Haydninvienna (Richard) reads with Jimmy Woods

As usual, I struggled to find a title for this topic. "Reading with Jimmy Woods" seems like what's happening at the moment though. "Jimmy Woodser" is a slightly old-fashioned Australian slang term for a man (always a man) who drinks alone in the pub. I realise that in this Pub you're never alone, but with our enforced isolation it sometimes seems like it. There are differing views on the origin of the term. One theory is that it comes from a poem by Barcroft Boake (his real name!) published in the Bulletin magazine in 1892 about a man named Jimmy Wood who wanted to end the practice of "shouting" (that is, buying rounds in a group). I can't find the poem on line. There's another theory about two publicans, one of them named Jimmy Woods, who owned pubs on the corner of York and Market Streets in Sydney in about 1860.

And as for being alone: I've just had 2 maintenance guys in here changing the smoke detector in the kitchen. Yesterday it was doing something to the windows.

ETA Just to make a liar of me, following the links in the Wikipedia article found this: "Jimmy Wood". Not exactly a happy poem. One hopes we avoid Jimmy's sad fate.

EATA A Jimmy Woodser might also be described as "drinking with the flies".

Happy new thread!

When I saw the title I wondered who Jimmy Woods was and, of course, did a quick Google. (That last clause would not have been understood twenty years ago.)

I came across James Wood, the actor, and Jimmy Woods the jazz player. I was wondering if you were reading with Jimmy Woods music playing.

Of course, my primary suspicion as that the title was in some way an April Fool's Day joke.

Happy reading in your Q2 reading thread.

Maddz asked how I was going with The Corfu Trilogy. The short answer, weirdly, is that I'm not. I can't seem to finish a read at present—I have a bad habit generally of not finishing books, but it seems to be worse at the moment. All I want to read is fluff. Attention span of a goldfish. There seems to be quite a few people complaining of the problem at the moment though. Just now I'm not-reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which as it happens I've never read, although I remember reading The Ladies of Grace Adieu years ago and enjoying it.

>3 haydninvienna: Oh man, Strange and Norrell. Best of luck with that brick :-)

Well, I, too, presently favour fluff and have an attention span that should make a goldfish proud. So you are definitely not alone.
I've never read Strange & Norrell either. I think its huge fame, back when, acted as a detractor: I tend to be a bit suspicious of things "everyone" suddenly reads. Without any good reason, I might add.

>3 haydninvienna: I could see Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell being a difficult choice during a time when one’s attention span isn’t at its best! I had mixed feelings about it and gave it 3.5 stars. The first section in the book was the slowest part I think, then its pace picked up a tiny bit. I enjoyed the style of it, and all the footnotes, but it’s a character-driven story and I hated one character and never got very attached to the others.

>3 haydninvienna:, >6 YouKneeK:, well, it is written in the style of a Victorian novel. Honestly, you'd think the Victorians were paid by the word or something! ;)

I read a paper copy when it came out (not straight away, I got the paperback in a Waterstones deal some time later) and >5 Busifer:'s description of 'brick' is entirely apt. I started re-reading it in ebook and didn't get very far before being distracted with other things. Oddly, I had the same reaction to the TV adaptation - I got so far, and didn't get back to it.

Now that I'm not commuting, I may start up TV box sets again; I finished Good Omens, started Midnight, Texas Season 2, but stopped, and there's others I've not started like The Borgias. I'm not allowed to buy any more box sets (e.g. The Medici - Masters of Florence until I finish what I have...

>7 Maddz: It was >4 BookstoogeLT: who referred to the book as a"brick", not me ;-)
(I loved the TV-version of Good Omens. The book, too, I've reread it multiple times. They are different, but each of them good!)

>8 Busifer: and a very fat brick at that! :-D

>3 haydninvienna: I gave Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell a 3-star rating. For me that is a rating for a "good book" but nothing exceptional. I am glad I read it and I loved the footnotes.

In 2006 Susanna Clarke was the Guest of Honour at P-Con III and I was asked to pick her and her partner, Colin Greenland, up from the airport and bring them to the convention hotel. They both proved to be delightful people and I took the opportunity of having Susanna sign my copy of the book.

>3 haydninvienna: It is rather difficult to give any book the attention it deserves in times like these. Read whatever you have to to stay as sane as possible. I was like a grizzly bear during a salmon run the last few weeks, tasting a little of a book then tossing it aside for another...

I wouldn't disagree with calling Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell a brick, but it's not a VOUS* by current standards. My copy is 1006 pages long. There seems to be a great many very long novels about in the fantasy genre, above all The Lord of the Rings, and as we well know, many people have read it several times. I found a catalogue entry for it on line that gives its length as 1,178 pages (main text only, not including foreword and illustrations etc). It's organised into 6 parts, which were originally published as 3 volumes, but it reads like a single work and Tolkien thought of it as such.

And it's not only fantasy that runs to long novels. There is a Wikipedia page that gives a list of the longest novels (which does not mention The Lord of the Rings, although it does mention some shorter works). The list does not seem to sort reliably by page count, but I think the longest novel on it originally written in English was Sironia, Texas (1,731 pages) by Madison Cooper, and then Sir Charles Grandison (1,647 pages in the Oxford World's Classics ed) by Samuel Richardson—excluding Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (3,024 pages), which I think of as a series rather than a single novel.

Another very long novel that isn't on the list is Thomas Mann's Joseph and his Brothers, for which I can't see a page count on line, but it's well over 1,000 pages as I remember it. (Yes, I have read it, and even enjoyed it. Read most of A Dance to the Music of Time too.)

>7 Maddz: I think Susanna Clarke was aiming for Jane Austen pastiche, but I'm not sure she quite got there. To me the style seems to be what the Fowler brothers called "negative archaism"—that is, avoiding any obvious out-of-period expressions but not trying to use expressions that are appropriate for the period but no longer current (although she does use some variant spellings, such as "surprize" and "chuse"). As the Fowlers said, period-appropriate positive archaism is dangerous country for the non-expert. (The King's English, page 208 in the third edition. Worth reading if you can get hold of a copy.)

I have indeed read both Good Omens and The Quite Nice and Fairly Accurate Good Omens Script Book, and also watched the series, and loved all of them. Come to think of it, I have a couple of TV boxed sets that might be worth a look.

*Volume of Unusual Size.

For TV box sets I can recommend The Hollow Crown (BBC). It consists of Richard II, Henry IV, V & VI, and Richard III. Maybe not for Bard purists, but highly enjoyable. Or so I think.
I was going to watch it again when I was waiting to start my new position, but the DVD player broke down. Now I have a player, but less time :(

>13 Busifer: I think I have the set of Slings and Arrows, a Canadian TV series about a fictitious Shakespeare festival, somewhere. Might see if I can find it.

>11 clamairy: I've followed Five Books on and off for some years and after reading your post I remembered one of their interviews, with Rabbi Lionel Blue. It was interesting because as a rabbi, and gay, he included a Mills & Boon among his favourite books. "Fans may be surprised by his choices, but one thing is key: a happy ending". If Rabbi Lionel Blue can read Mills & Boon, I can read fluff of any kind I choose, so there.

I actually got The Borgias - Season 1 to use as costume reference for a freeform I was participating in at the convention but ended up not watching any - I found plenty of period art online which enabled me to put together a costume. Then I ran across the complete season 1-3 and replaced my unopened season 1.

Ah well, I've finished for the day (and got a huge thank you for a report I built). I logged on a bit late (I'd been out first thing for the weekly shop) to a flurry of emails and a conference call. After spending most of the morning dealing with the emails and handing off some work to others, I built a first-draft report for a CCG upload in time for a 4 pm deadline. It needs refining next week once we get some real data, and I need to try and get rid of some errors (manageable where there's only a couple of rows, not so manageable when there's hundred of rows with the error).

>12 haydninvienna: said, "VOUS*"

Nice Princess Bride reference!

For lengthy volumes in SF, let's not forget just about anything by Neal Stephenson. For instance, my hardcover editions of his The Baroque Cycle run to over 2,672 pages, all told. If you include Cryptonomicon in the series, (and it is part of the same story), then the page count jumps to 3,590.

I was gifted a hardcover edition of Strange & Norell several years ago but have yet to crack it open... O_o

>15 haydninvienna: In 2003 I attended a week long Writers' Holiday at Caerleon in Wales. There were three evening events. On Wednesday we had a Welsh Male Voice Choir. On Thursday we had Caroline Graham, the author of the Midsomer Murders, as a guest speaker. She was very entertaining and a lovely person.

On Tuesday night we had a lady who wrote romance novels for Mills & Boon. The first part of her talk was a rather indignant denial of all the stereotype views people had about Mills & Boon authors. The second part of her talk was proof that the stereotype views were true in her case. That was also a very entertaining evening...for the audience.

>17 ScoLgo: I was wondering if anyone would catch that.

ETA But yes, it's a matter of definition, whether a serially published work that constitutes a single story is a single novel or not. LOTR is an interesting case because LOTR itself is a single novel, as I said above, but The Hobbit, which is part of the same story, is clearly not part of the novel, and The Silmarillion is part of the same mythology but not part of the same story.

The Wikipedia article I linked to contains this sentence under the heading "Definitions":

Excluded are self-published, printed-on-demand, vanity works, unpublished novels like Henry Darger's, novel sequences like the Chronicles of Barsetshire, novel cycles such as those set in the James Bond universe, and record-grabbing stunts written solely for the title of the longest work.

Heavens above! Just the idea of writing 10,000,000 or more words of vaguely coherent English prose just for the sake of a stunt makes me come over all funny.

I would have thought I would read more in this situation, but I find that I have no desire to pick up a book. I cook, I play my Nintendo game, I work on the family history, I still go to work a few days a week, I read a little in FB, and a few news articles. The only reading I've done in the past month or so is in the bathroom and letters and articles in my family history. This will all pass, right? I will have the desire to read books again? I'm not obsessing about the virus, nor am I overly panicked so far as I can tell. Just-distracted.

For the record, I loved Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell way back when I read it in a hardcover which belonged to my daughter, but I know I could never read it now.

It’s reassuring to know I’m not alone in being in a state of permanent distraction.

>18 pgmcc: Peter, I’d like to read more of the events of that Tuesday evening. Care to elaborate a bit?

>21 haydninvienna: The lady in question, whose name I cannot recall, started by saying she felt Mills & Boon authors got a very bad press, and that people thought they only focused on bodice bursting romantic entanglements, whereas in reality they handled many real life situations in their stories and that they deserved much more credit than they deserved. She then went on to discuss how she would construct one of her stories. This involved defining to beautiful people and constructing a plot that brought them together in some erotic, bodice busting encounter. There were many other examples her talk that proved she was very much the type of author the audience members thought a Mills & Boon author would be. :-) This was the main topic of conversation after the talk.

It was like someone thought to be an assassin denying that he had ever killed anyone and then describing in detail how he had killed a whole string of targets.

>22 pgmcc: Thought as much. You've probably heard the expression "Extruded Fantasy Product". Hers were obviously "Extruded Romance Product".

Found something I can read: Borges and Mathematics by Guillermo Martinez. I've had this on my wishlist for some time but took the plunge and bought the kindle version a couple of hours ago (the kindle version being a third the price of a dead-tree copy and also instant gratification). (Martinez is also the author of The Oxford Murders, which was filmed. Read the book years ago, haven't seen the film.)

One of the Amazon reviewers complained that Borges and Mathematics doesn't tell you much about Borges. I have to disagree. I've already learned a good deal about how Borges thought from the first couple of lectures (the book apparently originated as a series of lectures). I've also realised that The Oxford Murders pinched a basic idea from Borges' short story "Death and the Compass".

I remember reading somewhere the the mathematical logic of Borges' famous "Library of Babel" doesn't actually work, but I can't remember where. Not unlikely though that it was in one of Martin Gardner's essays.

ETA Having finished Borges and Mathematics, I find that the title is ever so slightly a lie—only the first 2 essays are strictly about Borges. The remainder, essays and lectures, are on other topics to do with literature and mathematics. Still interesting but less so than the ones devoted to Borges.

Since I'm at home more I've taken the opportunity of culling my LT wishlist a bit, partly by ordering things and partly by looking at reviews and deciding whether I really want the book or not. In the course of doing so, in a review of Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, I came across this: "As a family, they like nothing better than collectively proofreading restaurant menus before ordering their meals" (speaking of Anne Fadiman's family). A word to the wise restaurateur: try to avoid having groups of legislative counsel in your establishment, if your menus have been inadequately proof-read. Legislative counsel will not only read your menu for errors with a coarse and insensitive eye, but may even leave a marked-up copy of it. I may have been a part of a group who have done this.

>25 haydninvienna: That's brilliant!

>25 haydninvienna: Perhaps having such a party in the restaurant is a step in the introduction of a new menu. The restaurateur will have their menu proof read and been paid for it. Win-win.

