What links the gramophone and Antoinette Perry? The Saturday quiz
9 Lariat; opera; matinee; princess; choker?10 Olly Alexander; Simon Le Bon; Karen O; Marti Pellow; Katie White?11 A Room of One's Own; The Common Reader; Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid?12 46656; 3125; 256; 27; 4; 1?13 Image orthicon tube; gramophone; Margaret Herrick's uncle (possibly); Antoinette Perry?14 Viv Anderson, 1978, and Kerry Davis, 1982?15 Buchanan Castle; Tower of London; Spandau prison?
1 Samuel Pepys.2 Dante (Divine Comedy).3 Japan.4 John Surtees.5 Yorkshire shepherdess.6 Danube.7 Brahma.8 Heath Robinson.9 Lengths of necklace.10 Singers in bands with repeated names: Years & Years; Duran Duran; Yeah Yeah Yeahs; Wet Wet Wet; Ting Tings.11 Essays by Virginia Woolf.12 x to the power of x, from 6 to 1.13 Name origins of Egot awards: Emmy; Grammy; Oscar; Tony.14 First black players for senior England men's and women's teams.15 Rudolf Hess housed there after his flight to Scotland.
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Daily Mail
9 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Heidi Klum, 52, puts on cheeky display as she celebrates major milestone with husband Tom Kaulitz, 35
Heidi Klum is celebrating six years of marital bliss with her husband Tom Kaulitz. The supermodel, 52, marked the anniversary with a romantic, poolside snap to her Instagram on Sunday. '6 Years married today,' she wrote in the caption, adding in German, 'Ich liebe Dich mein Tom,' which translates to 'I love you my Tom.' Champagne glass in hand, Heidi shared a kiss and a snuggle with her husband as they basked in the sun in an infinity pool. They appeared to be on vacation at a stunning, beach locale. Heidi also shared various content of their anniversary celebrations, including video of them pouring a glass of champagne, a kissing clip, and photos from their wedding. She also showed off the gifts they appeared to exchange, along with video of their cuddled-up feet. Heidi wasn't planning to meet the love of her life the night she met Tom. In fact, she almost didn't go out. 'I really wanted to stay home,' the supermodel recalled in an interview with People. 'But then I gave myself a little kick in the butt.' That spontaneous decision to attend a friend's party turned into what Klum now calls 'the sliding door moment' of her life. Seven years later, the supermodel and the Tokio Hotel guitarist, who got engaged in December 2018 and married just two months later, are still going strong. Kaulitz offered Klum, a mother of four, a 'clean slate' after two previous marriages — first to celebrity hairstylist Ric Pipino in 1997 and then to British singer-songwriter Seal, with whom she was married for seven years. But with new love came old habits. 'At first I wanted to [project] what I had learned from different men I had been with… like 'Ooh, this reminds me of something that happened, is that a flag?'' she admitted. Ultimately, it was Kaulitz who challenged her to let go of her baggage. The Project Runway revealed, early in their relationship, Kaulitz said: 'Don't do this to me, because I'm not this person, I'm not that person. Scratch everything. I have to have a fair chance.' Doing this allowed their love to blossom as evidenced by their loved-up red carpet appearances and PDA-filled social media posts. The couple also enjoy a number of shared activities, including shopping for lingerie. 'He loves sitting there, and I go into the changing room and I come out with a different outfit on,' Klum shares. 'He loves me in a miniskirt. He loves me in pumps. He just loves when I get all dolled up.' The two even got matching name tattoos, though Klum jokes: 'His looks much better — so I'm the better tattoo artist.' Despite enjoying life as a wife, Klum says marriage hasn't changed her. 'This is pretty much what you get. I'm pretty loud and you know I'm there.' What keeps the relationship fresh?' she noted. She went on to credit 'stolen weekends,' 'handwritten notes,' and making time for each other for keeping them acting like newlyweds — plus 'a few things she can't share.' Although their 17-year age gap still draws attention, Klum insists she doesn't entertain the criticism. 'When our door closes at home, I don't really care so much what happens around us,' she says. 'I've learned things from my husband that I didn't know I was capable of doing,' she added. At 52, Heidi Klum continues to own her space by maintaining an unapologetically sexy and confident presence both online and offline. 'I've been photographing nude or in lingerie since 1992, way before Instagram,' she says. 