1. Hats off to her
Among the haute couture in the US Capitol’s rotunda last week, Melania Trump’s hat attracted almost as much attention as her husband’s inauguration. Commentators fell over themselves to describe it. Columnist Marina Hyde remarked: “Tailoring by Adam Lippes, millinery by Iron Dome”, the former a New York dress designer, the latter an Israeli missile defence system. Tina Brown called it a “Mask of Zorro hat”.
2. Taking the Mickey Mantle
Bob Uecker may not be a name familiar to FM readers, but his death this month aged 90 evoked memories of a rare quality: a sports commentator who did not take himself seriously. Uecker was a mediocre major league baseball player, a backstop to the pitchers, in the 1960s. “To last as long as I did, with the skills I had, was a triumph of the human spirit,” he wrote in his memoir, the pertinently titled Catcher in the Wry.
3. Slow-motion crash
The Cape Peninsula’s penguins, endangered by climate change, are lucky. Their fellow flightless aquatics across the ocean in South Georgia appear to be in greater and more immediate danger. The world’s biggest iceberg, A23a, which broke loose from the Antarctic shelf in 1986, is drifting north and could hit the island in two to four weeks. The island is a breeding ground for penguins and seals who might not escape the crash in time.
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