Seasons of the Years

We've been watching Game of Thrones, where summers and winters last for years. Except, how do you know? Isn't that how you measure a year? By the passage of seasons? If summer ends, and winter comes and goes, and now it's summer again, isn't that one year? So how do these Game of Throne players know how long a year is? Possibly they have some other method of measuring time, like counting days (except it's always dark during the winter), or cords of wood burnt, or number of deer consumed at the dinner table. I suppose they might have some more sophisticated method of measuring time, but given that none of the characters in this story have any interest outside of eff-ing and fighting, it doesn't seem likely. Lives of nerds don't make for dramatic stories.
     Or it could be like Methuslah in the Bible, who seemed to confuse years with months. If you are living in the tropics I can see how it would be hard to measure the passage of a year, all seasons are pretty much the same: hot. A month though, that's pretty easy to tell, just look at the moon. The moon is pretty reliable. Moon - month, think there might be a connection between those two words?
    But here we are talking about events on Saturn and we are using our own Earth-centric time system. A year on Saturn lasts 30 Earth years. Axial tilt is 26.73°  which is pretty close to Earth's own tilt of 23.5°, so Saturn has seasons much like Earth does, just much longer. Winter would last for seven or eight years, just like it does in Game of Thrones. Could it be that Game of Thrones takes place on Saturn? No, don't be silly, the people would have to be a hundred times as strong, breath ammonia, and be able to see in the dark. I mean, Saturn is a long way from the sun. Here on Earth the sun at arm's length appears to be about an inch in diameter. Out around Saturn, the sun would look like a BB.
   Anyway, winter is over in the Northern hemisphere of Saturn, the long night at the North pole is over and we can now see what's there, and what's there looks like a hurricane. That's good, some kind of familiar natural phenomena, not aliens with advanced technology. That hexagon thing though, that is mighty suspicious looking. That could be aliens. Just for reference, Saturn is 75,000 miles in diameter, about nine times the diameter of Earth.
    One last item, Andy claims there is no ocean beneath the hurricane, but how does he know? He hasn't been there. He's one of them scientist type guys who cook up explanations for stuff you can't see. Talk to other people, and they say there is an ocean down there:

This is surrounded by a thicker liquid  metallic hydrogen  layer, followed by a liquid layer of helium-saturated  molecular hydrogen  ...

 It's not a water ocean, but that wouldn't do you any good anyway, the sun would be too dim to be able to get any kind of tan.

The King is Dead, Long Live the Dwarf

We watched the first three seasons of Game of Thrones last winter (a year ago). Since then we watched House of Cards with Kevin Spacey & Robin Wright, and Justified, all of which we enjoyed tremendously. I liked Justified so much I even broke down and paid extra to watch the latest season. Producers are spawn of the devil. Don't they know we deserve to watch everything they produce - all the time - for free? They suck you in with free teasers and then when they've got you hooked, they reel in your wallet.

We also tried Revenge and Scandal but they didn't quite cut the mustard. We also tried Breaking Bad, but we failed to connect. Don't know why. Too close to home maybe.

We continue to watch The Good Wife, but we are all caught up and have to wait for the next episode. Curses. I hate waiting. We used to be dedicated followers of CSI (the original Las Vegas based series), but it hasn't been the same since Gil left. The new lead investigator (the former Cheers bartender) just doesn't do it for me. Probably because he's not Gil.

So we've exhausted our supply of super-dooper crime series, and since our resident hacker has departed we no longer had access to Game of Thrones, so I finally broke down and subscribed to HBO. It's going to cost me $100 for the first year, after that it doubles. HBO has a new on-demand feature that we can get through our Roku box, but you need a subscription to HBO to use it. Bah and humbug. These dang subscriptions are piling up. I need to cancel some of them.

Game of Thrones spoiler (if the title hasn't given it away already. We are one episode from being caught up): Joffrey the malevolent gets his comeuppance. I would have preferred to have him stabbed a thousand times and then cut up into little bits but we can't always get what we want. It did look to be an unpleasant experience, though he didn't suffer nearly long enough. I was surprised as this show seems to thrive on showing just how unpleasant people can be and he was among the best (worst) at this, I thought the producers would keep him around forever. Ah well, nothing lasts forever. Now Tyrion is on trial and we don't know if he is going to survive this ordeal or not. On one hand he is the best person in the entire show, and he didn't do it (commit this particular murder), at least not that we know of. On the other hand, maybe he is negotiating with the producers and if they can't come to terms, well, off with his virtual head. Also, Cersei, Joffrey's mother, Tyrion's sister, wants him dead, and she generally gets what she wants.