'So for me, it's nothing new. For the past 15 years, other people are now doing what I've been doing for 30 years. Instead of being in my little bottoms in a magazine, I'm on Instagram. It's the same thing.' And she has no plans to tone things down. 'For me to be older, it doesn't matter. I don't have this age-shaming or body-shaming thing. I feel like everyone should do what they want to do. I like to run around sexy — even now at 52.' That's been especially evident this summer, as Klum has been island-hopping in bikinis alongside Kaulitz. She's also vocal about challenging outdated ideas about aging. 'The biggest misconception [about] being in your 50s is that you are off the shelf. You're not off the shelf,' she said. 'We are very much on that shelf for everyone to see. Don't hide in your 50s. Beauty is ever-changing, and I'm here for the change. If it's always the same, life is boring.' Having risen to fame in the 1990s, when heroin chic was popular, Klum appreciates the evolving standards of today. 'Now it's okay to be older — but it didn't use to be like that,' she said. 'I feel like we're more welcoming of wrinkles and rolls on our body. Being accepted at every age is amazing. That we've changed and come all that way.' Still, she embraces modern cosmetic options, too. 'I'm all for Botox,' she declared, noting she's intrigued by celebrities opening up about their procedures. 'Whoever wants to talk about [plastic surgery] and wants to share, give me all the numbers.' Looking ahead, Klum welcomes the journey of aging — gray hair, laugh lines, and all. 'Don't we all want to get old? I know we always say that, but it's the truth. I'm already looking at 60 and 70, hopefully 80 and 90. And if we're still kicking it then, let's celebrate,' she concluded.
The Sun
9 hours ago
- The Sun
Big Brother legend marries husband AGAIN in stunning renewal a year after welcoming second child
BIG Brother star Brian Dowling has renewed his wedding vows with his husband for a second time. The 47-year-old said I Do to Arthur Gourounlian today with their two daughters present - ten years after they first walked down the aisle. 4 4 Arthur posted a snap of them suited and booted, surrounded by flowers and their little ones in their arms. Their famous pals rushed to congratulate them on the special occasion, with Natasha Hamilton writing: 'How beautiful- huge congratulations to you all.' Brian shared a series of pictures this morning, telling fans: 'You know what, it's a GORGEOUS DAY for a wedding @gourounlian …………… Wanna do it again TODAY.' The Six O'Clock Show host and his Dancing With The Stars judge hubby Arthur first married in Powerscourt Hotel in Enniskerry, County Wicklow, Ireland. To celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary, Brian took to Instagram to pay a special tribute to Arthur. The Virgin Media star posted a video of himself flicking through his wedding album and said: "10 years ago to this very day 30/07/15. We @gourounlian called it OFFICIAL in front of all our loved ones. "We literally had no idea what was ahead of us in the years to come or what was expected from each other as husbands. Well, let's just say it's been ONE HELL OF A RIDE." Brian spoke about the realities of being in a marriage. He wrote: ""Married life is not a walk in the park, it's FULL ON and can be a bit of a s*** show at times, but you've got to work at it, people. "We have ALWAYS LOVED each other, but I'm sure there may have been times when we both didn't like each other and listen, that's expected. "Let's just say the spare room has been occupied a couple of nights over the last 10 years, and that's ok." Baby struggle It comes a year after the couple welcomed their second daughter, Blu. They are also parents to a little girl called Blake. Brian's sister Aoife was their surrogate on both occasions. Brian - who first shot to fame on Big Brother series two - found out he was infertile when they started their surrogacy journey. 4 Speaking on Ireland AM in November, he said: "It's something I have been very embarrassed about, I don't know why I'm embarrassed about it. "The issue of the infertility for me is a much bigger issue, and that is of our daughter. "I'm still her father - when I say I'm infertile, I still have a child. I'm very mindful of the words that I use and the conversations I have. "I don't want our daughter seeing something when she's older or reading something when she's older." "People would always say to me, 'She's the image of Arthur',' he added. 'It was like a knife in my heart each time people said that because they were unaware of my own issue.
