dog-days

Ashkenazi Jewish data from 23andMe leaked online. Deeply, deeply sinister. 

Given the horrors of the Middle East right now, it seems odd to be talking about one small thing, but anyway. The comedian Mark Steel has cancer. He's written a very fine article about it. 

I saw him live when he visited a town I had a connection with for some time. (The connection being the ex). One of his jokes from then ended up being kept as a running one en famille.  I still remember spotting him after the show sitting/slumping in an Indian restaurant with some friends and looking completely shattered as if the adrenaline had run out of him all at once. 

Don't watch videos, but the article makes it sound as if Humza Yousaf has responded well to the Israel and Gaza disaster, given that his parents-in-law are trapped in Gaza having gone there to visit a 92-year-old sick relative. 

2 hours ago, snowleo said:

Season finales of One Piece and Wheel of Time, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. I probably never would have watched a pirate-thing based on manga if it hadn't been for recs here, so thank you! I wasn't expecting the dark turn in Ep 7, and I do hope the overall tone stays light going forward.

Also thank you to whoever was talking up Deadloch a while back-- I loved this so much! Hilarious, yet the mystery and characters were compelling and well-written. 

Next up is Only Murders and the latest season of Nailed It!

The kids and I are on the final season of She-Ra, which is a really, really good animated Netflix show. I'd put it right up there with Dragon Prince/Owl House/Avatar. I'll be sad when it's over, because I have no idea of any other shows for us to watch together when this finishes. Any suggestions? My kids are 8 and 11.

I liked Gravity Falls (Disney Plus).  A brother and sister go and stay with their chancer great-uncle Stan over the summer. Adventures ensue. 

12 minutes ago, Lord Patrek said:

....a bit overindulgent with the cats...

Admit this made me click through to the review and look up the book online. 

Overindulgence with dogs, octopuses, Welsh or haunted historical buildings would also have worked. 

I'm sorry. Even when it's right, it hurts. 

Not sure when the good time to say this is, but from how you've described him, you deserve better.

2 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I feel mean-spirited making a huge deal out of a small interlocution by pebble. If you're going to be childish about it, I don't feel mean-spirited in wondering why you don't know how conversations work.

 

You can't just decide for Mormont that he was talking about something else. Pebble did it by accident which is why I didn't want to make a big deal out of it but you're doing it on purpose at this point and I don't understand why because conflating all immigration together in one box is a conservative argumentative ploy. I don't think you're a Tory, are you? 

I'm just wondering what fairly bland thing I can say next that will make you hit the ceiling.

Apparently, I'm mean-spirited as fuck. 

6 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

 

Yeah look I don't want to sit here litigating exactly what two other people meant by what they said because it feels mean-spirited and is a bit of a side-track but she was responding directly to something Mormont said about immigrants as a whole with something that only applied to asylum seekers. 

Except it doesn't, because asylum seekers === immigrants in the eyes of many of the British public, so what affects one group is inevitably going to be felt by the other. 

If you don't want to seem "mean-spirited" and "going on a sidetrack", then just...count to ten and stop replying : ) 

3 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

 

Yeah, because she's confusing immigrants with asylum seekers. 

 

That's not what I'm reading. 

"by many people it is seen as"

7 hours ago, mormont said:

Most immigrants have jobs. You’re confusing immigrants with asylum seekers, which is forgivable because a certain section of the media and politicians want you to do this and so talk about immigration and asylum as if they were the same topic. But they’re not. 

No, she's not. She clearly says "they're waiting for their claims for asylum to be processed". It's the British public, not Pebble, who are doing the confusing. 

RIP Terence Davies.

Didn't realise he was a Liverpool man till now. Tail end of the generation of actors, writers and artists who rose high from a working-class background. 

He wasn't young, but I hadn't expected him to go so soon. Saw Benediction (about Siegfried Sassoon) by him last year when it was in cinemas. Thought he might have one or two more films left in him. 

Sunset Song has been on my to-see list for a while. Will have to make time for it. 

Finished Only Murders in the Building S3, which was completely daft and over-the-top, made by luvvies for luvvies, and still worked. Woke at five am feeling nauseous and sick (this always happens on Saturdays and never ever on Mondays) and it was great. The flashback to producer Donna Demeo snapping orders down the phone followed by the pull-back to show her in the process of giving birth made me laugh aloud. 

But it pushed even my tolerance for silliness too far when they lost the leading man and didn't have an understudy. Oliver, you're meant to be an experienced West End director, you can't not have an understudy ready! But the show did pull back from one cliché -- it didn't let the cat-loving, cardigan wearing Howard dash on stage to save the day.