>27 pgmcc: The restaurant in question was in a motel in the town of Bowral in New South Wales, to which our division had gone for a team-building exercise. Nice motel and quite decent restaurant, but lacking in proof-reading skillz. Bowral is otherwise famous for its association with Sir Donald Bradman.

I've seen a good few people complaining that all they can read is fluff. I may have found the lowest level to which I am prepared to go (yet, anyway). Browsing lists on Good reads, I found a reference to Robin Ince's Bad Book Club by (ahem) Robin Ince. Available on kindle for cheap, so I bought it. Ince is an English comedian, actor and writer who has made a touring show out of reading from and ridiculing some of the worst books he has found. He buys the books from charity shops and has a rule that a book may cost no more than £3.

Robin Ince's Bad Book Club does not always play for comedy; some of the books he ridicules are objectionable for worse reasons than just being eccentric or incoherent. However, being more specific than that would skate round the edge of Pub rules. On the whole, it was worth the £3.99 I paid for it on kindle and the afternoon I spent reading it.

>29 haydninvienna: I'm still working a couple of days a week so my brain is staying occupied. I shiver to think what depths I might sink to if I go workless :-)

At least you're reading some non-fiction. That always gets a "pinky raise" from me :-D

>29 haydninvienna: I might have taken a bullet on that Ince book.

>30 BookstoogeLT: That's not a pinky!

>30 BookstoogeLT: Only 2 days? I'm working full time from home... At least I can roll out of bed, get dressed, cross the hall and I'm in the 'office' (actually the main house library, but we've both got laptops and tables in there). I'm actually debating whether to cancel my annual season tickets (train and car park) - but I'll wait until after Easter when hopefully the UK government will decide when (if) we're likely to come out of lockdown. If we're likely to be out by May, I'll take the hit, otherwise I'll cancel.

Fortunately, I was used to home working, since I already did it 2 days a week. The main change is that I am logging into the council VPN on my council laptop via GlobalProtect in the library instead of using my MacBook Pro via Citrix in the sitting room. I did have to get a decent widescreen monitor, some replacement seat wedges, and a stand for my whiteboard. The advantage is that I have full access to my programs and bookmarks instead of what's been packaged in Citrix.

Ah well, today is the first day of my Easter break, and I'm not working (officially) until the 20th. I do have to drop in next Tuesday to run a report - it's new, I will need to make adjustments as data is added to the system, and do a vlookup in Excel once it's exported.

>31 clamairy: *puts on monocle* Au contraire, Madam, I never drink my tea OR read my non-fiction without lifting my pinky finger ;-)

>32 Maddz: Can't really do telecommuting with land surveying :-D Sounds like you've got quite the system all setup.

>33 BookstoogeLT: Google Earth? :D

It was lucky I already had 3 office chairs in the library - we're both geeks and welcome decent seating when doing extended online sessions. (One's going to go to the tip when this is all over - the gas lift is on the way out.) I used to play a couple of online games - Travian and Tribal Wars, and I could be playing all evening. Sitting on the sofa to play was an invitation to backache and wrist issues (I've had RSI in both at one time or another).

Our main issue is privacy - I deal with personally identifiable information for vulnerable people, and Paul deals with commercial computer security, so we have to go into another room for meetings. Fortunately the room is big enough we're not sitting close together and don't really overlook each other's work.

>33 BookstoogeLT: That's not the finger we usually salute with here in New York.

>29 haydninvienna: Looks like the Ince book is only available in actual paper, so I'm off the hook for now.

>35 clamairy: If NY is anything like Boston (and I'm sure it's worse, being bigger), I am not at all surprised :-D

>36 BookstoogeLT: It's actually not worse. I think Boston was ranked the least friendly city in the US. NYC wasn't even second. I'm not in the city though, thankfully. I enjoy visiting, and then I enjoy coming home.

>37 clamairy: Now that ranking for Boston doesn't surprise me one bit. I no longer drive in boston, period.

>37 clamairy: & >38 BookstoogeLT:
My experience of Boston people during our month long holiday in 2016 was that they were very friendly. I agree that when they got behind steering wheels they became demons, but that is a natural mutation for humans the world over. It is a bit like feeding gremlins after dark and letting them have water.

>39 pgmcc: Too true. Present company included. :o)

For those who celebrate Easter, I hope it was appropriately blessed for all of you.

I have had, for the past few years, a standing habit of finding a performance of the St Matthew Passion somewhere. One year I even went to the annual performance in Bach's own church, the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. This year, of course, I couldn't. But on Friday morning I clicked KUSC on, got Jim Svejda's program from the evening before, and was just in time for this aria:

"Mache dich, mein Herze rein ..."

Tears me apart. Every time. Every single time.

But of course, on Sunday morning:

The Easter oratorio. (Careful with the volume on this one. Also, it's the whole work, not just one piece of it.) Nobody does jubilation like Bach.

If I had to save one piece of music from the whole enormous corpus of human creation, I might hesitate for a split second but it would be the St Matthew Passion that I would pick. Sorry, but despite my username and how dearly I love Haydn and all his works, there is simply nothing else in all of musical creation to equal the St Matthew Passion.

>41 haydninvienna: And a blessed Easter to you too, Richard (although it is Palm Sunday here).

>42 -pilgrim-:. Yes, of course. I should have written “or will be appropriately ...”.

>43 haydninvienna: These pesky alternative calendars... :)

And a blessed and happy Easter to you, Richard. The same for next week to -pilgrim-, and happy Passover to Jewish Dragoneers.

Not exactly a literary figure but I see that John Horton Conway died on 11 April. He was a mathematician, and was a friend of Martin Gardner's, who definitely was a literary figure. Conway appears on my world-line because he invented the Game of Life, and it's now a standard exercise for budding computer programmers (I was one once) to do an implementation of it.

ETA XKCD's comment. This is how I found out that Conway was gone.

Here's a bit of something from out of left field.

As I may have said, I lurk in a few different places around LT, and I took a BB from MissWatson for Herr Mozart Wacht Auf. Minor problem: it's in German and there is no translation yet. I took 2 years of German in high school, and passed the course, and then had another go in the early 90s in an evening class, and my German is less than basic. But I came across a reference to a Hungarian polyglot named Kató Lomb, who was one of the first simultaneous translators. She wrote a short book on her "method" of learning languages, and there are newer books along similar lines. I picked up one, The Open Secret of Polyglots, for cheap on kindle. The initial basis of the method sounds ridiculous: find a novel in the language you want to learn and start reading it. Without using a dictionary. Just figure it out from context.

Yes, it still sounds ridiculous. But I started remembering things. I used to have a book somewhere by an Australian polyglot who also used to do simultaneous translation and whose method was to take a stack of books of instruction in the target language and just read one till he got stuck, then take up another one and do the same. Then come back to the first one, and so on. That also sounds ridiculous.

But: I remember how C S Lewis was taught Homeric Greek. His description of the process went something like this: he came to "Kirk" (his tutor) after only the barest acquaintance with the vocabulary and grammar of Attic Greek, and expecting to do a heavy slog on the grammar and vocabulary of Homer; but what Kirk did was to pick up the text of the Iliad and read aloud a chunk of it (a couple of hundred lines), then hand over a grammar and a dictionary and tell Lewis to go through what he had just read. They repeated the process until Lewis had it, and then went on to another chunk, larger and larger each time.

I haven't mentioned that both Lomb and my unnamed Australian also used any audio resources that were available, such as broadcasts, films, and any native speakers who happened to be available. Lewis had "Kirk" reading aloud.

And there's "Benny the Irish polyglot" who is still around on the net. He is an advocate of diving right in.

Well, I have Kaiserschmarrndrama by Rita Falk, which I bought for the sake of the title (Kaiserschmarrn is one of my favourite desserts), and I could try that. I believe that some of Rita Falk's novels are actually written in Bavarian dialect and I hope this is not one of them. I also have Imprimatur in both English and German.

>47 haydninvienna:

I also have Imprimatur in both English and German.

But not in Italian?

The approach to learning languages sounds intriguing. I know at least three polyglots; well four if you could a Russian I once knew whom I believe worked for an organisation referred to by a three letter acronym. I am always amazed by the languages they speak. The three I know and meet regularly are, by nationality, Russian (not the same one as already mentioned), Northern Irish, and Argentinian.

I must ask them about this approach. I suspect the Argentinian would see sense in the approach. She just appears to absorb languages.

>48 pgmcc: The one in German was the outcome of hitting the button too fast on Amazon. Since the title is the same for all the language versions, I didn't check that the top one was the English version. Then I was too lazy to send it back and just bought another one.

Further re Herr Mozart wacht auf: apparently he is brought back to finish his Requiem. However, he still can't face it, and spends his time trying to figure out this strange new world (although I suspect he could probably still find his way round the Innere Stadt) and discovering modern music. Spends lots of time in jazz clubs. After all, he was a keyboard man. That's the wonderful Dame Cleo Laine (who is blessedly still with us) and her husband Sir John Dankworth (who unfortunately is not) riffing off the final movement, Rondo Alla Turca, of Mozart's piano sonata in A major, K 331.

And on another note entirely, I'll just leave this here: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/spacefarers-book-predicts-how-space-coloniza....

>47 haydninvienna: I have tried this method. I had read Lewis' autobiographical account, so I considered it feasible.

The Classical Greek course that I did was structured in this way, except that the texts were initially somewhat adapted. It got me to a level where I could read Herodotus for fun after 2 years.

So, when I couldn't find a Russian course beyond the very basics, and some texts that I reallywanted to read and could not wait for a translation, I got a really big dictionary, a reference grammar, and dived in.

It works for me better than conventional courses, because you are forced to think about exactly why THAT word had exactly THAT shape and is placed THERE.

But I did have Russian speakers around who I could ask about words not in the dictionary and slang usages.

>49 haydninvienna: "... like an African safari 150 years ago ... not for the kids" Come off it! The Sciencenews writer has either forgotten, or never knew, a rather important piece of southern African history. How many thousand Dutch-speaking families left the Cape between 1834 and 1838 on what was effectively a one-way safari (even if they called it The Great Trek)? And kids were born in the wagons, and grew up loving the veld through which they travelled, passionately. At least some later kids got a love of the great outdoors from a pale shadow of the same. Indeed, I went to the Kruger Park for the first time at the age of four, and have loved it ever since. In those far-off and palmy days there was no electricity and no refrigeration anywhere in the park, and only two camps, both on the boundaries of the reserve, had public phones. Even the main roads had grass growing on the middelmannetjie (between the wheel tracks), but then we did have a car, and the camp managers could call one another up on short-wave radio. In summer most of the Reserve was closed because of malaria.

And wealthy and adventurous parents, deciding that was too tame, took their kids to Kafue or the Luangwa Valley in Northern Rhodesia ...

If I wasn't feeling bone lazy I'd go and dig out an old run of African Wild Life, where I'm sure I could find at least one account of a family safari to Moremi, Kafue, Serengeti or wherever, complete with toddler/s. It's been done, often, in the last 150 years!

PS to above: An "African Safari" probably was an expensive holiday for a foreigner travelling to the continent, even 60-75 years ago. But at the time I was talking of, when I was a kid, going to "the game reserve" was very much the cheap option for locals. A hotel cost 15 shillings and up per person per night, supplied breakfast within that price, and might do dinner for a bit extra. The Kruger Park charged 3 shillings a night for camping (supply your own tent) or 4 shillings for the use of one of their ex-army tents, which could sleep four. Rondavels and cottages were more expensive, up to £1 10s for a luxury cottage that slept six. All self catering, but most camps had a restaurant, whose food rather depended on the skills of the camp manager's wife. Breakfast 3/6, lunch 4/6, dinner 6 shillings. By comparison, it cost Esc.230$00 (a shade under £3 or US$8.40) to pitch a tent in the Lourenço Marques municipal campsite, regardless of length of stay, and bandas in Kenyan reserves were 10/- to 80/- a night (except for Treetops, 90/- to 250/-). So yes, East Africa was more expensive than South Africa, Angola rather more expensive and the Belgian Congo by far the most expensive (AA Road Atlas, 1960 edition).

>51 hfglen: >52 hfglen: Just to add to the pile-on, weren't there various wagon treks from the east of the US to the west during the 19th century?

Never mind, that's just the Science News piece. One hopes that the book is somewhat more historically informed. Damn, I may now need to buy the book myself, rather than just firing BBs from a place of relative safety.

Edited to fix egregious spelling fumbles.

>53 haydninvienna: Yep, I have journals kept by family members who came across the country in the 1860s. Indian encounters, cholera, and all.

>53 haydninvienna: I read somewhere once that the wagons of MrsLee's ancestors were the Cadillacs of the wagoning world, but Voortrekker wagons were the 4x4s :-)

>50 -pilgrim-: You read Lewis's account, as I did, in Surprised by Joy.

I must say I'm encouraged by the comments above. I expected a collective raised eyebrow of mild derision. And I also remembered that Clive James, who read in several languages, somewhere described starting a new language with a novel.

