Tag: visited
Prince Harry reveals his final words to the Queen when he visited her body at Balmoral
I visited Conde Nast’s ‘best place to go’ in 2023 in the UK – here is what you can expect
ONCE nicknamed God’s waiting room, Eastbourne is shaking off its fusty image with a bunch of boutique hotels, cool coffee shops and live music venues.
Squeezed between brash, boho Brighton and arty party town Hastings, it has often been seen as the prim older sister of the Sussex seaside towns. Until now.
Eastbourne was named one of the UK’s Best Places To Go next year by posh publishing giant Conde Nast – pictured its stunning Pier[/caption]
Claiming to be the sunniest town in England, Eastbourne is perfect for a weekend away[/caption]
For the Victorian resort has won the top spot on Time Out’s The Best Place To Visit In 2023 list, and posh publishing giant Conde Nast has named it one of the UK’s Best Places To Go next year.
Growing up in Sussex, Eastbourne was a regular haunt for me and my friends, shopping at The Arndale Centre — out partying at Roxy’s on the pier or riding the flumes at the Sovereign Centre pool.
And while the silver-hair brigade still pootle along the prom, the demographic has got decidedly younger as the town attracts young families and millennials away from London with its good-value housing and excellent schools.
Claiming to be the sunniest town in England, Eastbourne is perfect for a beachy weekend away. Stay at the Port — a black-clad boutique hotel on Royal Parade, and a far cry from the fusty hotels of Eastbourne past.
It has stylish rooms, a trendy cocktail bar and a smart restaurant which serves a cracking brunch with dishes such as Sussex trout royale.
In January it is getting in on the latest craze for pop-up beach saunas by collaborating with Samphire Sauna, a wood-fired wellness experience in a converted horse box.
Spend an afternoon pottering around Little Chelsea, a boho clutch of Victorian streets a few roads back from the seafront. It is packed with independent shops such as Camilla’s Bookshop, the Little Chelsea Antiques Emporium and cool cafes such as Beanzz Coffee & Kitchen.
My favourite haunt is Printers Playhouse, a quirky little live music and theatre venue on Grove Road.
Naturally, there is no shortage of fine drinking establishments either. Behind its colourful facade, the Dew Drop Inn in the town centre is a fun place to meet the locals.
Always dog-friendly, it has a marvellous gin collection and knocks out top-notch burgers, including vegetarian and vegan options.
After lunch, head to Eastbourne’s pretty Old Town, where Charles Dickens was a frequent visitor at Pilgrims House, one of the oldest houses in England. He probably had a few bevvies in the Lamb Inn, which has been serving the folk of Eastbourne since the 12th century.
A little farther west between the town and Beachy Head is Meads village, “where the Downs meet the sea”.
It’s close to the start of the South Downs Way, a 100-mile walking route from Eastbourne to Winchester, which this year celebrated its 50th birthday as a national trail.
Spend an afternoon pottering around Little Chelsea, a boho clutch of Victorian streets a few roads back from the seafront[/caption]
Walk along it to Beachy Head and down to East Dean for lunch at the 16th-century Tiger Inn. See the blue plaque dedicated to Sherlock Holmes, who retired to the village, according to crime-fiction fans.
Back in Eastbourne, film buffs will flock to the 2023 Crossing The Screen International Film Festival (March 3 to 5) at the Grove Theatre.
June is all about tennis, as the Devonshire Park club hosts the annual Rothesay International tournament (June 25 to July 1), a prestigious pre-Wimbledon event.
The Beach Life Music Festival (July 15 and 16) is a weekend of live music, street food and watersports, while Airbourne, Eastbourne’s famed airshow, below, takes wing from August 17 to 20.
But the highlight of next year will be the Towner Art Gallery’s centenary, with Towner 100 a series of exhibitions throughout year culminating in the 2023 Turner Prize in September.
Forget God’s waiting room, Time Out is right — Eastbourne is the hottest spot in the South.
GO: EASTBOURNE
GETTING THERE: Open returns from London Victoria to Eastbourne are from £42. See thetrainline.com.
STAYING THERE: Double rooms at The Port Hotel are from £89 per night, room only. See porthotel.co.uk.
