler James, Video, Worry About You, YouTube
❚ SOME F***BOOKERS might think shedding a load of virtual “friends” a very good New Year’s resolution. “Crack open an ice-cold PBR, stretch out in your skinny jeans, and take the quiz,” says the invitation to discover How hipster are you? Sadly, this irresistible ploy is a Facebook app so will involve compromising all your privacy settings and will of course reset to their defaults “How people bring your info to apps they use”. That means welcoming Facebook’s “one billion active users” to your quiz results. The quizmakers themselves claim that “only 2.5% of all people are true hipsters”. Do you really want one seventh of the world’s population knowing how uncool you might just be? Bit of an own-goal there, Zuckerberg Mi.
On the other hand, Katherine P from Birmingham posts: “Somehow I don’t think I need to do the quiz to know the answer.”
Posted in Europe, Media, North America, Social trends
Tagged hipsters, internet, New Year, quiz, resolutions, social media, world population
Before-and-after designs: left, coloured Plasticine model … right, real food on the plate by El Bulli chefs
❚ EATING CAN BE THEATRE, just as food can be art. The Catalan chef Ferran Adriá is Houdini and Picasso in one, commonly lauded as the best in the world. His three-Michelin starred restaurant El Bulli, two hours north of Barcelona, was an academy repeatedly garlanded by scholars who take dining seriously. Since 1987 it grew to serve 1,500 plates daily, prepared by 50 cooks and served by 30 staff typically to only 50 companions at table. Its culinary revolution is known as “molecular gastronomy” famed for scented gels and foams and for using every part of every animal and plant.
Adrià’s manifesto: No 10 of his 23 principles that summarise El Bulli’s cuisine
Now after 25 years of experiments, Adriá is replacing the restaurant with an inspirational foundation, while his career is being celebrated in Spain’s first major exhibition about cooking. In a series of galleries at Barcelona’s Palau Robert, we are blown away by a fearsomely complete collection of photos, letters, utensils, mementoes, and a vast poster of the 1,846 dishes catalogued by the restaurant. Best of all are the videos in which we see his edible creations being conjured. Another simple but charming glimpse behind the magician’s hand is a table-top displaying before-and-after designs of individual dishes: ingredients modelled from coloured Plasticine are composed as templates for his chefs to translate – abracadabra! – into the resulting plates of food shown alongside.
➢ The free exhibition Ferran Adrià and El Bulli runs at Palau Robert, Barcelona, until Feb 3, 2013
“ Tonight’s dinner involves all the senses, it engages the mind, and is also, at times, a strangely emotional experience. The dishes can be confrontational as well as exquisite… The constant stream of surprises continues for more than four hours – the green leaf that tasted exactly of oysters; the grilled strawberry with ginger on the outside and an injection of gin on the inside; the polenta gnocchi with coffee and saffron yuba; the perfect razor clam with its gelatin twin in the other half of the opened shell. Playful, arresting, occasionally alarming, the meal is almost like a story… ” / Continued at Guardian Online
❚ THE “WORLD’S MOST USELESS MACHINE” is not new news but it did raise a smile during a trip to the year-old Museum of Ideas and Inventions – essentially a hands-on diversion for restless children – while Christmassing in Barcelona. The co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s laboratory of artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky, came up with the idea in 1952. Electronics engineer and the “father of information theory” Claude Shannon, who worked with Minsky at IBM, liked the idea so he built the machine. It is a battery powered box, the sole purpose of which is to turn itself off after some human hand has turned it on.
You too can assemble your own useless machine in beginner-level electronics kit form (from US$35 + shipping), or in a ready-soldered version (from US$55 + shipping). Both include printed circuit board.
➢ Buy your own Ultimate Useless Machine online from Frivolous Engineering Company in Canada
Posted in Culture, Europe, Technology
Tagged Barcelona, El Bulli, exhibition, Ferran Adrià, food, Inventions, Marvin Minsky, Video
Futuristic puppet stars: Gerry Anderson with Virgil, Brains, Lady Penelope and Parker the chauffeur. (Picture: David O’Neill / Rex)
“ Gerry Anderson, who has died aged 83 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, was the main mover behind a number of puppet series commissioned by Lew Grade’s Independent Television Corporation. They made the company a fortune from the space age: perhaps the best known was Thunderbirds (1965-66), and among the others were Fireball XL5 (1962-63), Stingray (1964) and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-68).
