The big family event of June 2006 was my great-aunt’s 90th birthday. Here she is with her four children (the four on the left, with her sister-in-law) and her eight nieces and nephews, including my mother (whose face is unfortunately obscured). Three of the people in the picture are sadly no longer with us, but my great-aunt is still going strong and expects to turn 104 next month. (Picture taken by my sister.)
Two of the pictures from my own camera show the guest of honour and the youngest guest, young F, and me with my siblings.
The other family birthday that month was B’s ninth. The big present was a crocodile-shaped water sprinkler, which all three children hugely enjoyed.
Here is a rare video (well, compilation of several short videos) of the three kids together, B just 9, F about to turn 7 and U at 3½:
Apart from that, I see I went to the Tun on 1 June so must have been in London, was in Thessalonica for a meeting with the SEERC later in the month, attended a Wilton Park conference, and seem to have ended the month with a visit to Paris. At work we published a report on the Preševo Valley of Southern Serbia. My Greek intern K was replaced by Macedonian E. (They both now work for the European Commission.) And I wrote what turned out to be the last of my mega-meta-reviews of that year’s Hugo finalists. (It wasn’t possible the following year, for reasons which will become clear, and by 2008 other channels had taken over.) This was also the month that I started really getting into the Big Finish Doctor Who audios.
4,700 pages (YTD 23,300)
3/16 by women (YTD 11/73)
none by PoC (YTD 3/73)
The two really good ones here are Zoran Živković's collection of short stories, which you can get here, and Emma Crewe's anthropological stody of the House of Lords, which you can get here. I found The Triumph of the West pretty pointless, but you can get it here.
Sun, 12:56: ‘The past six weeks have been unlike anything I’ve known’: a GP on how the pandemic has changed his work… https://t.co/c5GGfm6CEv
Sun, 13:37: RT @nwbrux: Everyone, ignore the Mail on Sunday. I know it makes you angry. But channel your energy into something better. All you are doin…
Sun, 14:48: RT @kleine_m: This is messed up BBC. Germany makes defiling of foreign flags punishable (after an Israeli flag was burned), and this is the…
Sun, 20:06: RT @jamesmoran: Karen Gillan’s first appearance in Who! I had NO idea she’d come back later as Amy, and NO idea Peter Capaldi would come ba…
Sun, 20:07: Alas, @BSFA awards are delayed until probably after my bedtime. So on the bright side I’m doing the Doctor rewatch… https://t.co/cwFmXGyfoH
Sun, 20:08: RT @jamesmoran: Had a weird out of body moment when I visited the studio. Standing in the villa, full 360 set, talking to David about how n…
Sun, 20:09: RT @jamesmoran: One of my favourite stories is “City of Death”, so there’s a deliberate reference to that – Caecilius buys the TARDIS, thin…
Sun, 20:09: RT @Emily_Rosina: My housemate is very confused to see Peter Capaldi in this episode… “I thought this was a David Tennant one. What’s he…
Sun, 20:19: RT @jamesmoran: When Russell’s rewrite came back, it had all this “returning” and “something on your back” serial stuff for later in the se…
Sun, 20:19: RT @jamesmoran: You can thank Russell for the Welsh gags and the water pistol too – even though when he rewrites, he copies your style, it’…
Sun, 20:20: RT @jamesmoran: The biggest challenge was, what can the Doctor do? He can’t stop the eruption, it really happened. So you spin it around -…
Sun, 20:22: RT @difficultstage: Now, according to The Writer’s Tale that toga I have on was the subject of many a meeting…unbeknownst to me! #VOLCANO…
Sun, 20:25: RT @jamesmoran: I was on set for this big scene where the Pyrovile comes out of the vent (CGI creature not present at the time…) The vill…
Sun, 20:27: RT @MegReeves93: Donna had some of the best one liners, honestly. “You may have eyes on the back of your hands, but you’ll have eyes on th…
Sun, 20:29: RT @thirtccnthdocto: I freaked out when the curtain showed who was behind it. I also freaked out when the creature began to speak. But I wa…
Sun, 20:32: Donna Noble: But I’m history, too. You saved me in 2008, saved all of us. Why is that different? The Doctor: Some t… https://t.co/alI9rp9wfR
Sun, 20:33: RT @MaxKowarth: #VolcanoDay the ultimate ethos of the revival. The Doctor needs companions to tell him the truth (not just to get in troubl…
Sun, 20:34: RT @jamesmoran: It’s true, they didn’t have a word for “volcano” – they had no idea what was happening. The earthquake that Caecilius menti…
Sun, 20:35: RT @jamesmoran: “The most terrible choice…” I’m basically stealing from Genesis of the Daleks, one of my favourite stories. Forcing him t…
Sun, 20:35: RT @jamesmoran: I’d seen concept sketches of the creatures, but nothing more until the finished ep- I watched it on a tiny screen in a cupb…
Sun, 20:37: RT @jamesmoran: The lever bit always makes me cry, even now, as does Donna’s pleading later. Quite late at outline stage, I added in that D…
Sun, 20:39: RT @jamesmoran: The Doctor says 20,000 people died – we can’t be sure exactly how many, but 20,000 people did live there, and it’s thought…
Sun, 20:42: RT @jamesmoran: When Donna is shouting “don’t go to the beach, go to the hills” she’s trying to save lives – many people thought they’d be…
Sun, 20:44: RT @TraceyChilds50: #VOLCANODAY I NEVER actually went inside our modern artwork, the TARDIS. I managed to avoid stepping through those icon…
Mon, 07:30: RT @BSFA: Winner of The BSFA Award for Best Shorter Fiction: Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone – This is How You Lose the Time War (Jo Fletch…
Mon, 07:30: RT @BSFA: Winner of the BSFA Award for Best Non-Fiction: Farah Mendlesohn – The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein (Unbound)
Mon, 07:31: RT @BSFA: Winner of the BSFA Award for Best Artwork: Chris Baker (Fangorn) – Cover for ‘Wourism and Other Stories’ by Ian Whates (Luna Pre…
Mon, 07:31: RT @BSFA: Winner of the BSFA Award for Best Novel: Adrian Tchaikovsky – Children of Ruin (Tor)
Mon, 08:40: RT @alexstubb: My short read. Process: 1. Crisis. 2. Chaos. 3. Sub-optimal solution. Players: 1. Commission. 2. Member states. 3. Europ…
The Godfather won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1972, and picked up another two – Best Actor, which was declined by Marlon Brando in protest at the treatment of Native Americans at Wounded Knee (and elsewhere); and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. James Caan, Robert Duvall and Al Pacino were all nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but lost to Joel Grey as the MC in Cabaret. There were three other categories where The Godfather lost to Cabaret, which still holds the record for the most Oscars for any film that did not also win Best Picture.