MORE INFO: See visiteastbourne.com.
James Cameron Almost Visited the Space Station – and Helped Design a Camera Now Used On Mars
After James Cameron’s Avatar came out in 2009 and made $2.7 billion, the director found the deepest point that exists in all of earth’s oceans and, in time, he dove to it. When Cameron reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a couple of hundred miles off the southwest coast of Guam, in March 2012, he became the first person in history to descend the 6.8-mile distance solo, and one of only a few people to ever go that deep….
It would be fair to call him the father of the modern action movie, which he helped invent with his debut, The Terminator, and then reinvent with his second, Aliens; it would be accurate to add that he has directed two of the three top-grossing films in history, in Avatar (number one) and Titanic (number three). But he is also a scientist — a camera he helped design served as the model for one that is currently on Mars, attached to the Mars rover — and an adventurer, and not in the dilettante billionaire sense; when Cameron sets out to do something, it gets done. “The man was born with an explorer’s instincts and capacity,” Daniel Goldin, the former head of NASA, told me….
The original Avatar… required the invention of dozens of new technologies, from the cameras Cameron shot with to the digital effects he used to transform human actors into animated creatures to the language those creatures spoke in the film. For [his upcoming Avatar sequel] The Way of Water, Cameron told me, he and his team started all over again. They needed new cameras that could shoot underwater and a motion-capture system that could collect separate shots from above and below water and integrate them into a unified virtual image; they needed new algorithms, new AI, to translate what Cameron shot into what you see….
Among other things, Cameron said, The Way of Water would be a friendly but pointed rebuke to the comic book blockbusters that now war with Cameron’s films at the top of the box office lists: “I was consciously thinking to myself, Okay, all these superheroes, they never have kids. They never really have to deal with the real things that hold you down and give you feet of clay in the real world.” Sigourney Weaver, who starred in the first Avatar as a human scientist and returns for The Way of Water as a Na’vi teenager, told me that the parallels between the life of the director and the life of his characters were far from accidental: “Jim loves his family so much, and I feel that love in our film. It’s as personal a film as he’s ever made.”
Another interesting detail from the article: Cameron and his wife became vegetarians over a decade ago, built their own pea-protein facility in Saskatchewan, and though they later sold it Cameron says he “pretty much” loves farming and pea protein as much as movies. And he once suggested re-branding the word vegan as “futurevore,” since “We’re eating the way people will eat in the future. We’re just doing it early.”
But in a 29-minute video interview, Cameron also fondly discusses his earlier ground-breaking films, even as GQ’s writer notes their new trajectory. “It is a curious fact that Cameron has directed only two feature films in the last 25 years — and perhaps more curious that both are Avatar installments, and perhaps even more curious that the next three films he hopes to direct are also Avatar sequels….
“Cameron told me he’d already shot all of a third Avatar, and the first act of a fourth. There is a script for a fifth and an intention to make it, as long as the business of Avatar holds up between now and then. It seems entirely possible — maybe even probable — that Cameron will never make another non-Avatar film again.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I’ve visited my local pub every day for 68 years – the price of a pint is killing local boozers
A GRANDAD has visited his local boozer every day since it opened 68 years ago.
Bernard Bland first visited to the Nunsthorpe Tavern in 1954 when a pint cost just 1s 10d — 9p in decimal currency.
He has been going ever since, has even celebrated his wedding anniversaries there and only missed out on his daily drink during the Covid lockdowns.
This week he celebrated his 92nd birthday in the pub in Grimsby, saying he never tires of the company, adding: “I’ve got good friends here, they’re like family.”
Bernard was among the first through the door when the Nunsthorpe was built on the estate where he lives.
Over the years he has enjoyed countless pints with pals and his wife of nearly 70 years, Betty.
READ MORE COST OF LIVING
Now she is in a care home, he pops in on his own for his daily pint of Fosters and a double dark rum.
Surrounded by his 92nd birthday banners, Bernard said: “It’s only me at home so I come in and see people. I can’t stop at home.
“But the price of a pint has certainly changed over the years. It’s ridiculous the price of a pint these days.
“People can’t afford to come to the pub like they used to. The place used to be full to the brim with people but with balancing the cost of electric and gas nowadays too, going to the pub isn’t something everyone has the money to do.