African Game of Thrones

Another fine article from Russia. Suck it, White House pansies.

King Misuzulu KwaZwelithini (R) and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa (L) attend the coronation ceremony of South Africa's new Zulu king in Durban, South Africa on October 29, 2022. ©  Presidency of South Africa/Getty Images

African Game of Thrones: How will the new Zulu king deal with rebellious relatives? by Kubendran Chetty

The death of South Africa’s Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini, three years ago triggered a bitter family feud over succession – one that has found its way to the country’s courts and remains unresolved.

The Zulu nation is the largest ethnic group in the country with an estimated 15 million Zulu-speaking people, predominantly in the KwaZulu-Natal region, whose monarchy stretches back to the 16th century. They are synonymous with resisting British colonialism and oppression in the early 1800s, and the Zulu king is arguably the most influential traditional leader in South Africa.

King Zwelithini’s son, Misuzulu KwaZwelithini, was recognized as his successor and assumed a powerful position that controls vast resources and political power. However, his seat on the throne is being challenged by his uncle, Prince Mbonisi Ka Bhekuzulu, and his half-brother, Prince Simakade Zulu, who is the eldest son of the late king, but was born out of wedlock, and a list of aunts and uncles who have contested the legitimacy of his rule through the country’s courts. At the same time, other family members are firmly behind Misuzulu’s right to the throne.

The lasting conflict between relatives ensures the African ‘Game of Thrones’-like drama has played out in public view, embarrassingly exposing the bitter divisions in the royal family and putting on display the fractious relationships that now exist between those who support the king and those who are firmly against him.

It goes on for a bit about the various pretenders and their legal machinations, but this introduction is just great. Nice change of pace from the horror stories that we usually hear about Africa.

Through the Graves the Wind is Blowing

Stolen entire from Variety on account of being the best thing I've read this morning and because Variety's website is infested with popup ads.

Through the Graves the Wind is Blowing
Courtesy of Creative Agitation, Berlin Film Festival

‘Through the Graves the Wind is Blowing’ Review: Travis Wilkerson’s Playful, Political Essay Set in Split, Croatia

The unsolved murders of several tourists in Croatia's second city become the pretext for a spirited, mercurial tour of the former Yugoslav state's relationship to fascism.

By Jessica Kiang

The city of Split has long been a tourist magnet, famous for the churches and flagstones of its picturesque Old Town, and for the beauty of the rocky, sparkling Croatian coastline. But not all visitors come for the culture. Some seek the trashier pleasures of rowdy bars and cheap drinks, and all they know of the area’s history is that the spectacular medieval fortress clinging to a nearby cliffside was a “Game of Thrones” location. 

Split is also where US filmmaker Travis Wilkerson (“Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?”) recently lived for a stretch, having resolved — and then failing — to make a movie about the dissolution of Yugoslavia. This he tells us on camera, at the beginning of “Through the Graves the Wind is Blowing,” the film he made instead of that one, and it’s an admission of compromise that somehow never compromises the integrity of what follows: a witty, dismayed, eccentric and fascinating outsider’s-eye tribute to a deeply split Split. 

Wilkerson starts by introducing local homicide detective Ivan Peric, a character who could have walked straight out of a deconstructed neo-noir: a hangdog Sam Spade as written by Paul Auster channeling Franz Kafka. Peric, who only joined the force to avoid working in tourism, is on the political outs with his bosses and finds himself somewhat “working in tourism anyway,” when he’s assigned to several cases no one else wants, namely the murders of several holidaymakers in the area. It’s a sensationalist slant that Wilkerson is quick to puncture: this movie is not some true-crime serial-killer exposé. In fact, the rather absurd deaths, five of which are recounted in Peric’s lugubrious police-jotter manner on the spots where they occurred, are unconnected. Except that each is further evidence of the intense dislike the locals have for the shrieking, vomiting, urinating hordes that treat their town with such disrespect.

Peric faces insurmountable apathy and possibly actual obstruction in investigating his rapidly cooling cases. The spear (probably a “Game of Thrones” replica) used in one murder disappears. The authorities will not allow him access to another crime scene because it’s a local attraction at which the victim was allegedly killed for taking too many selfies, and they can’t afford to shut it down during high season. But even while he’s discussing the killings, the film’s other main character starts vying for our attention: Split itself is crowding in from the edge of Wilkerson’s gorgeously high-contrast black-and-white frames.

