2014 — 24 June: Tuesday
After less than optimum sleeping conditions during this hot spell I'm not currently at my best1 but "Lt. Kijé" is helping. As is my morning cuppa, of course. What can't be cured... and all that. KBO
I've been reading...
... a draft2 of Sassoon's poem "The General" that I found reproduced in a piece in the New York Times about an exhibition at the University of Austin in Texas. It's short, unsweet, and very much to the point. A lot of this World War I stuff is hard work. Here's a fragment:
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of them dead, And we're cursing his Staff for incompetent swine.
Amazon has a free Kindle download of some of Sassoon's other poems, but it is spectacularly badly formatted, so I don't recommend it. Meanwhile, I'm fairly sure I only ever spoke to one veteran at any length; that was my landlady's husband when I was living in 'digs' in Hatfield for two years during my apprenticeship. He was a lovely old codger (not that much older then than I am now) who I could occasionally gently coax into some reminiscenses.
When I asked Mrs Google to confirm my spelling of that troublesome word, she offered:
The latter returns a mere 756,000 results. I stand gently corrected. But somehow don't feel too bad about it. And I took Christa to meet the elderly couple back in 1974. I'm glad I did that.
I was tickled...
... to see, in a piece on screenwriting, the following aside:
The piece focusses on Fitzgerald's penultimate place of residence, a cottage on the estate of the comic actor Edward Everett Horton called "Belly Acres."
Who remembers Horton these days, I wonder? I remember I first saw him in George Cukor's "Holiday".
There is, no doubt, a jolly good reason why the scan of the cover art of my DVD never ended up where it should now be. I suspect I overwrote my original scan when scanning the more recent Nancy Meyers film "The Holiday". That was a silly thing to do, even by my standards.
For my lunchtime...
... listening I chose Richard Fortey and Kipling's "The crab that played with the sea". I then dallied a little with Mrs Google, only to be brought up very short by this amiable tosh arrant nonsense / non-science oh-so (one might almost say "Just So", perhaps?) casually asserted:
Like many plants and animals, the horseshoe crab is a living fossil. Fossilized specimens have been found that are believed to be 300 million years old, and yet are virtually identical
to modern varieties. These findings are consistent with the Bible, which says that God created the horseshoe crab and all the other types of sea creatures on the fifth day of creation
only a few thousand years ago.
Their existence puzzles evolutionists. In National Geographic, Biologist Sue Schaller says "You've got an animal that predates dinosaurs by 200 million years, and it hasn't changed much
at all. It hasn't had to evolve."
It doesn't really need Ben Goldacre to help me recognise bad science when I see it. When, by the way, did God create the fossils? And why go to all that trouble? Just askin'.
In days gone by...
... we would vary the route by which we drove to and from the Midlands on one of our several hundred frankly tedious visits that we made every few weeks (until Christa's health failed) to dear Mama up in her bat cave. By taking a more westerly route we could enjoy the stunning view from Birdlip in Gloucestershire on the A417 (shortly before reaching the "Air Balloon" pub, at which, oddly, we never once stopped). We were more than content to munch a sandwich and stretch our legs for a few minutes while admiring the vista.
We would sometimes skirt Cheltenham (or — in truth — it may have been Cirencester, or even Swindon!) more closely. I may not recall where I was (plausible: I often had my nose in a book) but I do remember we drove past an industrial estate with a factory sign the name of which was done in rather clever graphics. It was "EATON" and it alternated overlapping (tightly-kerned) black and white letters to yield a curiously 3D effect. I liked it.
So what's this?
My attempt, from memory, to imitate a somewhat similar effect created by the logo shown at the end of episodes of the (superb) second series of the Kevin Spacey / Robin Wright "House of Cards". (I don't usually let the credits roll to the very end so I only saw this quite recently for the first time.) It strikes me as both clever and subtle... rather like the TV show.
Caveat: the possibility exists that I got the font wrong :-)
Speaking of...
... days gone by, "Holiday" remains a good film, I'm happy to (re)confirm. But they don't make 'em like that 75 years later, do they?