Monthly Archives: July 2018

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The 2018 World Cup

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I was really glad to be able to watch the World Cup final yesterday in a cafe in Cormatin, Burgundy, with Anne, F and my sister who lives nearby.

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The clouds were threatening, and we did get sprinkled at one point.

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But the atmosphere was fantastic with local fans of all ages watching intently.

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Sometimes you make the most of what you’ve got.

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It was probably the most exciting World Cup final of my lifetime; my family, none of them particularly football fans, came along to humour me and were captivated. And for our fellow customers, the result was the right one.

Speaking of results, I can now reveal the final scores for my predictions contest:

✔ N %
36 64 56%
29 57 51%
28 50 56%
28 58 48%
27 49 55%
18 31 58%
17 32 53%
16 30 53%
15 32 47%
14 20 70%
14 25 56%
11 22 50%
8 13 62%
7 10 70%
pseudomantid 6 9 67%
5 7 71%
4 9 44%
4 10 40%
3 3 100%
3 7 43%
3 9 33%
2 3 67%
1 1 100%
1 1 100%
高円美砂子 1 1 100%
1 1 100%
1 2 50%
1 3 33%
1 4 25%
0 1 0%
0 1 0%

Congrats to , , and who all acquitted themselves well.

There were seven matches where nobody predicted the result: Iran/Morocco, Portugal/Spain, Iceland/Argentina, Brazil/Switzerland, Senegal/Poland, Saudi Arabia/Egypt and Spain/Morocco.

was the only person to predict that Switzerland would beat Serbia, pseudomantid was the only one to predict that Nigeria would beat Iceland, was the only one to predict that Iran would draw with Portugal, was the only one to predict that Switzerland would draw with Costa Rica, and was alone in predicting that Russia would beat Spain.

Thanks to all of you for participating. Livejournal is not yet dead! Though it is worth noting that when I did this in 2010, I had 281 participants rather than 31.

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Monday reading

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Current
The Æneid, by Virgil (translations by John Dryden and Robert Fagles, plus Seamus Heaney’s translation of Book VI)
Maigret Loses His Temper, by Georges Simenon

Last books finished
Doctor Who Quiz Book of Dinosaurs, by Michael Holt
Anno Mortis, by Rebecca Levene
“Slow Sculpture”, by Theodore Sturgeon
A Natural History of Dragons, by Marie Brennan
Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters
Wit, Wisdom and Timey-Wimey Stuff, by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright
An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon
The Man Within My Head, by Pico Iyer
Under the Pendulum Sun (extract), by Jeannette Ng
The Two Jasons, by Dave Stone

Next books
Up Jim River, by Michael Flynn
The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England, by Ian Mortimer

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Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth exhibition

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I grabbed the chance of a half-day during a work visit to London last week to go to Oxford and see the Tolkien exhibition in the Bodleian (strictly speaking the Weston building). It runs until the end of September, and it is free, though you would be well advised to book ahead. I am only going to hit on the highlights here; Robin Reid, who is actually a professional Tolkien scholar, has done a longer write-up for File 770.

The whole thing is one big room, with a strong emphasis on Tolkien’s art. I have read a lot about and by Tolkien over the years, but had never quite grasped how fundamental his visual imagination was to his creativity – you really need a display like this to appreciate it. He drew all the time, all his life – we have childhood drawings of his family, and doodles on the Times crosswords from his old age. Some of the illustrations were familiar to me, others less so. The exhibit that really blew my mind was Tolkien’s three carefully constructed pages from the Book of Mazarbul, which he had prepared for the original publication of The Lord of the Rings, only for the publisher to decline to use them on the (understandable) grounds of cost. I think I knew that these existed, but had no idea of how elaborate they are. Here is the third one:

‘It is grim reading,’ [Gandalf] said. ‘I fear their end was cruel. Listen! We cannot get out. We cannot get out. They have taken the Bridge and second hall. Frár and Lóni and Náli fell there. Then there are four lines smeared so that I can only read went 5 days ago. The last lines run the pool is up to the wall at Westgate. The Watcher in the Water took Óin. We cannot get out. The end comes, and then drums, drums in the deep. I wonder what that means. The last thing written is in a trailing scrawl of elf-letters: they are coming. There is nothing more.’

One other picture that I knew, but that somehow acquired new life for me when I saw the original, is the original conversation between the invisible Bilbo and Smaug. There is something very interesting in Smaug’s face and posture – he has some fox in him, as well as reptile.

