Until John Whittingdale made the facts crystal clear, I had been indulging a Pretty Woman reverie about his situation. Could the culture minister be the sensitive, handsome, lonely Richard Gere figure – just as in the smash-hit 1990 movie – and his ex-partner a charming Julia Roberts? Had he, like pewter-haired Gere’s character, fallen in love with a fresh-faced lady of the night … and just poignantly wanted to spend time with her? Well, no. Whittingdale dated the person in question, having met her through Match.com, but ended the relationship the instant he found out she was a sex worker.
Well, Whittingdale wouldn’t be the first man to have been unknowingly and inappropriately paired in this way through an online dating site. But – and how to put this delicately? – the gentlemen in question generally discover the awful truth very much more quickly than this, generally at the end of the first date.
I’m afraid that this is a crowning moment of weirdness for match.com, which has been baffling the public with its strange posters bearing the tagline: “If you don’t like your imperfections, someone else will.” (Shouldn’t there be an “even” at the start of that sentence?) One such implied that red hair and freckles were “imperfections”, provoking widespread fury. Another showed a young guy with different-coloured eyes. Yet another suggested that being unable to pronounce “Marylebone” was adorable. They might be tempted to use a big photo of Whittingdale himself for their next poster. But the site’s strange ad campaign seems to suggest that Match.com has imperfections of its own.
Stair lift?
The Stairway to Heaven trial promises to be the legal event of the year. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, former sex gods of rock, and respectively lead singer and guitarist of Led Zeppelin, may well have to explain themselves in a Californian court because Stairway’s opening chords are just seem similar to Taurus, an instrumental by the 60s band Spirit.
Stairway to Heaven has an intro incessantly plucked out in guitar shops all over the world – so much so that the rock geek played by Mike Myers in the 1992 comedy Wayne’s World is astonished to see a sign in his music store explicitly forbidding it: “No Stairway to Heaven”. (This joke may itself be a reference to the song’s mysterious lyric: “There’s a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure/’Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.”)
The judge might order Page to play Stairway live in the courtroom to assess it fully – but Page, disdaining “single”-type bursts of music, might insist on playing the entire album of which it is a part. I very much hope that Sky TV will cover the proceedings by using actors’ reconstructions – thespians with long grey hair hunched over their guitars — just as they did with the Michael Jackson trial.
Space, the final frontier
Any news about space exploration gets my attention – and this is a doozy. There is a new, privately funded plan to blast tiny spaceships out towards distant galaxies, travelling 25 trillion miles to the nearest star system (sadly with no actual astronauts on board).
These ships would weigh just a few grams, and carry a chip with a tiny camera and a navigation device. Yet they would have a form of sail, which would actually be metres wide but only a few atoms thick, which would be pushed by lasers fired from Earth, thus propelling the craft out into space. The Russian internet billionare Yuri Milner is investing £70m in a project into researching the feasibility of this, and he is collaborating with Mark Zuckerberg. Stephen Hawking is sitting on the board.
It’s headspinning stuff. But will it come to anything? Or is the idea of space travel the last frontier for restless hyper-rich zillionaires with intergalactic egos, and a lot of time and an unimaginable amount of money on their hands?