25 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

His TV show, Alias, was great, albeit went downhill after season 2

I liked Season 4 in places. 

One of Alias's problems was that Lena Olin (actress who played Sydney's mother) didn't return for S3. 

Finished Ahsoka. The last episode was very blah. It felt as if Filoni urgently needs to go away and read up on writing/directing for live action versus cartoons. 

Still, I did like live action Ezra. There's something so pure and lightside about him, slightly other-worldly, that reminds me of Luke at his best in the OT. Plus enjoyed Huyang's dialogue with Ezra and Ahsoka's with Sabine. 

Hope Rosario Dawson avoids doing the crossed-armed stance in S2 if there is one. It seemed to be standing in for her doing any actual acting. 

5 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

I might have been exaggerating in the bleak hours of night, but my heavens, it’s like Midsomer Murders, where do the bodies and the assaults come from? The most recent numbers I saw show the US murder rate/ serious assault rate per 100,000 population at 6.81/246.84, Canada at 2.07/150.81 and Ireland at 0.44/93.51. The Irish murder rate is down to 0.44, and ffs, it’s only the 11th lowest in Europe! And the way Irish writers come up with murder and crime stories, you’d think it wasn’t safe to walk around! 

At least one of the characters has given me some words I may add to my page here: You’ve got to believe in the world if you want to save it.

I think part of the Irish literature scene is determined to be anything but the stereotype -- write a charming comic novel with a surrealist bent? Hell no. Give us black paint, family breakdown and used syringes in an empty  bottle of Guinness. 

Ok, I guess many people growing up had to deal with things like the Church and small-town group-think and writing is a way to process that. Still, better you than me! 

Finished Desperate Undertaking (Lindsey Davis). One of the darker instalments in the Flavia Albia series, which itself generally has a somewhat grimmer tone than most of the Falco books. The murders – and there are many – are themed on deaths in Greek and Roman plays, often on ones adapted for use in the amphitheatre, including Pasiphae. 

I think in the Falco series, Davis either minimised through humour or carefully limited/fenced off some of the nastier aspects of Roman culture, so we saw it, but its implications, its full workings were less raw. Now Davis is less able or less inclined to turn away from it. 

Despite the grimness, I did enjoy it. Davis must have a truly encyclopaedic knowledge of the geography of Flavian-era Rome by now. 

8 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

I’ve been struggling through Kala, by Colin Walsh. Maybe I wanted to be punished (I think that Tana French does that to me at times). You friggin’ Irish, are you all such sick bastards? It’s about six teens who hung out with each other, in a tourist town on the west coast of Ireland, a place that’s supposed to be idyllic but is actually a seething pit of vipers and shit filled mud that the residents have to plod through all their lives.

One of the teens disappears (our titular teen) and events pick up years later when three of them are back in town, Helen, who fled to Canada, Joe, who fled to become a famous rock star, and Mush, who never left. Lots and lots of angst and guilt and dirty secrets. And then human remains are found. I had the audio book on and fell asleep, waking up three hours later and suspecting I skipped over a lot of deep reflections about inter-personal relationships and the confusion of teen years. And grim, ugly Irish secrets. If you like the dark side of the Irish, God bless, this is the book for you.

Thank you for reading it so that now I never need to! 

1 hour ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

1434 Cosimo de Medici returns from his banishment to Florence. Laying the groundwork for a dynasty that would rule the city for around 300 years.

1848 Wiener Volksaufstand (Vienna uprising? I guess) take place. Parts of the army were not willing to go to war against the revolting Hungary. Theodor Baillet von Tour, the minister of war, gets lynched.

1860 During the second Opium War the British army conquers Beijing. In the following the days the Old and the New Summer Palace get looted

1875 Sultan Abd ül-Asis declares the Osman Empire bankrupt due to its high debts.

1889 Paris. The Moulin Rouge opens.

Happy Birthday Levon Aronian (*1982)

Didn't realise German had taken a more authentic route with the Osmanlı Devleti than English. God knows how English got from Osman to Ottoman. Maybe some leap involving a mispronunciation of the Arabic Uthman. 

Voting is open in Fat Bear Week. 806 vs 428 then from the older bears 402 vs 901. 

Fat Bear Week is back!

Bear 806 jr. is still at the adorable stage. He just needs a red hat and blue coat. 

I'm worried about Otis. He's not looking well this year. 

And I love Grazer's ears. They look as if someone's stuck little blonde pom-poms to her head. 

The muesli experiments continue. I might make a movie about that with Ryan Gosling and Mahershala Ali. The Muesli Experiments. 