The other Best Picture nominees were Cabaret, Deliverance, The Emigrants and SounderCabaret is the only other of the nominees that I’ve seen. 1972 is not a good year for my cinematic education; I am pretty sure that the only other two films I’ve seen from that year are Slaughterhouse-Five (which I’ll get to next, as it won the Hugo) and the very odd Lee Marvin/Sissy Spacek film Prime Cut. I’d rate The Godfather as the best of them, though Cabaret is also very good. IMDB users also rank it top film of 1972 on bothrankings.
Here’s a trailer.
We are in the middle of a crime wave at the Oscars at the moment, having just had The French Connection, Midnight Cowboy, Oliver! and arguably A Man for All Seasons, with The Sting and The Godfather II coming next. It’s the story of Vito Corleone, boss of a massive organised crime network, and his son Michael who eventually takes over the family business. There is an awful lot of graphic violence. It’s another story about white men. But it’s really well told – I am struck by just how different I found it to Patton, made by the same director only two years before – and I’m putting it in the top third of my list, just below Oliver! but ahead of Ben-Hur. I had seen it once before, but I enjoyed the return visit.
The major returning actor from a previous Oscar winner is Brando himself, who also won Best Actor eighteen years ago for the lead role in On the Waterfront. Here he is iconically and convincgly made up to look like a Mafia grandfather and godfather. (The actors playing his sons are between six and sixteen years younger than him.)
Another returnee from On the Waterfront is Rudy Bond, who is Cuneo here (one of the other Mafia dons), and played Moose (one of the longshoremen) in the earlier film.
Sonny Grosso, whose story was the basis for last year’s The French Connection and also appeared in it, plays to type again and is a briefly seen New York cop, but not seen clearly enough for me to put a picture here. And we have an actor from a Hugo-winning film, Sterling Hayden who is Captain McCluskey here and was General Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove.
There are also a fair number of actors here who we will see again in future Oscar-winning films – not least (but not only) because the sequel comes up in two years’ time.
This is yet another film about white men, as was Patton. I was feeling ill the day I watched it, so I did not keep track as closely as usual, but I don’t think that there were many visible non-white faces and I don’t think there were any non-white speaking parts. To an extent the Italians and Jews, and even perhaps the Irish, are to be understood as non-Anglo-Saxons, but it’s not quite the same thing. Going back for another look, I did spot the stable hand who shows off the unfortunate Sultan.
The women are entirely present in terms of their relations with the men – the film obviously passes Bechdel One, in that there is more than one named female character, but I am not sure that it hits Bechdel Two (do any of them have an audible conversation with each other?) and definitely not Bechdel Three (the conversation is not about a man). Having said that, Michael’s two wives are both pretty memorable. Simonetta Stefanelli absolutely glows in her few scenes as Apollonia, and Diane Keaton’s Kay is sort of an Anglo-Saxon viewpoint character (we will of course see her again soon).
And yet, it’s a really well put together film. The plot is complex, with a lot of characters running around shooting each other, mostly in New York but also farther west and in Italy, but I found no difficulty whatsoever in keeping track of it all. The script is lucid and the cinematography adds to the story without distracting from it. “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” is an unforgettable line (used in several variations). The acting nominations were all well deserved – Brando as the title charcter, Al Pacino and James Caan as his sons Michael and Sonny, and Robert Duvall as the conigliere Tom Hagen. Brando in particular carries his character’s extra years effortlessly.
And the music is just tremendous. Here’s a vid with the orchestral suite (including most of the good bits) set to some of the Sicilian scenes from the film:
Despite its flaws, I think this is a better film than Cabaret – the characters have more depth, there is more going on and the story is told better – and it deserved the Oscar that year. You can get it here.
Next up: The Sting.
I had also read the book long ago, and went back to it for comparative purposes. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
It was a short ride, not more than twenty minutes and when they got out of the car Hagen could not recognize the neighborhood because darkness had fallen. They led him into a basement apartment and made him sit on a straight-backed kitchen chair. Sollozzo sat across the kitchen table from him. His dark face had a peculiarly vulturine look.
The book is a cracking good read. The film sticks pretty closely to the parts of the original story that it wants to tell, but there are two significant (and enjoyable) sections that are not in the film – the adventures of Johnny Fontane in Hollywood, and the back story of Vito Corleone in Sicily and his early years in New York (though I think the latter thread informs the Robert de Niro sections of the sequel film). The book has space to go a bit deeper into the political economy of organised crime, in particular the role played (or not) by the police. It’s also a bit better on the women characters (though this is not saying a lot), and has much more explicit sex than I remembered from reading it as a teenager. I can’t pretend that it’s a very deep read, but it’s a very interesting juxtaposition with last year’s The French Connection which also looked at organised crime in New York, from a rather different perspective. You can get it here.