There are a lot of other personal letters and documents which fill out Tolkien’s background, including the report from the sub-rector at Exeter College that he was “v. lazy” and warned that he might lose his scholarship, and then that he was “much improved”.

And there are fan letters too, including from President Johnson’s daughter, from Princess (now Queen) Margarethe of Denmark, and (this one really grabbed me) a 19-year-old Terry Pratchett.

The whole thing is great. My one niggle is that the internal layout didn’t seem very clear – each section is fine, but I didn’t understand the overall plan. Of course, with so much material, it’s nice just to see it all.

Here’s a lovely promotional video.

Highly recommended.

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Going My Way (1944)

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Going My Way was the highest earning film of 1944 in the American market; it won Best Motion Picture (the first tme that title was used for the award) and got another nine nominations and six awards, Barry Fitzgerald losing to Bing Crosby for Best Actor but winning Best Supporting Actor, Leo McCarey winning for Best Director and Best Original Motion Picture Story, Frank Butler and Frank Cavett winning for Best Writing, Screenplay and “Swinging on a Star” by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke winning Best Song. The other Best Motion Picture nominees were Double Indemnity, Gaslight, Since You Went Away and Wilson. The only one of those I have seen, oddly enough, is Wilson; the one other film from that year that I am sure I have seen is Arsenic and Old Lace, which did not get a single nomination in any Oscar category, but has definitely stood the test of time better.

Both IMDB ratings of films released that year put Arsenic and Old Lace second, after either The Conspirators or Double Indemnity, with Going My Way failing to make the top ten of either list (17th and 11th place respectively). Other films that outrank Going My Way on both lists include Laura, To Have and Have Not, Gaslight, Lifeboat, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Woman in the Window and Disney’s The Three Caballeros. Here’s a trailer from after the Oscars (which for some reason says it won eight rather than seven):

I honestly don’t think I had seen any of Bing Crosby’s films before, so this was a new one on me. Bing plays a youngish priest assigned to a New York parish to take the reins from a much older priest (played by Barry Fitzgerald, who we last saw as the boxing trainer in How Green Was My Valley). He wins the hearts of all through his musical talents, and saves the church from a rapacious mortgage owner by selling a hit song with the help of the church choir (who he has recruited from the ranks of the local delinquent teenagers) and his opera-singer ex-girlfriend. Alas, the church then burns down. And then he moves on to another parish.

It’s harmless stuff, and I guess the wartime mood was such in 1944 that this kind of feelgood escapism went down well with the public for reasons that we can understand. I didn’t find any of it awful, but I didn’t find any of it terribly memorable either. It’s pretty episodic, and you can tell in advance which way each of the episodes is going to go – apart from the destruction of the church at the end, which is a bit gratuitous.

The core is the relationship between the two lead male roles, both of whom played by actors of at least ten years’ difference in age with their characters – Bing Crosby was 41, but his ex-girlfriend from just before he became a priest is played by a 31-year-old; Barry Fitzgerald was 56, but his character has been a priest for 45 years. But they are mostly very convincing, and the chemistry develops well from suspicion to trust.

Crosby was already one of America’s favourite performers at this stage. “White Christmas” having come out several years earlier, and he does a nice warm unthreatening pastor, with a gift for music which is always used in context in the film – the songs are just songs, carrying little narrative burden.

Fitzgerald’s character actually has an arc, and the script successfully turns him from grumpy spoiler to humble patriarch.

The other performance that stood out for me was Risë Stevens as the opera singer, who does an electrifying Carmen half way through (and the following year actually did perform Carmen at the Met).

The choir actually includes one whole black kid.

I hesitated about whether to put this above or below How Green Was My Valley in my overall ranking. In the end I am putting it just below, due to its comparative lack of ambition.

Next up: The Lost Weekend, which I understand is about alcoholism.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) | Oppenheimer (2023)

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Weapons of Mass Diplomacy, by Abel Lanzac and Christophe Blain

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Second frames of the third pages of Book I and Book II (here published as a single volume):

This is a brilliant comic book about being at the sharp edge of diplomacy. Arthur Vlaminck is plucked from his almost-completed PhD to become speech-writer for the French Foreign Minister (the original title of the series is Quai d'Orsay, the location of the foreign ministry in Paris). The set-up is a very thinly disguised version of the 2002-04 period when the (barely pseudonymous) author was in fact speech-writer to the then French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin. There are a couple of characters who I think I recognise from their real-life counterparts.

