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Your Proofness: Dilaira Dubash Master Storyteller: Hurmat Majid Creativity Analysts: Jamal Khurshid, Essa Malik, Talha Ahmed Khan, Mohsin Alam, Hira Fareed, Nabeel Khan, Sobia Khan and Umar Waqas

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE, MAY 29, 2016

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Almost every child grows up listening to the story of Alice, the girl who stumbelled upon a magical world and had quite an adventure there. The story came to life when Disney truned it into a live action film. This week we have brought to you everything there is to know about the original story and its creator, as the second Alice film, Through the Looking Glass, just came to cinemas on May 26.

After slipping through a mirror, Alice finds herself back in Underland with the White Queen, the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Her friends tell her that the Mad Hatter is depressed over the death of his family. Hoping to save his loved ones, Alice steals the Chronosphere from Time to travel into the past. While there, she encounters the younger Hatter and the evil Red Queen.

The author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is Lewis Carroll. This is a pseudonym; his real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

Dodgson first used ‘BB’ to sign his non-professional writings, but in March 1856, when he wanted to publish his poem ‘Solitude’ in the magazine The Train, Edmund Yates, the magazine’s editor asked him to pick a pseudonym. Then Dodgson came up with a number of names until Yates picked Lewis Carroll.

For his learned mathematic books Dodgson used his own name. Lewis Carroll was also a Professor of Maths at Oxford University. You can see several mathematics and logic influences in his books: For example, when the Cheshire cat fades until it disappears, leaving only a grin suspended in midair and Alice says that she has seen a cat without a grin, but never a grin without a cat. This apparently reflects ancient questions in logic about substances and predicates.

Alice is named after a real-life character — the 10-year-old daughter of the vice-chancellor of Oxford University, Alice Liddell, who heard, along with her two sisters, the very first version of the tale during a boat trip on the Thames, and begged Carroll to write it down.

In 1928, Alice sold her manuscript of ‘Alice’s Adventures Under Ground’, because she needed the money to pay death duties. Sotheby’s suggested a reserve of only £4,000, but at the event it fetched £15,400 (an enormous amount of money in those days: it was then equivalent to £77,000) and it went to America. Today, Alice’s copy of the story is on display in the British Library.

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE, MAY 29, 2016

3 • There are diseases named after the book: Alice In Wonderland syndrome (AWS), where sufferers perceive parts of their body to be changing in size, and Alice In Wonderland-like syndrome (AWLS), where people misperceive the size and distance of objects around them.

Lewis Carroll himself suffered from these diseases, but it took until 1955 for English psychiatrist John Todd to discover the disease and give it its memorable name.

• The original 1864 handwritten manuscript of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ contained illustrations by Lewis Carroll himself — and they weren’t half bad.

• The tree that supposedly inspired the Cheshire Cat’s tree is in the garden behind the real-life Alice’s home at Christ Church College, Oxford.

• After reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Queen Victoria asked Carroll to dedicate his next book to her — which he did by dedicating his book An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Equations to her.

• Before getting its famous title, the novel was originally called Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.

• Since it was first published, Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland has never been out of print and has been translated into nearly 200 languages.

• While he created his characters, Carroll took inspiration from people he knew in real-life: He is Dodo, because he stuttered when he spoke, while Lory and Eaglet refer to Alice Liddell’s sisters Lorina and Edith.

• The Mock Turtle sings ‘Turtle Soup’, which

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was a real dish during the 1860s.

• A young Oscar Wilde was a fan of the book, which is high praise indeed.

• Lewis Carroll’s personal copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — one of only six original 1865 editions known to exist — was sold for a record $1.54 million in 1998, which, with inflation, would be worth around $2.24 million today.

• The working title of Alice’s new adventures was ‘Looking-Glass House’. It evolved to ‘Behind the Looking-Glass’, but eventually Dodgson’s friend Henry Liddon suggested ‘Through the Looking Glass’ and the subtitle ‘And What Alice Found There’ was added.

• The ‘wrong-way-round idea’ dominates the book, because this kind of game was a favourite of Dodgson’s. He liked to write letters in mirror-writing, drew pictures which changed into different ones when held upside down, and he also liked to play his musical boxes backwards. Some people think this has something to do with his left-handedness, and the asymmetry of his body.

• This sequel, Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there, was published in December 1871 (but was dated 1872).