>56 haydninvienna: I am dubious about the viability of the approach for a language that is completely new. I think some basic idea of grammar and sentence structure would be needed, and enough vocabulary not to look up every word.

Although I have heard of children being taught to read and write Church Slavonic simply by working their way through a Russian Bible.

But by "some knowledge", maybe fluency in a related language (or, better, several) would be sufficient. If I were really fluent in Latin, I might attempt Italian, for example. (Have no intention of trying - am not fluent enough.)

Perhaps Clive James knows sufficient languages for that effect to apply.

>57 -pilgrim-: I agree. I’m prepared to try it with German and with French since I have a basic familiarity with both, but I wouldn’t try it with Russian. Nor with any language that doesn’t use the Latin alphabet.

>58 haydninvienna: I don't feel that alphabet makes much difference. Alphabet memorisation come pretty quickly if you are actively using it regularly. And, for personal taste, I would rather read something in a different alphabet, than something that uses the Latin alphabet but puts radically different phonetic values on them compared to English (e.g. the Gaelic "mh" or "de" or Polish "c" or "cz").

I also find it easier to remember the distinction between ш and щ than between ż and ź. The Cyrillic alphabet warns my brain "pay attention, this is not English", whilst the false resemblance of "looks like z" induced a false sense of familiarity.

And just to prove that I have no sense of relevance at all, this was randomly posted on Metafileter as amusement while it's down for maintenance: a train ride from Bludenz to Innsbruck, from the cab (warning: it's an hour and a half long). I have actually done this trip, although unfortunately not in the cab.

>60 haydninvienna: Do we have to have tickets?

I would hate to get on the train and then be found to have no ticket.

>61 pgmcc: I haven't been asked for a ticket yet (I have it playing as I type). I know now why this trip seems slow even on the spiffy Austrian Railjet trains. Lots of single track stretches on the side of a mountain, and nowhere to put another track!

But OMG that part of the world is beautiful. Just google "Vorarlberg" and look at the images. But to give you some idea:

This is the view from the balcony of the flat I stayed in in a little town called Egg:


and this is the view outside the concert hall (the Angelika-Kaufmann-Saal in Schwartzenberg):


When I got off the bus outside the concert hall, I looked around and thought that in this world the magic never really went away. The concert was Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake performing Schubert's Winterreise. An absolutely magic evening.

>62 haydninvienna: Wow, that is the perfect combination of landscape and music. I've heard Bostridge singing Schubert on numerous occasions and he is one of the great interpreters IMO.

>62 haydninvienna: Bostridge certainly is one of the great lieder singers. I've also heard Mark Padmore sing Winterreise (can't remember the accompanist) at Hohenems in the same region. I actually think Padmore was better because more stage presence. The memory of him at the end of "Der Leiermann" just standing there staring into nothing haunts me still.

Most memorable Winterreise though was a Norwegian baritone whose name I don't remember (pretty damn good though) because of the venue. Theatre, not much bigger than a large living-room, in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Arctic Chamber Music Festival, February 2018. This was the venue:



and this is the main street of Longyearbyen:

Wow! Yes, that seems a perfect setting for Winterreise!

Mark Padmore is another of my favourite singers. He is a great Evangelist in the Bach Passions too.

>65 Sakerfalcon: I'm a total fanboi for Mark Padmore since forever, and I've seen him in the St Matthew Passion several times.

Yes, coming out of that little space into the snowy street with my head full of Winterreise was distinctly memorable. According to the metadata for that photo, it was taken on 15 February 2018 at 0947 local time. The sun doesn't appear above the horizon there till about mid-March; all you get in the mid-"morning" is the twilight. It's very beautiful.

>62 haydninvienna: A lovely journey indeed.

I have been camping, mostly, with my grandparents. In the mountains, deserts, beaches, at lakes and beside streams (my grandfather was an avid fisherman). Then traveling around the world with grandma after grandpa died, Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Mexico, and I think we are going to Africa soon. I have about 50 more boxes of slides to go through, then I begin traveling with my parents and the several crates of their slides.

>60 haydninvienna: Just arrived in Innsbruck ;-)

A truly amazing ride, thank you!

>62 haydninvienna: & >64 haydninvienna: How marvelous. I'm envious.

>67 MrsLee: What a spectacular journey! You still own a slide projector, or have you hooked something up to your PC?

>69 clamairy: I have a little battery operated viewer that I'm using. Stack the slides on one side, push/pull a little tray and the slide moves to the light screen. When you push the tray again, the viewed slide is pushed out and a new one is pushed in. It works well because it is easy to see, and I can grab the ones I want to scan right there. I also have my mother's carousel slide projector, but my grandmother's slides are all in boxes.

News flash. Katherine (TokenGingerKid) spotted these when out for supplies:

>71 haydninvienna: That's wonderful. Especially for those of us who are feeling dragged down.

>60 haydninvienna:, >68 hfglen: Well, I've spent time on these cab rides, among others, so...
https://youtu.be/sbPGht_7Ujs (Ofotenbanen, the Norwegian section of the ore route from the mines in Kiruna to the port in Narvik)
https://youtu.be/JmyFTU09zMc (Malmbanan, the Swedish section of the ore route from the mines in Kiruna to the port in Narvik)
But then I have a deep fascination with the IORE engines. And with Malmbanan/Ofotenbanen.

>73 Busifer: Thank you. I'm W-ing FH right now, so I'll look at them later.

Further to #74, I've just been reading a long, very dull (unavoidably) paper on bank insolvency regimes. I thought I needed a short LT break after that.

On a more usual note, earlier this morning I finally yielded and downloaded the kindle version of Nine Hundred Grandmothers, by R A Lafferty. I used to have the paperback (with this cover:) but I don't know what became of it, and it sells for ridiculous prices on Amazon. I love Lafferty, as you may have noticed: one of the LT reviews says "These stories are wacky, gruesome, inappropriate, hilarious, abstract, and still compact. They operate almost entirely on dream-logic, and are guaranteed to baffle and entertain.". If it matters, Neil Gaiman is also a big fan.

>74 haydninvienna: Well, it's mostly snow, and some tunnels. But it is the world's northernmost electrified railway, so there's that.

>75 haydninvienna: I almost jumped on that, but I tend to shy away from short story collections. They're just too easy to set aside and not pick up again.

Well, I did read some of the Lafferty: some of the stories are a bit dark for present circumstances (and some of the ones that don't look dark, in particular "Hog-Belly Honey", become slightly disturbing if you think about them too long). But he is still fantastic in every sense.

I'm giving Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell another go after the recent discussion of it starting here, prompted by saltmanz's description of it as "very dense and dry at times, but ... still wry and dreamy and wonderful". I wonder. Being the bad person that I am, I skipped to the end to read the last 50 or so pages (don't worry, I will go back and read the rest) and I found myself thinking of That Hideous Strength by C S Lewis. One of the climactic moments is strikingly similar to the climax of That Hideous Strength—and I am not accusing Susannah Clarke of plagiarism. There's a certain quality connecting them that I don't really have a name for, but its outcome is that I feel like there are two places both called "England", which happen to occupy the same bit of geography. One of them has VAT and politicians and coronavirus, and the other, which has been there for much, much longer, has Lewis and Tolkien and Edward Thomas (the poet) and Vaughan Williams's music, and now Susannah Clarke.

And just to prove that LT can change your life (at least a little bit), after the discussion above (starting at #47) I've been spending some time in the afternoons reading Le Petit Prince. I start from the beginning each afternoon and read as best I can, trying not to look up too many words, and get a bit further each time. It seems to be going OK so far. If I really need a crib I also have the new Penguin Classics edition in English.

ETA I also have Djinn by Alain Robbe-Grillet, “which is a novel composed as a textbook using vocabulary and syntax of gradually increasing complexity“ (from https://ask.metafilter.com/233290/Simple-Frenchlanguage-fiction#3378965—quite a few good suggestions there).

>78 haydninvienna: The French text I tried was an 18th century memoire, after I discovered that the English "translation" included barely a third of the original.

I have a copy that has been rendered into modern French, and I also tried an original edition (at a major library). Intriguingly, I found 18th century French slightly easier to read; the Latin o derivations of words were more obvious in the spelling, giving me a larger "known" vocabulary store. I needed my dictionary far less than I had expected.

I agree completely with your description of two England's. I don't think that "other England" will ever be lost, but it is sometimes hard to reconcile with the England I see around me.

Certainly the patriotism/nationalism that is demonstrated by the current government has nothing to do with the patriotism that I feel for my England. (But to say more on that would violate group rules.)

I would add Alan Garner to the list of writers with that essence of Englishness. His children's books are best known, but he wrote for adults as well.

Congratulations on starting Le Petit Prince. Do keep us apprised of your progress.

You are tempting me by your description Djinn.

>79 -pilgrim-: Certainly the patriotism ... : I absolutely agree. I wasn't born in England but I have UK citizenship through my father's having been born there. I awoke to the older England a few weeks after moving to the UK in 2006, when the bus between Bicester and Oxford was diverted because of roadwork on the A34 and had to go by the back roads through the villages—I suddenly realised that part of me had physically arrived somewhere that it had spiritually been all the time.

I wasn't trying to make a complete list of writers or composers who were in touch with the older England, of course, just giving examples, and at that only the ones that came to mind as I was typing. Oddly, neither Lewis nor Tolkien was born in England. Tolkien's paternal family roots were in East Prussia, and JRRT was born in South Africa. Which reminds me that I think T S Eliot qualifies too, on the strength of "Little Gidding" and its connection with George Herbert.

This seems an appropriate date to be discussing the essence of Englishness: the day after Shakespeare's birthday and At George's Day!

Well, yesterday we could have been discussing the elements of Australianness, since it was Anzac Day, a much bigger symbol of Australia to most Australians than Australia Day. (I’m not ignoring the significant NZ connection, I just don’t presume to speak for them.) of course with Covid everything was locked down—even the Dawn Service at the Australian War Memorial was closed to the public. First time ever, as far as I know.

I’m still going on Le Petit Prince. I’m trying to advance by 1 section a day, and it seems to be getting easier.

>83 haydninvienna: Interesting question. How would you describe the "elements of Australianess"?

It is also noteworthy that for both our countries the most important commemoration of lives lost in war and military Sacrifice remains the anniversaries of events of the First World War. I had difficulty explaining to a Russian visitor that VE Day was a more muted occasion for us, not because we do not remember our losses, but that it is not the main day for their commemoration.

ANZAC Day is remembered here too (on a far smaller scale, of course). But purely as a salute to the military. Are you saying that in Australia it had taken on a more general patriotic nature?

>83 haydninvienna: Are you enjoying Le Petit Prince?

>84 -pilgrim-: Elements of Australianness: I’m going to dodge that because I have no idea. Some ideas that were current in the past, such as the supposed national ideal of the “fair go”, are seemingly honoured only as an aspiration. I don’t even know whether there is a difference between my generation’s ideals and those of my sons’ generation. Actually, I’ll ask the boys that. In my own defence, I don’t know how to describe Englishness either—note I didn’t say Britishness; that’s for politicians.

I think Anzac Day has pretty well absorbed the place in the Australian national consciousness that in the UK is filled by Remembrance Day. As before, I don’t know about NZ. Remembrance Day is still observed to some extent in Australia, but I think the minute’s silence is now observed only on Anzac Day. There are other anniversaries which might be candidates for a bit of the patriotic fervour, such as the anniversary of the defeat of a Japanese landing force at Milne Bay in September, but none is celebrated publicly.

>85 -pilgrim-: Yes I am. I wouldn’t say I’m finding it easy, but it’s interesting and quite fun. And if Hugh reads this, I’m past the bit where St-Ex finds out about the baobabs.

Thinks: Elements of Australianness: must go back and read A Spirit of Play by David Malouf again. That’s what it’s about.

>86 haydninvienna: I still love the idea of baobabs as weeds!

This was so much earlier in the thread that you may not remember. BUT my husband and I thoroughly enjoyed watching Slings and Arrows on TV. If you haven't watched it as yet, do yourself a favor and do so. With regard to watching The Borgias left to myself, I enjoyed Jeremy Irons in the role but my husband wasn't overly impressed. And Busifer recommended The Hollow Crown and I truly do second that recommendation. I mean the cast was just phenomenal.

>88 jillmwo: Unfortunately I think the DVDs are in England—at any rate I didn't find them in a quick scan. Might have a proper look later. I'm supposed to be working at present.

>88 jillmwo: I must start watching that. I got series 1 to use as costume reference (and never found the time to watch it), and replaced it with the omnibus of series 1-3. I've been forbidden to get Medici Masters of Florence until I watch The Borgias.

Another thing I must dig out when I get back to England: The Cloudspotter's Guide, prompted by this. It never ceases to amaze me that people don't look at the sky. One of the benefits of WFH-ing is that I spend a lot of time in front of a row of big windows, and to look at the sky I need only raise my line of sight a little.