The fictional Alexandre Taillard de Vorms is a monstrous figure, convinced of his own greatness (and convincing to those around him as well), and perpetually reaching for meaningless phrases from ancient Greek philosophers to buttress his jumbled but passionate rhetoric. Vlaminck must rewrite every speech at least twice in response to ministerial whim, and the rest of his life gets put on hold. My sense is that de Villepin is much less monstrous, but I have met enough people of that seniority to recognise that Taillard de Vorms is a credible amalgam of the extremes of personality who gravitate to the political top. And even putting that aside, the depiction of a group of different individuals, including both bureaucrats and political appointees, reacting to crisis after crisis (sometimes self-inflicted) is very realistic. The drumbeat of politics is leavened by references to Tolkien, Star Wars and Metallica, and the whole thing is carried off very well. I am recommending it to senior diplomatic contacts. You can get it here.

This was my top unread comic in English. Next up is The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia, by Bryan Talbot and Mary M. Talbot.

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Your Code Name is Jonah, by Edward Packard

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Second paragraph of third section (actually page 6):

“Whalesongs are probably no different from birdsongs, except they are longer,” Rueff says. “After all, whales have much bigger lungs.”

A standard choose-your-own-adventure book; there are moments where you can make a good choice or a bad choice, and moments where the capriciousness of the author pushes you down one track rather than another. Not sure why I picked it up, but you can get it here.

This was the most popular book in my unread pile that I acquired in 2013. Next on that list is Missile Gap, by Charles Stross.

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The Complete Ice Age, ed. Brian M. Fagan

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

What makes a cold planet?
To create an ice age the first thing you need is continents at the poles. Geologists have run simple climate models to demonstrate this idea, showing that if you put all the continents around the Equator – the so-called tropical ring world – the temperature gradient between the poles and the Equator is about 30°C (54°F). This is due to a trick of both the atmosphere and the oceans. The fundamental rule of climate is that hot air rises and cold air drops; this is why in the tropics the land heats up and the air rises, resulting in towering cloud formations developing as the moisture in the air cools and condenses. At the poles it is cold so the opposite happens – the air falls, pushing outwards away from the pole as it hits the ground. So although ice forms at the pole when the sea water freezes, this ice is blown away from the pole towards warmerwater where it melts. This maintains the balance and prevents the temperature of the pole falling below 0°C (32°F). If, however, there is land on the pole or even around the pole, ice can form permanently, and the Equator-pole temperature gradient is much greater – over 65°C (117°F). This is exactly what we have today in the Southern Hemisphere. In contrast, if you consider the Northern Hemisphere, the continents are not actually positioned over the pole, but surround it, so instead of a single huge ice sheet as we have on Antarctica, there is a smaller one on Greenland, and the continents act like a fence keeping all the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. The Equator-pole temperature gradient of the Northern Hemisphere, therefore, is somewhere between the extremes of an ice-locked Antarctica and a land-free pole: about 50°C (90°F).

Nicely put together and gorgeously illustrated, a set of essays about our knowledge of ice ages (at least as of 2010; things may have moved on since then). I had not realised that the current period of ice ages (since 2.6 million years ago) is actually a rather rare situation in global history; in general the Earth has had a warmer temperature than now, rising to 8°C above today’s average at about 55.5 million years ago. The book looks at how continental drift and changing ocean currents have created (and sometimes failed to create) the conditions for an ice age to happen, and also at the impact of ice ages on human prehistory, going quite deep into hominins and Neanderthals. All quite fascinating. You can get it here.

This was the shortest book on my unread pile acquired in 2010, after the Doctor Who comic The Flood which I couldn’t find. Next on that list (if I still can’t find The Flood) is Fair Trade: The Challenges of Transforming Globalization, by Laura Raynolds, Douglas Murray and John Wilkinson.

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Semi-final retrospective, part one

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Yesterday’s match occupied almost precisely the time it took me to travel from Paddington to Oxford. Clearly Belgium only lost because I was not yelling at the screen to encourage them, instead getting updates from the Guardian and the FIFA app. Ah well, next weekend we’ll be in France for Bastille Day on Saturday and then the final on Sunday.

I seem to have had a lot of Belgium sympathisers participating in the last poll. Those who correctly predicted France to win were , , , , , and .