Tenniel’s illustration of the Jabberwock was originally intended as the book’s frontispiece, but it turned out to be so horrible that Carroll replaced it with the picture of the White Knight on horseback.

• The story has been translated into 65 languages, and 1,530 different editions were identified all over the world in 2015. The number keeps increasing.

DESIGN BY: SOBIA KHAN

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE, MAY 29, 2016

Film

4 Me before you Release date: June 3 Louisa Clark lives in a quaint town in the English countryside. With no clear direction in her life, the quirky and creative 26-year-old goes from one job to the next in order to help her tight-knit family make ends meet. Her normally cheery outlook is, however, put to the test, when she faces her newest career challenge.

Finding Dory Release date: June 3 Finding Dory welcomes back to the big screen everyone’s favorite forgetful blue tang Dory, who’s living happily in the reef with Marlin and Nemo. When Dory suddenly remembers that she has a family out there who may be looking for her, the trio takes off on a life-changing adventure across the ocean to California’s prestigious Marine Life Institute, a rehabilitation center and aquarium.

WarCraft Release date: June 10 The peaceful realm of Azeroth stands on the brink of war as its civilisation faces a fearsome race of invaders: Orc warriors fleeing their dying home to colonise another. As a portal opens to connect the two worlds, one army faces destruction and the other extinction. From opposing sides, two heroes are set on a collision course that will decide the fate of their family, people and home.

Now you see me 2 Release date: June 10 The four horsemen return for a second mind-bending adventure, elevating the limits of stage illusion to new heights and taking them around the globe. One year after outwitting the FBI and winning the public’s adulation with their Robin Hood-style magic spectacles, the illusionists resurface for a comeback performance in hopes of exposing the unethical practices of a tech magnate.

Clown Release date: June 17 From the deliciously twisted mind of Eli Roth comes the story of Jack and his Dad. As Jack turns six. Everything is ready for his party, except for one thing. The clown is late. As the kid’s patience fades so does his dad’s sanity. Increasingly desperate, dad goes into the back room, wears the clown costume, puts on the crazy wig, the makeup and the red nose. He’s a hit with the kids and saves the day. The only problem comes when he tries to remove the costume.

1. One dance Drake featuring WizKid and Kyla 2. Panda Desiigner 3. Can’t stop the feeling!

Justin Timberlake 4. 7 Years Lukas Graham 5. Work from home Fifth Harmony featuring Ty Dolla $ign

6. Don’t let me down The Chainsmokers featuring Daya 7. I took a pill in Ibiza Mike Posner 8. Work Rihanna featuring Drake 9. Pillowtalk Zayn 10. Needed me Rihanna

SOURCE: BILLBOARD.COM

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE, MAY 29, 2016

World wide weird Hi light Get your weekly dose of unusual and funny news from across the globe!

All fall down A 49-year-old elephant ‘Dunk’ needed a crane to get back up on her feet after falling over while ‘goofing around’ at a Swiss zoo. Druk weighs more than three tonnes and is the oldest mammal at Zurich’s zoo. She was playing with the younger members of her herd when she took a tumble and was too weak to stand up on her own. “Druk tripped over because her eyesight is not so good anymore,” said senior zoo curator Robert Zingg. The elephant cow “has never given birth but ‘has for many years been playing an important role as a leader and social aunt in the herd,” according to zoo officials. “She was eating well this morning and we very much hope that she will be able to recover,” Zingg added. Druk arrived at the zoo in 1968, just a year after she was born in the kingdom of Bhutan. Elephants typically live 45 to 50 years in captivity. Zingg said the zoo could not rule out euthanising the pachyderm, if they detect any signs of suffering. NBCNEWS.COM

Quite a shocker A bracelet that gives its wearer an electric shock when they go overdrawn is being launched. The idea is that the Pavlok wristband will be wired up to an online bank account so that, when the user goes overdrawn beyond pre-set spending limits, they will be given a 255-volt shock. It is worked out in four stages starting with the customer logging into their credit card or bank account facility. The shock is reported to be “slightly uncomfortable”, rather than painful, says Intelligent Environments, the company that provides the connection between the device and the banking sites. It emphasises it has been tested fully and is safe. The bracelet is expected to be particularly appealing to the youth with parents are particularly expressing an interest on their beloved’s behalf. NEWS.SKY.COM