>91 haydninvienna: It is rewarding to look up. I did it yesterday morning and last night.

>92 pgmcc: I love cirrus clouds. That's a pretty decent Moon photo too. Thanks for sharing them!

I remember one memorable day while I was working in Dublin. Came out of the front door of the Attorney General's chambers in Merrion Street and turned left (probably intending to go to the Central Library on Pearse Street). Looked up and there was a perfect circumhorizon arc. Nobody else seemed to notice!

Edited because apparently I don't know my left from my right.

This might fit into the "good and bad" thread, but I'll put it here.

Son Who Cooks is doing it a bit tough at the moment, because the owner of the food truck he was working at (see this post for details) got hurt somehow (not at work) and had to take a week off, and hasn't had sufficient trade to re-open. So Philip has basically been keeping afloat with help from Dad. John, one of the other occupants of the place he lives at, died just before Anzac Day, apparently of a heart attack. I just now got a message from Philip saying he had scored a book for me. Apparently John's family left some of his stuff for the other occupants and invited them to take whatever they wanted. He spotted this: Mozart: A Bicentennial Tribute (touchstone goes to a different title but it seems to be the same book), and thought "hey Dad would probably like that" and grabbed it. I've met John: he seemed like a decent bloke.

>94 haydninvienna: That is definitely one for the Merry & Miserable thread. Sorry to hear about your son's misfortune and the trauma of a housemate dying suddenly.

The scoring of an interesting book is definitely a silver-lining, but it does not seem to quite balance things in the favour of Merry.

>95 pgmcc: Yes, Philip found it a bit hard to take. He liked John a lot.

>92 pgmcc: Great pictures, thanks for sharing!

>97 Karlstar:
Thank you.

>94 haydninvienna: - What >95 pgmcc: said.

>95 pgmcc: >99 Busifer: Thanks both of you. Philip tends to keep his emotions pretty locked up, but this hit him.

>94I I am sorry to read your news.

>101 -pilgrim-: Thanks. I've passed the good wishes on to Philip.

I'm still going with Le Petit Prince. It certainly won't make me a fluent reader in French, but I think it's giving me confidence that I could actually master the language.

I'll just leave this here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/national-bookshelf-competition-portugal.

Still going with Le Petit Prince. I notice that Saint-Exupéry uses a surprising number of words that aren't in my dictionary. (The dictionary I had when I started was pretty crappy and I laid out a few quid for a relatively decent Collins one on Kindle.) But thanks to Le Petit Prince, I now know that the fellow who works the points on a railway is un aiguilleur. The word isn't in the Collins French to English (One Way) Pocket Dictionary; I had to rely on the English translation.

Almost finished Le Petit Prince. Now I'll have to start really learning to read French and read it again properly.

After the discussion about Charles Williams in majel-susan's thread, I downloaded an e-book from Faded Page of a book by Williams that I've not encountered before—The English Poetic Mind. This book was written at about the same time (early 1930s) as the earlier novels. Like a lot of Williams's nonfiction, one tends to get carried onwards by the sweep of his enthusiasm for whatever he is writing about without actually taking in much of what he says. This book is about Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth but that's all I can be totally sure of. Never mind, it was a fun ride. I was reminded of something I vaguely remembered having read about Coleridge: that while he was talking he seemed to be incredibly wise, but afterwards you had difficulty working out what it was. Or as Byron put it, in the prologue to Don Juan (which I found when I went looking for the other quotation):

And Coleridge too has lately taken wing,
But like a hawk encumbered with his hood,
Explaining metaphysics to the nation.
I wish he would explain his explanation.

Just to give Coleridge his due, he wrote one of the most purely magical lines in all of English poetry (which to my surprise Williams actually quotes):

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

The last two lines are beyond perfect. Coleridge really was a genius, but his genius did not lie in philosophy. Williams may have been a genius too, but not as a systematic critic.

Edited to fix touchstone.

I had one of those brain-snaps this morning where you suddenly find you've just ordered a couple of books without really meaning to. The first came out of the discussion above about learning languages. it is The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, which is, according to Amazon, "... the story of Joseph Jacotot, an exiles (sic) French schoolteacher who discovered in 1818 an unconventional teaching method that spread panic throughout the learned community of Europe. Knowing no Flemish, Jacotot found himself able to teach in French to Flemish students who knew no French; knowledge, Jacotot concluded, was not necessary to teach, nor explication necessary to learn.". We'll see.

The other isn't actually published yet. I know I've mentioned the Extinguished Countries Project before (-pilgrim- described me as firing BBs with a machine gun), but hadn't done anything about it. Then, looking at this page on Atlas Obscura, i saw the link at the bottom about visiting the Republic of Venice, which no longer exists. So I finally went in and ordered a copy: you have to make a contribution through Indiegogo.

Finished Le Petit Prince.

>106 haydninvienna: Félicitations, mon brave!

>107 -pilgrim-: Merci!

I looked at the Wikipedia article on Joseph Jacotot and found this: " His own process ... was to give a student learning a language for the first time a short passage of a few lines, and to encourage the pupil to study first the words, then the letters, then the grammar, then the meaning, until a single paragraph became the occasion for learning an entire literature.". That was essentially how C S Lewis was taught Homeric Greek, and I started wondering if "Kirk" (William T Kirkpatrick, see here) had encountered Jacotot. No answer there, unfortunately, and no reference in the article cited in the Wikipedia footnotes.

I thought this was amusing. I lurk on Metafilter a bit (mainly on Ask.Metafilter), and this morning I saw a question by a writer who had previously been published on paper and had now had the rights to his or her books reverted. The question was about self-publishing in general, and one of the answers included this gem: "As these books were previously published, they probably don't need additional proofing, unless you revise them extensively. If you do, or for the new books, expect to do a lot of proofing. Get others to help if you can. People are used to professionally edited books and they will complain when they find typos.".

Given the amount of complaint here and elsewhere about the decline in editing standards, I thought it was amusing. (If you're interested, the AskMe thread is here.)

Having finished Le Petit Prince, I am now starting Djinn.

>103 haydninvienna: Very cool! I give the guy who was the 'initial' winner points for organization and collection, many of his books have identical bindings, so they are either journals or part of a large set. Not too many points for sheer volume though.

>109 haydninvienna: You are correct, higher editing standards are needed.

>111 Karlstar: I used to get a bit tired of seeing politicians interviewed against a background of the volumes of the Commonwealth Law Reports. I suppose the advantage of using the Law Reports or Hansard is that there are lots of volumes and all the bindings are the same. Dull though.

>110 haydninvienna: I would join you if I could find a copy in the original. (Went looking online after you first mentioned it.)

>103 haydninvienna: Well, this is the photo I used for my MS Teams & Skype icons:



Think that would qualify? Mind you, the bookcases have been condensed a bit since the photo was taken.

In a galaxy far away, and a considerably long time ago, there was a thread were we posted pictures of some of our shelves. Quite fun, as I remember it. Not least because there was some discussion on various ways to sort one's books as well ;-)
Must be 10+ years ago, though!

>103 haydninvienna: and >116 Busifer: Are you familiar with the very popular twitter account, Bookshelf Credibility? (See https://twitter.com/bcredibility?lang=en). Very similar in nature to the Portuguese exercise!

>115 Maddz: Unfortunately our MS Teams icons are just a corporate head and shoulders portrait.

>114 -pilgrim-: I think I got mine from Amazon UK, but that was a while ago. I warn you, my reading is likely to be slow and in the first few pages I’ve already encountered a word or two that the dictionary doesn’t recognise. (It’s smart enough to recognise verb tenses and other variable bits.)

>117 jillmwo: And there seem to be quite a few tumblrs about bookshelves. This one looks pleasant and not too Interior Design: https://beautiful-bookshelves.tumblr.com/page/2

>117 jillmwo: Love it! A distinct improvement on judging heads of state by their footwear choices..

And in other news, here's something I saw while on my walk this morning:



It's a cat feeding station. The sign in the background is part of the hoarding around a building site. Someone (probably one or more of the workers on the site) is maintaining a cafe for the local feral cats.

Cats are a bit of a thing in the Islamic world. The Prophet (peace be upon him) was fond of cats (there's the story that he once cut off the sleeve of his robe rather than disturb his favourite cat who was sleeping on it) and there seem to be quite a few feral ones around here. The cat cafe isn't the only place I have seen food put out for them, just the most elaborate.

>117 jillmwo: I clicked on the link and then I started scrolling...

>118 haydninvienna: Speaking of Interior Design, I am astounded when I watch TV programmes about building the ideal home; programmes like "Grand Design". I can only remember seeing two episodes in which books appeared. The majority of the houses featured had no bookshelves whatsoever in any room. That does not appeal to me as an ideal home.

>115 Maddz: I am having bookshelf envy right now! I would be totally distracted in a meeting with you by trying to read the titles!

>120 haydninvienna: That is lovely. You probably know about the Cat man of Aleppo who is trying to care for all the cats left to fend for themselves after the shelling of the city? He is a hero.

>122 pgmcc: A home without books is a Nightmare Home!

I think my own, personal feral cat cafe will have an expanded clientele soon. Saw the little girl with her very handsome paramour on the back lawn making babies.

>122 pgmcc: >123 Sakerfalcon: The same! I have to admit to being kind of nosey, so I'm following the real estate market in my neigbourhood. That way I get to see a lot of homes styled for sale. No bookshelves, no books: not even SPACE for having shelves ON, because people seem to think tearing down interior walls (or the true horror fad: glass walls! from hallway to bath, from living room to bedroom... WTF?! Sorry, I need to breathe slowly for a bit...) is the sane thing to do? And also, new buildings has floor to ceiling windows facing outwards. On the second story, in the inner city, opposite an office building?!
Anyway, less space for books.
A bleak future seems to await.

>122 pgmcc: >123 Sakerfalcon: >125 Busifer: I am strongly reminded of SATV's offering "Top Billing", which each week features some new multimillionaire designer "home" in the wealthiest suburbs of Johannesburg, Cape Town or Durban. I have often commented to family that the houses all look the same (pseudo-Tuscan outside, industrial inside), and even when they claim to be inhabited by families with small children, there is no evidence at all of "kiddie compost". Though mostly they seem to be inhabited by gay couples. I was amazed a few weeks ago to see a sign of literacy in one of these palaces -- a small shelf with half-a-dozen books on it! But signs of actual reading -- never!

My current house has lots of big, architectural windows (tall, no mullions) that are nearly floor to ceiling and while I love them, they make bookshelf placement tough. Though I could fit a few up here, I don't because of the UV effect - fade city. So they are sequestered downstairs in various rooms and hallways. I would have liked one more room to dedicate to a library, but that wasn't in the cards so it is what it is. Unless you go downstairs you'd hardly know I read (only library stacks, a few reference books and current reads are up here). Better than having them fade though.

>127 Bookmarque: The windows/light vs bookspace struggle... not an easy one.
I wish for a dedicated library, too, but space is limited and so my books are spread out across our flat, all according to available wall-space.

>125 Busifer: Interior glass walls? This one is special .....

Have any of you read, We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin? The whole city is built of glass to prevent people having any secrets. >129 Sakerfalcon:, imagine your kitchen with the glass interior walls and with glass exterior walls too. Of course, that was in fiction, but I think your example is a step in that direction.

One of our more interesting dining experiences was in a very good restaurant in Brussels some years ago. Food was good but the facilities were a bit of a shock—I walked into the Gents and observed that all the cubicle walls were transparent. Fortunately, turns out they went opaque when you locked the door. I still don't know how it was done.

>129 Sakerfalcon: Ew. I'm clearly not the target group for those solutions!

>131 haydninvienna: Some 20 years ago an indoors public swimming pool complex close to were I then lived got refurbished. Some brilliant mind had thought up, and no one caught it in either development or production, that it would be fantastic if the changing rooms had glass walls. It would be so nice to be able to change while looking out at the pool area, yes?

On re-opening the big scandal was that the men's changing room, on the same level as and adjacent to the pool, had a wall that was floor to ceiling, wall to wall (we're talking 50+ metres) totally transparent!

>131 haydninvienna: Encountered the same in south Florida, Palm Beach I think. The walls and door appeared to have two panes of glass and some sort of gas was released between them when you locked the door. The interior was lit with a lot of neon lights.

I remember a toilet facility I visited at a heritage site in the Soviet Union. Beautiful marble archways, one for men, one for women... leading to the same room.

There were cubicle walls between the Turkish toilets - but no doors. Thus, if you approached whilst a stall was occupied, or completed your affairs before your neighbour, you had an unavoidable full view of what the other ladies AND gentlemen were doing.

My tour group quickly invented the new art of synchronised squatting.

>134 -pilgrim-: "My tour group quickly invented the new art of synchronised squatting."

LOL!! Let's hope that doesn't become a new Olympic sport any time soon.

