Jonathan Welsh

In 1952, an English teacher named Cecil Dormand secretly paid for a dirt-poor 11-year-old to take a drama course. He never told him and the boy didn’t find out until decades later. By then, he was a knight, that little boy’s name was Patrick Stewart. He was born into a poor family in Mirfield, a small mill town in Yorkshire and his father came home from World War II a violent man, and he was violent toward Patrick’s mother. Young Patrick learned exactly when to step between his father’s fist and his mother. An English teacher put a copy of Shakespeare in his hand and told him to get up and perform. He never stopped and left school at 15. By 19 he was completely bald... most agencies told him he'd never make it because of that. In 1987, the LA Times called him an “unknown British Shakespearean actor” when he was cast as Captain Picard. Then he became one of the most famous faces on Earth. You’ve probably heard that part. Here’s the part you haven’t: He spent decades as a patron of Refuge, sheltering women and children from domestic violence. But he never stopped trying to understand his father. He dug up a 1940 newspaper clipping that said his dad had come home with severe shell shock. He went to France and walked the ground where his father’s unit was pinned down under bombing for hours. He learned his father had PTSD, and nobody ever helped him. So Patrick became an ambassador for Combat Stress, a charity that helps veterans. In 2013, a young woman at a Texas convention told him she was a survivor of domestic violence. He asked, “My dear, are you okay?” Then he hopped off the stage, held her, and told her: “You never have to go through that again, you’re safe now.” At Dragon Con, a Make-A-Wish girl dressed as Spock came to meet him. 2,000 people were waiting for him to speak... he sat down and talked with her for 15 minutes, making all of them wait. He told her that since they were friends now, whenever she saw him on screen she could wave and say, “Hello Patrick.” After 9/11, he felt helpless, so he brought his one-man A Christmas Carol back to Broadway for a full week of charity shows. He played every character himself and donated every cent. In 2019 he did it again, and every dollar went to feeding hungry New Yorkers. In 2017, he fostered a pit bull named Ginger, who had been rescued from a dogfighting ring. She was his first dog in more than 50 years. He couldn’t bring her home to England, so he found her a family. Then he kept fostering more. When he said he was done with Star Trek so many people told him the show had gotten them through the hardest times of their lives. So he wanted to see if Picard could do it one more time. Rest in Peace, Sir Patrick 🖖

A guy who used to sleep in his car in a Chicago alley, strung out on heroin, made his first movie a few blocks from that same alley. The movie was The Dark Knight, and he played the Joker's henchman, standing a few feet from Heath Ledger. He only got the part because Christopher Nolan rejected him first. Dastmalchian was doing small theater gigs around Chicago and paying rent as a telemarketer and a movie theater usher when the casting call went out. He read for one of the guys in clown masks who rob the bank in the opening scene. He was pretty sure he'd booked it. A week later he found out they'd already shot it without him. A few months after that, his phone rang with a completely different role. Thomas Schiff, the paranoid schizophrenic who hides in the police honor guard at the commissioner's funeral with the Joker. That's who you're looking at in the photo. It was the first movie set he'd ever walked onto, and on his last day of the shoot he walked past the alley where he used to sleep, five years after he got clean. The movie made a billion dollars and he still couldn't find an agent. He moved to LA with The Dark Knight on his résumé, and the small agencies and management companies he went to turned him down anyway. So he wrote about the car. Animals is about two heroin addicts living in a beat-up car by the Lincoln Park Zoo, and he cast himself as the guy he used to be. It won a special jury award at SXSW in 2014 for courage in storytelling, and his son was born about a month later. Denis Villeneuve kept hiring him, for Prisoners, Blade Runner 2049 and Dune, and one of the first things Denis asked him was what working with Nolan was like. Fifteen years after The Dark Knight, Nolan brought him back for Oppenheimer and wanted to know what working with Denis was like. Nine days ago he opened as M. Bison in Street Fighter, the main villain of a big Paramount release, playing the part Raul Julia made famous. If Nolan had said yes the first time, he'd have made his movie debut as a dead guy in a clown mask.

JUST IN: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warns AI agents could soon make unauthorized financial decisions, saying “You can't stop it.”

Tons of people who clearly don’t know how LLMs work are posting crap like this. First of all they are not programmed to any meaningful extent and second they are not guessing. Do you really think they could solve the highest level math problems if that was all they are? Wake up. These things are capable and they will grow many orders of magnitude more capable in the future.

Arsene Wenger has his funny sleeping bag coat on for the second half.