The Guardian
21 hours ago
- The Guardian
Knife throwing and cheeseburger spinning: the agony and ecstasy of being a viral trickshot video star
For much of the month of June 2023, David and Daniel Hulett sat in their parents' basement in Virginia throwing five-cent coins in the air. First David would flip his nickel. Then Daniel would flip his nickel. They were trying to get the coins to land on their edge, an occurrence they knew was vanishingly improbable, but not impossible. This was their work. After three or four days, doubts began to set in. 'When you've been doing it for so long, you're like: the next one has to be it!' says Daniel, 26, the elder and generally chirpier of the two. 'You get really optimistic. And then it doesn't happen and you feel like the world is ending. It's almost physically painful. You get messed up.' The pair altered their grip. They tried different spins. They concluded perhaps a table tennis table wasn't the best landing surface – too bouncy – so they tried wood, a bathroom tile, two types of granite. For David, 24, the repeated failures hit particularly hard. 'I couldn't sleep,' he says. 'I would have dreams about flipping the nickel. You end up feeling like you're in a simulation. Like, what is real any more? What even am I?' What David and Daniel are is professional trickshooters – better known to their 12.5 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook as the Hulett Brothers. They are among the most successful purveyors of an art that has long since transcended its pool hall origins to become wildly popular on short-form video platforms. Trickshots consist of people pulling off amazing, improbable, pointless feats in the disputed borderlands between luck and skill. Or, as Daniel says, 'We make up stupid games and try to beat them.' There are certain common trickshot tropes – ping-pong ball golf shots, full court basketball throws, sliding iPhones across tabletops so they nestle perfectly into chargers – but the most successful performers have their own special niches. Mike Shields, AKA That'll Work, recent winner of the inaugural Trick Shot Championship, is a master of the Wii toss, throwing discs directly into the thin mouth of a Nintendo Wii. Turkish trickshooter Gamze May, 32, AKA @gmzmy, has a nice line in oud tricks. In one she plays a little riff on the lower strings of the instrument, then launches a cigarette into her mouth from the upper strings. Very cool. Then there's Amanda Badertscher, a PE teacher from smalltown Georgia, who was recently invited on to America's Got Talent after a producer spotted her Instagram channel, @thetrickshotqueen, which mostly consists of her whacking basketballs into a net with a baseball bat from the other end of the court. And what is her singular talent, I ask her? 'If I had to narrow it down to one? I would say hitting crazy equipment with a baseball bat,' she tells me. The Hulett Brothers are the quintessential all-rounders. They have kicked soccer balls into bins from 50 metres away; they have dropped pieces of paper from stepladders into the teeth of waiting shredders; they have thrown a plunger so it lands suction cup-down on a ping-pong table, then tossed a kitchen roll so it lands about the plunger's handle; and they are perhaps the best people in the world at throwing a red plastic cup so it stacks within another red plastic cup. What is consistent is their signature celebration: maniacal jumping, wild abandon and simultaneous cries of 'LET'S GO!' This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. It was in November 2023 that they finally pulled off the nickel flip on what they estimate was the 70,000th attempt. Daniel made the winning toss. The coin flipped a couple of times, bounced, spun around and settled on its side on a piece of paper the brothers were now using as a landing surface. There is a split second of disbelief. Then scenes of primal, almost simian celebration as it dawns on them that they have finally done it. David looks like a man released from a cosmic burden. Trickshots have become a huge business. In the algorithmically segmented world of short-form video, these brief and #oddlysatisfying clips of ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things are one the closest things we have to a shared culture. The best of them transcend language, religion, culture, politics. They work as both sport and absurdist commentary on the futility of all human endeavour. Their appeal lies somewhere in the ratio between the laborious hours of toil that the trickshooters put in and the instant gratification they provide the viewer. They have wasted time, and now doth time waste us, to paraphrase Shakespeare's Richard II. The unquestioned masters of the art are Dude Perfect, five frat house roommates from Texas A&M University. Their first viral video from 2009 consisted of one of their number, Tyler 'The Beard' Toney, scoring a series of nonchalant no-look basketball shots in his back yard and, crucially, not reacting – as if it were just a thing that happened every time he attempted it. Indeed, in the best of their videos, nonchalance is the salient feature, as these genial friends toss sliders on to feet, bread into toasters, keys on to hooks, as if life really were that satisfying. It's all in the editing. The troupe has now accumulated 17bn views, 60 million subscribers and enough cash to take their trickshots to insane extremes, including scoring a basket from the top of an 856-foot tower in Las Vegas. Earlier this year they announced they had received a $100m investment to create Dude Perfect World, a 'family friendly' entertainment resort complete with 330-foot trickshot tower. Their most serious rivals – the Buster Keatons to their Charlie Chaplins – are Australian troupe How Ridiculous (14bn views, 23 million subscribers). The Perth-based trio have managed a mere 540-foot basketball throw, albeit blindfolded, backwards, from the top of the Luzzone dam in Switzerland. Like Dude Perfect, they are evangelical Christians and regularly thank Jesus for their success. Their website quotes Psalm 115:1: 'Not to us, LORD, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness.' Clearly, you need a lot of faith even to attempt to score a basket from the top of a dam – and nothing says thank you, Jesus, like dropping a bowling ball into some helicopter blades. As budgets increase, accusations of AI fakery and green-screen shenanigans are never too far away – indeed, trickshot debunking videos are almost a genre in themselves. Still, in the case of Dude Perfect, no credible evidence has ever emerged that the videos are faked, despite 15 years' worth of internet sleuthing. Dude Perfect and How Ridiculous take pains to emphasise just how many failed attempts they make in their numerous behind-the-scenes videos; and in any case, is it really less effort to, say, render a convincing 3D digital model of a basketball flying across a court than it is to spend an afternoon patiently tossing one? Still, the more high-budget the trickshots become, the farther they move from their back-yard roots. I find I prefer the shorter, less professional videos, the ones that retain the palpable sense of idle tomfoolery, of happenstance glory. Once when we were at uni, my friend Martin abruptly flicked a spliff at me from five metres across a room and I somehow caught it in the corner of my mouth and began smoking it in one smooth motion. Everyone immediately applauded and pronounced me king. Alas, it was not caught on camera, or I may have ended up in a different career. But we all hopefully experience one such moment in our lives. This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. 'Trickshots are just so relatable,' says Badertscher, who recently spent 16 days attempting to throw an American football over her house into an unseen basketball hoop. 'Really anyone could do them at any level. People see me in the back yard and they figure, oh, I could do that in my yard!' This, it seems to me, is the basic stuff of the trickshot, the childhood instinct to play, to fiddle, to fool. 'I started doing this kind of thing when I was really young,' says Jacob Grégoire, a 25-year-old from Quebec, who counts 1.8 million followers on Instagram as @jacob_acrobat. 'Even when I was a small kid, I would do stuff like balancing my toothbrush on my nose. Maybe it's ADHD or something. If I have something in my hand, I'll throw it and catch it.' Then there is the flash of sporting inspiration, when you notice a particular move that is pleasing to do, and ask: can I make a game out of this? In my favourite children's picture book – Russell Hoban's How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen – the young hero Tom discovers the fooling around that so irritates his Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong in fact endows him with the precise range of skills required to triumph over his intended punishers. 'Maybe that will teach you not to fool around with a boy who knows how to fool around,' Tom taunts the stricken Captain after defeating him at the made-up sports of womble, muck and sneedball. Many trickshooters have revelled in similar triumphs as they reveal to sceptical parents that their bottle-flipping and card-tossing actually brings in a decent income. Turkish trickshooter Gamze May says she got right on her parents' nerves when she first started making trickshots during the Covid lockdowns, marooned at her family apartment in Istanbul. 'I was bouncing ping-pong balls on pans and it was making an annoying sound. My mum and dad would get angry. But it was entertainment for me.' They are fully on board now – her two hours of trickshot work a day supplement her income as a digital marketer. But their initial scepticism reminded her of the sort of disdain she experienced as a girl who always wanted to play with the boys. 