"because he’s dead in the eyes"

Links  Yesterday I attended the fun fair in Sefton Park.  After the abject terror of the Sky Rider and being tipped upside down with hundreds of metre below me and thinking the chest bar was loose (my arms still hurt from holding the other bars) I visited the waltzers, which was fine for the first two minutes.  Five minutes later motion sickness ensued and the Christmas dinner, or at least my Christmas dinner was postponed for a few hours while I stopped feeling quite so ill.

Meanwhile, Vogue Magazine has news of the Harvey Nicks beauty shop soon to be opening in Liverpool One, the Beauty Bizarre:
"Beauty Bazaar, Harvey Nichols will be the first one-stop destination for all things beauty," Harvey Nichols group concessions and beauty director, Daniela Rinaldi, said today. "This truly unique space, spread across three floors, will house the very best brands in the market, alongside the very latest services that will ensure grooming of the highest level, all within the convenience of a single space. Globally, this will be the first time international and premium brands will be housed within such a luxurious environment, anchored by a fabulous Champagne and Cocktail Bar, to ensure that Beauty Bazaar is an experience like no other."

One of The Guardian's sub-editors writes about her godforsaken job. Is subedited by a colleague who introduces errors into the piece at a late stage. Hilarity ensues in the comments:
"Not Charlotte's fault – I was doing some late editing on this and typed that in a hurry. About the worst crime a sub can commit is introducing errors at a late stage and there, I've gone and done it. Now fixed – thanks."

Amazing scenes this morning at Shakespeare's Globe when it was visited by the olympic torch. The bearer, Ify, is interviewed by their blog:
"It was amazing. I didn’t know there would be so many people in the theatre so I was amazed how much noise everyone made. I thought there would be only a few people in there. (She laughs when we tell her there were several hundred people watching her.) I could see people in the audience who I didn’t even know cheering and crying."

A 6-year-old Guesses What Classic Novels Are All About
"[On The Road] “I think it’s about a car. A car that goes to Mexico, Indonesia and other places. It’s about a car that goes on all sorts of adventures. The guy on the cover is a teen, he likes to drive people places a lot. And he’s French.”"

Maureen Dowd, Cub Reporter
"Six weeks before the AIDS story was published, Dowd had gotten her first byline as a general assignment reporter on the Metro desk. Fairly unremarkable, it's about Columbia University's just-completed Computer Science Building, on which $5.6 million was spent. It's notable mostly for the prediction of Arno Penzias, a vice president of research for Bell Laboratories and a Nobel Laureate in physics. "By 1986, there will be more microprocessors being produced than McDonald's hamburgers," he told Dowd. "The Dick Tracy wrist radio is not that far away."

BBC Archive: Behind the scenes at the 1948 Austerity Games
"These 'Austerity Olympics' were not only the first post-war Games, but also the first Olympics in which British television played a role. This collection of programmes and photographs looks back at the Games, remembering the athletes who took part and revealing the BBC's role in televising events."

Fantastically outspoken interview with Joanna ("Stacey") Page by The Stage on the subject of ITV's Superstar
"“Think about Ramin [Karimloo]. He was in a rock band and he is amazing. He would even look like Jesus. But you have Andrew Lloyd Webber saying about a U2 song Rory sang - which was performed with no facial expression because he’s dead in the eyes - that he did not know any musical theatre star who could sing like that. What about Ramin? He just played the Phantom for you. How insulting. It’s disgusting.”"

Fantastically outspoken interview with Julie ("Celine") Delpy by The Village Voice on the subject of her career:
"My agent called, and he was like, 'What are you doing?' And I'm like, 'Well, I'm writing a screenplay with Ethan and Richard for a sequel.'
"And he was like, 'Why are you doing that?'
"And then he called me back an hour later, and he's like, 'Well, we had a meeting, and you know, we think you're not focusing enough on your acting career.' I mean, he asked me to play a sexy Latina in Rush Hour 3 or whatever." The agent, she says, would send her to read for parts that were already cast, just to keep her busy."

Sex, violence and swearing on film: 100 years of the BBFC
"Probably the nearest we get these days to getting out the protractor is on language." They have reluctantly concluded there is no substitute for counting the swear words in a film. "It doesn't mean that's the only thing we look at – particularly with the f-word and the c-word – we'll look at whether they're comically mitigated, or aggressively aggravated, for instance. But if you don't count, you discover there's no stable boundary. So the rule of thumb is four fucks maximum at 12A."

I have a few years of my Tweets accessible in my Facebook timeline, but it's not ideal. Now Twitter itself is moving towards a facility for viewing archives and downloading:
"Users have been expecting and demanding this function for quite some time, and the great demand was also reflected in the creation of sites such as oldtweets, which allows users to search through some posts from Twitter's first year. While there are many, many boring tweets from that time, oldtweets still came with something Twitter did not offer."

Wait Until Dark: Audrey Hepburn's Non-Hitchcock Hitchcock Film
"Wait Until Dark (1967) is the best Hitchcock movie that Alfred Hitchcock didn’t direct. With a cast led by a cool brunette—Suzy Hendrix, played by Audrey Hepburn, who’d been tapped by Hitch to play just that type eight years earlier for his ill-fated No Bail for the Judge—the film is often mistakenly attributed to Hitch. Projecting his own pompousness on the director, critic Rex Reed huffed and puffed that “If Hitchcock could only laugh at himself, this is the movie he’d make.” It’s easy to see why."