>123 Sakerfalcon: My SFF collection. You can see some Tanya Huff and a couple of shelves below you can see the 3 books of The Fionavar Tapestry. Opposite the Huffs are some Sharon Greens. Mind you, the standard circular crop for Skype and Teams takes most of the books out. I originally took the photo for my LinkedIn profile when I was job hunting.

The room was originally the attached garage. It was converted by a previous owner, and the people we purchased the house from were using it as a bedroom. We saw the house, and in terms of space for books, it won hands down. Still have books in every other room of the house though (apart from the utility room, the bathroom, the dressing room and the downstairs loo). Yes, we have books on the landing, in the attic and the hall. Occasionally we have books on the stairs - they're in transit between floors.

Only problem is there's no heating in there apart from radiants, it's single wall construction, and has a flat roof. So it's cold, and we hear the randy pigeons thumping around... The past couple of days we've had the oil-filled radiator on, I've been in long sleeves and a wooly cardigan with a boiled wool jacket on top, and I still feel chilled.

>136 Maddz: "... a boiled wool jacket ...": Boiled wool?

>134 -pilgrim-: By "Turkish toilet" you mean what I know as a squat? Mild humblebrag: I encountered these in the St Catherine's Monastery on Sinai. That is not the only toilet-related memory from that excursion: my wife had to make use of what was said to be the highest toilet in Egypt, near the summit of the mountain.

>134 -pilgrim-: You remind me of the first time I visited the Mountain Zebra National Park (near Cradock in the Eastern Cape), back in the mid-'60s. It was a lot smaller then than it is now, hadn't been open to the public long and was only available for day visitors. The offices, shop and tourist facilities were in an old farmhouse (now a luxury private camp), and the, er, "cultural amenities" were in a hut down the garden path. Sure enough the hut had two doors ... but no partition inside. The amenities themselves were a long-drop (like Granny Weatherwax's in Lancre, for those not familiar with the term), covered by a board with two holes in it.

>137 haydninvienna: Woollen with a felted surface, very dense. (Not what you get when a merino jumper inadvertently goes through a hot cycle in the washing machine.)

I suspect when my Mum went to camping in Sinai in the late 40s/early 50s there wasn't even that at the monastery... I encountered a public one on Santorini in the early 80s and retreated in horror as it was in serious need of industrial quantities of disinfectant and a high pressure hose.

>137 haydninvienna: Exactly.

>138 hfglen: I think I met the ultimate in long-drop facilities at a French château. Not only were they communal (multiple holes to the board) but they were extremely long in the drop -- down the outside of the castle into the lake below.

Are we lowering the tone of your thread sufficiently, Richard?

>137 haydninvienna: et al: on amenity requiring a squat my worst experience was on a ferry in Greece. Opened the door, looked at what was inside, and decided that given the semi-rough seas my need wasn't that pressing. There was some sloshing involved.

I seem to remember that you have visited Savonlinna, haydninvienna? I have a photo of one a high-drop, from a tower and straight down into the moot, about four or five regular floors down.
At least it was well ventilated. Don't know how much that was appreciated during winter, though. It can be pretty harsh in those parts.

>140 -pilgrim-: Whaddaya mean, the tone? My threads don't have a tone. As to long-drops, I vaguely remember one in Carnarvon National Park (Central Queensland) which I visited 50-plus years ago, where it was obvious that it was a very long drop indeed. I was in high school at the time, and in the company of a crowd of my classmates. Much hilarity ensued. And as to the château: one reads things about facilities that were not provided at Versailles ...

>141 Busifer: Yes I have indeed been to Savonlinna, but I have no experience of the castle facilities, only of the perfectly ordinary ones at the hotel. I've actually also been to Santorini, but again have only experienced the hotel facilities, which again were entirely normal.

Gotta love the GD. Here we are 10 or so posts from Peter's mentioning Zamyatin's We, and we are throwing around stories about toilets. Mind you, I blame Sakerfalcon entirely—she started it in #129.

I've just had the disinfectant guy in here—coronavirus precautions rather than a comment on my housekeeping—the whole building is being done. I retreated down to the lobby for an hour or so with My Family and Other Animals. By gosh, it's a somewhat unflattering portrait of Lawrence, isn't it?

>116 Busifer: I found a couple of those threads. I'm sure there are more.

https://www.librarything.com/topic/10414
https://www.librarything.com/topic/26459

I'm also one of those people trying to read the spines behind people on the news. (The best are the PBS NewHour crew, who are all reporting from home. Real books!)

>142 haydninvienna: When I visited the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, that was what I noticed. Suites of almost unimaginably opulent rooms, but the original "facilities" - a room with wooden boards with holes in two facing rows (no partitions - very convivial!) were a 10 minute walk away in a building across the grounds. It was -20 degrees when we were visiting, which really made you appreciate the hardiness of the Russian courtier!

>142 haydninvienna: Having read those descriptions of Larry before encountering anything by Lawrence Durrell, I am afraid that I have never been able to take him seriously enough to read him!

>145 -pilgrim-: me too!

>142 haydninvienna: Leslie and Margo don't come off much better than Larry, though I love the book dearly and it always makes me laugh. I never read Larry's books because they sounded like "literature" which generally means depressing and full of unpleasant people doing unspeakable things to each other, and life is too short.

>143 clamairy: Oh! Nice find! All the images that I posted seems to be broken. Definitely need to check up.
(I might accidentally have moved the pictures: they were from our previous flat...)

>145 -pilgrim-:, >147 tardis: I've been trying to read The Alexandria Quartet but have been finding it hard going. I much prefer Antrobus Complete - very tongue-in-cheek. I did manage Bitter Lemons, it's more travelogue than literary. In some ways he comes across as rather Bloomsbury - and I never got on with them either.

>150 -pilgrim-: Intriguing. It had never occurred to me that he would attempt "witty". Probably heavily influenced by young Gerry's portrayal, I have always thought of Lawrence Durrell who takes himself very seriously.

>147 tardis: Leslie and Margo don't come off much better than Larry ...: agreed. I also have never tried to read Lawrence, fearing that he would be too brainy for me. I wonder if he is brainier than Anthony Powell, who I did read and enjoy.

I think it's fair to say that all the human characters are caricatures, to a greater or lesser extent. We know that some creative licence was taken because Lawrence was already married at the time, and neither that fact nor his wife Nancy is mentioned. Theodore Stephanides and Spiro the taxi driver come off pretty well. Interesting that, according to Wikipedia, Theo also appears in at least one of Lawrence's books, and in one of Henry Miller's. The only character that isn't a caricature is Roger the dog.

"Margo" wrote an autobiography of sorts, Whatever Happened to Margo?, which according to all-knowing Wikipedia, "... includes details about the lives of her family, particularly Leslie, Gerald, and Louisa Durrell following their time on Corfu. The manuscript was apparently written in the 1960s, but it was discovered in the attic by a granddaughter nearly 40 years later and published in 1995.". In the Foreword (dated 27 November 1994), Gerald says that "From the beginning and every bit as keenly as the Durrell brothers, Margo displayed an appreciation of the comic side of life ... Like us, she is sometimes prone to exaggeration and comic flights of fancy ...".

>142 haydninvienna: Apologies for lowering the tone of your thread! Mea culpa!

>130 pgmcc: Yes, I have read We. I found it fascinating and horrifying. An excellent book.

>152 Sakerfalcon: No need for apologies. I'm always looking for someone to lower the tone.

Incidentally, I read We also. Not a pleasant read but salutary.

>152 Sakerfalcon: & >153 haydninvienna: I found the history of the book as fascinating as the story itself; how it was published in English many years before being released in its own language, Russian.

>155 -pilgrim-: Is it better than the story about the publication of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?

Just to change the subject with a jerk, I'm a fan of the website Indexed. I thought yesterday's post (that is, the one posted on Friday, US time) was particularly apposite for the present times: https://thisisindexed.com/2020/05/i-wouldnt-say-were-you-know-together/.

ETA You may also have noticed that I spend some time on Atlas Obscura. This story posted today has some absolutely stunning images: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hubble-space-photos-western-landscape-pain.... I have believed for a long time that every penny spent on the Hubble Space Telescope was justified by the sheer awesomeness (in the older sense) of the images it produced. Like this one, the Ultra Deep Field:



The image is "... approximately one tenth of the angular diameter of a full moon viewed from Earth (which is less than 34 arcminutes), smaller than 1 sq. mm piece of paper held at 1 meter away, and equal to roughly one twenty-six-millionth of the total area of the sky" (from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field#Hubble_eXtreme_Deep_Field). Each of the fuzzy specks in that tiny patch of sky is a galaxy—about fifteen thousand of them.

When things really started to come online 20-25 years ago I spent an inordinate number on hours on the NASA website after I found the link to the Hubble archives... "Space, the final frontier..."

Sheer awesomeness, indeed.

>156 haydninvienna:
As you say, awesome in the real sense if the word.

Pure WOW!

>156 haydninvienna: Since you sent me to ThisisIndexed.com, I thought I would reply with this, which struck me as particularly apposite:
https://thisisindexed.com/2007/05/calling-in-sick/

>156 haydninvienna:, >157 Busifer: I remember a conference dinner which adjourned early (for such things), so that we could all go to the lab and stay up to 4am, watching the latest photographs from Hubble come in.

>160 -pilgrim-: That sounds like one good awesome time, and a good memory to have!

>160 -pilgrim-: you have no idea how envious that makes me.

Richard, how are you doing? Are you still getting out for a walk and some sunshine?

>163 pgmcc: My very word I am, Peter. It gets interesting though, being in lockdown and during Ramadan. Last couple of mornings I’ve taken a water bottle with me, which I just realised I shouldn’t have been doing, because no eating or drinking (at all; yes really; exceptions for pregnant women and the sick) between sunrise and sunset. (I usually get out about 0415, about half an hour before sunrise, and get back an hour or so later.) Nothing extremely terrible will happen to an unbeliever here who breaks the rule, except possibly for a telling-off, but I understand that in some stricter places it could be a prison matter.

Doha is relatively pleasant in the early morning, but gets decidedly less so by mid-afternoon. Today it was about 25°C (78°F) at 0430, but more like 38°C (100°F) at 1500.

A while back I was approached in the shopping centre by a couple of fellows who asked why all the cafes were closed and where could they get some lunch. I said “Well, it’s Ramadan” and they looked at me blankly. So I directed them to the supermarket to buy whatever they wanted and then to take it all back to their hotel room.

>164 haydninvienna: Wow, I didn't realise that fasting is applied to unbelievers. It puzzles me, because surely you are not also required to follow the prayer obligations of Ramadan?

Is it because of the scandal and temptation that this provides to the faithful? Does it only apply to you in public places, or is it expected that you observe it in your own home also?

>165 -pilgrim-: Because of the scandal and temptation, exactly (ETA: and only in public places). Inside our own homes, we unbelievers eat and drink as normal. And no, we are not expected to comply with the prayer obligations.

There are actually 2 or 3 Christian churches in Doha, but they keep a low profile and are of course not permitted to proselytise.

I've always thought a religion's silencing of another to show a profound lack of faith in their own.

>167 Bookmarque:

Mind you, working for the government of a Muslim country has its advantages at times. As I said, it's the holy month of Ramadan now, but the next month (Shawwal) is predicted to begin on Friday (lunar calendar, the beginning of a month depends on sighting the new moon*) and the first day or two or three days (depending on the country) are the festival of Eid al-Fitr. We officially get three days' leave for Eid al-Fitr, believers and unbelievers alike, but this year the Qatar Central Bank, of which our office is a part, is closing for the whole week. So we get a continuous nine days off—woo! But can't go anywhere—boo!

*Not strictly true. From Wikipedia:

Each month of the Islamic calendar commences on the birth of the new lunar cycle. Traditionally this is based on actual observation of the moon's crescent (hilal) marking the end of the previous lunar cycle and hence the previous month, thereby beginning the new month. Consequently, each month can have 29 or 30 days depending on the visibility of the moon, astronomical positioning of the earth and weather conditions. However, certain sects and groups, most notably Bohras Muslims namely Alavis, Dawoodis and Sulaymanis and Shia Ismaili Muslims, use a tabular Islamic calendar (see section below) in which odd-numbered months have thirty days (and also the twelfth month in a leap year) and even months have 29.

The Islamic calendar is used in practice only to fix the dates of festivals and suchlike religious purposes, and for ordinary civil users the ordinary Western calendar is used.

Also, Wikipedia tells me that "According to numerous Hadiths, 'Ramadan' is one of the names of God in Islam, and as such it is prohibited to say only "Ramadan" in reference to the calendar month and that it is necessary to say the "month of Ramadan ... ".

>169 haydninvienna: Is that observation of the moon in Mecca - or do different locations end up on different religious calendars, depending on the weather conditions in their locale?

I have just been reading a little about the problems of observing the Ramadan fast whilst living within the Arctic Circle...

>156 haydninvienna: Ahh, that's wonderful...

