In order to get a driving licence in Honduras, you have to take, and pass, a simple written questionnaire and complete a medical check, eye exam and a blood test. That's it. No practical test. Tip for visitors to Honduras: don't rent a car, the locals haven't learned how to drive!
According to zuto.com, the UK has one of the longest driving theory tests in the world, at 50 questions. The world champion? Vietnam, with a whopping 450 questions. The majority of Vietnamese drivers are extremely old, because it takes so many years to complete the theory test. It's a lot easier in Uganda, where you only need to get 25% of the 30 questions right.
Until recently, the Egyptian driving test involved just a highly tricky "drive forwards six meters; then reverse six meters". Which meant the testers didn't need any test track greater than 6 meters in length. I haven't been able to confirm what percentage of people failed this. Recently the test has been made harder (it could hardly been made easier) by the addition of an S shaped track and a parking test.
The Philippines driving test lasts about 5 minutes and includes making right turns only. There is driving on the right in the country, so presumably all Philippine roads are circular, making it awkward to get from one coast to another. Maybe there's only one road in the country, making the North Circular look pathetically small. But good for an Indy 500 perhaps. In contrast, in India - where they drive on the left - you only have to be able turn left in the driving test.
Meanwhile, here in the UK a new Highway Code, which is described by the Government as "essential reading for all road users, including pedestrians, mobility scooter users, cyclists, horse riders, drivers and motorcyclists", has been published. It includes a new "hierarchy of road users":
1. pedestrians, in particular children, older adults (yay!) and disabled people
2. cyclists
3. horse riders
4. motorcyclists
5. Motorised vehcles
which frankly sounds what already pertains.
There are countries which require first aid training for drivers, which sounds like a good idea.
Want to know the safest countries, based on road fatalities per capita? San Marino leads with just 0 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants (the UK is 10th with 3.5). Be careful in Libya (40.5), Venezuela 37.2) or Thailand (38.1).
I'm off to San Marino for my hols. Not driving, just walking in the streets.
Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have apparently asked for their music to be deleted from Spotify's catalogue in a fit of pique about the inclusion of podcasts by someone called Joe Rogan, who commits the ultimate sin of interviewing (and by and large agreeing with) vaccine sceptics. I believe this is called self-cancel culture.
If you were to hazard a guess as to who would be next to jump on this particular bandwagon, who would it be?
Yep you've got it; it's Harry and Meghan. They are believed to be miffed that something has gone viral without their being included, liked, followed or even noticed.
Daniel Ek is reported to be mortified. Not.
I really have no idea who Neil Young is, or Joe Rogan, but I thought you should know.
Last July I went to my local furniture store to find a new mattress. I came out having ordered a full package of bed, mattress and headboard. Which says much for (a) their marketing tactics and (b) my gullibility. A few weeks later came the delivery, which was fine except ... no headboard . Fast forward a few months and the headboard arrived but unfortunately wasn't the correct one. Thence to November: another headboard which ... had the wrong screw holes. Today (nearly 7 months after my order) yet another replacement arrived and ... you've got it, it was the wrong colour. As it happens I don't think I would have noticed if the delivery guys hadn't pointed it out, so I said "that's fine; I'll take it".
Anyway, I'm not going to tell you about that, as this is a serious blog not a diary of the details of my unremarkable and mundane life. Instead I'm going to talk about Paul Keating who was born 2 days after me. The former Australian Prime Minister recently grandly announced his opinion that Britain “suffers delusions of grandeur and relevance deprivation”.
I think that's probably true. Further, I thought it long before he did. Not saying he's been influenced by my blog but you never know. If you're out there Paul give us a comment. Now Keating is a long-standing supporter of an Australian republic, so perhaps you'd expect that from him. On this occasion he was incensed by remarks by UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss that China could engage in military aggression in the Pacific as "nothing short of demented".
"The reality is Britain does not add up to a row of beans when it comes to East Asia. Britain took its main battle fleet out of East Asia in 1904 and finally packed it in with its ‘East of Suez’ policy in the 1970s. And it has never been back."
The truth, of course, is that Britain has always been guilty of overreach. Post-Empire we are a small country with a much diminished military and a couple of big bang nukes which no sane Prime Minister would ever use. Perfidious Albion is the master of bluster and bluff. Vladimir Putin will be shaking in his boots.
Government ministers are terribly fond of saying that "Britain is the best ... the UK was the first ..." in a vain attempt to believe we are still important in the world. "Best soft power ... national health service which is the envy of the world ... the Premier League is the best in Europe ... leading the way ..." It's embarrassing. And mostly incorrect. Most of all, it's patronising to the rest of the world.
Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a disorder where people with this condition have an inflated idea of themselves and a need for lots of attention from other people. Sounds like us as a nation? No wonder no-one likes us ("bloody patronising poms"). Time to settle down, people, know our place and ... get rich. Like the Swiss.
I quite like my country; I'm happy living here, although I believe that, all other things being equal, I'd be just as happy in many of the world's countries. By any definition of a patriot, I am probably not one. The Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1913) wrote "I am willing to serve my country, but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than my country. To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it."
Looking forward to sitting up against my headboard tonight, reading a book which I shall tell you about shortly.
You will be pleased to know that Ipswich Town are gradually creeping up the League One table.