'I was always running or playing football, basketball, every sport. I was playing console games. I still play console games. I would drive remote-control cars. My mum would be angry. Why are you playing with the boys?' Her answer then and now is simple: 'It makes me happy. When I'm playing sport, I feel I am out of this world. It's like meditation. I have no stress. I don't think about problems. Maybe some people don't understand me, but I don't care when I'm making trickshot videos.' There is always the odd dissenter underneath the videos: a commenter calling out the trickshooter as a fraud or a fluke. Anyone could manage this if they did this for five hours and 29 minutes. As is so often the case, the commenters miss the point. For one, the trickshooters hardly lack skill. Mike 'That'll Work' Shields recently challenged 10 people with 'ordinary jobs' to best him at a series of trickshots, and prevailed in every single contest. Badertscher played college softball. May was the captain of the women's football team Bakırköyspor until she retired in January. 'Sports people can learn these things a bit easier,' she says. 'I spend lots of time practising and then I improve.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion These are, however, 'super-strange skills', as David Hulett puts it. Over the hours of practice, you do become incrementally better at, say, tossing ping-pong balls so they play a tune on a series of carefully arranged pans, or dropping paper from a stepladder into a shredder. It was David who had the crucial insight that a small crease across the paper will attenuate the curve of the parabola on its descent, resulting in a greater probability of it sailing into the waiting shredder. Just as Dick Fosbury's flop at the 1968 Olympics changed the entire discipline of high-jumping, so a trickshooter can alter the history of their sport in a single afternoon. But the real skill is the sisyphean determination, the patience, the faith that in the end, it will happen. Because it will happen. As long as you don't give up. 'We were always super competitive,' David Hulett says. 'Dan and I wanted to win whatever we were doing.' The trickshooter knows that they can make the sheer brute force of numbers crush the momentary fluctuations of skill. I am terrible at darts. But were I to throw tens of thousands of darts in the general direction of a dartboard, eventually, tearful with rage, starving, my entire family having abandoned me, I would score 180. All I would need to do is capture that one time on camera – then discard the 89,362 takes when I didn't do it. In this way, anyone can be Lionel Messi for 15 seconds. The cameraphone has democratised sport. Still, as every child knows, the thing that takes the time is not the playing – it is the tidying up. It's a simple thing to sit there, throwing playing cards at a target. It's a total pain picking up thousands of cards. And then there are the tech fails. Once, after three or four hours, Gamze May managed to throw a card across the room so that it curled into the hairline crack between two dice. Beautiful. Only when she went to retrieve the footage, she realised her phone storage was full and the video had stopped recording. This is the bane of her life, in fact. 'My phone always has storage problems. It's still full. I always need to clear it.' But these frustrations must be offset against the regular cadence of success that trickshooting provides. 'When I'm making videos – how can I describe the situation? It's like someone is whispering in my ear: you will do this. And I believe it and then it happens. I feel amazing. I feel like a bird. I'm flying. Maybe it seems silly to some people but it is like therapy for me.' Trickshot culture has started to infiltrate other forms of performance, too. Grégoire started out his career as a professional acrobat, performing with troupes including Cirque du Soleil before a series of injuries made him question whether there was really much future in it. 'I have a herniated disc and a really bad knee. Acrobats have short careers.' So Grégoire has taken his performances to social media, which offers him more autonomy and a more reliable revenue stream. He isn't sure what to call the hybrid form he purveys here. 'I started out throwing a knife into an apple. I'm now throwing a knife into an onion that's flying in the air and landing on a knife in my mouth. I've pushed it so far, I don't even know what it is any more,' he says. But although he exhibits amazing physical prowess, he still considers his videos trickshots. 'It's a combination of skill and luck. I have to do them many times.' He sees this as a creative avenue opened up by social media; you couldn't attempt this sort of thing on stage as it would take too many tries to get right and the audience would boo. On the other hand, the minuscule attention spans of TikTok and Instagram Reels force him to be more inventive than he'd have to be on stage. 