This is not the Split of any tourist brochure. Wilkerson’s camera is trained on the suburbs, the derelict malls, the abandoned motels, the once-futuristic plazas grown scrubby with weeds and angry with graffiti. Over striking dystopian cityscapes, often mirrored in the perfectly silver standing water of a permanent puddle or two, Wilkerson narrates his idiosyncratic 20th century history of Split. He makes particular reference to the shameful relationship to fascism. Croatia as an independent state first existed under the Ustaše, the local fascist party installed as a puppet regime in 1941 by the Nazis, and so the story of Croatian nationalism is inextricably entwined with its far-right past.

It’s an association Wilkerson finds written across the city today in horribly prevalent swastika and Ustaše-symbol graffiti, deeply knitted into the local football scene and given its most awful expression further inland at the Jasenovac concentration camp, which had the grim distinction of being the largest such European extermination factory not to have been built by the Germans. And yet the town has another history too, of resistance and resilience and heroic acts of self-sacrifice which Wilkerson also relates in his low, frank, warm narration. Most satisfyingly, for a film titled after a line in the Leonard Cohen song “Partisan,” he tells the story of Rade Koncar, the WWII partisan whose statue, in 2018, fell onto the drunken neo-fascist who was trying to deface it. “Rade Koncar,” says Wilkerson with something like joy, “Still fucking up fascists 70 years after they killed him.”

The irreverent, intimate voiceover is one way he saps the potential pretension or self-seriousness out of this dynamically entertaining film, but he also achieves a lovely conspiracy with the viewer by showing his work, its rough edges, its errata and false starts. It is ironic and a little subversive that the punchy imagery — hyperreal photography, text on screen, blood-spatter overlays, CCTV footage — should be so agitprop in its aesthetic. Wilkerson has the very opposite of propaganda’s agenda, questioning dogmas and doubting certainties and making “Through the Graves the Wind is Blowing” a beautifully monochromatic meditation on how nothing is actually black and white.

Looked up the fortress in Split Croatia. It's quite the place. Google Maps has good 3D View of the place, and Chrome now has a video capture function, so I thought I'd give it a try. Not as smooth as I would have liked, but good enough for this post.

Fortress Klis, Split, Croatia
Chuck Pergiel

And here's the Leonard Cohen tune:

The Partisan - Leonard Cohen
aszad

Reading this review another Leonard Cohen song came to mind: Nevermind.

Gunpowder

Gunpowder (2017) | Official Trailer ft. Kit Harington | HBO
Gunpowder is a three part mini-series about the Gunpowder Plot to kill Kind James of England in 1603. The plot is the origin of Guy Fawkes Day,

Remember, remember,
The Fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot;
For I see no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

Nursery rhyme made famous (in my head) by V for Vendetta, which is where Anonymous got their masks.

The show stars Kit Harington (commonly know as Jon Snow in Game of Thrones) as Robert Catesby, the Catholic instigator of the scheme. Kit, as he does in Game of Thrones, plays a hothead unswayed by appeals to reason.

Anne Vaux is played by Liv Taylor, daughter of Steve Tyler of Aerosmith.

The hunchback Cecil is played by Mark Gatiss.

One of the best scenes is when the conspirator dump several pounds of gunpowder on a cloth in front of the fire to dry it out. Geez guys, but I suppose desperate times call for desperate measures. Once it's dry any stray spark will set it off, and naturally, because they are engaged in a gun battle with the sheriff's men, a spark does land in the powder and boom, off it goes.

The Gunpowder Plot Conspirators, 1605

The show graphically depicts some of the tortures used to extract confessions from prisoners, and equally graphically depicts the methods of execution. Revolting all around. Thank god for civilization, or maybe I should say thanks that such methods aren't used anymore, at least not in places that the West currently considers civilized. Folks living in Europe in the 1600's considered themselves civilized.

The whole thing hinges on what people believe. You could argue that Catesby was driven to his plotting by the harsh fines being levied against Catholics, but that only works if you adhere to your faith in the face of persecution. Perhaps they remained Catholics because their belief is all they could be sure of, being as the world is such an unpredictable place. Kind of reminds me of the political war being waged in the USA these days. This one is being fought over beliefs just like the war between the Catholics and the Protestants in 17th Century England. Facts and reason are of no use in such a battle.