Sat, 12:56: RT @QUBelfast: Conflict & Change: A Conversation with Rory Montgomery & Jonathan Powell Join Prof Richard English as he leads the conversa…
Well, we are partially back in the office. We have a strict rota – open Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; nobody does more than two days in a week; ten to twelve people each day (of a total strength of 49); only those who have actually asked to return have returned. We have proved we can work from home if we have to, the numbers are robust, but I was one of those who felt the need to recolonise our working space for general mental wellbeing.
I must say I found it very helpful to hang out with colleagues in real life rather than virtually. I am senior enough to have my own room to work from, but some of my equipment is at home and difficult to move safely, so I co-opted another desk in the open seating area and actually rather enjoyed myself. None of the people who I work with particularly closely had opted to come in this week, but that meant that I was able to get to know a couple of other colleagues a little better, including one chap who had only started as the lockdown was coming in.
We still have not been able to see our own daughters. Visits are now permitted, but under conditions that are basically unworkable (no touching, maintain 1.5 metre distance). Still, the trends are in the right direction. Today's numbers are again encouraging – 1750 in hospital, 364 in intensive care, 57 new fatalities, which are about half way between the corresponding numbers for 23 March (1883/385/78) but still some way above 22 March (1646/322/41), when the initial curve was particularly steep.
I am still in the fortunate position that anyone I know at all well who has had the COVID-19 virus has recovered or seems to be recovering. But there has been a grim toll in some people's families. One friend told me how she went straight from an international conference of health specialists in Brussels in early March to visit her mother in the UK. They both went down with the virus (which my friend reckons she caught at the conference). My friend got better; her mother did not. She's not the only person I know who has lost a close relative, but it's a particularly dreadful case.
Which brings me to today's real significance for me; it is the thirtieth anniversary of my father's death, aged 62, from a heart attack sustained while changing planes in John F. Kennedy Airport. He lingered for a few days but did not regain consciousness. At the age of 20 he had had the awful experience of seeing his own father, then aged 67, drop dead stading beside him in church. My other grandfather also died of a suddent heart attack in his sixties, and I need not spell out the conclusions that I have drawn for myself.
Whe he died, my father had just put the finishing touches to his last book, Interpreting Northern Ireland, in which he analysed the pros and cons of various ideological and methodological ways of examining the Nothern Ireland. He quipped that "It is quite possible that, in proportion to size, Northern Ireland is the most heavily researched area on earth." His first book, Church and State in Modern Ireland, set the agenda for the analysis of mid-twentieth-century Irish politics for a generation, and is still taken as a baseline for today's researchers even if they don't always agree with it.
He was not only an analyst. In a June 1971 pamphlet on The Reform of Stormont, written for the New Ulster Movement, he proposed five key reforms: proportional representation for elections, stronger parliamentary committees, more members of the Stormont Parliament, a reformed Northern Ireland Senate and proportional representation of the political parties in government. Four of these became hardwired into the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973 and later the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The Northern Ireland Senate was abolished rather than being reformed, though the suggestions survive in spirit in the Civic Forum/Civic Advisory Panel. As far as I know, my father was the first to advocate most of these ideas in the Northern Ireland context (apart from proportional elections, a discussion which is older than Partition), and I think he deserves more credit than he has received for originating them.
He would have been encouraged, frustrated and fascinated by the way the world has changed in the last thirty years. He would also have loved being a father-in-law and grandfather, and of course that is where we miss him the most. He packed a lot of love and guidance into the 23 years that I knew him, and I wish there had been more of those years.
A spectacle, certainly, and as an early palace of industry clearly worthy of the guidebooks (themselves novelties). By any stretch of the imagination, though, the Manufacture des Tabacs was an odd place to look for someone who would become the most celebrated mathematical astronomer of his day—but not everyone follows a straight course to the person they might become. Thus it was that in 1833 a young man, freshly minted as a graduate of the celebrated École polytechnique, could be found every working day at the Quai d'Orsay, reporting for duty at the research arm of the factory, France's École des Tabacs.
A nice little study of two very different parts of astronomical history: first, the mid-nineteenth century quest for the planet Vulcan, and then the story of Einstein's conceptualisation of General Relativity and the practical test during the eclipse of 1919, which confirmed it. I had touched on this issue during my MPhil research on Sir Robert Ball, so it was a nice return to a previous topic. Levenson gets very much into the context of the two different situation, particularly vivid on Le Verrier in Paris in the 1830s and Einstein's early career. I felt he didn't quite bridge the two – I'd have liked a bit more on the noted astronomer James Craig Watson who actually claimed to have seen Vulcan during the solar eclipse of 1878, and the book ends up being very firmly two different stories with a common topic of interest but which are otherwise not that closely related. But both stories are interesting. You can get it here.
Thu, 16:40: RT @cybertechaccord: Products that are connected to a network are called the “internet of things” or “IoT” and they are here to stay. Hacke…
Thu, 17:11: EU diplomats face the enemy within https://t.co/s3gDYLcF4X Vimont speaks out – fascinating if you have been following the EEAS’s troubles.
Thu, 18:45: RT @DougSaunders: In France, it’s currently possible for a woman simultaneously to be fined €165 for being in public with a face covering a…
Thu, 20:48: How plagues change the world https://t.co/6YcXS6Ta47 A historical perspective: what were the effects of the 14th-century Black Death?
