washyourlyrics
Like you, we have of course been following health secretary Matt Hancock’s advice for the last few weeks, and bellowing God Save The Queen at the top of our lungs in the work bathroom, a single patriotic tear rolling down our cheek.
But this deep into coronavirus panic, the appeal of the most boring national anthem in the world is starting to wane, and we’re looking to other options. Wash Your Lyrics is a new website that matches up the official looking hand-washing instruction posters that have been popping up in office bathrooms with 20 seconds worth of lyrics from whatever song you want. So now you can sanitise your digits to the strains of ‘Stayin’ Alive,’ ‘Torn’ or that Vietnamese coronavirus hit.
The Premier League banned handshakes at the start of games, but not at the end
There were some strange happenings before the Manchester derby this weekend. Instead of the usual pre-match line of handshakes, the rival squads lined up as normal, and then walked straight past each other, with a slight nod of the head. Referee Mike Dean appeared to kiss one of his assistants on the chest in lieu of a handshake. It was all part of measures to stop the potential spread of Covid-19 – although in a slightly baffling turn of events, the players still shook hands and hugged as normal at the end of the game. In Europe, the Champions League game between PSG and Borussia Dortmund will be played behind closed doors because of the threat of the virus.
Game of Thrones’ hated showrunners have a cameo in Westworld Season 3
With a few misjudged decisions in the final season, Game of Thrones show-runners David Benioff and DB Weiss went from beloved creators of a hit show to some of the most hated people on the internet. Now they’re back, and they’ll be making a cameo appearance in the upcoming series of another HBO hit – creepy robot thriller Westworld. The writers are set to make an appearance in the second episode of season three, as technicians working for the mysterious Delos corporation, which runs the android-filled theme parks of the show.
Disaster movie Contagion is shooting up the iTunes charts
Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 thriller Contagion follows the panic that ensues after a pandemic spreads across the world from China. Gwyneth Paltrow plays a businesswoman who becomes infected with a virus that has jumped from bats to pigs to humans, and carries the virus back to the United States. The movie has shot into the Top 10 of iTunes movies rental charts, and as the film isn’t on Netflix or other streaming platforms, there’s been a surge in attempts to pirate it too.
HBO is making a TV series of The Last of Us with the creator of Chernobyl
Streaming’s insatiable demand for content means that every moderately successful creative work will inevitably get adapted into a television series – Amazon’s new series Tales From The Loop is literally just based on some drawings a guy did. So of course we rolled our eyes quite hard when we heard about the HBO version of hit game The Last of Us. But it actually has the potential to be quite good – Craig Mazin, the creator of the gripping miniseries Chernobyl is working with the creative director of the game Neil Druckmann on the series, which takes place in a version of the United States that’s been hit by a parasitic fungus that turns its victims into monsters.
Amit Katwala is WIRED’s culture editor. He tweets from @amitkatwala
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