Heroes and villains

🧑‍💻 The moon | 🇷🇺 Music | 👟 Rishi Sunak

12 April 2024

Heroes and villains

Brandon Bell/Getty

Hero
The eclipse, for doing the unthinkable, says The New York Times: getting Americans offline. During the celestial phenomenon on Monday, internet traffic dropped by between 40% and 60% along the “path of totality” – where the sun was totally blocked out by the moon. Though, in fairness, this was probably just because everyone was using their phone to film the spectacle.

Villain
Music that’s either too fast or too slow, which has been banned in the Russian republic of Chechnya to quash any “polluting” western influence. The region’s culture minister said “all musical, vocal and choreographic works should correspond to a tempo of 80-116 beats per minute”, to “conform to the Chechen mentality and sense of rhythm”.

Villain
The late Queen, for valiantly trying to steer Liz Truss in the right direction. In her forthcoming memoir, Truss says the 96-year-old monarch gave her two words of advice when she took over at No 10: “Pace yourself.” Maybe, Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister concedes, “I should have listened”.

Rishi Sunak in the offending Sambas. Instagram/@rIshisunakmp

Villain
Rishi Sunak, for making Adidas Sambas uncool. Pictures of the famously nerdy PM wearing the classic trainers prompted GQ to complain that he had taken “an eternally cool sneaker and ruined it for everyone”. Sunak claimed he had been wearing Adidas trainers for years, but nonetheless offered a “fulsome apology to the Samba community”.

Hero
The Rev Dr John Gillibrand, a vicar in Wales who has introduced “micro-services” lasting only 15 minutes on Monday afternoons, for those “too busy” to manage a whole one. What a brilliant idea, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. Given all the pressures of modern life – supermarket deliveries to arrange, Instagram to check, One Day to binge-watch – it “hardly seems realistic of the Almighty” to expect people to sit in church for hours on end every Sunday. “Much more convenient to squeeze in a quick blast of God on a weekday evening, between pilates and Pointless.”

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