One of the best British actors has lost his fight with cancer aged 69. He got a BAFTA for his Sheriff of Nottingham against Kevin Costner's Robin Hood, where acted the American off the screen. Most of you will know him as Professor Snape from the Harry Potter films, where he played a brooding dark character to perfection. My own favourite was Truly, madly Deeply, with Juliet Stevenson, which was where I first saw him and fancied him like mad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truly,_Madly,_Deeply

This film by all accounts is very good, with Eddie Redmayne doing us all proud as he plays Lili Elbe in the film of the best selling book. Hopefully, it will help the general public to understand those of us who were wrongly gendered at birth. However, no matter how good it is, I won't be going to see it.

It's too close to home, too painful for me to even glance at. The trailers make me want to wince, not because it's so awful but because it reflects too clearly part of me, or how I used to be. I just cannot watch it.

I wrote Trish's rap quite spontaneously then had to try and organise some rhythm to it. It's not a medium I enjoy as few of the exponents of it don't possess clear diction and it tends to sound like a series of rhythmic groans. However, I can accept like all presentation forms, it isn't easy to get it to balance in meter and rhyme. I doubt I shall try it again, which might please some of my regular readers, but felt the inclusion of it given the abilities of the character involved was a distinct possibility. However, she is much cleverer than the poor old dear who reports on them.

Mya Taylor, star of the iPhone shot movie Tangerine is being promoted as a potential Oscar nominee.

http://www.theguardian.com/global/2015/dec/21/mya-taylor-tra...

2015 certainly seems to have been the year of the 'Trans Celebrity'. Ironic, seeing as most of us would rather fade into the background.

I got a bit distracted playing with my new BlackBerry playbook (second hand variety) my fingers didn't always do what I wanted them to do, or so it thought. Even so it has a bigger brain than I do, and certainly a bigger memory

From the Guardian, some have happier stories to tell than others.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/dec/15/...

There is no cure for stupidity, how do these people manage to reach maturity?

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/us-town-rejects-solar-pa...

It reminds me of the woman who wrote to a paper complaining that switching to daylight saving was shortening her life or another who refused to wear her glasses in case it wore the lenses out.