Factoid: Thunderbirds hero Jeff Tracy and
his sons John, Scott, Virgil, Alan and Gordon were all
named after early American astronauts
Captain Scarlet as Royal Mail postage stamp last year
“ The pre-ITV world of the early 50s had been one of puppets such as Muffin the Mule and the Flowerpot Men, a mirror for a Britain on extremely visible strings. Rocket men, on BBC radio, Radio Luxembourg and in the Eagle comic, meant Dan Dare and Jet Morgan – recycled Biggles and Battle of Britain pilots. After Anderson, they were destined for the galactic dole queue, just as Eagle’s demise was hastened by the arrival of Anderson spin-offs such as TV Century 21 (1965-71). “Everything we did,” Anderson told his biographers Simon Archer and Marcus Hearn, in What Made Thunderbirds Go! (2002), “was in an endeavour to sell to America”, and Grade spectacularly achieved that with Fireball XL5, a US network sale to NBC. Thunderbirds, shown across the world and more than a dozen times on British TV, is the show that defines the Anderson achievement, yet never attracted a US network… ” / Continued at Guardian Online
➢ F-A-B gallery of Gerry Anderson creations at Guardian Online
➢ 2011, Brains explains “lenticular” Thunderbirds postage stamps
Thunderbirds’ secret base at Tracy Island: model kit comes with miniature versions of the Thunderbird 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. “Some assembly required.” From Dragon Models USA, $115
➢ Paul Hammans on the extraordinary dynamics of Stingray:
Stingray’s Troy Tempest and “Aqua” Marina (Photo: ITV)
“ Anderson’s third series in Supermarionation brought a new level of emotional literacy to the genre, albeit one difficult to define. Gradually the move had been made and puppetry was continuing to move toward greater realism, but let’s not get this out of proportion; it was not the end of innocence. Puppetry of the Gerry Anderson variety, despite being set in an imaginary future began to appear more relevant at a deeper level for the audience of the day. The transaction in any learning process depends upon emotional involvement and increasingly the puppet series got you involved… ” / Continued at Cult Britannia
Posted in London, North America, Technology, TV
Tagged 1960s, Captain Scarlet, Fireball XL5, Gerry Anderson, puppetry, Stingray, Supermarionation, Thunderbirds
✱ Deejay legend Robbie Vincent has returned to JazzFM on Sundays 1-3pm… Catch up on Robbie’s JazzFM August Bank Holiday 2020 session thanks to AhhhhhSoul with four hours of “nothing but essential rhythms of soul, jazz and funk”.
◆ Who was who in Spandau’s break-out year of 1980? The Invisible Hand of Shapersofthe80s draws a selective timeline for The unprecedented rise and rise of Spandau Ballet –– Turn to our inside page
✱ If you thought there was no more to know about the birth of Blitz culture in 1980 then get your hands on a sensational book by an obsessive music fan called David Barrat. It is gripping, original and epic – a spooky tale of coincidence and parallel lives as mind-tingling as a Sherlock Holmes yarn. Titled both New Romantics Who Never Were and The Untold Story of Spandau Ballet! Sample this initial taster here at Shapers of the 80s
✱ Jawing at Soho Radio on the 80s clubland revolution (from 32 mins) and on art (@55 mins) is probably the most influential shaper of the 80s, former Wag-club director Chris Sullivan (pictured) with editor of this website David Johnson
➢ Search for all on Bowie here
at Shapers of the 80s
✱ “I’m not a rock star” Bowie often said – No, David, you were a messiah – Obituaries and key videos about
the godlike one
✱ Prince Rogers Nelson RIP: ‘A funny cat’ and ‘sole authentic genius’ of the 1980s
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 