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Double whammie

Not content to be the home of the ‘World’s Best Pizza,’ as declared by a recently published guide to global pizza, Naples, Italy is now also the home to the World’s Longest Pizza. The finished pie stretched more than a mile along the seafront between the US consulate and the Castel dell’Ovo. Exact distances are important, so let it be noted that this pizza was just over 6,082 feet, according to the official Guinness World Records. The recipe called for more than 4,400 pounds of flour, 3,500 pounds of tomatoes, 4,400 pounds of mozzarella, 66 pounds of basil, and 52 gallons of oil. The effort, involving 250 pizza-crafters and six hours, eleven minutes of labour, beat out the previous record-holder constructed by the city of Milan at last year’s Milan Expo, a pie that didn’t even cover a mile.

“It’s absolutely a point of pride for our city, which is the home of pizza,” Alessandro Marinacci from Naples’ Pizza Village, the event’s co-organiser along with flour producer Caputo said. THEGUARDIAN.UK

You must be yolking Teenager Megan Watkins was stunned when she cracked open a triple yolk egg — at staggering odds of 25 million to one. The 17-year-old made the miracle find as she cooked up breakfast in her older sister’s restaurant in Thetford, Norfolk.

Megan’s dad, Charlie Guy, said he was at the sink peeling potatoes on Saturday when his daughter turned to him and said the egg she was frying had three yolks. Farmer Charlie said, “Megan showed me and straight away I told her not to move and to stop cooking the egg. It sent everyone to panic stations.It’s Amy’s kitchen — but she’d taken her first day off in about three years.” He added, “The hens only started laying about a week ago. It was the first shock we’ve had from them.” The egg was laid by one of 50 chickens at the family-run Island Farm in nearby Hockwold. Among the batch of seven eggs, Megan and her sister Cerys also cracked four double yolk eggs — the odds of finding these are 1,000 to one. MIRROR.CO.UK

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE, MAY 29, 2016

6 As much as we might judge people for their bad spelling, the truth is that English spelling doesn’t make any sense. It turns out there are reasons for the eccentricities of the language, even though they may be terribly dumb.

The Crazy Rule: Writing has become second nature to us, so it’s easy to forget how the letter ‘o’ is always shifting sound. You get the word ‘con’, where its sound is basically ‘aw’, but then in ‘son’ it’s encroaching on ‘u’ territory. Then you have ‘comb’ and ‘tomb’, which are totally different ‘o’ sounds despite having no right to be.

common man would forever be reminded of precious Latin, thus ensuring that it would never become a dead language — oh wait, it died. They did the exact same thing with ‘receipt’ (then spelled ‘receit’, but drawn from the Latin word ‘recepta’). Changing the spelling to match the Latin origin is at least mildly understandable, but less understandable is changing spellings to match Latin words they have nothing to do with, which also happened.

The origin of the word ‘island’ is the Old English word ‘yland’ or ‘iland,’ but since the Latin word ‘insula’ has a similar meaning, scholars decided to just throw an ‘s’ in there. That one was so influential that it actually changed the word for the central walkway in a church — up until then spelled ‘aile’ to ‘aisle’.

The Dumb Reason: It all comes down to sloppy handwriting. In medieval times, highly stylised writing focused on the ‘minims’, or vertical lines in a letter, and the smudgy nature of ink confused people trying to read it. For example: in, ni, m, iii, ui, and iu might all look exactly the same because the horizontal lines written into each letter were so thin, they tended to smudge or just fade away.

The solution to this problem was to just stop using ‘u’ for some words, such as some, love, and come. This is the reason why you see an ‘o’ for a ‘u sound when it’s next to ‘n’ or ‘m’, like in ‘monkey’ and ‘tonne’, and also why you see a ‘c before a ‘k’ when the letter appears next to more minims. The ‘c’ was a good way to separate ‘k’ from letters it could be easily confused with, which led to spellings such as ‘lick’ and ‘flick’.

The Crazy Rule: You know the rule: ‘i’ before ‘e’, except after ‘c’. A rule that is immediately followed by a tonne of exceptions: either, neither, weigh, neighbour, caffeine, weird, protein, feisty, conscience, and approximately 10,000 more words. So it’s less a rule than a thing that just happens, sometimes.

The Dumb Reason:

The Crazy Rule: Every once in a while English words will have silent letters in them, such as receipt, debt, scissor and island. And there’s actually a really interesting explanation for that: Pretentious people who thought a certain language was superior than another.