Thu, 21:51: RT @bbcdoctorwho: Father’s Day aka the day that Rose tore a hole in the fabric of the universe is 15 years old today! #DoctorWho https://t.…
Fri, 09:19: “If the 21st century turns out to be an Asian century as the 20th was an American one, the pandemic may well be rem… https://t.co/AQJxYwwfN9
Fri, 10:45: RT @MatthewOToole2: Remarkable thing I’ve discovered: NI is spending millions subsidising long haul air travel despite not having a single…
Current The Complete Secret Army: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Classic TV Drama Series by Andy Priestner The Accident, by Ismail Kadarë Roger of Hereford’s Judicial Astrology: England’s First Astrology Book?, by Chris Mitchell Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime 1: Breaking the Strain, by Paul Preuss Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
Last books finished A Sacred Cause: The Inter-Congolese Dialogue 2000-2003, by P. E. Winter The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman Black Wine, by Candas Jane Dorsey The Godfather, by Mario Puzo
Next books The Nightmare Stacks, by Charles Stross The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obreht
Wed, 23:19: RT @Hugo_Book_Club: In 1964, #Zelazny was the 2nd-youngest to have written a Hugo-shortlisted work. He was 27 years, 4 months when he was o…
Thu, 10:45: RT @Donal_OKeeffe: I understand that Gemma O’Doherty and John Waters will, for the first time in their lives, be appealing. https://t.co/nO…
The third entry in this compilation of comic strips, in full (by Tony Millionaire, whose work I don't otherwise know and frankly this doesn't encourage me to seek it out):
About a year and a half ago I went both to the permanent exhibiton of the Charles M Schulz museum in California, and to a temporary exhibition of his work in London. I bought this while I was in Santa Rosa; it's a collection of pieces paying tribute to Schulz's work, some of them very personal – one or two of the artists were lucky enough to meet or know Schulz himself, and most of them have some thoughtful things to say about the Peanuts strip, which was pretty progressive for its time. To call attention to a couple of them, Jeremy Sorese has an interesting meditation on where the adults are in the Peanuts universe; Liz Prince explores the Peppermint Patty/Marcia relationship; and Hilary Price recalls a magical afternoon in Santa Rosa. It's a lovely book (apart as noted above from the Tony Millionaire contribution, which really misses the mark) and you can get it here.
This was my top unread comic in English. Next on that list is a Doctor Who comic, Gaze of the Medusa, by Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby and Brian Williamson.
Tue, 12:56: RT @jackiantonovich: Sarah Michelle Gellar wearing her Prophecy Girl dress from the season 1 finale of Buffy is the quarantine gift we all…
Tue, 19:09: Here’s the Quartier Leopold, ie the EU quarter of Brussels, filmed in 1978, pretending to be the 1943 setting of UK… https://t.co/mQuF8oY3OW
A month when I visited Berlin and London for work, and I have a note that I was in Bath too, but am really not sure why. (Anne's birthday fell in the middle of my Berlin trip, so we must have celebrated at the weekend.) I also got a really weird phone call from someone who felt it really important to tell me that "je suis" is "Jesus" with "I" in the middle. At work, I took some time off Crisis Group to do a chunky bit of consulting for my future employers Independent Diplomat. I also applied for a job with the European Commission, but it was one of those cases where they were really formalising someone's existing job and the advertisement was not serious.
As the fine weather came in, U and F dressed up, and B climbed a tree.
The big geopolitical news was Montenegro voting for independence, and its subsequent peaceful separation from Serbia. I still feel rather proud that I helped make the argument for Montenegro as an independent state to EU policymakers long before it became fashionable.
This was also the month that I had my infamous exhange with John Scalzi over his novel Old Man’s War (see here, here, here and here). We are friends now (picture from last year’s Hugo ceremony).
3,300 pages (YTD 18,600)
1/15 by a woman (YTD 8/57)
1/15 by PoC (YTD 3/57)
Links above to my reviews, below to Amazon.
Lots of good books here, but the two I enjoyed most were both non-fiction, Moondust, about the Apollo astronoauts, which you can get here, and Echoes from the Dead Zone, a Cypriot anthropologist's take on his island's problems, which you can get here. On the other hand, two of these books were so awful that, unusually, I could not finish them, Ivanhoe being slightly the worse of the two. You can get it here, if you want.
Mon, 13:14: RT @StephenFarryMP: I can confirm that I have also received advice from PSNI regarding a loyalist threat. Solidarity with @patsymcglone @St…
Mon, 22:37: RT @MSmithsonPB: My nomination for the fool of the day. Surely an MP would know that opposition leaders have been making responses to PM br…
Tue, 08:00: RT @youngvulgarian: sorry if this is a ragingly basic point to make but what’s been so frustrating about the past two days is that one of t…
Tue, 10:45: The South’s restaurant reopening is going slowly, according to OpenTable data. https://t.co/xreh0FmMBM A report from the US.
And what a squealing, tempestuous, fuss-making child she was. The quivering pink tongue and toothless gums in July's shrieking mouth were more familiar to her mama than her baby's arms and feet. With such agitation coming hourly from this newly born creature, Kitty did believe that this pickney must have been ripped from some more charmed existence. That she howled for the injustice that found her now a slave in an airless hut, in a crib too small, and being mothered by an ugly-skinned black woman who did not have the faintest notion as to why her pickney did yell so.