The Plagues of Breslau

The Plagues of Breslau - Trailer
Tu Brother TV
It's 8:15PM, we've finished watching our movie for the night and it's still light out. Tonight's movie is a Polish Crime Thriller. We listened to it in the original language, presumably Polish, and read the English subtitles. There was a scene at a horse race and another at a motorcycle race, which was pretty cool. There were a couple of scenes that involved people jumping out of the way of a runaway thing and they were pretty bad. Or maybe people are just really bad at detecting approaching danger. They get bowled over left and right. Maybe they got a discount for the large number of falls.

The murders are bizarre and grisly, but nothing worse than what we saw in Game of Thrones.

The movie trots out a bit of history to fit in with current events, but it's fake history, as Diksha Sundriyal at Cinemaholic explains:

Is The Plagues of Breslau Based on a True Story? 

No, ‘The Plagues of Breslau’ is not based on a true story. It is a crime drama, written by Patryk Vega and Sylwia Koperska-Mrozinska. In the film, Magda uses the Week of Plague as the historical reference for the serial killings happening in Wroclaw. She tells the story of Frederick the Great. After taking over Breslau in 1941, he wanted it to become a great city. For this, he needed to weed out all the bad things that would hold back its peace and prosperity. He considered six human fallacies to be the plagues that would never let them grow. 

They were degeneracy, pillaging, corruption, slandering, oppression, and treachery. To show everyone how serious he was considering his plans, he devised the Week of Plagues. Every day, apart from Sunday, one person, who had committed any of these crimes, would be publically executed. Apparently, Magda reads about it in a book of local history. In reality, there is no account of any such practice in the reign of Frederick the Great.

I think Diksha means 1741, not 1941. Frederick the Great died in 1786. He went to war against Austria in 1741. Nine months later they signed the Treaty of Breslau. Breslau is the German name for Wroclaw.

Update May 2023 replaced missing video.

Science Fiction

Planets

I'm reading about the brouhaha over the Hugo awards this year, and I came across this in a story on The Atlantic by Kameron Hurley. 

The author Ursula K. Le Guin said it best in her National Book Award acceptance speech:

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

The 'divine right of kings'. Huh, haven't heard that phrase in a long time, and certainly not in reference to the present. People have been trying to come up with an alternative to capitalism for a long time. Communism is the only idea that has gotten any traction, and the implosion of the Soviet Union gave it a big black mark. Red China is still going strong, though all progress seems to be because of liberal capitalist modifications to their system.

From the other side of the aisle we have this on WND by Vox Day (aka Theodore Beale):

Consider the two great laments of the modern American woman. For the unmarried woman, it is the reality that she must marry later in life than ever before, if she is able to marry at all. For the married woman, it is that unlike generations of women before her, she cannot afford to stay home with her children unless she is fortunate enough to have married to a man of the financial elite.

Ok, not all women want to get married, have children, and stay home and raise them, but I believe that is the desire of a large majority. Vox blames this on the women's rights movement, but I'm not sure that's the case. I'm more inclined to blame it on unbridled capitalism and war mongering. But I could be wrong. It might just be that we've plundered all the easily obtained resources, we've been fruitful and multiplied, and now everything is tougher for most everyone. There is yet another way to look at it and that is we have seen how fancy the future could be and we all want part of it, we are no longer satisfied with 40 acres and a cow.

Lastly, Brad Torgersen mentions Judy-Lynn Del Rey. Would that be any relation to Lester? Why yes, it would. She was his wife:

Judy Lynn and Lester Del Rey at Minicon 8 in 1974.

I read some of Lester's books a long time ago and he must have made an impression on me because his name sure stuck. Or maybe it was just his name: Rey, like in Ray Gun. Whatever. I had heard of him, but I had not heard of Judy. Judy may have been more important because she worked as a Science Fiction editor for many years. If she looks a little odd, it might be because she is a dwarf. Which reminds me of my favorite character on Game of Thrones.

Miscellaneous

Paid a visit to a doctor today. Talking about a minor chronic infection in the lungs. Shows us some CAT scans, points out the problem areas, very tiny, they look to my untrained eye just like everything else. For comparison, she pulls up some Google images of this disease (broncho-something or other). Huh, doctors use Google. Anyway, in these images the disease is obvious.

Now we are talking about drugs and I get to wondering how many different drugs are there? Zillions, I imagine. Some are very common and are taken by millions of people. Some are really weird and are only taken by a few people. Surely someone has a chart that illustrates this. I should see if I can find one.

Oregon House of Representatives passed a rent-control bill today. Christ on a crutch, effing morons. We continue our slide towards the abyss.