This morning the extra ingredient was canned rhubarb. I'd hoped for something like stewed, fresh rhubarb; the bright red shiny stuff softened in a pan by someone wholesome on Saturday morning TV, and which they claim to have taken from their garden. Actually, this was grey and none of the texture had survived the canning process. It was edible with the addition of ginger, but was still not exactly enjoyable. Won't be adding rhubarb again unless my future life features an allotment and a kitchen. 

Andor is very good, though I tend to view it as not being especially Star Wars. It's a serious show and takes itself seriously. You might be bored in the first two episodes, but stick with it, because it does pay off. 

Clone Wars whatever you do, don't try and watch the whole thing. There are lots of online recommendations for the stand-out episodes/episode clusters. I'd put them in chronological order then go through them, though the order doesn't matter that much outside of the little story arcs within each set of episodes – only the later Clone Trooper and Ahsoka-Anakin episodes should be left till later. You'll probably quickly get an idea of which characters you want to see more of and which are like watching bantha shit dry. Clone Wars can be fun to dip into. Season 6 Episodes 1 through 4 were a highlight for me, but work better if you've seen earlier Clone Trooper episodes. 

What Corvinus said re Obi-Wan/The Mandalorian/Ahsoka. 

Cheating by using today's Google Doodle, but it was a nice one. The best kind really – introduced me to someone I'd never heard of who did good work. Ferdinand Berthier (born September 30th 1803) was an early campaigner for the deaf and advocate of deaf culture. I went to Project Gutenberg and with the help of machine translation am skimming one of his books, a biography of the Abbe de l'Epée, the founder of what would become the National Institute for Deaf Children. 

The book seems quite rambling and name-checks a lot of people rather like a modern TV awards ceremony. Still, I've come across one good (not totally reliable) story in Chapter 12 through 18 – in which an abandoned deaf-mute boy of twelve or thirteen is identified as the Comte de Solar, who was assumed to have died of small pox. Berthier is very partial to the boy for the sake of his subject, de l'Epée, who championed his claim. In fact, l'Epée's ward was ultimately declared to be an imposter. When the grave of the child Solar was opened, the remains were found to possess a crooked tooth that the allies of Not-Solar had taken as proof of the stray's identity. 

It's called the Affaire Solar and seems fairly well-known, especially on the French internet, though has passed me by till now. 

In Berthier's version of the story, the fake Solar went on to join the army and died on the field of battle due to being unable to hear the signal to retreat. (One of those anecdotes that two centuries of changing tastes has made bathetic rather than tragic.) 

8 hours ago, Pellert said:

I just finished the part of a series called “The Bound and the Broken” that is currently released (3 out of 5 planned books in the main series). 
 

I started a separate thread about it in hopes to give the writer a small boost since I have not seen it mentioned in this forum, if it at least deserves to be thrown out there as an alternative to people searching for new stuff in this genre.
 

IMO it’s a fresh breath in terms of new releases in high/classic fantasy last couple of years - if your looking for an action-packed, well-planned and intriguing classic fantasy I recommend you try it out  

Out of curiosity, your RL initials don't happen to be R. C. – do they? : )

1 minute ago, Zorral said:

Thanks!  What does affect us though, is our friend's concert in Williamsburg, debuting his latest music. This is one of the communities most affected by flooding in Brooklyn, which means subways, basements, streets and avenues.   I don't think we can get out there -- and as far as we know, the theater has a big basement. He hasn't gotten back to us as to whether it got canceled/postponed or not.  Lots and lots has gotten canceled, including a doggies in costume-theme parade scheduled for today, one of NYC's most favorite annual events.    Yet the stupid mayor didn't allow schools to close today -- and now parents and kids are stuck all over the place, unable to get to their kids or the kids to get home. Most subways are suspended; buses, including school buses in many places can't get out of their lots, or are stuck in water.  Adams, the disaster given us by geriatric NY Dem party that just keeps on giving, giving, giving.  He did NOTHING  at all in terms of preparing organization for this new storm that was predicted all week.  Just as with every other weather disaster -- he just makes sure he gets the hell outta dodge, and then goes, 'What ya want from me?  I deserve life-work balance as much as everyone else."

But seriously, we got off lucky!  This time!

V. glad you're okay, but what a crap mayor. Even a little college I worked in in the sticks a few years ago knew to send the kids home early on buses when the river was threatening to burst its banks and rain was forecast. 

Indeed, have been looking at the photos on the BBC. Hope Zorral and other NYC boarders are as little affected as possible.