Another historical novel by Andrea Levy following on from Small Island, this time looking at colonial Jamaica at the time of rebellion and the abolition of slavery. I confess my more or less complete ignorance of Caribbean history, and while I have read a fair amount about the implementation and abolition of slavery in the United States, I don't think I've read anything about the history of the British colonies. In the wake of a bloody rebellion in 1831, the British smugly abolished slavery in the Empire with effect from 1834; but those facts and dates don't give any expression to the brutality of the institution or to the desperate society that emerged from the reform. Levy's story concentrates on women, her central character adopted by her master's sister as a pet and thus well-placed to observe the damage the system did to the white owners as well as the slaves. It's largely told in semi-patois but very readable. Like Small Island, it didn't blow me away, but I felt I learned a lot from it. You can get it here.
This was my top unread novel by a non-white writer. Next on that list is Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter.
Sun, 20:18: RT @mrpeterharness: This opening sequence was one of the last things written. When we had some idea of what was going to happen. #TruthOrCo…
Sun, 20:19: RT @mrpeterharness: 1/3 I don’t know if Steven had always had this story in mind, but its was clear that he felt there was unfinished Zygon…
Sun, 20:19: RT @mrpeterharness: 2/3 – …the other about a sleeping sickness. But Steven kept teasing me that he was going to pitch a story with an excit…
Sun, 20:19: RT @mrpeterharness: 3/3 But at the “Deep Breath” premiere, he dragged me into a dark room full of stacked chairs, and said “Global thriller…
Sun, 20:23: RT @LoTCosplay: “Are you phoning me with your backside again” means that Kate has totally butt-dialed the Doctor before and man I wanna kno…
Sun, 20:33: RT @cliffchapman: It’s weird watching this post-Brexit. So much has changed for the worse since then, but it was a pretty direct asylum sto…
Sun, 20:33: RT @mrpeterharness: A UNIT gag that never made it in: THE DOCTOR: Do you have a partner? Boyfriend, or -? OSGOOD: (shakes head) You kind…
Sun, 20:36: I wonder if Turmezistan is in the OSCE? Probably not NATO, but Partnership for Peace… And Shanghai? #TruthOrConsequences
Sun, 20:38: RT @Emily_Rosina: Haha love a bit of tumbleweed! Does it actually exist anywhere other than in opening shots of a new scene? #TruthOrCons…
Sun, 20:40: RT @ingridoliver100: I found it really interesting that all of the people thirsty for war in this episode were women. Felt different. #Tr…
Sun, 20:44: RT @mrpeterharness: But in a deleted scene straight after this, Colonel Walsh blasted a Zygon who looked exactly like her son. Bit bleak. H…
Sun, 20:46: RT @mrpeterharness: You may have noticed that Colonel Walsh began life as… BRIGADIER BAMBERA! Yes, “Battlefield” fans, that’s right! #Truth…
Sun, 20:48: RT @Sci_Phile: The controlled burning of pollen made by the Fire Brigade of Castilla y León County at the park of Cidacos, in Calahorra, La…
Sun, 20:51: RT @mrpeterharness: “Everything’s just going nuts” – bit of far-sightedness from Jac there. Jaye Griffiths is wonderful. The feeling of exi…
Sun, 20:53: RT @ingridoliver100: “Makes one wonder what the question is?” I always giggled at that line because it felt a bit saucy in relation to talk…
Sun, 20:56: RT @mrpeterharness: I love this moment, even if half of you had guessed. Jenna is utterly chilling. She’s a really good baddie, isn’t she?…
Sun, 21:18: RT @mrpeterharness: Steven was always keen that two-parters do something different in the second part. Although Zygons is a bit more tradit…
Sun, 21:20: I have to say, I think the Capaldi-era opening titles are the best in New Who. (Nothing beats the 1970s Time Vortex.) #TruthOrConsequences
Sun, 21:23: RT @mrpeterharness: One thing I loved about Hinchcliffe Who is all the “body horror” – wanted to get a bit of that here. Lovely blobby good…
Sun, 21:25: RT @mrpeterharness: Early drafts featured The Doctor and Osgood climbing the cliffs and finding a church service in progress where the vica…
Sun, 21:29: RT @mrpeterharness: 1/2 Why is Bonnie called Bonnie? Well, her boyfriend Zygon was called Clyde. So she christened herself that as a joke.…
Sun, 21:35: RT @mrpeterharness: The lie-detector test really makes this scene incredibly tense. I know the big speech gets a lot of notice, but I do th…
Sun, 21:41: RT @mrpeterharness: Bleak, sad little scene. But brilliantly done by all concerned, behind and in front of the camera. All praise to Nick A…
Sun, 21:48: You just want cruelty to beget cruelty. You’re not superior to people who were cruel to you. You’re just a whole bu… https://t.co/JnLubpyi7H
Sun, 21:49: When you’ve killed all the bad guys; and when it’s all perfect and just and fair; and when you have finally got it… https://t.co/JsmvWdtUlS
Sun, 21:51: The Doctor: Do you know what thinking is? It’s just a fancy word for changing your mind. Bonnie: I will not change… https://t.co/PfOJPPiOXq
Sun, 21:53: RT @mrpeterharness: I was terrified that such a long monologue would alienate people – terrified about how people would take it . That kind…
Sun, 21:54: RT @mrpeterharness: The American Ambassador was on a set visit for this. Apparently, he applauded after Peter had finished. This kind of th…
Sun, 22:05: That was brilliant, thank you! I remembered enjoying this a lot first time round, but had forgotten just how good… https://t.co/aVsDtthQTx
Mon, 08:22: RT @edwardlucas: My father, the Oxford philosopher JR Lucas, was not just a renowned academic, but an inspirational and indefatigable campa…
Mon, 10:15: RT @Emily_Rosina: We’re in Pompeii. And it’s #VOLCANODAY Join in with a tweetalong of The Fires of Pompeii! Featuring live tweets from w…
One of the less well-remembered episodes at the end of the second world war was the capture of the Italian city of Trieste by the 2nd New Zealand Division when the German garrison surrendered to them in preference to the 8th Dalmatian Shock Corps of the Yugoslav Partisans. The two armies uneasily held the city jointly for a few weeks until the Yugoslavs backed off to the line which still in part forms the international frontier between Italy and Slovenia. Until 1954 it was run as an independent UN protectorate, and then split, the city and a narrow coastal strip going to Italy and most of the hinterland going to Yugoslavia (subsequently split more or less evenly between Slovenia and Croatia).
