00:00:00
Speaker 1: Barbara Friedman is our digital content editor. She's here with Barb's Wire, top three trending stories on social media. And you are welcome to WhatsApp us at 0725671567. You can call on 0214460567. Barbara, what have you got for us? Yeah, morning.
00:00:18
Speaker 2: I definitely haven't had as good sleep in the last few nights as I normally do, Clarence.
00:00:22
Speaker 1: It's two of us.
00:00:23
Speaker 2: Because of the storms and the dog. Anyway, let's try to keep our head together. The first one is all about the fashion weeks entering their robot era. Sure, it's not the first time robots have walked around for the fashion houses in the fashion weeks. But it's definitely the most prolific amount of robot usage in the weeks that have just happened. So there was New York Fashion Week last week. We've just had London Fashion Week. And then there's Vogue World, which is a big annual event in Milan and It was conceived by Anna Wintour years ago and it's got a charitable cause. But again, they had robots and humans walking and dancing. And then you saw like all the celebrities, you know, sitting on the sidelines. There was Donatella Versace and J-Lo sitting next to each other. clapping and kind of looking amazed at these robots.
00:01:23
Speaker 1: You say human robots and mechanical robots.
00:01:25
Speaker 2: Well, exactly. And this is my joke I was about to launch into, which was about the irony of the models and the robots. Because for decades, have models not been asked to look like robots and have very blank stares? This was inevitable. Last week at New York Fashion Week, a robot fell off the runway. They were all clapping.
00:01:46
Speaker 1: Mechanical or human?
00:01:47
Speaker 2: No, mechanical. And it is a video you should go online and try and find because it completely like falls off the side. And one of these big beefy bounces goes along the runway, leeches down and pulls the robot up from under the catwalk, pulls it up. I was thinking, imagine if that was a human catwalk. and then sort of drags it off the stage. And then now, right now in London Fashion Week, there was a very short-looking, very square, large sort of shouldered robot in a fur, I assume not of real fur, or Peter would have been there, in a fur coat of some kind, walking down this kind of very sort of classical, fancy kind of loungy forum where they were holding it. Totally weird. Like, how is that even something you go, oh, that looks fantastic? Fantastic. I'm going to buy it. That is a fantastic look. I love the way that robot, that really strange shaped robot is wearing that coat. The whole thing is just so odd. And I have to say there's a lot of pushback online. On a lot of the posts, people are saying, what are you thinking? And there's going to be a time we look back at this, people are saying, go, what on earth was going on? I don't think that– you know, I know that we say models are like clothes hangers, right? They're skinny and they have blank stares. And I suppose they are robot-like. I think that's the irony of it, which I just kind of thought about when I was looking at it and had to kind of mention.
00:03:13
Speaker 1: I don't know if I should be saying this, but my wife, Wendy's niece– actually, we said goodbye to her just last week. She's gone to London and she's going to be, for the very first time– in Fashion Week in London, which I think is very... Fantastic.
00:03:30
Speaker 2: I mean, an amazing.
00:03:31
Speaker 1: I don't know if I should be commenting or I should be speaking my mind on this stuff.
00:03:36
Speaker 2: Tell her to look human. Tell her to distinguish herself from the robots. Oh, she's a wonderful young woman. Of course. And I just can't see that this is.
00:03:46
Speaker 1: It's choreographed, so you don't have a choice.
00:03:48
Speaker 2: No. The Vogue World Show, which has just taken place in Milan at the oldest shopping, active shopping mall in Italy, which was actually, I was fascinated. It's called Galleria Vittoria Emanuele II. It was actually first constructed in 1865. So it's this beautiful old building that is still a working mall. And this is where they had this Vogue World where the robots and the human models were running around performing shows. And getting all this feedback. So I don't know.
00:04:19
Speaker 1: I'm kind of thinking who's buying because this is expensive.
00:04:21
Speaker 2: Well, this is always where the fat. Yeah, this is couture. So obviously this is not what you actually normal people wear. Exactly. Eventually gets made. I mean, I could be wrong. I'm sure Amber, who's one of your producers today, would be able to tell tell you who buys more about fashion than me. I think that those runway– It's arm and a leg. But the runway stuff is for the very wealthy or more couture, and then they make a pret-a-porter versions of it, I would assume.
00:04:44
Speaker 1: You're saying people actually buy this stuff?
00:04:45
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:04:46
Speaker 1: They do.
00:04:46
Speaker 2: They absolutely do. They absolutely do. I mean, Jennifer Lopez sitting in the front row there, I'm sure, was eyeing that robot and thinking, I'm going to buy that. The robot without the clothes on.
00:04:56
Speaker 1: No, no.