>164 haydninvienna: Yikes. I also didn't realize you weren't allowed to even drink water in public.

>167 Bookmarque: Agreed.

>170 -pilgrim-: Normally, the moon wherever you are, but many places around the region follow the observation from Makkah (which is now the preferred romanisation, apparently because the unbelievers have adopted the other spelling for their own improper purposes). Apparently it is possible for a month to begin on different days in different places because the new moon may not be visible from where you are until the following evening. As to observing the fast within the Arctic Circle, like most things in Islam there's disagreement about what is theologically correct.

>171 clamairy: Yup, not even water.

>169 haydninvienna: Interesting update from Qatar, Richard. The observation of the fasting month has changed a little over the last decade or so in Malaysia - it used to be left to the vagaries of the Imam's here spotting the moon to determine the beginning and ending of the month but nowadays Malaysia pre-determine their "feast".

As a practicing Muslim and one who converted in adulthood, I would say that the hadith are as much a source of dispute than confirmation and the one on use of the word Ramadan does not have universal acceptance.

Thank you for the warm welcome into the group and good luck getting to Eid-al-fitr as Qatar cannot be a great deal of fun even in May when not feeling able to drink in public.

>173 PaulCranswick: I'm not entirely sure how it's done here either. I think a few years ago they were basically going with whatever Saudi Arabia did, but Saudi Arabia and Qatar aren't best mates now. Maybe the local imams are looking for the new moon (or more likely predicting it) independently. Given the small distance between Doha and Makkah (relatively speaking), the result is probably much the same.

Carefully skirting (I think) the Pub rule about no talk of religion: I knew the hadiths were open to controversy; I don't pretend to be an expert on Islam but living in a Muslim country it's hard not to pick up things, and of course the practice of fasting during the Holy Month affects me directly, even if I don't observe it in private.

Also, it's a trifle hard to imagine what the Eid festivities are going to be like this year. Being the introvert that I am, and an unbeliever to boot, I've never taken any particular part in them previously, but I understand that despite what you may have thought, Qatar gets pretty festive. It's actually not a bad place to live if you can stand the climate (which of course gets pretty unpleasant in late summer—did you know that a desert can get extremely humid?).

Incidentally, you are not the first convert of British extraction that I've encountered. Back at the start of my drafting career, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we had a senior legal officer in the Attorney-General's Department (in Canberra in Australia) with a Scots name and a broad Scots accent. To my great surprise he took me aside quietly one morning and asked me not to be surprised if he sometimes said odd things during unit meetings. I raised my eyebrows and he explained, "I'm a Muslim". He had been raised a Scots Presbyterian, then a Roman Catholic, and finally, after travel in the east, converted to Islam. I think he was the first Muslim I had ever encountered in person, Muslims then being rather uncommon in Australia.

Still reading. This one is a re-read, prompted by what is going on in majel-susan's thread: The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter. Lots here on C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien and Charles Williams, and rather less on the less-well-known others like Owen Barfield, and a demolition of the idea that there was an Inklings program or even a common Inklings philosophy of anything.

And in (literally) other news: an obituary of Lord Robert May. As it asks, why would a medical journal publish an obituary of a man whose first degree was in chemical engineering, and whose PhD was in theoretical physics?

>175 haydninvienna: That is a beautiful obituary.

>176 -pilgrim-: Yes, he must have been a pretty remarkable man. I first heard of him in the context of predator-prey relationships in some book or other on (I think) fractals.

The discussions on Out of the Silent Planet and War in Heaven have led me to order a copy of The Image of the City and Other Essays, me having been for years interested in Williams's view of London as "the City". Won't see it for a while though, since it will go to my address in England and who knows when I'll get back there.

Something I've noticed: there are several full biographies of C S Lewis (I have 2, one by Roger Lancelyn Green and one by A N Wilson), and his autobiography; there are at least 2 of J R R Tolkien (I have the one by Humphrey Carpenter somewhere); and there's Carpenter's book that I mentioned in #175. How many biographies of Charles Williams? (Deliberately didn't touchstone him. I doubt, looking at the list of possible "Charles Williamses", that a touchstone would be useful to anyone who didn't already know who I was talking about. I notice that Alibris has mixed up at least 2 different authors called Charles Williams.) One, and that not published until 70 years after Williams died. But then Williams was not a well-known Christian apologist and his fantasy, although it has never quite totally sunk beneath the waves, never came anywhere close to the popularity or influence of Tolkien's.

>178 haydninvienna: Charles Williams is the least well-known of that crowd, but wasn't he also coming at it from an entirely different angle from his cohorts? I could be wrong, but I think he assumed a lot more knowledge of esoteric practices (like Tarot) which probably had an impact on his popularity. I haven't read him since forever either, but I doubt he's aged well. I will still look forward to hearing your impressions of him.

The stories about local practice of Ramadan are just as interesting!

Richard, managed to celebrate the end of Ramadan yesterday by video calls. Wife and son in Sheffield, eldest daughter in Norway and me and youngest daughter here in Kuala Lumpur all connected by WhatsApp video calls. I think it was good for a change because it made us appreciate what we have taken for granted for so long.

>179 jillmwo: Jill: Williams was certainly the least well known of the three, but there is at least one other Inkling who had some sort of literary standing: Owen Barfield. (And of course there were others who drifted in and out, like Hugo Dyson and Nevill Coghill.) Barfield was a solicitor, not an academic, but had been a friend of Lewis's since forever. As far as I know there is no biography of Barfield, nor is there likely to be.

You are right that Williams was "coming at it from an entirely different angle", but then it's easy to overestimate the similarity in how Lewis and Tolkien were coming at it. All of the Inklings were Christians in a general sense, but Lewis (both of the brothers) and Williams were Anglicans and Tolkien was Roman Catholic. Barfield was an Anthroposophist. Jack Lewis, in middle age and after his conversion, was an orthodox Anglican, but Tolkien somewhere suggested that late in life Lewis reverted significantly towards being an Ulster Protestant. Even though Williams was a devout Anglican, he was not an orthodox one. And yes, Williams had leanings toward the occult. He had been a member of A E Waite's Order of the Golden Dawn, which if I remember correctly was a spin-off from a group which had included Aleister Crowley. In his novels at least, Williams seems to use occult symbols pretty freely—one of the novels is even called The Greater Trumps, an allusion to the tarot pack designed by Waite. I think also (and this is just me) that Williams was a real poet, much more than either Lewis or Tolkien.

The biggest problem for Williams, in some ways, is that he wrote far too much, and too much of it is hack-work. At least it's apparently honest hack-work, but only a mad completist would want to chase down copies of some of his books. A second problem is that so much of what he wrote is incomprehensible. Perhaps "incomprehensible" is unnecessarily unkind, but I get the impression that what he communicates is his own enthusiasm rather than a coherent thesis or story. Even in his fiction it's sometimes hard to follow what is actually happening, a complaint which cannot be made about Lewis. But the novels still have power. I started reading War in Heaven, and found I had to skip to the end because I just couldn't stand the elder Mr Persimmons. Going to start Many Dimensions next. I've read that before, so I know I can handle that one.

I mentioned Carpenter's book The Inklings in #175. It's a really interesting read on how the Inklings thought, and their differences.

>180 PaulCranswick: Paul, I can't do that, unfortunately. The video chat and internet telephony systems don't work here. (Same in the UAE, apparently.) The local telecommunications regulator blocks them on the basis that they are not licensed here. I use Microsoft Teams for work, but that runs through the office's VPN. Webex is available too, but I'm certainly not going to stump up for a Webex licence for family use. Private VPN applications are said not to be illegal but all of the ones I know of are blocked.

ETA Serves me right for not checking Wikipedia first. There is in fact at least one biography of Barfield: Owen Barfield: Romanticism Comes of Age: a Biography, by Simon Blaxland-de Lange. Even available on Amazon for reasonable money, and there are 12 copies on LT. Looking over Mr Blaxland-de Lange's other books on Amazon, it seems clear that he writes from the Steinerite perspective.

I have to share this: The Milky Way over Snow-Capped Himalayas. Obviously a composite but it still stopped me in my tracks.
Anyone who doesn't check Astronomy Picture of the Day every day doesn't know what they're missing. And then Earth Sciences Picture of the Day and NASA's Earth Observatory Picture of the Day.

>182 haydninvienna: Very nice. Don't shoot me, but I'd forgotten all about the APOTD.

>182 haydninvienna: That is one amazing photo. Thanks for sharing.

>181 haydninvienna: Why do you consider The Greater Trumps to be a reference to the tarot pack designed by Waites specifically? As far as I know, the phrase refers to the Major Arcana in any tarot set.

The names of the components of members of the Major Arcana in the Waited pack match with the standard names in the European tradition.

It has been a long time since I read The Greater Trumps, but I only remember it using the identities of the cards, not the specific symbols in Waites' designs, which are the only innovations that I am aware of in his set.

I was interested in the history of playing cards, the peculiarity of their imagery, and why different sets, for different games, and in different communities, contain different cards. Originally the standard cards that we know were simply the Minor Arcana of a full tarot deck, the purpose of which was divination. Since this was punishable by death in many Christian countries, the use of the cards for gambling games seems to have originated as an excuse for possessing a deck. (Mah-jong tiles have a similar history of dual purpose.)

That was why I (foolishly!) started my reading of Williams with The Greater Trumps.

It also means that I know relatively little about the modern tarots developed by specific occult groups, or how they interpret the truncated tarot deck. But I have some memory of more traditional practices and interpretations, and my impression was that those were the meanings Williams was referencing.

But I really need to reread.

>185 -pilgrim-: I actually did know that the tarot pack pre-dates Waite by a few centuries, including the arcana. Probably just an association of ideas, knowing that Williams and Waite had been associated for a time. ETA Carelessness, in other words.

Current read, on a whim: The Love letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple on Kindle from Project Gutenberg. Fascinating. Probably would be even more fascinating if Temple's letters to her had survived. But what a life—carrying on a love affair which neither of their families approved of, in the middle of Temple's travels as a diplomat during a period of major upheaval in English history. Both of them were of high rank; she was well-enough connected that at one time Cromwell's second son was paying court to her. After they had outworn their families' opposition she contacted smallpox, and though she survived, the scarring destroyed her looks. Bless him, Temple married her anyway. The marriage seems to have been a successful one. She later became a friend and confidant to Princess Mary of Orange, and she and Temple were involved in the negotiations that put William of Orange and Mary on the throne of England.

(Late to it, but for an outsider such as myself it is clear that the rules of Islam wasn't conceived by someone close to the arctic circle. Three years ago the month of Ramadan coincided with the months of midnight sun. And no one can abstain from water and food for 30 days straight and expect to live. If memory serves me right a local imam managed to get an acceptance for a solution were one hour a day, around midnight, was set aside for getting some fluids and sustenance into the system.

This year Ramadan in Sweden ended on May 23, at about the same time as the sun starts to stay above the horizon in the absolute north of Sweden.)

>187 Busifer: That is not the only solution observed. Some communities within the Arctic Circle have fatwas allowing them to follow the hours at Mecca, or the nearest Muslim city.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/03/ramadan-canada-arctic-fasting-hour...

>188 -pilgrim-: Yes. Apparently that wasn't acceptable to the local community. I admit on being hazy on the details, most muslims here are located down in the southern parts of Sweden were midnight sun isn't an issue and so not something I've heard being discussed by various muslim co-workers that I've had.
(In Sweden religion tends to be private, but one do notice when people suddenly go to lunch but then sit looking at you without having anything themselves.)

Even in the north of Scotland, it must be a privation to have to fast between 0410 and 2154 (sunrise and sunset at Sumburgh, in the Shetland Islands, on 23 May this year).

Latest additions to my home library, thanks to WFH:



Just printed today and delivered by a colleague. I do not propose to add them to my LT catalogue though.

>191 haydninvienna: I was going to say they look horribly like work... I've just downloaded some statutory guidance for my job but it will stay in .pdf format.

Unexpected acquisition: After LM: NASA Lunar Lander Concepts Beyond Apollo. (No touchstone at present.) This is a NASA technical report made available as a free download (warning, there's 445 Mb of it). Found out about it by a post by Dugsbooks here.

>193 haydninvienna:
That sounds very interesting. Dugsbooks posts some great links.

>194 pgmcc: I skimmed through it yesterday afternoon. It's a bit light on text, and heavy on tables and graphics. Lots of drawings of design studies. Which are interesting up to a point, but I think the price (free) was right.

> Did you not haggle?

>196 pgmcc: *snort*

>196 pgmcc: In our household it's my wife that haggles.

