Lifestyle
Mama June Bringing Chickadee's Ashes On Family Disney World Trip For Christmas
After suffering the loss of Anna “Chickadee” Cardwell, Mama June and the rest of her family are spending the holidays at the happiest place on earth … and we’re told Anna’s remains are coming along, too.
Sources connected to the family tell TMZ … before Anna passed, they had all spoken about spending Christmas at Disney World in Orlando, Florida — and that plan is going forward, because the fam has rented a house in the area and will spend the week together.
We’re told the family has a small urn holding some of Anna’s ashes, and they’re planning on bringing it with them to the rental house … so they feel like she is there.
Our sources say Mama June, Alana “Honey Boo Boo” and her boyfriend Dralin Carswell, Lauryn “Pumpkin” Efird and her family, and Anna’s daughter, Kaitlyn, will all be going to the Mouse House — we’re told Anna’s ex-husband, Michael, got an invite for their kid, Kylee … but no word back on if she’ll be coming, too.
Mama June’s Daughter, Anna ‘Chickadee’ Cardwell, Dead at 29 After Cancer Battle
Obviously, Christmas is going to be a hard one for the girls after recently losing their mother … and while there are no plans to bring Anna’s ashes to the theme park, we’re told Kaitlyn plans to wear her new necklace there, which contains some of her mom’s remains.
As for the gifts, Anna said before she died that she wanted to give her kids iPads, and our sources say they were already gifted the tablets — with the family wanting to fulfill one of Anna’s final wishes.
As we reported, Anna died earlier this month from stage 4 adrenal carcinoma. The family showed up at her funeral in Georgia, and the plan was for Anna to be cremated after the memorial … with her ashes being divided up and given to family members.
Lifestyle
In 'Miss Merkel,' Germany's former chancellor is a crime-solving amateur detective
BERLIN — Little is known about how Germany’s former Chancellor Angela Merkel is spending her retirement, and that seems to be the way she likes it. Thanks to a German crime fiction series adapted for television and now proving a hit in Italy, she is back in the headlines — this time as a fictional small-town amateur sleuth.
As the title suggests, Miss Merkel is a whodunnit that imagines the former chancellor as an Agatha Christie-style detective who starts solving crimes out of sheer boredom. For want of a G7 or European Union summit, Merkel is desperate to put down the garden shears and get back to solving something, anything! This time, it’s a village murder. Move over, Miss Marple!
The TV adaptation stars German theater doyenne Katharina Thalbach as Merkel. Like Merkel, Thalbach is 70 and from former East Germany. She says it wasn’t too hard to prepare for the role.
“You could always see the burden of power in Merkel’s shoulders, how it weighed on her,” Thalbach tells NPR. “So, I focused on my shoulders, put on a wig and one of her signature colorful boxy blazers and I had the feeling I was her. That I am Angela Merkel!”
Thalbach has met Merkel a number of times but is not sure whether the ex-chancellor is a fan of Miss Merkel.
“The last time I saw Angela, I tried to find out whether she’s read the books or seen the series,” Thalbach recalls. “But she deftly dodged the question, saying instead that her office staff are big fans.”
The books’ author, David Safier, known previously for his fictional accounts of the Holocaust and his work as a scriptwriter, says he’s also none the wiser as to what Merkel thinks of his alternative retirement plan for her.
“Probably she has read the novels,” Safier speculates. “To be honest, if there would be a crime novel where you are the hero, wouldn’t you at least read the first 10 pages?”
While the books are a commercial success, the small-screen adaptation by RTL — which will be available to stream later this year in the U.S. — has received lukewarm reviews in Germany. The broadsheet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung acknowledged the star power that Thalbach’s performance brings to the production, but lamented the show’s “corny jokes.” German magazine Fokus suggested the production company engage Safier as the scriptwriter, seeing as he won an Emmy for a German sitcom Berlin, Berlin.