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Robot Visions, by Isaac Asimov

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Second paragraph of third story (“Robbie”):

She craned her neck to investigate the possibilities of a clump of bushes to the right and then withdrew farther to obtain a better angle for viewing its dark recesses. The quiet was profound except for the incessant buzzing of insects and the occasional chirrup of some hardy bird, braving the midday sun.

As with the companion anthology, Robot Dreams, this included a lot of stories which I had fairly recently returned to in The Complete Robot and did not especially like; a smaller number of stories which were new to me and which I generally liked a bit more; and some lovely illustrations by Ralph McQuarry. It also ends with a number of essays on robots by Asimov, most of which are about how clever he was to have invented the Three Laws. What really struck me was how little adaptation he felt he needed to make to the changing times; Alan Turing completed his PhD in 1938, just before Asimov started publishing, and in real life artificial intelligence has followed Turing’s path and never come close to Asimov’s. Likewise, the ethical and even political dilemmas faced by Asimov’s characters seem rather pale now; I don’t see much reference, even implicit, to John Rawls (who in fairness published A Theory of Justice only in 1971, almost three decades after the Laws of Robotics). Anyway, if you want, you can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2016. Next on that pile is Welcome to Night Vale, by Joseph Fink.

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Monday reading

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Current
Anno Mortis, by Rebecca Levene
Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters

Last books finished
Weapons of Mass Diplomacy, by Abel Lanzac and Christophe Blain
Newry Bridge, or Ireland in 1887 (Anonymous)
The Bear and the Nightingale, by Katherine Arden
The Way By Swann’s, by Marcel Proust

Next books
“Slow Sculpture”, by Theodore Sturgeon
The Man Within My Head, by Pico Iyer

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Family videos

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A few months ago I discovered RTÉ’s archived news reports of Ireland’s switch to decimal currency – when the UK switched from pounds of twenty shillings and 240 pence to pounds of 100 new pence in 1972, Ireland was compelled to follow suit, as the Irish pound had always been pegged to sterling. (Scots and others please note – this was unilaterally done by the Irish with facilitation after the fact from the Bank of England.) My grandfather was the Chairman of Ireland’s Decimal Currency Board, and the RTÉ report includes what I suspect may be the only video footage of him in existence. The first thirty seconds of the news clip are soundless, but the very first shot is of my grandfather grinning at the camera while the Minister of Finance fiddles with the new money.

The report ends with a few seconds of soundbite from my grandfather, where I can recognise his twitching of his eyebrows behind his glasses as something I share.

This is me on the BBC election broadcast last year (at 0:14:44; 0:42:25; 1:22:13; 2:17:42; 2:42:45; 3:43:46; and 4:15:25); what do you think?

For comparison purposes, here is my cousin being interviewed; does he share any of our grandfather’s tics? (Incidentally our grandfather died in 1976, several years before Brian was born.)

And for further comparison, from our mothers’ generation, an interview with our aunt:

I can see some similarities between the four of us, I must admit.

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Quarterfinals retrospective part two

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A few more people called both England and Croatia to win yesterday. I was not among them. The foresighted four were , , and . I watched the first match from the airport bar in Sofia, and followed the penalty shoot-out on the bus between plane and terminal in Brussels.

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Rose de Paris, by Gilles Schlesser and Eric Puech

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Second frame of third page:


Hi Rose. I'm Christine.
I'm Sidonie. Do you know where you are staying?

A bande dessinée that I picked up in Paris a year or so ago, script by Gilles Schlesser who has written a number of non-graphic novels set in Paris and a literary guide-book to the city that has been translated into English. Young Rose comes to the city from Brittany in 1925, and ends up mixing with lots of people including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, who she briefly dates; meanwhile her other boyfriend is involved with a complex conspiracy involving his boss's involvement in the drugs trade. I didn't feel this was completely successful as a book – the sepia hue was intended to give a nice period feel to the story, but it gets rather old rather quickly, and both illustrations and plot are very busy. As one reviewer commented, Rose ends up at every remarkable event of the period while pursuing a complicated love life. You can get it here.

This was top of my unread non-English comics pile. Next I think are the final two volumes of Aliénor: La Légende Noire.

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  • Sat, 06:54: Weirdly after two days in Bulgaria, my phone is now working again and notifying me of missed calls and SMS’s. Been… https://t.co/iIo6PvyMFQ
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