Ariana Grande mocked for tattoo typo
Too bad pop star Ariana Grande is vegan — she just tattooed an accidental homage to a Japanese barbecue grill on her palm. The US singer’s attempt to ink an ode to her hit single 7 Rings backfired recently after social media quickly chimed in to tell her the characters actually translated to “shichirin”: A small charcoal grill.
Grande, 25, had posted a now-deleted photo of the new body art on Instagram before her fans pointed out the spelling error. In widely shared screenshots of now-deleted tweets, Grande acknowledged she had forgotten a symbol but noted that the design would not last, as skin on the palm regrows faster than that on the rest of the body and tattoos there usually fade. “It hurt and still looks tight. I wouldn’t have lasted one more symbol lmao,” she tweeted. “But this spot also peels a ton and won’t last so if I miss it enough I’ll suffer thru the whole thing next time.”
She later wrote: “Pls leave me and my tambourine grill alone. thank u.” Her apparent nonchalance didn’t stop Twitter from skewering her with memes and mockery. Some were ironically sympathetic: “Met with all the Asians, and our official ruling is that the Ariana Grande tattoo is good,” wrote Twitter user Kevin Nguyen. The video for 7 Rings boasts more than 100m views on YouTube and debuted at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
‘Two-thirds of UK kids make music’
New research has found that more than two-thirds of young people are active musicians. The study by music charity Youth Music, in tandem with Ipsos Mori, polled more than 1,000 British children aged seven to 17 about their music habits. Unsurprisingly, 97 per cent of them had listened to music in the previous week — but 67 per cent had also engaged in “some form of music-making activity”. It’s a huge rise from 39 per cent in 2006, when Youth Music conducted their previous survey.
Among those who said they made music, singing was the most popular means, with 44 per cent saying they did so compared with 17 per cent in 2006. Thirty per cent of surveyed children played an instrument — 39 per cent of whom are somewhat self-taught — with the piano proving most popular. Eleven per cent made music on a computer — rising to one in five young men — while fewer than 10 per cent rapped or DJ’d. Music-making tends to fall off as children get older — 79 per cent of children aged seven to 10 made music versus 53 per cent of those aged 16 and 17. Income affected the findings: 76 per cent of children entitled to free school meals described themselves as musical, versus 60 per cent of those not entitled. Activities including rapping, DJing, writing music and making music digitally were all markedly higher among children from lower-income backgrounds.
A Very English Scandal returns to TV
A Very English Scandal, the Golden Globe-winning BBC drama about the Jeremy Thorpe affair, will return for a second series by looking at a very different scandal: The notorious divorce case of Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll, known by some back in 1963 as the “Dirty Duchess”.
“We’re going to focus on the very public divorce from her second husband. He went through her private desk and found a list of all the men she’d slept with,” producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins told the Radio Times. He also found compromising Polaroids of her wearing nothing but pearls with a man whose face was not in the pictures.
Treadwell-Collins added, “At the time, the news was in all the papers: People thought it could have been a member of the royal family or the Government or a Hollywood actor. No one still knows who it was.”
The original series of A Very English Scandal, written by Russell T Davies, starred Hugh Grant as the disgraced Liberal leader Thorpe who was scrambling to cover up his affair with Norman Josiffe (AKA Scott), played by Ben Whishaw. The Guardian’s TV critic Lucy Mangan described it as “brutally funny, endlessly clever” and an immaculate show that “entwines two decades of salient political history with a finely worked portrait of the English establishment”.