The Dumb Reason: Over the last 500 years, there’s been a continuing effort to standardise all spelling. The mess started in the 16th Century, when people putting together dictionaries decided to insert a ‘b’ into ‘debt’ and ‘doubt’ to remind everyone that they had evolved from the Latin word ‘debitum’, even though the preferred spellings, ‘dette’ and ‘doute’, made way more sense. But hey, at least the

In the 11th Century, English had developed its own standardised set of spelling conventions that had an almost perfectly phonemic orthography — meaning that each letter had a specific sound it made, regardless of what word it appeared in or what other letters were around it.

Then, in 1066, the Norman conquest happened. William the Conqueror invaded with an army of French, Norman and Breton soldiers, who quickly established Latin and French as the standard languages throughout the British Isles. French and Latin words were absorbed into English quite poorly, and with much regret. ‘Seize’ and ‘siege’, for example: In French, those words have very different pronunciations. But that distinction didn’t survive the migration to the new language, even though the spelling did. Now we write them totally differently but say them the same. The problems continued: Norman scribes convinced English speakers to change ‘cwen’ to ‘queen’ and ‘cwic’ to ‘quick,’ because, English being the language of the lower class, French speakers were the only ones who could afford any books. Naturally, those original spellings look stupid to you now, but that’s only because you’re not used to them. Our only question is, if you’re thinking in terms of logic and accessibility, why would you just start throwing ‘k’ and ‘q’ around like that?

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE, MAY 29, 2016

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What it’s about: In the 3D animated comedy, The Angry Birds Movie, we’ll finally find out why the birds are so angry. The movie takes us to an island populated entirely by happy, flightless birds — or almost entirely. In this paradise, Red, a bird with a temper problem, speedy Chuck, and the volatile Bomb have always been outsiders. But when the island is visited by mysterious green piggies, it’s up to these unlikely outcasts to figure out what the pigs are up to.

Help the Angry Birds by finding the words given below in the puzzle: RED BOMB MATILDA LEONARD EAGLE

MIGHTY TERENCE STELLA ROSS CYRUS

MIME PHOTOG BUBBLES HAL

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE, MAY 29, 2016

• He inherited his name from his father, who is a former footballer and became his son’s advisor as Neymar’s talents began to grow.

• He played futsal and street pickup games growing up in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and began his career playing for Santos’s junior team when he was 11.

• Neymar joined the Santos Academy in 2003 where he perfected his skills.

• Neymar is the only Brazilian soccer player to have graced the cover of TIME magazine. In fact, the only other Brazilians to find their way on the cover have been political leaders.

• With all of Neymar’s hype and talent, he actually came fairly cheap for Barcelona. The Brazilian is the ninth-most expensive purchase in the club’s history at only €57 million.

• The striker will get $74 million in salary over five years, $13 million of which is a signing bonus.

• Despite making dramatic headways into the footballing spotlight, Neymar was overlooked by Dunga for the National team squad flying to South Africa for the 2010 World Cup, even after Pele and Romario pitched for his inclusion.

• In 2012 and 2013, SportsPro named him the most marketable athlete in the world.

• His footballing idols are Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Andres Iniesta and Xavi.

• Neymar is the eleventh-highest scorer of all time for the Brazilian national team.

• The first club to make a bid for Neymar was West Ham. • He nearly died in an accident when he was just four years old.

• His annual income is approximately $32 million.

• He scored his 100th professional goal on his 20th birthday.

• He nearly joined Real Madrid but West Ham was the first club to make a bid for him.

• Many Brazilian footballers such as Pele, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho have already been adapted in famous cartoon series. Neymar also joined the league when he tied up with famous Brazilian cartoonist Mauricio de Sousa.

The first issue was named ‘A boy with talent’ where Neymar showed up with his unique Mohawk hairstyle.

• Neymar was neglected by the Brazilian national football team during the 2010 World Cup football, despite his immense talent with the ball. Many big footballers such as Pelé and Romário had a direct conversation with team manager Dunga to recruit him in the national team for the World Cup. • Neymar is an icon in promoting Brazilian modern pop music. He is particularly attracted to MúsicaSertaneja. A video if him dancing with his teammates in the locker room of Santos FC to the tune of ‘Ai se eutepego!’

by Michel Teló made a huge sensation on the media.

COMPILED BY: ABDULLAH ANWAR SOURCE: SPORTSLOOK.NET