00:04:58
Speaker 2: The clothes on the robot. I'm being funny. It really isn't very flattering. It really isn't very flattering. The next story is actually beautiful, and it's just such a gorgeous series of videos that news houses are posting about this little six-year-old girl who has broken the female Rubik's Cube record. world record. Her name is Lian Zhizhi. I always have to look up the Chinese pronunciations. So it's not spelled Zhizhi, but that's how you pronounce it. And she's affectionately known as Zhizhi, not as Lian. And she is... She's a Chinese speed cuber. She has set the woman's world record average at 4.277 seconds over five solves, and she broke the record twice in a few days. But when you watch this video, please don't, anyone listening who's got a six-year-old, please don't feel your child is an underachiever. Because I have never, we were just sitting watching this in the office now with our mouths open. I mean, she literally sits there casual and just does this. Blah, blah, blah. And then when she saw the time, she kind of puts her little hand up and kind of like, she's very proud of herself. Hold on.
00:06:14
Speaker 1: Did you say the woman's record?
00:06:15
Speaker 2: That's the thing.
00:06:16
Speaker 1: So that's not a kiddie's record.
00:06:17
Speaker 2: No, and I looked all of this up because exactly your question came to my mind. Then I looked up what's the male record. So the male record is held by a nine-year-old boy, and that is 2.7 seconds. And then I asked Google, I said, why would the woman, the female record be– higher than the male. That can't be a thing. You know what they said? They said that culturally more boys do Rubik's Cube in competition than girls. There's 10% of competitors in the world are girls and the rest are boys. And they said that when they've put equal numbers in one room to do it, there hasn't been a distinction. So it's just interesting to me. I don't even know why they have to have a separate male and female one because surely that really doesn't require any, you know, and our brains are not different. In fact, female brains are better, just saying. Not biased or anything.
00:07:19
Speaker 1: But really, I mean, wasted on a Rubik's Cube. You don't want to waste a good brain on a Rubik's Cube, but I get you.
00:07:25
Speaker 2: She apparently has a mastered 1,300 algorithms. So this is not as magical as we all think. And practices for hours a day. Apparently during her career at six years old, she started at four. She's had times where she hasn't been that sort of, she's been not that into whatever. And then she's, you know, her mom has, yeah, there's a whole story about her. And she's reached plateaus. And then she's got back into her competitive spirit. I don't know. It's all too much for me. I was never a Rubik's Cube person. I tried once and then I decided never to try again because it made me feel stupid.
00:08:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was adept at one stage.
00:08:03
Speaker 2: Oh, you were adept.
00:08:04
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, over a couple of hours.
00:08:07
Speaker 2: You know, Bruce Hong's little boy is a Rubik's Cube champion. He wins competitions.
00:08:14
Speaker 1: Fascinating.
00:08:14
Speaker 2: Yeah. We won't send him this video because he might feel threatened. And then finally, because I'm keeping it light today, as you can hear, because I couldn't with all the stories this week. And this is my last day because I'm not here tomorrow.
00:08:28
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:08:29
Speaker 2: Yeah. And Friday. Sure. We do need a break sometimes. And the story is, actually came out, was last night on a lot of different news posts. It was 100 years left of 2026. But to be factual, today it's 99 days left. Did you realize there were 99 days left of the year?
00:08:51
Speaker 1: No. Now you do.
00:08:54
Speaker 2: People are like reacting on social media with absolute horror because– and having this sort of minor existential crisis because January was yesterday, wasn't it?
00:09:03
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:09:05
Speaker 2: I know we say this every year, but this year really, I feel like January was like the other day. Yeah, I'm with you on that one. 99 days till the end of the year, people.
00:09:14
Speaker 1: And if you say it that way, there's a lot of work to do.
00:09:16
Speaker 2: Well, you know– What do you still have to do for the rest of the year? What were your intentions?
00:09:22
Speaker 1: Everything that I started the year off with. Wow.
00:09:25
Speaker 2: Okay. 99 years. I just think it gives us days.
00:09:28
Speaker 1: Not years. Days.
00:09:30
Speaker 2: Okay. It gives us perspective, everyone. Does it not? Okay. It's Bob's wire.
00:09:35
Speaker 1: 99 days left. You have to really kind of pull finger now. I've got to pull finger. When it dawns on you in that particular manner, it can be really kind of sobering because I know that I've been putting things off. I've been putting things off. So there was some procrastination. Some of those things I can uh yeah i can i can face up to and some of the other stuff which is very difficult to get things to to go my way for a good couple of years but yeah i gotta play some catch up and i gotta do that really quickly we're gonna find out about the weather in a short while
Speaker 1: Barbara Friedman is our digital content editor. She's here with Barb's Wire, top three trending stories on social media. And you are welcome to WhatsApp us at 0725671567. You can call on 0214460567. Barbara, what have you got for us? Yeah, morning.
