2 Friday April 8 2022 | the times
times2
DOWN
Kinder
Surprise
DOWN
Rishi
Sunak
London has a new place of
pilgrimage for those who still
believe that everything started to
go wrong the day David Bowie
died: Madame Tussauds has
unveiled a new waxwork of
the man journalists call
the Thin White Duke
when they’ve already
called him David Bowie in
the same sentence, and it’s
causing some raised eyebrows.
Showing Bowie in his Ziggy
Stardust guise — Dot Cotton hair,
tin-foil third eye and all — the
model has been several years in
the making.
“Bowie, who died in 2016, met
museum artists in June 1983 to
provide hundreds of precise
measurements and hair and skin
colour references,” the Evening
Standard reported. And yeah —
the hair and skin all look pretty
spot-on. However, as a long-To one of my favourite tropes of
British culture — the clanging
cognitive dissonance that comes
when a huge Hollywood figure visits
a regional area of Britain with
hilarious results. You may recall
that last year gave us the multiple
delights of “Tom Cruise in
Birmingham” — a visit during which
Top Gun apparently ate two chicken
tikka masalas, back-to-back, and
then had his car nicked by locals:
what I would term the Full
Birmingham Experience, a joke
I am allowed to make because I am
from Wolverhampton.
Fast-forward to this spring, and
similar delights are occurring in
Norfolk, hosting Mr Saturday Night
Fever himself, John Travolta. First
sighted in Norwich Morrisons —
“near the bread counter”, as Norfolk
Live breathlessly reported — it seems
Danny Zuko was quick to work out
the class system inherent in British
supermarkets, and where his natural
home, as an A-list celebrity, lay.
Or, as Norfolk Live reported later
with some updated news: “He sent
his runners to Swaffham Waitrose
for supplies.”Anyway, from one shit-show to
another as a huge breaking news
story revealed that the chocolate
maker Ferrero was recalling batches
of Kinder Surprise eggs in the UK
“due to a link with salmonella”.
The Food Standards Agency said “a
number” of food-poisoning cases had
been reported and urged customers
to return products with a best before
date between July 11 and October 7.
One worrying aspect, however, is
that salmonella seems to have...
gained sentience? But in a confused
way? As we know, salmonella is
usually a real eggs-based thing, but
in this case it seems to have looked at
the chocolate display, gone, “Mate,
it’s the same shape and the same
name”, and jumped ship.
Pandemic news, and it seems that
there’s a new variant on this rise, with
more than 600 cases of coronavirus
XE being noted. Which confused me
— I thought “Coronavirus XE” was
the name of Elon Musk’s new baby.UP
Covid XE4
time Bowie-starer, I feel there’s one
measurement Tussauds has skimped
on. Observe Bowie’s trouser area. For
a man famously blessed with, to quote
Paula Yates on Michael Hutchence,
“the Taj Mahal of crotches”,
this iteration looks a
bit... underpowered?In all the confusion of the past
few years, one of Celebrity
Watch’s side gigs — the Will
Leonardo DiCaprio Ever Date
a Woman over the Age of 25
Surveillance Bureau, Bar & Grill
— has, sadly, been neglected. Last
time it clocked on for business, it
was to note that the following
string of numbers — 23, 25, 23, 22,
21, 25, 25 — marked the ages of
DiCaprio’s girlfriends when he ended
relationships with them. Sadly but
inevitably, no woman has made it to
their 26th birthday while still being
blessed with the love and sexual
attentions of DiCaprio, now 47.
Then Covid hit, and I kind of lost
track, to be honest. But last week
DiCaprio and his inamorata, Camila
Morrone, were spotted out and
about in New York — seemingly
still together. These must be
bittersweet days for DiCaprio
and Morrone, though — for
Morrone hits 25 on June 16,
and all the facts tell us that she
will be off to “the Single Ladies’
Special Farm” — aka “back on
Tinder” — shortly afterwards.