What was the population of bears in North America before the white man came? John Snow (from Game of Thrones) wears a bear skin coat. If everyone who lives in the frozen north wears a bear skin coat, what is the maximum population of people you could have? If you kill all the bears, then everyone gets a bear skin coat, but coats wear out and are going to need to be replaced. So the question is how many bears can you kill a year without having a bad effect on the bear population?

Most of the blogs on my list also have lists of blogs, some are extensive. I poke around there occasionally. A couple of days ago I decided to make an effort to follow some of them, so I have been adding them to Feedly. Once you have added them, it makes it easy to see what everyone else is taking about. Also, you don't have to see if they have posted anything recently. Feedly does that part for you. Looking over these posts the past couple of days I have discovered a couple that I like, a couple I don't like, and several that are okay, but don't really interest me.

One subject that gets my attention is stories about cops behaving badly. There is no end to them and there probably won't be. Meanwhile, for every one of those stories there are a zillion instances of people behaving badly and cops doing their jobs correctly. I don't want to hear about these individual incidents. However, if anyone manages to purge a nest corruption, I do want to hear about that.

I spent some time reading about Maria Butina. Depending on which story you read, you may think she is evil incarnate, or decent person caught in jaws of a political fight.

I really think we need a subscription fee tacked onto our internet access. Fee gets dividy up amongst all the websites you visit. Get rid of these frigging pay walls.

The Empress - Netflix Series

The Empress | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

We're talking about:

Duchess Elisabeth in Bavaria (1837 – 1898), nicknamed Sisi, was Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary from her marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1854 until her assassination in 1898. . . .

In 1897, her sister, Sophie, died in an accidental fire at the Bazar de la Charité charity event in Paris. While travelling in Geneva in 1898, Elisabeth was stabbed in the heart by an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni. Her tenure of 44 years was the longest of any Austrian empress. - Wikipedia

Fabulous wealth, fabulous palaces, fabulous clothes, rigid social protocol, simmering unrest, neighbors threatening war, all the stuff we got in Game of Thrones but this time for real.

There were a couple of odd bits.

Franz's mother gives Elisabeth a necklace. Franz's brother tells her that the necklace was worn by Marie Antoinette at her execution. While there are a zillion pages talking about a fancy diamond necklace that a couple of jewelers tried to sell to Marie, I found nothing about one from her execution.

When the royal doctor conducts the royal purity test he finds Elisabeth's hymen is broken. Now it comes out that this can happen to a girl from horseback riding. Huh, the things nobody ever tells me. Google is no help, some pages say it's true, others say not.

Robert Stephenson, British railway engineer, has an oddly clandestine meeting with Franz Joseph about building a railroad in Austria.  It actually did get built:

Semmering Railway

The Semmering Railway, built over 41 km of high mountains between 1848 and 1854, is one of the greatest feats of civil engineering from this pioneering phase of railway building. The high standard of the tunnels, viaducts and other works has ensured the continuous use of the line up to the present day. - UNESCO

Dragons

Some of the biggest—and most iconic—flying animals in all of history. And non-history. From
How Dragons Fly: When Biology Trumps Physics - Naturalist

House of the Dragon got me wondering about whether you could actually have a dragon. What would it take? I'm going to assume they are carnivorous being as they've got a reputation for eating people and large animals. You also get more energy from eating meat than from eating grass, and if you are going to be flying you are going to need a lot of energy. Like other large predators, they probably spend a lot of time lazing around and sleeping and only go hunting when they are hungry. Given their large size, they probably wouldn't have any difficulty finding something to eat, so they would not need to be airborne for long. Pop up in the air, take a quick look around, spy a fat cow, swoop down and chomp it up, pop back up into the air and head back to the cave for a week long nap.

If you have a tame dragon, as long as you gave it a cow every week or so, it would probably be very happy just hanging out in its cave, dreaming ferocious dragon dreams. You need it to go on a mission, you give it a couple of pounds of amphetamines and a barrel of sugar water or alcohol and he'd probably  be good for an hour. If you can't complete your mission in an hour with a dragon you probably need to rethink your strategy. You can probably only ask them to fly a mission maybe once a week, and for a large, old dragon, maybe only once a month.

As for the fire breathing, digestion produces methane, so dragons might have a special bladder where they can store methane. All you need is to belch out that methane and a little spark and you've got a natural flame thrower. Striking a couple of rocks together should be enough to get you a spark to ignite the methane. Or maybe dragons grow special teeth that spark when struck together.