I found this picture of New Zealand troops relaxing in the streets from 75 years ago, and wondered how easy it would be to track down the exact spot where the picture was taken.
The answer was, very easy indeed; I don’t think it took me fifteen minutes to cruise Google Maps along the shoreline and find the precise point on the Riva Grumula where the camera would have been in 1945.
Myself, I have only ever driven past Trieste and never actually visited; must do that some time.
Two new-ish Who comics that I picked up on one of my London trips last year – I have now read almost every Doctor Who novel (there are a couple of recent releases I haven't caught up with yet) but I am much further behind in the world of Who comics, especially Titan who keep pumping them out.
Heralds of Destruction, by Paul Cornell and Christopher Jones
Second frame of third chapter:
This is a Third Doctor story, firmly set in UNIT between The Three Doctors and The Green Death, with beautiful attention to character and detail both in writing and art. The setting is a small English village, with the Master as part of the apparatus of an alien invasion; but then there's the really unexpected reappearance of a face from the past of Doctor Who, which really cranks up the storytelling a gear. (There's also time-slippage to Westminster in 1868.) The character of Jo is quite substantially redeemed here, and we're given more substantial grounds for Mike Yates' imminent change of allegiance than we got on screen. It's the Third Doctor era as informed not only by the show as broadcast but by the sympathetic (and sometimes superior) novelisations of the late great Terrance Dicks. Loved it. You can get it here,
World Without End, by John Barrowman, Carole Barrowman, Antonio Fuso and Pasquale Qualano
Second frame of third chapter:
Unfortunately I haven't read the Torchwood novel Exodus Code, which I think this is a loose sequel to; lots of fun stuff happens, including Captain John Hart (as portrayed by James "Spike" Marsters) taking over the original Victorian-era Torchwood estate, and some gorgeous art with some nice nods to the show (and one or two nods to Doctor Who). But it's only the first part of an ongoing narrative, and who knows when I'll get another chance to visit Forbidden Planet… You can get it here.
Sat, 12:56: RT @BBCRosAtkins: THREAD (on a clock panel no less). In the last few weeks, I’ve been broadcasting from home and lots of you have asked abo…
Sat, 14:59: RT @Mico_Vlahovic: I served as ambassador to US during the term of pres. George W. Bush & for the first two years of pres. Barack Obama. Im…
Sat, 19:00: RT @bbcdoctorwho: 50 years ago today, the Third Doctor travelled to a very different universe, and faced the fearsome Primords, in ‘Inferno…
Sat, 20:36: RT @LSC_Malta: Malta’s spending on aid to businesses and companies affected by the pandemic amounts to around 22% of GDP. This is the most…
As I go through the Oscars, I decided that before turning to The Godfather I'd look at the other big winner of 1972, Cabaret – which still holds the record as the film to have won most Oscars without winning Best Picture (8; followed by Gravity with 7 in 2013). I had seen a stage production in the Arts Theatre, Belfast, in 1992, directed by the late Peter Quigley who also starred as the MC (with Richard Croxford as the male lead), and a lot more recently I read the books on which it is loosely based. And of course I was familiar with a lot of the music. Here's a trailer:
I'm a huge Berlin nerd anyway and love the portrayal of the doomed diverse and decadent culture of 1930 – closer in time to 1972 than 1972 is to the present day, the self-confident world of the nightclub contrasting with the uncertain navigation of three young people orbiting each other in overlapping love affairs. Isherwood himself (along with W.H. Auden and Jean Ross, the model for Sally Bowles) criticised the film for underplaying his own homosexuality and also for minimising the crushing poverty of Berlin at the time. Even without those details, it's compelling enough, particularly for the performance of Liza Minelli, aged 26 but playing younger, an impressive combination of confidence and vulnerability.
The killer moment in the film, however, doesn't have her in it at all – she is supposedly asleep in the car when her two chaps take a break from a drive in the country and stop in at a rural beer-hall. It's particularly impressive in that we think going into the scene that it's going to be a moment of romantic exposition between Michael York and Helmut Griem as Brian and Max, and then turns into something completely different, Fascism smashing apart the details of intimacy. It is the only song not performed in the Kit-Kat Club, and it sends shivers down my spine every time. I am always particularly grabbed by the little girl with pigtails singing her heart out, and the old man who wants nothing to do with it.
I had not seen the film in full before, and I must admit it's not as good a film overall as The Godfather (which I will watch next), but it has a lot of other merits and duly won Oscars for Best Director (Bob Fosse), Best Actress (Liza Minnelli), Best Supporting Actor (Joel Grey as the MC), Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Score Adaptation and Original Song Score and Best Sound. I note that the stage show's subplot of the older Jewish guy falling in love with the non-Jewish landlady was replaced by a younger Jewish woman falling in love with a secretly Jewish chap, which I think works better. (Though I'd have loved to have seen Lotte Lenya as the landlady in the original Broadway version.)
No crossover either with previous Oscar/Hugo winners or with Doctor Who, though Michael York has good sci-fi credentials as the title character of Logan's Run (and was also a guest star in Babylon 5).
And so, on the The Godfather. (And Slaughterhouse-Five, which won the Hugo that year.)