I wonder, does DiCaprio know he
keeps doing this? Does he want to
go out with older women — but is
scared of the number 26? Is it just
the number of birthdays they’ve
had that’s the problem? What if he
started going out with someone
who was born on February 29 in
a leap year? Then he could start
banging women the same age as
him but who were, birthday-wise,
only 12.
Should this idea be used, the
Will Leonardo DiCaprio Ever
Date a Woman over the Age of
25 Surveillance Bureau, Bar &
Grill will charge its customary
$777,777 fee.tAs we all know, but
try to ignore, one of the primary
reasons Amazon can deliver eg
a hardback copy of Tales from
Avonlea/50kg of well-rotted manure/
an inflatable mattress within 24 hours
is because it effectively suppresses the
organisation of workers’ rights. How
badly? Well, Amnesty International,
which usually deals in torture and
coups, published a report on Amazon,
which included the eyebrow-raising
information that the company
monitored “threats” using “a new
technology system called ‘geoSPatial
Operating Console’ ” that secretly
observes workers’ private Facebook
groups for any talk of unionisation,
pay rises or collective action.
Obviously, everyone has different
views on how to run a company, but
I’d suggest that when you’re paying
union-suppression consultants $3,200
a day and your boss is worth
$189.2 billion, you probably have a bit
of financial leeway left to pop in the
odd pay rise and holiday. Maybe by
not developing a costly app to monitor
workers’ private social media
accounts? It’s just a mad thought.
However, in a moment that
suggests that, ultimately, the
universe does have an inbuilt self-
regulating justice algorithm, it’s
Jeff Bezos’s uselessly vast fortune
that has caused a seismic shift at
Amazon. Clearly at a loss for what
to do with a pile of money so large
it’s virtually unimaginable (there
are apps that let you see Bezos’s
wealth visually, and it takes three
minutes to scroll through it),
Bezos has taken to building rockets
and firing himself into space.
The unforeseen consequence?
Well, last week it was announced
that the Amazon warehouse in
New York had, finally, successfully
formed its first union. Or, as Chris
Smalls, the activist behind the
movement, said: “We want to thank
Jeff Bezos for going to space —
because while he was up there,
we were organising a union.”Does this mean, in the future, bird
flu could be spread via Mr Cadbury’s
Parrot? Or that a new wave of
bubonic plague will originate in
a reformed Boomtown Rats? Or
Flea from Red Hot Chili
Peppers, after he’s hung
out with them? I hope the
BMA is on to this.Caitlin
Moran
Celebrity Watch
The super-wealthy are weird, aren’t
they? I’m sure, in future years, there
will be in-depth psychological studies
on how the ultra-moneyed have a
genuinely different culture from most
people. They think in an... odd way?
This week Rishi Sunak leapt on last
week’s Chris Rock/Will Smith hoo-ha
as being a relevant moment in his life,
thus: “Both Will Smith and I have had
our wives attacked,” he told the BBC’s
Newscast, sadly. “You know, I think it’s
totally fine for people to take shots at
me. It’s fair game.. .[but] it’s very
upsetting and, I think, wrong for
people to try and come at my wife.”
Of course, it’s both creditable and
totally understandable to feel
defensive when a loved one is under
attack. No one wants to see, as Kay
Burley memorably tweet-captioned a
picture of a morose-looking dog after
the Paris attacks in 2015, “the sadness
in his eyes”.
However, I would suggest that there
is some difference between Rock
essentially shouting “BALDY!” at
Jada Pinkett Smith, unprovoked, and
justified public outrage that the
chancellor of the exchequer’s wife —
a tax “non-dom” — still had a stake
worth £400 million in a company that,
until last week, had investments in
Russia. I’m not sure that essentially
shouting “WEALTHY!” at someone is
quite as... mean?
UP
Amazon
Labor
UnionUP
Leonardo
DiCaprioUP
Pete Doherty
UP
John Travolta
UP
David BowieTo the Headline of the Week,
courtesy of nme.com, which gave us
“Pete Doherty says that he ‘nearly
lost my feet’ during his battle with
drug addiction”.
I mean, we’ve all lost a shoe on
a big night out, but this is next-level
stuff.N
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