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Wall Street Journal
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Face With Tears of Joy' Review: Smartphone Hieroglyphics
'Emoji Dick,' a line-by-line translation into emoji of Herman Melville's 1851 novel, 'Moby-Dick,' was published in 2010. Five years later, the Oxford English Dictionary chose the 'face with tears of joy' emoji as its word of the year. Today there are north of 3,500 accepted emoji characters, many of which have become inescapable in digital communication. Is this increasingly widespread visual lexicon a language of its own? Linguists and language pedants generally say no. In 'Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji,' Keith Houston, weighing the evidence, concurs. He asserts, however, that there is 'a richness of emoji usage that rivals any language.' That, too, might rankle the pedants, but the author, an emoji aficionado, mounts an energetic case. Mr. Houston opens with a brisk history that identifies distant ancestors of the emojis you find on your phone, forebears that can include symbols found on ancient scrolls and 18th-century Buddhist texts. The term 'emoji' derives from combining the Japanese words for 'picture' and 'written character.' Shigetaka Kurita, a software engineer, is often credited with creating the first set of emojis, which the Japanese cellular provider Docomo launched in 1999, but researchers have found emoji-like characters, including precursors to today's familiar smiley faces and hearts, on Japanese word processors dating back to the 1980s. An emoji relative, the emoticon, which combines keyboard characters to make simple pictorial symbols, first appeared in 1982: A Carnegie Mellon computer scientist proposed to colleagues on an electronic bulletin board that they type three punctuation marks in sequence— ':-)'—to indicate when they were being facetious. Google and Apple helped the system go global with smartphone operating systems that used emojis liberally. Doing so required the support of the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization that ensures that digitized characters and symbols are compatible across networks and devices.
The Independent
05-04-2025
- Sport
- The Independent
The special meaning behind Willie Mullins dominance at the Grand National
Look up 'Dominance' in the English Dictionary these days and the name W P Mullins could well be found. The phenomenon of modern day National Hunt racing continues to rewrite the record books courtesy of an emotional victory for Nick Rockett, with son Partick aboard, in the 2025 Grand National, sending a meteoric training career stratospheric. Not content with simply training the winner of the National, Mullins despatched the 1-2-3 with last year's hero I Am Maximus carried out on his shield in second under Paul Townend two-and-a-half lengths behind, while another Closutton inmate Grangeclare West was third for rider Bryan Hayes a further half-length adrift. To reinforce the Closutton dominance Meetingofthewaters claimed fifth, while Minella Cocooner was seventh, meaning that only Appreciate It, who was unfortunate to be brought down by Kandoo Kid on the second circuit, finished out of the first seven from the six runners saddled by Mullins. In a 34-runner race with 30 fences over four-and-a-quarter miles, it represented an incredible achievement, even for a man that sent out the 1-2-3-4-5 in a Grade 1 event at Cheltenham last year. It also took the week's tally at Aintree to eight winners. The feat wasn't lost on an ecstatic winning rider. 'Willie getting me to win a National is his greatest achievement,' cackled Patrick Mullins as realisation of his triumph began to sink in. Mullins senior is used to winning, a lot. But this victory carried a special resonance. He said: 'I don't think it gets any better than this. To sire the winning rider, train the winner and have Jackie and everyone here . . . the way we planned this with Stewart (owner Stewart Andrew), over $10 bottles of wine down in Australia.' Nick Rockett was Andrew's late wife Sadie's pride and joy. She passed away from cancer in December 2022, just days after witnessing her purchase make his debut in a Fairyhouse bumper. Andrew said: 'Sometimes life takes us down roads that none of want to go down, and when we're there, we can end up in not the best places. Nick was Sadie's horse. She'd asked Willie to find her a horse. 'Sadly just before he was ready to run, we found out she had terminal cancer on 17 November, sadly she passed away on 8 [December 2022]. Willie ran him just to let Sadie see him. He finished fourth and Sadie said, 'He's run a massive race, he's not fit, but when we get him fit, he will win'. 'We had a session in Melbourne going down to see Absurde and Vauban, and because of said trainer, we were late for the restaurant so we ended up slumming it at two o'clock in the morning somewhere – I can tell you how classy it was, the wine list was 'red or white'! 'Wille said then, 'This is the plan: we're going to win the Thyestes, we're going to win the Bobbyjo, and then have a crack at Aintree'. What can you say? The man is a gentleman.' Mullins picked up the story: 'All great plans come together. I went to school with Sadie years ago and met her years later at a sale. We went for a cup of tea at Cheltenham one day and she said, 'We must buy a horse', and here we are 'My mother's not here, father's not here, I'd love to have my parents here. To give your son a leg up in the National is one thing, for him to win it, is off the charts in my book. This is the summit for me, I don't think it can get any better than this. It's just huge. Now I know how Ted Walsh felt when Ruby won it for him. I never thought I'd have that feeling.' Just for good measure, the duo combined to win the final event of a pulsating week on Merseyside when Green Splendour landed the bumper for, you've guessed it, his father. Liverpool hasn't seen dominance like it since Shankly and Paisley.