Dragon bones are going to need to be very light, like bird bones. And that armored skin is going to need to be something light weight, not thick and heavy like a crocodile. I dunno, maybe make the armor out of same thing as space shuttle tiles, but grow it organically. I don't know how you could grow such tiles, but I don't know how we grow teeth either. In any case, dragons are totally possible. Nobody is going to create one any time soon, but maybe in a thousand years we will have learned enough biology that we would be able to. Then we could have the nine zillionth season of Game of Thrones, but for real.

Update - Stu did some math on this.

Intent, Intonation & Intelligence

Peter Dinklage (the dwarf actor) as Tyrion Lannister

We were watching Peter Dinklage (the dwarf actor) in The Game of Thrones last night. He is one of my favorite characters mostly because he seems to be pretty sharp. Is he really sharp, or is his part just written that way? And if Peter is really a dullard, would we still believe that he is a smart person because he sounds like he is smart?

I got to thinking about this this afternoon and it occurred to me that intonation produced by a person speaking might be an indicator for intelligence. Or perhaps it just indicates that the portion of your brain where you emotions influence your intonation is especially well developed.

I imagine an actor trying out for this role and he is rejected. When he asks why, judge and jury plays a tape of another actor they are considering for this role. Then they play a tape of the session they just concluded. The judge asks our candidate if he hears the difference and his reply is "no". And the judge tells him that is why he was rejected, i.e. because he does not hear the difference in intonation. He does not hear it because he is not that smart.

I am not saying there is a connection between intonation / infection and intelligence, just that there might be one. It might not be there except in our minds, our subconscious collecting information about everyone we meet, information like the way they talk and therefor how smart they are. But we've got zillions of years of spoken communication under our belts. There is a heck of lot of information that gets communicated in a face to face meeting. A great deal of who we are is determined by our cultural conditioning, things of such a subtle level that we are not even aware of their existence. Until we go visit another culture and find out stuff you find ordinary other people find hilarious and thing you find hilarious they find insulting. So there might be a connection and we are probably using it, totally subconsciously.

The Abandons - Netflix Series

The Abandons | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Feels a bit clumsy. Set in the 1850's, we've got two strong women opposing each other over the expansion of a silver mine in the fictional town of Angel's Ridge in Washington territory. On one side we have Lena Headey (famous for her role as Cerci Lannister in Game of Thrones) as Fiona Nolan the matriarch of a small cattle ranch. On the other we have Gillian Anderson (X Files) as Constance Van Ness, matriarch of the local silver mine. The silver mine built the town, but the mine isn't performing as well as they like and Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the primary investors, is threatening to pull out. Gillian/Constance's solution is to buy out four land owners to expand the mine, but those four owners have no interest in selling. Cornelius is famous for having gotten rich by building a railroad empire, but  there is no mention of mining in his Wikipedia article. However, like all uber-wealthy people he no doubt had his fingers in a number of pies. Early on in the show he visits Angel's Ridge, arriving in a fancy carriage pulled by four horses. Would he have actually made such a visit? Seems unlikely, but hey, it's TV.

Interesting bit. Fiona has made a group of orphans (The Abandons) into her 'family', most of them are teenagers. Our sympathies tend to lie with this group, Constance is obviously the evil capitalist. So I kind of expected the other land owners to side with The Abandons, but a couple of guys don't want to have anything to do with this mess and just want to be left alone. Can't you guys see what's coming down the pike? Are you blind? They're not blind, they're just not looking. I see that a lot in modern day politics.

Anyway, push comes to shove, and then the situation escalates and then it escalates more and we get a spectacular finish.

The show was filmed in Alberta, Canada, at the CL Western Town & Backlot.

7 episodes, about 40 minutes each.

Diana Rigg / Emma Peel

The Avengers - Short Skirt, Long Jacket [Emma Peel]
If you are under 50 years old, or shoot, even 60, you may never have heard of Emma Peel. When I was high school she was my goddess. Emma was one half of a dynamic duo, opposite John Steed, in The Avengers. Emma was played by Diana Rigg who has recently reentered the popular consciousness by playing Queen Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones.

The Avengers was kind of far out:

The stories became crazier and crazier — Space plants from the moon! Assassination by laser! Invisible spies! Housecats trained to kill! Politicians hypnotised into becoming children! A Shrink Ray! — and typified the swinging cool of 1960s Britain. - TV Tropes

Quote of the Day:

Rigg has long been an outspoken critic of feminism, saying in 1969, "Women are in a much stronger position than men.

I suspect that is only true if you are confident and believe in yourself.

More:

Rigg was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1988 New Year Honours and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 1994 Birthday Honours.