Well, that's passed an afternoon very pleasantly. tardis gave me a hook for a derail and I posted links to a couple of performances of The Mikado. Just spent a couple of hours watching the 1987 TV performance of the Jonathan Miller production for the English National Opera. I must have first seen it in Australia when it was new, and I have to say that The Mikado is certainly the best G&S (as good as anything by Strauss or Lehár), and it's hard to see how it could be better done than this. Casting Eric Idle as Ko-Ko was just a piece of incandescent genius—his stage business when he finds out that he has apparently executed the heir to the throne of Japan cracks me up every time. The rest of the cast are pretty damn near perfect also, particularly Lesley Garrett and Felicity Palmer. And I defy anyone not to smile while listening to the overture. Effervescent, is the word for it.

>198 haydninvienna: Just watched the version linked above - updated to 2016!

I remember seeing the ENO version in the late 80s; it was on one of the terrestrial channels (probably BBC2) and I seem to recall taping it along with the 'Making of' programme that accompanied it. I chiefly remember the 'Australians of all kinds' in the list...

Yeah, here's the documentary link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfzpePn_9P0

Gawd, the bubble perms and Lady Di flicks!

Mum used to take us to the touring performances by the D'Oyley Carte company; they'd have a couple of weeks every year at the Bournemouth Pavilion. She had fond memories of a school production of 'The Pirates of Penzance' she took part in.

>199 Maddz: I started on the 2016 version and then switched to the original 1987 one for the sake of Lesley Garrett and Eric Idle, and Felicity Palmer trying to pretend she is ugly and old. And Richard Van Allan—a perfect Pooh-Bah. And Mark Elder as music director. (Thames TV; not sure what that implies about which TV channel it was broadcast on. In Australia it would certainly have been broadcast on the ABC.) Often wonder what the home like of Mr and Mrs Ko-Ko must have been like. As I wonder about the home life of Lt and Mrs Pinkerton after the end of Madame Butterfly. (Yes I know all the cool kids call it "Madama Butterfly" now but I. Am. Not. A. Cool. Kid.)

Our high school in Oz did Iolanthe one year, and it seemed to go down all right.

>200 haydninvienna:
ITV was the third TV broadcasting channel in the UK, and , as its name implies, was the Independent TeleVision channel i.e. not funded by the TV licence, but by advertising. But you actually got different companies broadcasting in different regions. Thames TV covered the Thames Valley and a lot of the South-east of England. If you look at the end of independently made TV from that period, you can see which company actually made the programme, but the splash panels like that just indicate which region was broadcasting it when it was taped.

So ITV, taped by someone in Thames Valley region.

I spent a sizeable party of my schooldays taking part in the annual G&S production. We had annual theatrical productions and choral concerts as well. But the G&S operettas (and some major choral works, like the Messiah, which also roped in parents) were the only productions done jointly with the local boys' grammar school. (A possible additional reason for the performances being well-attended?)

I can still sing sizeable chunks of The Gondoliers, Patience , and H.M.S. Pinafore. The Mikado however, we never performed. Nevertheless, I was word-perfect in by the age of 5, purely due to repeated plays of my parents' LP.

>198 haydninvienna: Many thanks for the links. But I have to admit that at the end of Act 1 I succumbed to the link Youtube put on the right of my screen, and spent the evening watching a magnificent production of Die Zauberflöte made in Paris in 2001 -- in German with English subtitles, to my surprise and delight.

ETA: Inspired by that, I intend to go looking for Don Giovanni after a favourite cookery programme tonight.

>203 hfglen:. Er, yes, I did notice there was some Mozart there ... Might have a look at that myself. Actually, I might look out for Così fan tutte, which I’ve never actually seen performed.

>204 haydninvienna: At the end of Zauberflöte there was a link to a recording of Cosi, which I've also never seen. I intend to remedy that soon.

>198 haydninvienna:, >199 Maddz:, >203 hfglen:, >205 hfglen:
You people are evil. Wafting such temptation under a poor pilgrim's nose...

(Thank you all.)

>206 -pilgrim-: Bwahahahahaha!
I have put some links into your "sidles" thread.

Got sidetracked by Renée Fleming singing "Mariettas Lied" from Korngold's Die Tote Stadt, surely one of the strangest operas ever written. Astonishing music though. And my goodness, hasn't La Fleming still got it!

Yes, the same Erich Wolfgang Korngold who wrote the music for lots of Hollywood films, after being chased out of Germany and Austria by the Nazis.

Now, in the middle of all the other Stuff that’s happening, my router decides to play up: it won’t maintain a connection for more than a few minutes. Definitely a first world problem except of course that I’m WFHing and our office uses Office365, so I can’t work at all without a reliable internet connection. A couple of live chats with the phone company, and all being well I’ll have a new one tomorrow morning. For which I have to pay, plus a call out charge for the installation. I could possibly just have gone to one of their locations and picked the new router up myself, but I’d rather save all that bother and have it done for me.

>209 haydninvienna: Ours did the same this past (southern) summer -- I think I mentioned that we had a thunderstorm and the old router got fried by a direct lightning hit. Better Half went and collected a new, much fancier router and Melissa and I followed the 3 lines of instruction on the box, wondering if we'd ever get it working by our inexpert selves. Worked first try, as soon as we switched the power on (and give or take the ISP working on the line, has done ever since).

>210 hfglen: Yes, as I said, I could probably have gone to one of the locations and just collected a new one, but this way I get to blame someone else if it doesn't work. Also, none of the open locations is particularly close--the one in the mall just down the street is apparently closed in common with almost everything else in that mall. But I believe they are to open again (subject to some limitations) on Monday.

And in my semi-internet-less state this afternoon, Ive been reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Not sure how far this is going to grip me.

>211 haydninvienna: I use that strategy for quite a few things. Yes, I can drill a hole and mount a hanger myself. No, in no way am I going to drill through glazed tiles if I can avoid it. If it crack, let it be the on the head of the tiler...

>212 haydninvienna: I'll be interested to read what you think of the original. Drood was just plain strange.

>213 Busifer: Hear hear!

>211 haydninvienna: The guy turned up on time, did the job, and left. I now have a nice new router and things seem to be OK.

I'm glad you got your issues corrected. I was blaming my router for intermittent signal drops, until I realized I have the same issues on my hardwired PC. I would blame the modem, but I'm 99% sure it's my cable company at fault. And right now I don't want a serviceman in the house, so I'll wait a while. It's never down for more than a minute or two, so it's mainly just an annoyance at this point.

I have a similar problem in that the router is located in what used to be the attached garage so we have to use a range extender in the hallway to get a good signal upstairs. Every so often the signal is horrendously glitchy, and everything has to be rebooted - the extender and the router.

It may be the various Mac devices being unsure which channel they're supposed to be on - I used to have major problems accessing the wifi at Paul's Mum's until we told it to look for a specific channel. I used to have to go upstairs, connect and go back downstairs again.

At some point, I want our access point shifted to the hallway which will help, and I can get a cat-5 drilled into the 'office' to a wi-fi/wired hub (or more likely an extension). However, that will cost me so I'll wait until the last of the twin pairs fails and Virgin have got to redo the installation. (I and my neighbour had a pair each, they aren't signed up, and I'm now on the final feed of the 4.)

As I'll be working from home until September at the earliest, I'm somewhat unenthusiastic about faffing around until it becomes absolutely necessary.

>217 clamairy: >218 Maddz: Thanks, both of you. I'm now sure that the old router was on its way out: no problems so far. I'm in an apartment and the signal reaches everywhere without any problems, but the 2 big computers (my iMac and the work PC) were connected to the router by Ethernet. Even they had problems with the old router. There's 2 iPhones, a MacBook and an iPad on wifi though, all of which seem to be connected with no problems.

Just saw a post by MarthaJeanne, who lives in Vienna, that as of today they no longer have to wear masks in shops. Half their luck. Nor the least weird of the consequences of the lockdown here is that you have to make an appointment to visit the Qatar Distribution Centre (aka the government booze shop) to get your necessary supplies.

>212 haydninvienna:
I enjoyed The Mystery of Edwin Drood and the speculation about how he might have intended it to proceed.

Drood is totally unrelated to the original apart from Simmons borrowing the name, a few characters and some scenes. As >214 Karlstar: said, Drood was strange, but the strangeness was explained at the end. I would not recommend Drood unless you have nothing else to read.

On the plus side it did create a curiosity in me to find out more about Dickens and Collins.

>221 pgmcc: I have a copy of Hyperion somewhere, which I have not read, and at the moment have little reason to. Simmons doesn't really seem to be my kind of bloke.

>222 haydninvienna:
Hyperion and its sequel, The Fall of Hyperion, are books I really enjoyed. Very spiritual. I would not judge them on his later works.

I read The Terror and while I mostly enjoyed it, I had no desire to rush out and read more. Partly because it was so long and partly because I didn't think a situation so dire and historically dangerous needed a supernatural element. I didn't take it with me in the move.

>222 haydninvienna: & >223 pgmcc: I enjoyed the first one more than the second, and gave them both high ratings. I have no desire to keep going though. I think that must say something about how happy I was to be done with that world.

>224 Bookmarque: & >225 clamairy:
I had finished and enjoyed the first book when I realised there was a sequel. I read the sequel and felt the two books were one book in two volumes. I felt the two made a lovely whole.

When another book came out I felt it would damage the good of the first two. I did get the next book and read some pages into it. It struck me as just a sequel for the sake of a sequel, which means "for more money". I have seen comment that without reading the third and fourth books one would not know what was going on in the first two books. I felt that if the third and fourth books want to start explaining what was going on in the first two then I wanted to have nothing to do with them.

>225 clamairy: There is a definite drop-off as the series continues. That being said, Simmons does give full explanations for everything by the end of the fourth book, (farcasters, the Time Tombs, The Shrike - all of it comes together in an impressive manner). However... I found the 4th book to be a real slog what with all the mountain-climbing nonsense. It felt like something Simmons had gotten into and he was putting the 'coolness' of mountain-climbing into the pages thinking that his readers would find it just as fascinating and fun as he did. This reader did not... The third book also had a very familiar scene that I felt was lifted (plagiarized?) directly from a rather famous SF movie.

The first two books should be read together as Hyperion really leaves things hanging. Stopping after two books, like you did, works too as the 3rd and 4th books jump quite a ways into the future and only one character from the Hyperion duology remains alive at that point, (well, technically two characters but saying more would constitute a spoiler).

>221 pgmcc: It made me more interested in Dickens and Collins as well.

>222 haydninvienna: >223 pgmcc: Hyperion and the sequel were fantastic, if you like epic sci-fi.

>224 Bookmarque: I really recommend The Abominable, if you want to try out his non-scifi. It is nothing like Drood.

>225 clamairy: I liked the last two of the series, though not quite as much as the first two.

>227 ScoLgo: & >228 Karlstar: Thank you for your reviews/comments. Maybe someday when I run out of other things I feel I need to read I'll give them a go. I can't keep up with my TBR list as it is. I can't imagine it's going to get better.

>181 haydninvienna: I did think Williams was indeed on the incomprehensible side. But again, I read him some 40 years ago and I might not find him quite so weird if I were inclined to give him a second chance.

>230 jillmwo: It was 40 odd years ago that I first tried Williams - The Greater Trumps - and gave up because I found him incomprehensible. Inspired by the discussions here, I tried again last month, and found War in Heaven wonderful.

But he does not spoon-feed his allusions, the way most writers nowadays seem to feel compelled to, so maybe I needed those intervening years to acquire the breadth of background experience to be able to follow him!

I've dipped into Williams again recently (see somewhere above about The English Poetic Mind and a couple of the novels), and I argued that he is great at communicating his enthusiasm but not so good with straight factual prose. I often have the impression that his mind is running faster than he can write. And I agree with >231 -pilgrim-: that he doesn't explain his allusions. He often seems to be subject (more than most writers, perhaps) to the illusion that everybody else has read the same books as he has and taken away the same impressions from them, which given his idiosyncratic mind, is a source of obscurity in itself.

I've made an LT lifestyle out of derailing other people's threads, so now I'll derail my own. (Or, putting it another way, I'm now posting about a bunch of random, vaguely book-related stuff that's occupying my magpie mind at the moment. I remember that the Australian newspaper, back when it started and before it became another organ of the Murdoch monster, had a back page column written by Kit Denton called "A Walk Around my Cluttered Mind".)

Some few days ago, I derailed MrsLee's thread in Cookbookers with a discussion of passionfruit. That was partly inspired by memories of this book: Simple Flavours, by an Australian named Geoff Slattery. Slattery was/is (I think he's still around) an interesting bloke: he began as a sportswriter in the Melbourne newspapers, and still writes on sporting topics, but he also loved food, wrote about it, and opened a series of restaurants which were apparently pretty good. He wrote Simple Flavours and started the Australian publishing firm Text to publish it. I used to borrow a library copy of Simple Flavours quite frequently back in the day, and may even have cooked from it. At least, it gave me the nerve to try making risotto, of which Slattery is a big, big fan. Second-hand copies are surprisingly hard to find, and I never actually got around to buying one, but this morning I finally found a copy for a reasonable price on Abebooks from a seller in Bendigo. There's also a website which seems to have the whole text of the book. Just to start with, and continue the passionfruit theme, here's his variation on Fredy Girardet's passionfruit soufflé. Be sure to read the little story about his son's reaction to the soufflé. Lots of stuff about rhubarb in the book too.