Fri, 12:22: RT @APCOBXLInsider: In need of some #lockdown TV recommendations? We polled the office for their favourite TV series to binge during lockdo…
Fri, 20:48: Paul Garner: For 7 weeks I have been through a roller coaster of ill health, extreme emotions, and utter exhaustion… https://t.co/gfE96EgvVI
Sat, 07:08: RT @wblau: Here is the English translation of the truly remarkable speech Germany’s President Steinmeier gave today in Berlin, commemoratin…
Sat, 09:10: RT @WHO: #OnThisDay 40 years ago, #smallpox was made history. It’s the only human disease to be eradicated so far. A lesson we must take…
Sat, 10:45: RT @russelldavies63: 1/12 THE POSITION OF THE FIREPLACE. Long thread. Bear with. But here’s the original Series 2 order of episodes, issue…
Thu, 17:11: RT @BenjaminMyersQC: Appreciating how important it is to use time wisely, I have experimented with how a jumbo rawl plug (shortened) can be…
Current The Complete Secret Army: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Classic TV Drama Series by Andy Priestner A Sacred Cause: The Inter-Congolese Dialogue 2000-2003, by P. E. Winter Black Wine, by Candas Jane Dorsey The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
Last books finished Riverland, by Fran Wilde Peanuts: A Tribute to Charles M. Schulz, ed., Shannon Watters The Hunt for Vulcan: …And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe, by Thomas Levenson Joanna Russ, by Gwyneth Jones In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire
Next books Sleepers of Mars, by John Wyndham Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime 1: Breaking the Strain, by Paul Preuss
Wed, 15:33: RT @pisaniferry: Economists have their (mostly critical, rightly) view on the ruling by the German Constitutional Court on the #ECB. But wh…
Wed, 16:39: RT @EndPolioNow: Vaccines are one of the best investments we can make in human health & potential. Thanks to the polio vaccine, the world h…
Wed, 17:04: RT @Emily_Rosina: We’re going back in time to 18th century France for a tweetalong of The Girl in the Fireplace! With live tweets from @S…
Wed, 20:06: RT @russelldavies63: 1/2 The Doctor looks out of the window here cos we worried a LOT about the geography. That the little girl’s bedroom i…
Wed, 20:06: RT @russelldavies63: 2/2 …we got really hung up on it. It really worried Julie Gardner. “We need to establish it!” So we spent money on tha…
Wed, 20:12: RT @russelldavies63: POMP FACTS: Mme P’s mother was Madeleine de la Motte. Yes, I can exclusively reveal, a distant ancestor of Wilfred Mo…
Wed, 20:14: RT @jennycolgan: I went as a clockwork robot to a costume party ON A HOVERBOARD and everyone called me the Bo Peep Wench Thing and I was fu…
Wed, 20:14: RT @StevenWMoffat: Okay, so we’ve all seen this, we know how it ends. Here is the story of the horse though the mirror – and how it nearly…
Wed, 20:15: RT @Annas_TARDIS: ‘What’s a horse doing on a spaceship?’ ‘Mickey, what’s Pre-Revolutionary France doing on a spaceship? Get a little perspe…
Wed, 20:18: RT @LMMyles: One of my fav things about these tweetalongs is seeing Moff and RTD being just Incredibly, Wonderfully Fannish. I mean, I know…
Wed, 20:24: RT @BlogtorWho: Like the line about monsters’ nightmares, the description of the Doctor as ‘the Oncoming Storm’ also comes from ‘Love and W…
Wed, 20:24: RT @russelldavies63: When I was on Totally Doctor Who’s Mastermind, one of the questions was the name of this anti-oil… and I couldn’t re…
Wed, 20:30: RT @russelldavies63: This is so beautiful. And Reinette’s dignity and wisdom here, her understanding of this sci-fi world, is just incredib…
Wed, 20:33: RT @russelldavies63: THE HORSE! @StevenwMoffat has described this problem. I asked Phil Collinson how they ever fixed the horse problem, an…
Wed, 20:35: RT @StevenWMoffat: A good ten minutes from the end and the monsters have been defeated already. I wouldn’t have put with this in my era! #c…
Wed, 20:41: RT @StevenWMoffat: Technically Reinette was the only person I killed in the @russelldavies63 era. And in fact she was dead when I started ……
Wed, 20:41: RT @russelldavies63: Look! Rose & Mickey exit via a gangway that ISN’T THERE!! People think we had tons of money, but we could never afford…
Wed, 20:42: RT @BadWolfArchives: “There she goes… Leaving Versailles for the last time.” This Murray Gold score breaks my heart every time… The ro…
Wed, 20:47: RT @Emily_Rosina: ⭐️ EXCLUSIVE NEW #DOCTORWHO! Versailles is silent now. Madame de Pompadour yearns to see the Doctor’s face again… Wa…
Wed, 20:48: Peter Capaldi, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat came third in a Doctor Who pub quiz and were mortified – Radio Times https://t.co/kD6ljMWhC5
Wed, 21:20: RT @AmIRightSir: The current House of Commons contains 38 MPs who were not old enough to vote at the general election that took place on th…
Thu, 08:04: RT @ilgarmammadov: An hour ago Supreme Court has totally acquitted me on all charges!
So, it's seven weeks yesterday since I was last working in the office. (I've been in twice, briefly, to the deserted corridors to pick up documents and other stuff.) When I do go back, it will be very different at first. People will be socially distancing, wearing masks, and generally being very careful. Cafes, bars and restaurants won't reopen until June, so until then a lot of the normal work socialising will be reduced to munching sandwiches at a safe distance in the park. (Which is not too awful.) I'll probably start off by using the car to commute. (It's a hybrid and I can charge it in the office car park, so the carbon footprint will not be too bad.)