Most read in The Sun
“I live on my own so thankfully my gas and electric are all right.”
Dad-of-two Bernard, a former Navy cook, celebrated his 65th anniversary at the pub with Betty.
He added: “She’s my whole life. It’s like her wheelchair has a satnav that takes us here but it’s great because everyone is so friendly. I’ll still be coming while I can. I’ve got no plans to stop.”
UFO Cases That Suggest We Have Been Visited By “Others” — Alien Encounters and the Military – Mysterious Universe
— Delivered by Feed43 service
All the countries The Queen visited during her 96 years – from Tonga to Uganda
FARMERS dyed their sheep red, white and blue in her honour in New Zealand.
In Australia, electricity poles kept crashing down from the weight of people clinging to them for a better view.
The Queen’s five-and-a-half-month tour of the Commonwealth in 1953[/caption]
And in Jamaica, a man threw his coat over a puddle so the Queen would not have to get her shoes wet, in the spirit of Sir Walter Raleigh — and was promptly arrested for lunacy.
The world had never seen anything like the Queen’s five-and-a-half-month tour of the Commonwealth that began in November 1953.
And it has never seen anything like it again.
It was the first time a reigning sovereign had ever visited many of the countries on the tour, including Australia and New Zealand.
READ MORE ON QUEEN’S DEATH
The epic tour was designed to harness the unprecedented popularity of the monarchy in the wake of the young Queen’s coronation just months earlier.
And it was absolutely exhausting — 43,000 miles by land, sea and air, being feted all the way.
It is estimated she shook 13,213 hands, received 6,770 curtsies and heard 503 renditions of God Save The Queen.
She and Prince Philip left Charles, five, and Anne, three, behind because of the gruelling schedule.
Most read in The Sun
They found it “ghastly” to say goodbye.
But it was also the start of an incredible adventure for the 27-year-old Queen and 32-year-old Philip.
He recalled later: “The level of adulation — you wouldn’t believe it.”
First stop on November 24 was a one-night stay in Bermuda, where fights broke out between American tourists and local schoolchildren over the best viewing spots.
Next day it was Jamaica, where lady-in-waiting Pamela Mountbatten complained: “The streets of Kingston had been festooned with so much royal bunting, it was impossible to see what anything really looked like.”
Then the couple boarded steamship SS Gothic, which had travelled to meet them carrying eight tonnes of luggage for the rest of the tour.
After passing through the Panama Canal, the ship arrived in Fiji on December 17.
Chieftains came aboard to welcome the royals with a dance, then the Queen sipped on a seashell full of the potent local drink kava, made with pounded roots mixed with spit.
She was thrilled, and said to Pamela Mountbatten at the end of it all: “Didn’t you love this!”
Tonga was next, where the Queen was introduced to the oldest resident — a 175-year-old tortoise presented to the country by Captain Cook in 1777.
In Tonga they were warmly welcomed by Queen Salote and later thousands of enthusiastic Tongans.
Queen Salote, who had won British hearts by cheerfully waving from an open carriage in the Coronation Day rain in London, did her best to impress the Head of the Commonwealth with a luncheon feast that included 2,000 pigs, chickens, lobsters and yams, washed down with coconut milk.
But it was the next stop, New Zealand, when things really went crazy.
A cameraman called her arrival on December 23 “like the Second Coming”.
Three quarters of the country’s population saw the Queen during her five-week stay, but she did not get to see enough of those she was most interested in — the Maori people.
Again and again, white dignitaries hogged the sovereign’s time and refused to allow traditional ceremonies to go ahead.
Lady Pamela revealed: “We were so disappointed.”
From Auckland, Her Majesty delivered her annual Christmas Speech by radio to the Commonwealth, saying of her tour: “I want to show that the Crown is not merely an abstract symbol of our unity, but a personal bond between you and me.”
After a few days’ rest at sea, the royals steamed into Sydney Harbour on the morning of February 3, 1954.
Half a million people out of a population of 1.8million turned out on the shores to watch them arrive.
Tens of thousands had slept outside to secure the best spots, and locals said the night had been lit up by the glow of campers’ cigarettes.
