The Week in Words: Chan's Chop House

Jackie Chan is opening a theme park in China. It’s free entry, although you have to get past the ninjas first. Chan will mostly use the park located in a Beijing suburb to house his personal collection of fully restored traditional Chinese sandalwood houses, some dating back 400 years. I think they should consider adding an extra layer of authenticity by giving visitors the chance to recreate some his more hair-raising stunts. Patrons could queue up for the Police Story ride, where they will be thrown onto a 30 foot pole covered in Christmas lights and told to slide down it, suffering major lacerations as a consequence. Or spend half an hour on the Project A simulation, where people get to ride around on a bicycle without a saddle. Sounds great, just bring your own bandages.

Birthday week - thanks for all your concern. Year 29 is an odd numerical nonentity; not significant enough to concern close acquaintances into an emergency Clintons purchase, or personally critical to feel the need to buy a motorcycle or find the nearest bungee jump. Mum has been understanding. “So you’re in your 30s now then?” “I’m 29.” “Oh, right… well, happy birthday love.” Anyway, birthdays remind me of that old Norman Wisdom joke. “Three things happen when you get old,” he said. “The first is your memory goes, and I can’t remember the other two.”

More science faction for you now. Researcher Nickolay Lamm has released images of what humans might look like in 100,000 years. A bit like aliens, ironically: huge eyes and big bulging foreheads. I can understand the forehead bit. Our heads have been expanding since the Middle Ages and will continue to grow to keep up with our brain capacity, writes Parmy Olson. But the reason for our bulbous eyes takes a greater conceptual leap. “Our eyes will grow to Japanese anime-style proportions… as human beings are forced to live in other colonies of the solar system and in dimmer environments farther away from the sun.” Let’s hope for a decent Specsavers when we’re up there.

I think the fact boffins believe we’ll be around in the year 102013 is encouraging, even if famine/nuclear war/global warming/Simon Cowell doesn’t ruin us before then.

There have been some sensationally negative reviews for the new Diana biopic. I haven’t seen it, but we can at least make some speculative assumptions based on the opinions of critics, who seem to be relishing the opportunity to stick the knife in. Tim Robey’s one star review in the Telegraph was brilliant. He wrote, “Oliver Hirschbiegel’s movie is a special class of awful,” but on the plus side, “it’s hysterical”. Even Chris Tookey in the Daily Mail couldn’t stomach the film's “tackiness”. “It’s directed without panache, lightness of touch or the slightest aptitude for romance,” Tookey writes.

Naomi Watts, the Australian actress given the unenviable task of playing Diana, seemed a touch sensitive about defending the film, after walking out of this awkward interview with Simon Mayo on BBC Radio last week. It sounds to me like they should have made a different film, maybe one based on the constant Diana paranoia (‘Dianoia’?) you find on the covers of the Daily Express. Like the extraordinary suggestion that an SAS “hit squad” had a hand in Diana’s death. That sounds like a Jason Bourne film, or at least a Diana film that people might watch.