With decent weather, and a few other things going right, my spirits have definitely picked up. I invited a bunch of people to celebrate my birthday via Zoom, and it was nice to see some familiar faces again, some of whom I had not seen in a long time. The Doctor Who rewatches have continued (there's another one tonight, The Girl in the Fireplace). I've continued to explore our neighbourhood for new things to look at – the other day I heard rumours of turtles in the Zoetwater ponds, but didn't locate any.
And I must admit that the long weekend for 1 May was a welcome break. I used the time to go through old photographs in the attic, finding a couple of myself taken at my 21st birthday party. (Yes, I had a moustache. Yes, I had a full head of hair. Yes, I was thinner.) It was very pleasant nostalgia – I have been gradually emailing the people concerned to remind know what they looked like in 1988.
As we move to the next phase, the question a lot of people are asking is how much the world will change once this is over. I must admit that I'm a sceptic on this. I wonder how different things will really look in January 2021 compared to January 2020, assuming (as I think is fairly safe) that the economy has begun to bounce back by then. Some changes are inevitable, of course. A lot of us will be less well off, and some of us will be dead. In Europe at least, the state will have a greater share of the economy. There will I hope be a greater appreciation and respect for those providing vital services, health most obviously but also food production and distribution. But does this amount to a fundamental re-ordering of society? I don't really see it.
The structures of the United States and the European Union (and the United Kingdom) are all under strain. However COVID-19 is not going to provide the killer blow. As Jeremy Cliffe noted in the New Statesman, obsessing about whether the end of the EU is nigh is a distraction from the much more interesting and useful question of how the complicated pressures on the EU are changing it. EU governments continue to argue, but they continue to do so in an EU framework. And despite the starry-eyed predictions of some, I don't see that the pandemic has proved to be a tipping point for either Scottish independence or Irish unity – I would be interested to see any evidence that it has changed a single person's mind on either issue. (More locally: see Flanders vs Belgium.)
The USA is of course in a desperate situation, but that was already the case. By any objective measure the federal response to the pandemic has been a disaster, and President Trump's failure as a statesman and human being very visible. However from my obsessive browsing of FiveThirtyEight, it is striking how little President Trump's approval numbers have moved at all (whereas in Europe there have been seismic shifts in the polls in a number of countries). The narratives of both sides in America's deeply polarised political culture are being confirmed; as with the EU and UK, while the weaknesses of the system are being brutally exposed, it's not clear to me that anyone has changed or will change their minds about how the system works or should work.
So, all we can do is continue to work to make the world a better place. And try to stay in good health while we do it.
Tue, 12:56: RT @TreeSmithMusic: If Ring Around the Rosie is a nursery rhyme about the bubonic plague, then I say we get to work on a covid-19 nursery r…
This is the latest post in a series I started last November, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in current circumstances when we are all somewhat distracted. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
No Crisis Group papers in April 2006, but I did publish a piece in Interationale Politik in the wake of the failed Dutch and French referenda on the EU's Constitutional Treaty, advocating the sort of citizen's assembly, with an element of random selection, that has subsequently been used to great effect in Ireland and which President Macron is now advocating for France and for Europe; I was ahead of my time. You can read it here.
My only trip was to Stockholm, starting on my 39th birthday; as well as attending a conference, I went to the Vasa Museum and the Nobel Prize Museum, both very interesting. We celebrated my birthday at the weekend when I got back, which also was the weekend that the lovely School Reunion episode of Doctor Who was broadcast.
Six-year-old F and I had a trip to the big park in Kessel-Lo where he tried a couple of means of transport.
More grimly, one of our neighbours was murdered by her husband, who later took his own life in prison. She had been a stalwart of the annual dorpsfeest, and a bench in the grassy space behind the parochial hall is dedicated to her memory (lovely photo by Ernst Gülcher).
Without much travel, and commuting by car, I read only 13 books in April 2006, but some of them were quite long:
4,900 pages (YTD 15,300)
2/13 by women (YTD 7/42)
1/13 by PoC (YTD 2/42)
The best of these are the two biographies of Alexander Hamilton and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. They were almost exact contemporaries – they were born two years apart and died two years apart, she soon before her 49th birthday (of natural causes) and he a few months after his (shot dead by the vice-president of the United States).
Neither is mentioned in the other biography, and they would not have ever met (neither ever crossed the Atlantic), but they would have known about each other. John and Abigail Adams certainly knew them both. Abigail was not a fan of either. On 30 September 1785, she wrote of Georgiana,
Amongst the most celebrated of their beauties stands the Duchess of Devonshire, who is masculine in her appearance…
and on 28 January 1797, she wrote of Hamilton,
Beware of that spare Cassius, has always occured to me when I have seen that cock sparrow. O I have read his Heart in his wicked Eyes many a time. The very devil is in them. They are lasciviousness itself.
Angelica Schuyler Church (who gets a lot of the good lines in Hamilton the musical) and her husband (a radical English MP) must also surely have known them both on rather better terms – John Church was an ally first of Earl Grey (he of the tea, who was also Georgiana's lover) and then of Charles James Fox (who she also strongly supported).
One of Hamilton's great-granddaughters was a Georgina, but that's more likely a homage to Washington than Devonshire. (Incidentally it was she who got the famous Emma Lazarus poem, "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses.." inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.) You can get Alexander Hamiton here and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire here.
None of the other books this month was all that bad but I guess The Moon Pool failed to convince me; you can get it here.
Mon, 12:56: RT @JeremyCliffe: The thing with prophesying the EU’s imminent doom is: 1) it’s as old as the European project itself 2) it can become rep…