Continuing the food theme: I hang out on Metafilter a bit too, though I rarely post there. This morning Ask.Metafilter had a thread about recipes in books. All the usual suspects seem to be there—the Nero Wolfe cookbook, Roald Dahl, Andrea Camilleri, Like Water for Chocolate and so on—but there's a link to another thread about a drink called "Antwerp Flinders" in Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale. (I have a copy here somewhere in my TBR.) If you follow the link you find a quotation from Helprin's daughter:

I just called him to ask about the Antwerp Flinder, and he told me that it is not real and that he's never made one. His advice is to follow the recipe and hope for the best.

He is extremely fond of made-up recipes in general, and he actually does make some. These creations were absolutely infamous in our home, and thankfully he only cooked when my mother was away or indisposed. He called one particularly awful dish Circumpolar Pasta. It involved pasta, sardines, and pistachios, (up to this point I was thinking, this doesn't sound too bad) and would have at least been edible had he not neglected to shell the pistachios before adding them to the pasta.

Metafilter user evilmonk wins the first-mentioned AskMe thread with "not kidding: there is a great recipe for blood pudding in the annotated dracula.".

Reading Slattery's recipes made me nostalgic for Melbourne. I've been to all the Australian capital cities and love all of them, but Melbourne is special in its own way. I was last there a couple of years ago visiting my elder son and his then girlfriend (now fiancée) who were living there while she did her apprenticeship (or whatever it's called) in dentistry. Kerry Greenwood's "Corinna Chapman" books will give you some sort of flavour of why Melbourne is special (and Corinna is a baker, so another food connection).

ETA In the course of browsing the links on the Ask.Metafilter page, I discover that Diane Duane's website has a whole bunch of recipes on it, and the ones I looked at look good!

>233 haydninvienna:
I am afraid there are too many book linkages for this to be considered a real derailment of your thread.

Your quote from Helprin's daughter reminded me of Letitia Cropley's recipes in The Vicar of Dibley, including:

"Marmite cakes, lemon curd with ham and cheese, and a bewildering concoction of chocolate with cod's roe."

>233 haydninvienna:

Metafilter user evilmonk wins the first-mentioned AskMe thread with "not kidding: there is a great recipe for blood pudding in the annotated dracula.".

What's wrong with blood pudding? It is one of the less disturbing dishes that my father fondly remembered from his childhood.

>234 pgmcc: "Lemon curd with ham and cheese" reminds me of what I remember as the 3-ingredient challenge. Unfortunately it's not easy to google. The idea is to think of 3 ingredients, or 3 foods, any two of which go together but if you add the third one it becomes revolting. Googling for "Letitia Cropley" recipes led me only to a few sites joking about how they were her heirs, except for a restaurant review that contains this:

Ladies and gentlemen, I present for your consideration my starter: watermelon carpaccio with a black olive tapenade and feta cheese. If that strikes Vicar Of Dibley fans as a tribute to Mrs Letitia Cropley, whose comedic calling card was marrying absurdly assonant sweet and savoury flavours (a stilton and kiwi fruit tart, for example), it is presented here without a pinch of humour or self-parody. It is, in fact, a signature dish, albeit the repugnance of this collation suggests the signature belongs on the sort of confession that once led straight to the gallows.

Full review.

>235 -pilgrim-: Didn't say anything was wrong with blood pudding, although it's not something I care for myself. (I've eaten haggis, too and am not a big fan of that either, although I wouldn't push it off a plate.) I think evilmonk was just commenting on the oddity of having a blood pudding recipe in a book about Dracula.

My uncle used to have blood sausage all the time when I was a kid. People say he fed it to me and I liked it, but now I probably wouldn't be able to choke it down even though I'm a devoted carnivore.

>238 Bookmarque: That's almost how I feel about it. I tried it once, semi-voluntarily, and didn't care for the texture—the ingredients were somewhat of a secondary matter. I unwittingly tried steak tartare once, too, when I was at the restaurant in Canberra at which Son Who Cooks was then working. Little blighter sent me out a freebie from the kitchen which, in a dimly lit restaurant, I didn't recognise for what it was till afterwards.

>236 haydninvienna: What I was trying to remember was the problem of the Incompatible Food Triad. Googling that phrase turns up quite a few hits: the original statement of the problem, a discussion, another discussion, a trial of some solutions, and a solution that apparently works.

Just to show the strange places that a random walk across Wikipedia can lead to: I was trying to answer jillmwo's comment about whether the GD was truly educational. I was going to mention the old BBC radio game shows such as My Word!, My Music and Just a Minute as examples of something, but in the end didn't. In the course of thinking about it, I looked at the Wikipedia articles for those shows, and they led me to the one for I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue, which led me to the one for the game "Mornington Crescent", which led me to the one on "The Game (mind game)", which led me to Finite and Infinite Games by James P Carse (and to The Religious Case Against Belief, also by Carse) and to The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek, which on the descriptions seems to be saying much the same as The Living Company, by Arie de Geus, which is a book that I actually have (and have actually read).

The point is that the 2 books by Carse are religious philosophy and that by Sinek is about business. Not a place I expected to go. Amazon tells me though that the 3 books are "frequently bought together".

I'd kind of like to read the 2 books by Carse. They sound interesting, but the reviews (particularly for Finite and Infinite Games) are polarised—literally all the way from "brilliant and life-changing" to "pretentious load of waffle". Has anyone read any of the 3 books? If so, what did you think?

>241 haydninvienna:
...and? What have you concluded in relation to your original quest? Do you feel more educated having wandered for forty days and forty nights in the desert of Wikipedia, a sojourn prompted by jillmwo's question?

There are people waiting for the answer; a sign, even. Put us out of our misery. Is all our piffle simply piffle, or is it a kernel of wisdom; a tiny acorn from which a mammoth oak tree of knowledge will grow; a beginning; or merely a whirlpool of entertainment and fun?

We need to know.

>235 -pilgrim-: >238 Bookmarque: >239 haydninvienna: Uhu, fried blood pudding served with lingonberry jam is a staple in many Swedish homes, not to mention in school, as I grew up. It's cheap, and practically doesn't need any preparations, so is popular with families with lots of kids and bachelors especially.
Not sure that we mean the same dish when using that name, though.

>235 -pilgrim-:, >238 Bookmarque:, >239 haydninvienna:, >243 Busifer:

Black and white pudding are key elements of a full Irish breakfast. I prefer white pudding. White pudding is not dissimilar to haggis, which I quite like.

I paraphrase a quote from Imprimatur:

"If you wish to avoid civil unrest never let the people know what happens in the courts or what goes into sausages."

>244 pgmcc: Swedish blood (black) pudding is made from pig's blood, rye flour, and ale (or broth), plus lard and spices. And treacle. Traditional Swedish food, the truly ancestral stuff, is full of sugar.
Ewww.
We don't have cooked breakfast, the way the Irish or the English do. This is traditionally lunch/mid day fare.

Yes, the blood sausage of my youth was made from blood - I assume pig and cow and other choice nuggets I'm sure. lol

>241 haydninvienna: Perhaps it's all in how we define educational? My husband and I went through the entire series of QI (Quite Interesting) which is truly television for those inclined to nerdiness. Lots of tidbits that can drive one to open up books in pursuit of facts and contexts. LT here is a lot like that.

>247 jillmwo: That's pretty much what I had in mind. I've never seen Quite Interesting but I understand it has a lot in common with the radio shows I mentioned—basically, let a group of literate, intelligent people together in some kind of minimal framework and let them talk.

>242 pgmcc: My wanderings were in fact vaguely educational, and they added a couple of things to the wishlist. Piffle, as long as it's intelligent piffle, is all part of the package.

>242 pgmcc: I think there's a kernel of wisdom in all piffles. At least here at the Dragon.

>248 haydninvienna: There's a large number of Quite Interesting episodes on Youtube. Here's one to get you started:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy9FwJqdaQ0

>249 Busifer: That's basically what I said, and Jill went and called me on it. Never mind, all in good fun.

>250 hfglen: Thanks Hugh, i'll put them on the list.

The talk about black pudding reminds me of the story about Spartan black broth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_soup

>252 Maddz: Thanks Maddz, now I need brain bleach—you've just revived a long-ago memory of a mention of a blood soup in (I think ) Kafka's diaries. I gave up on Kafka about there.

>252 Maddz: Nope. You cannot make me look. Especially after reading >253 haydninvienna:'s reaction.

I do learn a lot in here, I just don't remember as much as I would like. Or possibly I remember the wrong things.

>252 Maddz: Crubeen (boiled pigs’ feet) used to be very popular in Ireland. I think the gentrification of the younger folks’ tastes has pushed them from the societal memory. I have had some and the dish is very tasty. I thought the outline of the Spartan soup sounded good.

There is a restaurant in Dublin that has mixed French and Irish to create its title: Le Bon Crubeen. Yes, their signature dish is crubeen.

I once did a sort of blood soup using a vegetable broth with barley flakes (or was it spelt) and flavouring it with black pudding.

It was interesting in a mildly masochistic way. Edible was the best description. I've not repeated the experiment, mostly because I suspect it would need actual blood not processed blood, and I don't think the local butcher would get it for me.

Mind you, I recall eating steak in France once, and the chef coming and checking we really wanted to have our steaks cooked bleu - "Ze Eengliish like well-done". Not this English family - none of this Victorian wimpy bloodless meat for us (unless it's pork or chicken).

>255 pgmcc: Well, that’s historically festival food for the poor, isn’t it, and as such time has elevated into tradition.
It’s still possible to find boiled pigs’ feet in some groceries in time for Yule, here.
And >253 haydninvienna: - blood soup is associated with the annual goose slaughter, in the southern parts of Sweden (Skåne). But like >254 clamairy: your comment made me decide not to click the link in >252 Maddz:.
Ewww.

>256 Maddz: Yeah, unprocessed blood is of the essence, so to speak ;-)

>256 Maddz: I love my steak bleu.

We arrived at our holiday village in France one year and it was nearly 9pm when we arrived at the restaurant for dinner. The proprietor came over to take our order. I asked for the steak and he said, "I suppose you want it medium, or well-done." I said, "No. I want it bleu."

He kissed me. He said, "I love you! You make my day. All night long they order, 'medium', 'medium', 'well-done', 'well-done', 'medium'. They destroy the meat. I love you."

We always got good service there.

I’m very much OK with pigs’ feet, although I prefer them smoked and in pea soup. Steak Bleu, not so much. One memorable evening in Florence a few years ago, DW and I ordered a steak Florentine in the hotel restaurant—they grill a large steak and slice it into strips at the table and share it. We ordered it medium to suit her. After taking a forkful, she pronounced “This is RAW!” and dumped most of it onto my plate. I didn’t complain.

I’ve been eating mostly vegetarian here for a while now, mainly because I’m not sure how far I trust the local supermarkets, but after all this I may just go vegan.

>250 hfglen: Greatest line ever (talking about cheese): "I just like stand in front of the fridge and eat it cuz there's no calories if you eat it straight out of the fridge."

We have a new GD spirit person (or something)!

>250 hfglen: Educational? How about this: they are talking about a fellow named Geoffrey Pyke. The question was about the least successful plebiscite ever, and the answer was that in 1939, a fellow named Geoffrey Pyke sent a team of investigators to Germany (disguised as golfers) to poll the German people on how they felt about the idea of going to war.

I propped at the name Pyke and Wikipedia-ed him. Yes, this was the certifiable chap who proposed winning the Battle of the Atlantic with gigantic aircraft carriers made of ice.

>250 hfglen: et al: In reply, see Sandi Toksvig sabre a bottle of champagne.

>263 haydninvienna: Thanks. I did within the last week or so.
And have read of both of Geoffrey Pyke's insane ideas, but not connected them to the same person.

It sounds as if you're getting hooked on QI. Welcome to the clan.

>264 hfglen: Maybe. Now watching an ep which has a quiz about mini-horses as guide animals and the advantages thereof. They haven't so far mentioned that a guide mini-horse could trim your lawn for you.

Hmm. I hope somebody has read Judith Tarr's SFF Equines blog over on Tor.com.

I'd hate to be guided by a stroppy lead mare even if she's smaller than a Shetland.

>266 Maddz: I think they came to the conclusion that a dog was still preferable. I take your point though. My wife has 3 horses, all of which are too big to be guide horses, heaven help us—”Mo”, the biggest, is about 18 hands—but personality-wise, in their separate ways, they are all completely unsuitable to be guide horses even if appropriately shrunken.

ETA I checked with Mrs H. Mo is 18.2. Big boy. Fortunately, he is a real cuddle-monster, which is intimidating in itself when he is so big.

And now, since this thread is getting a bit long, I think it's time for a new one.