The Rock Says…
With the whole world battening down the hatches and staying indoors our standards for entertainment are rapidly slipping, with everything from hand washing tutorials to Twitter rants going viral like it’s not even funny. Among the former category, however, a new video has emerged to be top dog, courtesy Dwayne Johnson, also known by his wrestling name The Rock, as well as for being one of the biggest movie stars. He posted an Instagram video showing him and his youngest daughter scrubbing hands like its going out of fashion, while Johnson croons a song from his hit film Moana.
Johnson wrote, “Our sheltering at home, pre daddy’s shower ritual. Before my showers now, Baby Tia (mama mia) demands I sing the rap portion of my song You’re Welcome from MOANA, while I wash her hands. We realised a few weeks ago that the rap portion of the song is perfect timing when getting your little ones to have fun washing their hands. Stay healthy and safe, my friends. And gotta love how at the start of this vid, baby Tia is like, “just shut your mouth and sing daddy.” Stars and their kids, they’re just like us.
Publisher’s Remorse
It took a global pandemic to get publishers to finally take a second look at his book. Scottish author Peter May first pitched Lockdown, a thriller novel set around a global pandemic (cough cough) to publishers in 2005. The novel, which was rejected at the time for “being too unrealistic”, was finally published last week. The novel was inspired by British and US pandemic preparedness documents from 2002, which the screenwriter-novelist had read at the time.
“At the time I wrote the book, scientists were predicting that bird flu was going to be the next major world pandemic. When I read it again for the first time since I wrote the book, I was shocked at just how spookily accurate it was,” May told CNN, adding, “The everyday details of how you get through life, the way the lockdown works, people being forbidden to leave their homes. It’s all scarily accurate.” Lockdown (the book, not our current lifestyle) is currently available on Amazon UK, and is being sold in Kindle format.
Not Shaken, Nor Stirred
Fears over the Covid-19 pandemic got you feeling stressed, dare we say, shaken up? One way to keep calm and carry on is to remember all the positive effects that lockdowns around the world are having on, well, the world. Apart from sharp drops in pollution and noise levels, the earth itself is shaking less, at least according to seismologists. Around the world, scientists who study this stuff are recording a lot less ambient seismic noise, which refers to vibrations generated by cars, trains, machinery, and essentially all manner of human industrial activity.
Apart from giving seismic sensors a bit of a break, this also means seismologists are able to detect smaller events taking place deep inside the earth’s crust, which is crucial to our under-standing of what goes on inside our planet. Indeed, in the absence of the usual noise and vibrations, even earth’s upper crust is moving slightly less, which also shows that people are abiding by the lockdowns imposed around the world.