Rowan Atkinson, the guy who plays Mr. Bean, bought a McLaren F1 in 1997 for £640,000, about a million dollars then. He drove it 41,000 miles, crashed it twice, and sold it in 2015 for £8 million.
The 2011 crash near Peterborough threw the V12 engine 20 metres from the wreckage, and the £910,000 payout to rebuild it was Britain's largest single-car insurance claim at the time. Even with that, profit hit roughly £7 million. Atkinson said most of those miles were "going to Sainsbury's or doing the school run."
Atkinson is a trained engineer. He earned an electrical engineering degree from Newcastle University in 1975, then a master's in the same field from The Queen's College, Oxford in 1978. His father had studied at the same college back in 1935.
His thesis was on something called self-tuning control. In plain English, that means any system smart enough to adjust its own settings while it runs, without a person standing there tweaking dials. Aircraft autopilots work this way. Paper mills and chemical plants do too. Other engineers cited his thesis in a 1979 paper published by the Institution of Electrical Engineers.
Atkinson told The Arts Desk the thesis was "good enough for an MSc but not good enough for a DPhil," which is Oxford's name for a PhD. He had wanted the doctorate. Comedy at the Oxford Revue kept pulling him out of the lab. He left with the master's, which he called "a quite rare degree at Oxford." Decades later, in 2006, Oxford made him an Honorary Fellow of the same college he had walked away from to do Mr. Bean.
The engineering brain never switched off. For years he wrote technical car columns for Car magazine, Octane, and Evo, getting into how cars actually behave on the road with the precision of someone trained in control systems.
The meme has the master's from Oxford right. The rest of the story: a published engineering thesis other engineers cited, a PhD he was on track to finish before comedy took over, an Honorary Fellowship he picked up decades later, and one of the most complicated production cars ever built used as a daily driver for the school run.
Bruno Fernandes in the Premier League this season:
◉ Most chances created (101)
◉ Most chances created from open-play (73)
◉ Most accurate passes into the box (65)
◉ Most big chances created (24)
◉ Most big chances created in open play (19)
◉ Most assists (16)
◉= Most through balls-completed (13)
He also ranks second for final third passes completed (530), shots (73) and goals + assists (24). 👏
Let's talk about the fat.
Not the lean bit. The fat. The white seam running through a rib-eye that you've been told to cut off, trim away, render out, discard. The fat that gets removed before the nutrition label is calculated so the numbers look better. The fat that every chef from Escoffier to your nan's Sunday roast knew was the point.
That fat is oleic acid: the same fat in olive oil, which has a Mediterranean diet named after it and a documentary about it and a very successful PR campaign that has been running since approximately 1990.
That fat is stearic acid: which is neutral on LDL cholesterol, raises HDL, and is so non-threatening that even the most nervous cardiologist struggles to find fault with it.
That fat is the carrier for vitamins A, D, E, and K: the fat-soluble vitamins, which are called fat-soluble because they require fat to be absorbed, which means eating the lean version of the meat and wondering why you feel nothing is a metabolic irony of the highest order.
The fat is not the problem.
The fat was never the problem.
The fat is, in fact, quite significantly the point.
Stop cutting it off.
Neville said what many think/known deep-down, but feel scared to say because of the reaction.
The tone of Ian Wright’s question is the same as the AFC fan-reaction to my statement.
It’s like a sin to be honest about the “media darling” Rice.