Safier came up with the idea for Miss Merkel in 2019, on the day Merkel announced she wouldn’t be running for a fifth term. He says he sat down to watch an old rerun of Columbo that same evening and the idea for his top-10 Spiegel bestseller was born.
Safier says Angela Merkel makes for a consummate detective.
“Merkel is highly intelligent, much more intelligent than other politicians,” he says. “She is strongheaded. And, after 30 years in politics, she’s used to dealing with sociopaths and psychopaths.”
Like Miss Marple, Merkel is often underestimated — something the former chancellor used to her advantage throughout her political career. Thalbach says this particularly baffled alpha-male politicians.
“The real Merkel was brilliant at finding skeletons in the closets of her political rivals,” Thalbach asserts. “But she had none of her own: the perfect trait for an ace detective!”
Safier says it’s the references to Merkel’s former life as chancellor that tickle his readers.
In the first book, Miss Merkel attends a community theater production and remarks that “compared to six hours of Beijing Opera with Xi Jinping, everything else is a piece of cake.”
“Her experience helps her to solve crime mysteries. When she’s questioning a suspect, she knows that she has to wear him down,” Safier says of his main character. “Merkel knows what it’s like to probe and ask questions over and over again. She did it until the early hours at countless EU summits.”
Unlike Miss Marple, Merkel is actually a Mrs. — a Frau Dr., that is, with a Ph.D. in quantum chemistry. In the TV series, Merkel’s husband asks why she’s still wearing her trademark pantsuits in retirement. Her answer could be considered classic Merkel logic: “I’ve still got 50 of them in my wardrobe.”
Angie nostalgia aside, Safier says that in his next book, Miss Merkel is seeing a therapist after realizing, while writing her memoirs, that she neglected to solve a number of issues during her time in office — be it Germany’s ailing railway system or relations with Russia.
Merkel was something of an enigma in office. Now, in retirement, the fictional version of her is an open book. The real version is set to be revealed in November. That’s when Safier’s next installment comes out — and when the real Merkel publishes her autobiography.
Lifestyle
Ed Sheeran Roasts Fan Who Misheard Lyrics in 'Thinking Out Loud'
Ed Sheeran‘s giving his fans with poor hearing some grief … telling one of them she’s probably on a watchlist ’cause she misheard an iconic line in a song.
Here’s the deal … in the song “Thinking Out Loud” Sheeran croons he will love an unnamed person “until we’re 70” — a line meant to convey a long-lasting love.
However, fans have been giving the pop star guff … ’cause what happens to the love when a person in the couple turns 71, they ask. This has sparked a viral trend of people jokingly flipping off the camera — POV of what happens when ya age out by Ed’s standards.
Never one to shy away from poking fun at himself, Ed made his own video … aggressively flipping off the camera before storming out with his guitar slung over his back.
While many fans laughed, a few had a totally shocking moment … ’cause they realized Sheeran belted out the word 70, not 17 like so many of them thought.
One woman expressed her confusion in the comments … and, ES jokingly wrote back, “Youre on a watch list somehwere.”
Of course, Ed’s in the middle of his Mathematics tour … with shows this upcoming weekend in Cyprus.
Hopefully, fans are belting out the right lyrics at his concerts … ’cause they don’t want to end up on any watch lists!
Lifestyle
'The Dictionary Story' is a kids' book that defies definition
Have you ever read a children’s book where the main character is… the book?
Dictionary has noticed that even though her pages contain all the words that exist, she doesn’t really tell a story like all the other books on the shelf do. So one day, Dictionary decides to change that and bring her contents — guts? pages? definitions? — to life.
A hungry alligator bursts out of the pages ready for a snack — and finds a donut several pages later. But Donut doesn’t particularly want to be eaten, so he rolls off further into the alphabet. Alligator gives chase and the story soon goes off the rails — they crash into Queen who slips on Soap. And that’s all before Tornado shows up! Definitions go flying, no one is in the right place. Can Dictionary put herself back together again?