Staring

Dan Croll - From Nowhere (Official Video)
The tune is fine, the video is kind of clever. What's up with everyone staring into the camera? All is revealed at the end. Bonus points if you figure it out before the big reveal. I didn't, even though in hindsight it is perfectly obvious. Obvious, that is, if you remember the games you played when you were a kid.

I signed up for YouTube premium just after they bumped the price from $10 a month to $12. Figures. I could tolerate a few random ads, but when they start hammering me with the same ad over and over again it got to be annoying. My kids recommend Spotify and while it might work fine with smartphones, the desktop browser version seems to be broken. Besides, I seem to like older music more than newer music. This tune is from 2014. I had never heard it before a couple of days ago. I suspect that most of the new stuff is popular just because it's new and different, not because it's any good. Let a few years go by and the dross will fade and the good stuff will float to the top.

I don't like paying money for something I've always gotten for free, but maybe it's time, and it's not like $12 a month is going to bust me. I'm paying $16 a month for HBO and I don't even use it anymore since Game of Thrones is over. Netflix has an apparently endless supply of shows. Even if I watch a movie every night I'm not going to make a dent in their supply. They are probably adding shows faster than anyone could watch them. Of course, a lot of them are dross, but sometimes it isn't apparent that a show is a stinker until you get half way through and by then you've invested so much mental energy in it that you may as well finish watching it.

I signed up for YouTube TV recently in the mistaken belief that I could do away with cable TV completely. You can't, not if you want to watch your local NBA team. So I canceled it. It was easy. Just go to the web page and click on cancel. Boom, you're done.

Dealing with the cable TV company is like wading through the circles of hell. I tried to cancel HBO, which I get through Frontier. I spent half an hour chatting with chat bot, only to learn that I had to make an actual phone call to their "retention team". Useless scum sucking pigs. I am trying to figure out how to cancel it without having to talk to anyone. If it would only take five minutes I wouldn't mind, but they've already wasted a half hour of my time, and I suspect they are going to waste an unknown quantity. Maybe if someone dumped a bucket of shit on Frontier's head honcho they would change their ways.

DARK - Netflix Series - Season 1

DARK Season 1 Official Trailer # 2 (2017) Netflix Mystery TV Series HD
ONE Media

Feels like we have seen this show before. We've got a rainy, dark, forest, the small town of Winden, Germany, a smattering of school kids, big and little, and two missing kids. We've also got animals inexplicably falling dead, electric lights being flaky, a mysterious cave adjacent to a nuclear power plant and a mad scientist conducting weird experiments.

Winden Germany (Blue Marker) and Philippsburg Nuclear Power Plant (Red Marker)

Winden is about ten miles from the French border. There is a nuclear power plant 18 miles northeast of Winden.

Realized after the first episode that we had started watching it once before, but found that the story line included time-travel, and being as the boss was opposed to anything science-fictiony, we turned it off. I'm not a big fan of time travel, but some time travel stories are pretty good even though they are fundamentally ridiculous.

This one is just confusing. We've got a dozen or so characters, but we have them operating in three different times periods, so we have three different actors playing each character, one for each time period, which makes it challenging to keep the characters straight, never mind the plot. Wikipedia has a good cast listing.

Did I mention it's rainy? And dark? And the music is creepy. (Soundtrack) The whole show has a very creepy vibe. And because most of our characters are confused and upset, they spend an awful lot of time out wandering around in the rain without umbrellas or even hats. Amazingly, nobody dies of pneumonia.

One good thing is the elaborate clockwork time machine. We catch glimpses of it early on, but we finally get a good look at in the last episode.

Clockwork Time Machine
Image adjusted using Windows Image Viewer

The gyrations it goes through reminds me of the title sequence from Game of Thrones.

10 Episodes, ~50 minutes each.

The Last King

The Last King

The Last King (original Norwegian title Birkebeinerne) is a historical drama that film centers on the efforts of the Birkebeiner loyalists to protect the infant heir to the Norwegian throne. The film is set during the Civil war era in Norway during the 13th century. - paraphrased from Wikipedia.

We watched this last night on Netflix. The first thing we noticed was the big, red-haired wilding from Game of Thrones, Kristofer Hivju, in a starring role. Well, of course, you'll find him here. Who is better at swinging an axe in brutal winter conditions?

The movie has a couple of surprising features:

• lots of chasing people on skis with evil intent, so much skiing that it put me in mind of old James Bond movies.
• squads of bad guys using crossbows effectively.
• horses carrying soldiers running on snow. The snow would have to be either not very deep or well packed. I can imagine short paths being well traveled enough for a horse, or perhaps a narrow path between adjacent villages, but I don't think there were much in the way of roads in medieval Norway. Well, you can't have a medieval war story without warhorses, so mark this one up to the influence of Hollywood.