00:00:18
Speaker 2: I definitely haven't had as good sleep in the last few nights as I normally do, Clarence.
00:00:22
Speaker 1: It's two of us.
00:00:23
Speaker 2: Because of the storms and the dog. Anyway, let's try to keep our head together. The first one is all about the fashion weeks entering their robot era. Sure, it's not the first time robots have walked around for the fashion houses in the fashion weeks. But it's definitely the most prolific amount of robot usage in the weeks that have just happened. So there was New York Fashion Week last week. We've just had London Fashion Week. And then there's Vogue World, which is a big annual event in Milan and It was conceived by Anna Wintour years ago and it's got a charitable cause. But again, they had robots and humans walking and dancing. And then you saw like all the celebrities, you know, sitting on the sidelines. There was Donatella Versace and J-Lo sitting next to each other. clapping and kind of looking amazed at these robots.
00:01:23
Speaker 1: You say human robots and mechanical robots.
00:01:25
Speaker 2: Well, exactly. And this is my joke I was about to launch into, which was about the irony of the models and the robots. Because for decades, have models not been asked to look like robots and have very blank stares? This was inevitable. Last week at New York Fashion Week, a robot fell off the runway. They were all clapping.
00:01:46
Speaker 1: Mechanical or human?
00:01:47
Speaker 2: No, mechanical. And it is a video you should go online and try and find because it completely like falls off the side. And one of these big beefy bounces goes along the runway, leeches down and pulls the robot up from under the catwalk, pulls it up. I was thinking, imagine if that was a human catwalk. and then sort of drags it off the stage. And then now, right now in London Fashion Week, there was a very short-looking, very square, large sort of shouldered robot in a fur, I assume not of real fur, or Peter would have been there, in a fur coat of some kind, walking down this kind of very sort of classical, fancy kind of loungy forum where they were holding it. Totally weird. Like, how is that even something you go, oh, that looks fantastic? Fantastic. I'm going to buy it. That is a fantastic look. I love the way that robot, that really strange shaped robot is wearing that coat. The whole thing is just so odd. And I have to say there's a lot of pushback online. On a lot of the posts, people are saying, what are you thinking? And there's going to be a time we look back at this, people are saying, go, what on earth was going on? I don't think that– you know, I know that we say models are like clothes hangers, right? They're skinny and they have blank stares. And I suppose they are robot-like. I think that's the irony of it, which I just kind of thought about when I was looking at it and had to kind of mention.
00:03:13
Speaker 1: I don't know if I should be saying this, but my wife, Wendy's niece– actually, we said goodbye to her just last week. She's gone to London and she's going to be, for the very first time– in Fashion Week in London, which I think is very... Fantastic.
00:03:30
Speaker 2: I mean, an amazing.
00:03:31
Speaker 1: I don't know if I should be commenting or I should be speaking my mind on this stuff.
00:03:36
Speaker 2: Tell her to look human. Tell her to distinguish herself from the robots. Oh, she's a wonderful young woman. Of course. And I just can't see that this is.
00:03:46
Speaker 1: It's choreographed, so you don't have a choice.
00:03:48
Speaker 2: No. The Vogue World Show, which has just taken place in Milan at the oldest shopping, active shopping mall in Italy, which was actually, I was fascinated. It's called Galleria Vittoria Emanuele II. It was actually first constructed in 1865. So it's this beautiful old building that is still a working mall. And this is where they had this Vogue World where the robots and the human models were running around performing shows. And getting all this feedback. So I don't know.
00:04:19
Speaker 1: I'm kind of thinking who's buying because this is expensive.
00:04:21
Speaker 2: Well, this is always where the fat. Yeah, this is couture. So obviously this is not what you actually normal people wear. Exactly. Eventually gets made. I mean, I could be wrong. I'm sure Amber, who's one of your producers today, would be able to tell tell you who buys more about fashion than me. I think that those runway– It's arm and a leg. But the runway stuff is for the very wealthy or more couture, and then they make a pret-a-porter versions of it, I would assume.
00:04:44
Speaker 1: You're saying people actually buy this stuff?
00:04:45
Speaker 2: Okay.
00:04:46
Speaker 1: They do.
00:04:46
Speaker 2: They absolutely do. They absolutely do. I mean, Jennifer Lopez sitting in the front row there, I'm sure, was eyeing that robot and thinking, I'm going to buy that. The robot without the clothes on.
00:04:56
Speaker 1: No, no.