'People always want more on social media. On stage, you can build up a story. People are patient. On social media it needs to be good right away. People get bored so easily. Everyone is just scrolling, scrolling, so it really pushes me to find the most attractive, best thing immediately.' It is a double-win, algorithmically, if you can not only snare someone's attention, but then get them to watch your 15-second video again. 'I think that's my strong point,' Grégoire says. 'The tricks are sometimes so complicated, people rewatch them three or four times to understand them.' Indeed, some of the greatest trickshooters embrace the form's inherent dadaist absurdity. Videos of ping-pong golf jostle for attention with images of death and devastation in Gaza and Ukraine, and maybe offer some mordant commentary on them – just as the artists of the original Cabaret Voltaire embraced surrealism, chaos and non-meaning at the height of the annihilation of the first world war. 'You know, when I open my Instagram now, it's like crimes against humanity … trickshots … crimes against humanity … trickshots!' says Michael Rayner, 62, AKA @brokenjuggler, who makes delightfully weird trickshot videos in his Los Angeles front yard. 'I'm sort of here for all of it,' he says, arguing that what you see on short-form media is in some senses a truer reflection of reality than what you see on TV. 'America is a very violent country right now. I perform in a lot of immigrant communities and everyone is terrified of being snatched away by Ice. My videos are my own therapy but I also hope they give people some diversion in a harsh world.' A professional entertainer, Rayner took to Instagram after all of his regular comedy club gigs were cancelled during the pandemic. These included routines that he has spent the best part of five decades honing: one involves him keeping a tennis racket aloft by batting it between two sticks; another involves him spinning a cheeseburger around a parasol. But he combines these with improbable trickshots. His signature move is throwing his daughter's Nicolas Cage cushion behind his head into a basketball net. The fact that he performs all this deadpan, looking very much like some 'schlubby dad on his driveway', causes a large degree of cognitive dissonance in the comments section. 'Sometimes my videos are so fantastical that people assume it is fake. They think it's AI or green screen. That's the sad thing about reality now. Reality itself is thought of as fake.' He's recently added voiceovers to his videos, framing his trickshots as a sort of religious rite. 'I was summoned by the oracle,' he intones on one. 'And to complete my mission, I had to make a Nicolas Cage basket while on a unicycle … ' In another he expresses gratitude for the fact that he gets to do this stuff for a living. 'Can you imagine? Some people have to have jobs where they sit behind a table and write on pieces of paper and hand those pieces of paper to someone else. But I am lucky. I am grateful. I am in charge.' The Hulett brothers are certainly grateful. If they were not performing trickshots, they would be working in finance. 'That's what our majors were in college, so we've both gone in the opposite direction,' David says. Their father is a banker, their elder brother an accountant and their sister a financial analyst. 'I never thought I'd be in a creative job,' Daniel says. 'And I never thought I'd get to spend so much time with my brother.' Still, this is a respectable career now. When they announced to their father that they intended to do this full-time, far from being disappointed, he asked for a business plan. 'Once we gave him the business plan and executed on it, he's always been very supportive. 'You're making money. You're happy. This is great.'' A successful video can bring in thousands of dollars a month but it's no sure thing. The nickel video, for example, bombed so badly that the brothers removed it from TikTok. This is why it's important to re-edit videos so they also work across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube – the better to hedge against algorithmic disruption – and to pursue branding deals, which they say account for 80% of their income. Their medium-term goal is to move into more lucrative longer-form YouTube content, but even now money is good enough that they can hire a warehouse and employ business managers and editors, meaning they can spend each afternoon doing what they do best: trickshooting. On a normal day they will spend five or six hours tossing a Mentos mint into a Diet Coke bottle revolving on a bicycle wheel, or rolling soccer balls across ping-pong table obstacle courses – which makes it start to seem like a respectable time investment. Can any of us really say that we spend our working lives doing something more important? Michael Rayner certainly sees it as time well spent. 'You know, I get a lot of private messages from people saying they were really sad today but then my videos did snap them out of it for a moment,' he says. 'I don't want to be grandiose but if I can bring a little bit of happiness to people suffering from mental illness, I'm happy with that.'