Skiing Birchlegs Crossing the Mountain with the Royal Child, 1869, by Knud Bergslien.

The skiing was at least semi-authentic. No fancy tricks, basically just skiing long runs downhill with maybe a few gentle turns.

Swords, Sorcery, Politics, & Tunes

Hungry Lucy - We Won't Go
Last week we watched House of Cards with Kevin Spacey, a really fine show. Frank is everything, I mean everything, you expect of a US Congressman. This week we watched the first season of Game of Thrones. Basically the same story, political intrigue, lots of literal and figurative eff-ing. It looks like it is set in the middle ages, i.e. a thousand years ago, but there are a few elements that do not quite jibe, which means it was tens of thousands of years ago, or several light years away, or everything we know about our history is wrong. I am going with the last one, as that seems to be the one thing you can depend on. Anyway, after watching the show all week, this tune started running in the back of my mind. It took me a while to recall just what is was, but after I found it I spent an hour listening to her.

The Take

The Take Official US Release Trailer 1 (2016) - Idris Elba Movie
Movieclips Trailers

The Take is action packed. That's about all I can say about it. We watched it because we are big fans of Idris Elba (from Luther & The Wire). There were a couple of clever lines, but the plot was likely pulled out of a book of standard B-movie plots.

Kelly Reilly had a small part as some kind of CIA bureaucrat. I only mention her because I recognized her but didn't remember where I had seen her. It might have been True Detective or possibly Flight.

Richard Madden (Robb Stark from Game of Thrones) plays a pickpocket who hires an attractive young woman to distract the tourists by taking off her clothes and walking down the steps of a tourist hotspot while he steals all their stuff. That nets him a couple of bucks, but he's soon back at it and this time he steals a backpack from a very foolish young woman, a backpack that contains a bomb that goes off 10 steps after he dumps it in the trash. And then we have action.

On Netflix.

The Last Kingdom

The Last Kingdom | Series 1 Full Trailer
The Last Kingdom is a BBC produced TV series. Season 1 is available on Netflix. We watched the first two episodes this evening. It's pretty good. It's based on The Saxon Stories, a series of historical novels written by Bernard Cornwell, who also wrote the Sharpe's Rifles series, which I really liked.

In an interview, Cornwell said: "For some reason the history of the Anglo-Saxons isn’t much taught in Britain (where I grew up) and it struck me as weird that the English really had no idea where their country came from." - Wikipedia

The story is set in the late 9th Century (877, I think the opening screen said). I thought this was like the time of King Arthur, but Arthur is from the late 5th and early 6th centuries AD. We do have some historical characters, like

• Guthrum
• Alfred the Great
• Odda, Ealdorman of Devon
• Æthelwold ætheling
• Edmund the Martyr
• Æthelred of Wessex
• Asser

There is a great deal of brutality, much like Game of Thrones, but we also have a young, attractive and rich couple who are obviously in love, but I'm not sure that word has even been invented yet. And they're on the run. I think this might be Hollywood plot number 867B, but it's well done, and the girl is pretty great. She has a brain and has no compunction about killing bad guys. She also saves our hero at least once an episode. I don't know why she isn't pregnant yet, unless she's using some of those pagan spells.

Update June 2018 replaced missing trailer.

Have A Drink

We've been watching Borgia, Rules of Love, Rules of War, and I finally put two and two together. Unlike Game of Thrones which has at least one character with a brain (the dwarf), none of characters in Borgia have distinguished themselves, at least not in a positive way. They all seem to be vile, conniving heretics.
    Then it occurred to me that they are drinking wine all the time, well, at least when they are in town. Occasionally you will see soldiers drinking water when away from town, but I'm pretty sure the habitual drinking of water in a town was a good way to contract some horrible disease that would kill you.
    So basically these guys are intoxicated all the time, so no wonder everything they do seems insane. Rational thought is going to have to wait for a couple-three hundred years for clean water.
    We're all in this together, we're all drinking, we're all crazy, and we're all comfortable with this. This is what we are familiar with: 5,000 years of the fruit of the vine.
    And then we run into ganja from the East, and hey, that stuff is different. Those people are different. They act different, they think differently, they smell different. Grrrr, they must be the enemy! Wine is the one true God! We must slay all the ganga smokers! And that's why we have our great and wondrous War on Drugs.