“It’s a book about chaos. Chaos and order. Fine line,” says Oliver Jeffers who — along with Sam Winston — wrote and illustrated The Dictionary Story. The two previously worked together on 2016’s A Child of Books (where the main character is a child, not a book). They’ve been working on The Dictionary Story pretty much ever since.
“But not working on it full time, seven years total” clarifies Oliver Jeffers. “Maybe if you were to add it all up, I don’t know. I don’t even want to think about that.”
(Sam Winston likes to joke that they knocked this one out in a week but he’s very much kidding — this book took work).
For example, how do you make a book into a character that the children and adults reading the book can have a relationship with? “It was a real challenge because we had to literally make a book,” explains Sam Winston. Luckily, his partner Haein Song is a bookbinder. “We had her literally make us two physical copies, which we then photographed and drew on and aged and then distressed in different ways.” While the prop dictionary starts out all nice and new, by the end of the book she’s looking very beat up. “But it’s told a pretty wild story,” says Winston.
Haein Song also sent Jeffers the paper that she used to bind the dummy book. “She sent enough of that to me that I was able to do the paintings on the same paper. So it looked seamless,” Jeffers explains. Then he scanned the sheets of paper with his illustrations on them. The end result is a combination of photography, painting, ink handwriting, and typography, for the dictionary definitions.
“It looks like a real dictionary,” says Jeffers. “But if you pay close attention, you’ll see that all of the definitions have been rewritten.” Like:
zero /ˈzɪərəʊ/ Zero is a word that means nothing. Nothing is a word that means nothing. Even though zero is a different word for nothing, both mean nothing. This definition has just told you nothing.
miracle /ˈmɪr.ə.kl/ Something that is amazing or magical for which there seems to be no scientific or common-sense explanation. Often associated with finding a parking space or getting homework done.
The definitions are not not true, but they are a little sideways.
As the characters in the book — like puddle /ˈpʌd.əl/ A small pool of water. Puddles are often made by rain and they love to look up at the sky — come to life (and, in Puddle’s case, make friends with Ghost), they disrupt the text on the page. Puddle, who Cloud made by crying, soaks through the definition for “power.” Alligator makes a hole in the “a”s as he escapes from inside the book. When Queen slips on Soap, some of the “s” words go tumbling off the page entirely. Letters end up out of order, or jumbled up in a pile. Definitions are in the wrong column. Sentences go all wonky.
“The idea behind the book is that you’ve got this very rigid structure,” Sam Winston says, of a typical dictionary. “So where some of the humor and the playfulness and the fun comes from is that this is a book doing something it shouldn’t do.” Essentially, coming alive.
And to circle back to why it took Winston and Jeffers so many years to make this book: there’s not much software designed to do this in the way they needed it to be done. “Imagine a column of type in a newspaper accidentally becoming a waterfall of type,” says Winston. “Everything gets knocked off its grid and its axis and out that waterfall emerges, say, a crocodile.”
You’ll probably never see that in a newspaper — or a normal, boring dictionary — because that is not what publishing software typically does. “We have all of these typographic structures that are not meant to be bent and then to bend them is like cutting out thousands of single letters and then sticking them back on the page,” Winston says.
There was a lot of back and forth to get to the finished product — a lot of half completing drawings and half writing definitions, and then a lot of destroying an illustration and or a definition and sending it back again.
“It’s a dance,” says Sam Winston. “But you know, we like it. There’s a lot of trust in the room, so we have fun.”
And, by the way, the story itself is fun. While a lot of thought and work and planning went into making it, at its heart The Dictionary Story is just a good old fashioned chase story with a lot of chaos and a heartwarming ending (can Dictionary put herself back together? Maybe with a little help from some friends!)
“I think what you’re looking at when you see these books are two individuals who have a deep respect for storytelling and the physical objects of books. Having fun together and playing well together and sharing that with the world,” agrees Oliver Jeffers. “It’s a pure joy.”
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