Many of us struggle to not get sucked into the content machine, even if we simply say: ‘This doesn’t matter’
Last week a video did the rounds of Diego Simeone getting annoyed with Ben White for walking over an enormous Atlético Madrid crest-doormat placed literally in the middle of the tunnel entrance which Ben White had to walk into to get to the room Atlético Madrid had themselves selected for Ben White to get changed in.
Then on Tuesday night, Diego Simeone walked over an enormous Arsenal crest-doormat situated in the middle of the tunnel at the Emirates Stadium to get to the room Arsenal had themselves selected for Diego Simeone and the rest of his Atlético Madrid side to get changed in.
Continue reading...The great Mexican director is in England to pick up a BFI fellowship – and buy a haunted house. He talks gods, ghosts, monsters and almost being destroyed by the Weinsteins
When Guillermo del Toro goes to the cinema, he buys three seats. “I’m an expansive fellow,” he says, occupying one end of the sofa in the library of a London hotel. “Between the popcorn and my elbows and my girth, I need more than one seat. But I also like the feeling of being in company and yet alone. Everyone says how great the cinema is as a collective experience, and I agree. At the same time, I enjoy it the most when it’s not packed. I like being semi-alone.”
Those vacant seats must come in handy, too, if there are any ghosts in the vicinity. Ghosts and Del Toro go way back. The multi-Oscar-winning director was 11 when he first sensed a spectral presence at his family home in Guadalajara, Mexico. He insists this was his late uncle, who, before his death, had promised the young horror buff that he would pop back and tip him off if there were anything on the other side. Del Toro later heard a persistent sighing in his dead uncle’s room – a detail that inspired Santi, the sighing ghost-boy in The Devil’s Backbone, his 2001 horror set during the Spanish civil war. Decades later, when Del Toro was in New Zealand scouting locations for The Hobbit (which he co-wrote), his hotel room was filled with the cacophonous uproar of a murder in full swing, audible in a kind of surround-sound. And though there was no ghost as such when he stayed in an early-19th-century hotel in Aberdeen while filming Frankenstein two years ago, he felt “an oppressive vibe” about which he duly live-tweeted to his two-million-plus followers. Currently, he is looking to buy a haunted house in the UK. Presumably via Frightmove.
Continue reading...The world No 1 lost to Jorden van Foreest, but squeezed into a tie for first and won the blitz playoff
The world No 1, Magnus Carlsen, making a rare return to classical chess this week at the annual TePe Sigeman tournament in Malmö, Sweden, squeezed through to a blitz playoff in Thursday’s final round after Turkey’s 14-year-old talent Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus blundered fatally in the late stages after reaching a drawn position.
Carlsen tied on 5/7 with India’s Arjun Erigaisi and won the blitz playoff 2-1. This was the final sudden death game.
Continue reading...My prank demonstrated how our minds can adversely affect our health, and scientists are increasingly showing that negative thoughts can produce very real symptoms
For his last birthday, I gave my husband a monthly beer box subscription. While he saw it as a generous and delicious present, it spawned a mischievous idea on my part. One evening, as I watched him drain the last bottle, I opened my email. “We’ve just had a message from the beer people,” I said. “They’re issuing a recall on the last batch.”
“What’s the problem?” he answered. “Some sort of contamination issue,” I replied. My husband’s face fell. “Are you OK? You look a bit peaky,” I said.
Helen Pilcher is a science writer and the author of This Book May Cause Side Effects
Continue reading...After Zelenskyy, Robert Brovdi is Moscow’s top assassination target owing to his long-range attacks deep within Russia
Vladimir Putin has told Russians that victory against Ukraine is inevitable. But on Saturday no tanks or missiles will rumble over the cobbles of Moscow’s Red Square. For the first time in almost 20 years the annual celebration of the allies’ victory over Nazi Germany will take place without military hardware. The reason: the Kremlin is afraid of a Ukrainian attack.
The man who has arguably done more to spook the Putin regime this weekend than anyone else is Robert Brovdi, the head of a Ukrainian military drone unit, Madyar’s Birds, named after his call sign. In recent months it has carried out a series of long-range strikes against targets deep within Russia, including ports, oil refineries and missile factories.
Continue reading...This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world
Continue reading...
On Call No week at The Register is complete without a new installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which you share tales of the peaks and troughs of the tech support experience. So let's get going and meet this week's contributor, who we shall Regomize as "Gerald." He took us back to an early moment in his career, when he worked for an outfit that configured Windows 98 PCs as "data collectors" for its clients. As part of his job, Gerald built PCs and provided field support. In this story, he built a new data collector, checked that it worked with the usual round of tests, and left it for someone else to install because he had another job to do elsewhere for a different client. That visit was interrupted by his boss, who Gerald said "reamed me out for allowing a non-functional system to leave the shop." After the criticism stopped, Gerald's boss ordered him to fix the stricken PC, ASAP, even though it was 100 km away by car. "The boss man said go, so I went," Gerald told On Call. "About an hour and a half later, I arrived to diagnose the recalcitrant PC. The client was literally hopping mad and asking how I could be so stupid, because his firm was losing money." Gerald got to work and inspected the PC, which was on the shop floor, connected to power and peripherals. It booted and worked well but couldn't reach the network. "A check of devices installed showed the network card," Gerald reported, "and a ping to home worked... but nothing outside the box itself was reachable." Gerald decided the only thing to do was take the PC back to the office for more tests, so he started unplugging the peripherals. "Out came the power cord, display cable, keyboard, mouse..." and then he noticed the network cable wasn't plugged in. "It was neatly coiled and taped to a support column," Gerald told On Call, making it very easily fixed – and quite the embarrassment for the angry client and boss. Have you been abused for a customer's error? If so, click here to send On Call an email so we can share your story on a future Friday. ®
No week at The Register is complete without a new installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which you share tales of the peaks and troughs of the tech support experience. So let's get going and meet this week's contributor, who we shall Regomize as "Gerald." He took us back to an early moment in his career, when he worked for an outfit that configured Windows 98 PCs as "data collectors" for its clients. As part of his job, Gerald built PCs and provided field support. In this story, he built a new data collector, checked that it worked with the usual round of tests, and left it for someone else to install because he had another job to do elsewhere for a different client. That visit was interrupted by his boss, who Gerald said "reamed me out for allowing a non-functional system to leave the shop." After the criticism stopped, Gerald's boss ordered him to fix the stricken PC, ASAP, even though it was 100 km away by car. "The boss man said go, so I went," Gerald told On Call. "About an hour and a half later, I arrived to diagnose the recalcitrant PC. The client was literally hopping mad and asking how I could be so stupid, because his firm was losing money." Gerald got to work and inspected the PC, which was on the shop floor, connected to power and peripherals. It booted and worked well but couldn't reach the network. "A check of devices installed showed the network card," Gerald reported, "and a ping to home worked... but nothing outside the box itself was reachable." Gerald decided the only thing to do was take the PC back to the office for more tests, so he started unplugging the peripherals. "Out came the power cord, display cable, keyboard, mouse..." and then he noticed the network cable wasn't plugged in. "It was neatly coiled and taped to a support column," Gerald told On Call, making it very easily fixed – and quite the embarrassment for the angry client and boss. Have you been abused for a customer's error? If so, click here to send On Call an email so we can share your story on a future Friday. ®