Shilpa Shetty and scandal

Funnily enough it's not the biggest Bollywood stars like Shahrukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan or Aishwarya Rai who make international headlines because of scandal. It's Shilpa Shetty - a girl who goes with her mother almost everywhere and seems to be one of the most politically correct stars in Bollywood *grin*
For those of you who have been talked into watching some Bollywood movies, you may remember Shilpa from Baazigar. Baazigar (which was made in 1993 and was her debut film) is in fact her biggest hit to date ;-P The trailer for this film is here if any of you want to see it :) (she's the first lady Shahrukh is romancing, the other leading lady as many of you will know is Kajol).

So firstly, as you may or may not know, Shilpa won the UK celebrity Big Brother not too long ago, but what happened to her in the house caused an international incident. Major British politicians such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown felt it necessary to speak up and the incident provoked a huge discussion about racism in the UK (as well as discussion about whether what happened to Shilpa was racism or just bullying). Perhaps the best way to give you more of an idea about what happened is this video (go forward to the part when she's interviewed and shown clips from what happened if you're bored with the beginning bit):

Part two of the video is here, but I imagine the first clip will be quite enough information.

But now, Shilpa has become part of another international incident. This time it involves Richard Gere, public kissing (on the cheek!) and I guess further food for thought on how different people from different cultures feel about what's appropriate and what's not (which was the topic of this post). Here's a news report on the incident:

The incident has now gone even farther with talk that Richard Gere might be sentenced to prison for "public obscenity".

Yet another new Harry Potter trailer

Warner Bros have just released another trailer. This one's for the US market I think (the other one was the international one):

The beginning bit is the same as in the international trailer, but there are changes later through the trailer, but IMO the changes are bad rather than good... I mean it's even more action packed and even more pompous :-/ Of course one wants some action, but in the end what I'm excited about are the characters...

Second Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Trailer

I've left it a bit long between posts again and as usual when I leave it long, my posts are short ;-P (incidently, I'm still much better than Ziggy who has just started updating his blog for the first time in about 18 months ;)).

Anyway, the next Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix trailer is out, wheee! :D Check it out if you want to:

There's a lot about it that I like, but I hate the music. It's such a typical high drama, high action soundtrack and I think it kills a lot of the details (if you concentrate on trying to get the soundtrack out of your head you can actually see a little bit of the political aspect that the director, David Yates, has talked about). I'm also a bit worried about how overloaded with special effects both these trailers have been. I hope the whole film will not be like this.
My favourite part of the trailer is Umbridge's laugh (in fact I just generally love the way Umbridge has been portrayed full stop ;) ).
What about your thoughts? :)

Personality Types

Unsurprisingly, psychologists have tried to work out ways of categorizing people into personality types. The most popular method as far as I know is the Myers-Briggs type indicator. This method is based on whether people are:

• Introvert or Extravert
  
• Sensing or iNtuition
  
• Thinking or Feeling
  
• Judging or Perceiving

You can read up more about these factors on wikipedia. By using them people can be divided into 16 different personality types. You can read more about the types here or here.

Because I think it's fun, here are a couple of personality tests *grin*
The one which is definitely the most fun is a Harry Potter test ;) It assigns you to a personality type, but also to a character in the Harry Potter series which belongs to that particular personality type. This might seem like a strange thing to do, but you'll find psychologists actually write entire works about personality types in literature. In fact I rather think it's probably much easier to assign a fictional character to a personality type than it is a real person.
You can check out all the possible personalities with Harry Potter characters assigned to them here.

You can also check out the Jung Typology Test and a a test which is supposed to be for computer programmers but I think you'll be able to do it anyway :) (the cool thing about these two is that they tell you how many of your answers pointed towards which traits).

The other Myers-Briggs personality test I found is the BBC one. It uses slightly different terms, but it's basically the same thing. It's "planner or spontaneous" instead of "judging or perceiving", "heads or hearts" instead of "thinking or feeling", "facts or ideas" instead of "sensing or intuition".

Finally if you want a totally different kind of test, then check out this Big Five Personality Traits Test. This is based on a different sort of idea - rather than assign people to a personality type, they are evaluated on 5 different traits:

• Openness to Experience
  
• Conscientiousness
  
• Extraversion
  
• Agreeableness
  
• Neuroticism

By the way, according to wikipedia the Myers-Briggs tests have a very low reliability rate, about 50% of people get different results upon retaking it lol
But despite that I'm rather curious what you got on those tests - maybe you could post in the comments? :)
I'm also curious if you think my results suit me ;)

On the Big 5 test I got three traits average, Extraversion low and Openness high. My exact results are here if you want to see them (though I actually think it's the least interesting of the tests ;-P).