One Boer War veteran, who had waited five hours for a glimpse, told a newspaper: “God bless her, I fought for her great-great grandmother Queen Vicky.”
In all, as in New Zealand, three quarters of Australia’s population would see her during a two-month stay that saw her criss-cross the country by road, rail and air.
It was the height of summer, and a young Clive James recalled waiting in the heat to see the royals with his schoolmates “fainting left and right, as if their serried ranks were subject to sniper fire”.
But the Queen never even broke into a sweat. Lady Pamela explained that the Queen simply did not perspire, adding: “That means she can’t get relief, so she suffers twice as much from the heat.
“She says no perspiration makes it much worse.”
But the Queen only had thoughts for those who came to see her.
Lady Pamela explained: “She was very meticulous in the motorcades that the car should go slowly enough for people to get a proper view.
She used to say, ‘What’s the point in coming unless they can see me?’ ”
Often they were going so slowly that the Queen could overhear what people were saying, which was often that she looked fed up.
She told a staffer: “It’s awful. I’ve got the kind of face that if I’m not smiling, I look cross.
“But I’m not cross. If you try to smile for two hours continuously it gives you a nervous tic.”
However, the epic tour took its toll.
The Queen wanted to build a personal connection with Commonwealth nations[/caption]
A WORLD TOUR
At one point the Queen complained to Philip: “All these mayors are so boring, boring, boring. Why are they so boring?”
And during a few days’ rest in a chalet outside Melbourne, a camera crew waiting outside were startled when Philip burst out of the door with a pair of tennis shoes and a racquet flying after him.
The Queen then emerged, shouting at him to come back, and dragged him inside.
The entire scene was caught on film, but a courtier charged out “angrier than a wounded buffalo” and ordered the cameraman to hand over the footage.
Next out was the Queen, now all serene.
She said: “I’m sorry for that little interlude, but as you know it happens in every marriage.”
The royals finally steamed out from a harbour near Perth, bound across the Indian Ocean for a brief stop at the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.
Then it was on to Ceylon — now Sri Lanka — where the glass beads on the Queen’s dress got so hot in the sun they could not be touched.
A quick pause followed in Aden, now part of Yemen, then two nights in Uganda, where the Queen opened a new dam on Lake Victoria, sending water crashing down into the White Nile.
From there, they flew to Tobruk in Libya, where Prince Charles and Princess Anne were waiting.
The youngsters had travelled aboard the Britannia on her maiden voyage, and the new ship then took them all to Malta for a few days.
Then finally they all sailed home to London, where on May 15 a banner on Tower Bridge greeted them with the words: “Welcome Home”.
Read More on The Sun
Tens of thousands of people lined the banks of the Thames.
Their Queen was home, and her reign as British monarch and Head of the Commonwealth family of nations could begin in earnest.
The Queen was insistent the motorcade move slowly so people could get a proper view[/caption]
Dan Walker defends David Beckham after claim he visited Queen’s coffin for ‘exposure’
NASA Astronaut Reveals How We’d Know If Aliens Visited Earth And It Involves A Lot Of Death – The Sun
— Delivered by Feed43 service
Meta Injecting Code Into Websites Visited By Its Users To Track Them, Research Says
Krause discovered the code injection by building a tool that could list all the extra commands added to a website by the browser. For normal browsers, and most apps, the tool detects no changes, but for Facebook and Instagram it finds up to 18 lines of code added by the app. Those lines of code appear to scan for a particular cross-platform tracking kit and, if not installed, instead call the Meta Pixel, a tracking tool that allows the company to follow a user around the web and build an accurate profile of their interests. The company does not disclose to the user that it is rewriting webpages in this way. No such code is added to the in-app browser of WhatsApp, according to Krause’s research. […] It is unclear when Facebook began injecting code to track users after clicking links. “We intentionally developed this code to honor people’s [Ask to track] choices on our platforms,” a Meta spokesperson told The Guardian in a statement. “The code allows us to aggregate user data before using it for targeted advertising or measurement purposes. We do not add any pixels. Code is injected so that we can aggregate conversion events from pixels.”
They added: “For purchases made through the in-app browser, we seek user consent to save payment information for the purposes of autofill.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.