00:04:58
Speaker 2: The clothes on the robot. I'm being funny. It really isn't very flattering. It really isn't very flattering. The next story is actually beautiful, and it's just such a gorgeous series of videos that news houses are posting about this little six-year-old girl who has broken the female Rubik's Cube record. world record. Her name is Lian Zhizhi. I always have to look up the Chinese pronunciations. So it's not spelled Zhizhi, but that's how you pronounce it. And she's affectionately known as Zhizhi, not as Lian. And she is... She's a Chinese speed cuber. She has set the woman's world record average at 4.277 seconds over five solves, and she broke the record twice in a few days. But when you watch this video, please don't, anyone listening who's got a six-year-old, please don't feel your child is an underachiever. Because I have never, we were just sitting watching this in the office now with our mouths open. I mean, she literally sits there casual and just does this. Blah, blah, blah. And then when she saw the time, she kind of puts her little hand up and kind of like, she's very proud of herself. Hold on.
00:06:14
Speaker 1: Did you say the woman's record?
00:06:15
Speaker 2: That's the thing.
00:06:16
Speaker 1: So that's not a kiddie's record.
00:06:17
Speaker 2: No, and I looked all of this up because exactly your question came to my mind. Then I looked up what's the male record. So the male record is held by a nine-year-old boy, and that is 2.7 seconds. And then I asked Google, I said, why would the woman, the female record be– higher than the male. That can't be a thing. You know what they said? They said that culturally more boys do Rubik's Cube in competition than girls. There's 10% of competitors in the world are girls and the rest are boys. And they said that when they've put equal numbers in one room to do it, there hasn't been a distinction. So it's just interesting to me. I don't even know why they have to have a separate male and female one because surely that really doesn't require any, you know, and our brains are not different. In fact, female brains are better, just saying. Not biased or anything.
00:07:19
Speaker 1: But really, I mean, wasted on a Rubik's Cube. You don't want to waste a good brain on a Rubik's Cube, but I get you.
00:07:25
Speaker 2: She apparently has a mastered 1,300 algorithms. So this is not as magical as we all think. And practices for hours a day. Apparently during her career at six years old, she started at four. She's had times where she hasn't been that sort of, she's been not that into whatever. And then she's, you know, her mom has, yeah, there's a whole story about her. And she's reached plateaus. And then she's got back into her competitive spirit. I don't know. It's all too much for me. I was never a Rubik's Cube person. I tried once and then I decided never to try again because it made me feel stupid.
00:08:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was adept at one stage.
00:08:03
Speaker 2: Oh, you were adept.
00:08:04
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, over a couple of hours.
00:08:07
Speaker 2: You know, Bruce Hong's little boy is a Rubik's Cube champion. He wins competitions.
00:08:14
Speaker 1: Fascinating.
00:08:14
Speaker 2: Yeah. We won't send him this video because he might feel threatened. And then finally, because I'm keeping it light today, as you can hear, because I couldn't with all the stories this week. And this is my last day because I'm not here tomorrow.
00:08:28
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:08:29
Speaker 2: Yeah. And Friday. Sure. We do need a break sometimes. And the story is, actually came out, was last night on a lot of different news posts. It was 100 years left of 2026. But to be factual, today it's 99 days left. Did you realize there were 99 days left of the year?
00:08:51
Speaker 1: No. Now you do.
00:08:54
Speaker 2: People are like reacting on social media with absolute horror because– and having this sort of minor existential crisis because January was yesterday, wasn't it?
00:09:03
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:09:05
Speaker 2: I know we say this every year, but this year really, I feel like January was like the other day. Yeah, I'm with you on that one. 99 days till the end of the year, people.
00:09:14
Speaker 1: And if you say it that way, there's a lot of work to do.
00:09:16
Speaker 2: Well, you know– What do you still have to do for the rest of the year? What were your intentions?
00:09:22
Speaker 1: Everything that I started the year off with. Wow.
00:09:25
Speaker 2: Okay. 99 years. I just think it gives us days.
00:09:28
Speaker 1: Not years. Days.
00:09:30
Speaker 2: Okay. It gives us perspective, everyone. Does it not? Okay. It's Bob's wire.
00:09:35
Speaker 1: 99 days left. You have to really kind of pull finger now. I've got to pull finger. When it dawns on you in that particular manner, it can be really kind of sobering because I know that I've been putting things off. I've been putting things off. So there was some procrastination. Some of those things I can uh yeah i can i can face up to and some of the other stuff which is very difficult to get things to to go my way for a good couple of years but yeah i gotta play some catch up and i gotta do that really quickly we're gonna find out about the weather in a short while