On the Myers-Briggs tests I mostly got INTJ (which is Snape ;) ), though I also once got INFJ (Dumbledore) on the HP test and ISTJ (Hermione) on the BBC test. On both of these though when I changed some answers that I thought I could have answered in more than one way I came up as INTJ. I think the ISTJ description totally doesn't suit me though ;-P ISTJ's are supposed to be very orderly with the way they put things, excellent with time management and very systematical - which I think are not really traits that many people would associate with me ;) On the other hand a personality that I didn't get, but I think some could argue for me is INTP (Voldemort). I think I'm probably an INTJ though, which is a bit interesting in that it's apparently extremely uncommon (0.8% in the USA) amongst women ;-P

In terms of numbers this is what I got on the programmer's test:
E=4 Extraversion
I=7 Introversion
S=2 Sensing
N=18 iNtuition
T=11 Thinking
F=8 Feeling
J=16 Judging
P=3 Perceiving

And this on the Jung test:
Strength of the preferences %
89% Introverted
88% Intuitive
38% Thinking
33% Judging

On a random note, I think the part of this FAQ about INTJs in which they tell you how to deal with INTJs is hilarious ;)

Take That - the manband

Here we go, yet another post that has been in my drafts since December ;-P

For those who don't know, Take That was a British boyband that was immensely popular in the early and mid 90s (Robbie Williams was part of it until 1995) and I managed to get hooked on them when I was about 12 - I think it was March-April 1996 (they split in February 1996). As you see I had terrific timing with when I chose to get hooked (but hey - uptil I was 11-12 I thought all modern music was crap and classical was the only thing worth listening to so there really was no opportunity to get hooked before that ;-P).
Anyway, they were a pop band that was particularly famous for their live shows. And I really do believe that there is no pop band or pop singer ever that did shows which were as spectacular to watch. I think there may have been quite a few boybands that made a bigger name for themselves worldwide like The Backstreet Boys, The New Kids on the Block and perhaps even Boyzone, but none of these boybands had the dancing skills, physical fitness or frankly even sense of humour and creativity to be able to pull off shows to the standard of Take That (btw, the choreography and ideas for Take That's shows came from within the band - another aspect not typically to be found in most pop acts).
Just to demonstrate what I mean, here's one of Take That's live performances at the Wembley Arena (their first arena tour) in 1992:

Apart from very energetic dance routines they also did very cheeky TV appearances, which were another thing of theirs that I loved (hey, I think it's quite obvious from this blog that I like cheeky TV appearances ;-P). Here's one that had me laughing for a whole weekend (from Italian TV I think and this was their last single so it must have been late 1995 or early 1996 - no Robbie Williams just the four of them):


And here's the bizzarre part - 10 years later Take That have decided to make a comeback. Many doubted this would work out. Take That's whole image was built on things which seem very difficult to recreate by men aged 35-38. Many also thought that they wouldn't manage without Robbie Williams (though I hardly thought it would be an issue - they managed without him very well after he left the band in the 90s).
But it seems like everybody was wrong ;-P In fact Take That are getting more impressive results in the charts than they did the first time round! They did an amazingly successful comeback tour, which sold out in a few hours. They managed their first ever chart double (no.1 single and no.1 album in the same week). "Patience", their first single was no.1 in the charts for 4 weeks. Their new album was no.1 for five weeks and after the release of their second single, "Shine" (which was no.1 for two weeks) the album has gone back to the no.1 spot on the charts, which so far makes a total of 7 weeks (more than any other of their previous albums!). Their second tour since their reunion sold out even faster than their first. And they made the most spectacular comeback in the history of the Brit Awards - winning Best Single for Patience. You can see them getting the award in the video below (I guess I put it in mainly because I was amused by the Valentine kissing bit ;) but the whole thing is rather sweet ;) ):

It's quite an amazing story considering all that happened to them after they split up. Robbie Williams was the only member who commercially survived the break up. Gary's solo career started better than Robbie's but once it went wrong it went wrong drastically. Mark although his career never went as low as Gary's also ended up losing his record deal. He got back into the public eye after winning Celebrity Big Brother, but his solo career really couldn't be called particularly successful. Howard's solo material never even got released and he ended up doing DJ work. Jason never even tried for a solo career...
And then all of a sudden they get together again and they're even more successful than they were the first time round - it's a strange business, isn't it? ;)

Anyway, I love their new live performances as much if not more than their old ones, so I'll just fill the rest of this post with youtube videos ;-P
I think my favourite performance of theirs is what they did to "It Only Takes a Minute Girl" which was a very early single of theirs (probably about 1991 or so) and it's a veeeery primitive kind of tune which I think they rightly decided they couldn't perform the way they used to. But for you to really get the "joke" I think you need to hear the original tune first, so check out this live performance from Manchester in 1995 (I think the staging of this one is great but if you don't then trust me - the modern one is drastically different ;)):

In contrast this is what the same song looked and sounded like on the 2006 reunion tour lol:


Take That apart from managing all sorts of firsts in the charts did a different sort of "first" in a TV program in December. You can read up on the concept of the "Audience With" program here. Take That are the first ever band to do the program live. And I'm going to put a youtube video (or rather playlist) of the whole thing below. I think the opening is particularly good, but otherwise just watch whatever you like - I couldn't really make my mind up so I just decided to put the whole thing into the post ;-P If you're wondering what Jason and Lulu are talking about in clip no.3 - well the whole comeback thing actually started out because of a documentary. It rekindled a lot of interest in Take That. In that documentary it was implied that Jason and Lulu had at some point slept with each other... Anyway, here's the program :) :


Finally, for the figure skating fans - you might like to see a clip of Take That performing on Dancing on Ice with Torvill and Dean. Check it out here