Since getting relegated from the Premier League in 2002, the team meandered up and down the Championship table with finishing positions ranging from 3rd to 15th - including two unsuccessful play off campaigns - before a further relegation to League One in 2019. Going through nine permanent (sic) managers and six caretakers, as well as financial administration, during that period.
I have no knowledge of the financial constraints within which managers worked under the ownership of Marcus Evans after he purchased the club in 2007 but there were clear indications with tiny transfer budgets and a number of different loan players coming in each season. Not exactly conducive to long term development. In April last year Evans sold the club to an American consortium Gamechangers 2020, who own Phoenix Rising FC, a second tier soccer club in the US. They claim they will "invest heavily" and "are committed to restoring ITFC to its former glory ".
What this means remains to be seen but on the face of it a return to the glory days of winning the First Division (1962), the FA Cup (1978) and UEFA Cup (1981) for this small town club is completely impossible. There are, and have been, small town clubs in the Premier League (Bournemouth, Burnley, Norwich, Swansea and others) but their stay has often been short term and characterised by permanent relegation battles. Still, we fans would take that, at the same time knowing that, without a wholesale restructuring of English football, it is not possible for a club with a stadium capacity of 30,000 to compete financially with clubs with 60,000+ stadium capacity, worldwide marketing presence and owned by sovereign wealth funds and hugely rich Russians, Americans and the like.
Manager Paul Cook was recruited on 2 March 2021. A month later the club was under new ownership; they finished 9th at the end of the season and in the summer there was a huge overhaul of the playing staff. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the difficulty of effectively building a new team, the new season started very badly, with no wins after six games and the club in the relegation places. By early December we were in 11th place and the owners decided a further managerial change was necessary. Cook was sacked and replaced by Kieran McKenna, who had been a first team coach at Manchester United but has no experience as a manager. Improvements were slow in coming but the Tractor Boys are now 8th in League One and only 5 points off the play off places, with 4 wins from the last 5 matches.
I may be delusional in detecting hopes of a revival and my new found hope may prove short lived. We've tried all sorts of managers from Roy Keane to Mick McCarthy to ex Town captain Jim Magilton and none have brought the hoped for revival of fortunes, so maybe going for an unknown manager isn't any more of a gamble than they were. Ultimately though, all the managers were working under severe financial constraints. Even so, there have been plenty of clubs that have managed to achieve spectacular success by successive promotions without large amounts of money - Wigan and Bournemouth come to mind. I'm afraid Ipswich Town has not been a well-run club for years. I'm just hoping the Gamechangers will live up to their name.
I'm sad that the club rarely appears on TV and I live 360 miles from Ipswich so am unable to visually assess their performances. But I live in hope of doing so in the future, if they can just kick start a return to ... well, not glory days but at least as competitive a position as this historic club should be.
I had some work done in my lounge. "We'll have to move this ... and this .. and ..." Whoa! Be super careful of that round table which, underneath a protective sheet, houses the most difficult jigsaw puzzle known to humankind. I say. Very much an incomplete puzzle, a work in (slow) progress.
The building work (removal and disposal of asbestos, since you ask) finished, they offer to restore all items of furniture to their original positions. But I exclude the puzzle table from that, preferring to take care of it myself. Carefully remove the sheet ... oh my! There are pieces all over the place, including the floor. Disaster! What's more, this Star Wars jigsaw is double sided and the colour of the reverse side - i.e. the more difficult side which I understandably chose to leave until the second run through - is uncannily similar to that of my lounge carpet. Much hunting on my (sore) knees ensued and this morning I began to process of retro fitting all the loose pieces.
I'm most of the way there but have discovered a potential problem: there appears to be a piece missing. 😭 More scrabbling around on the floor. The covering sheet, meanwhile, has been through the washing machine and the tumble drier so I put my head inside those to check, also retracing the route from the lounge to the utility room. Nothing. Maybe the piece is on the puzzle table somewhere. I'll keep you informed.
On the bright side, when I got the sheet out to cover the puzzle, I found one of my lost socks (see 22 Jan). Although it no longer matters as there is now no such thing as a pair.
If you're a serious hifi fan, you'll eschew digital renditions of musical classics - whether Beethoven or Woody Guthrie - in favour of classic vinyl recordings.
My earliest records were vinyl records. LPs (Long Play): 33⅓, EPs (Extended Play): 45 and Singles: 78 revolutions per minute - rpm. 12 inch, 10 inch, 7 inch.
I entertained various friends and family over Christmas with my "lost socks" tale. Sorting out my sock drawer in preparation for festive visiting, I discovered eight unmatched socks. Weird.
I know, not at all entertaining. Dunno why I blathered on about my socks, as though anybody would be interested. Turned out that someone actually listened and, on my recent birthday, I received these:
Yesterday I wore two of these:
At the same time. Not a pair.
Now I understand. I was brought up to regard wearing non-matching socks as a Crime Of Fashion. No longer; it's the New Normal of Fashion. And I've gained eight (previously useless) socks.
This movie, a dramatisation of a novel by Thomas Savage, is already receiving a number of award nominations. For me it's an art film, by which I mean that it's more than just a visual narrative; it embraces various art forms. From amazing Montana landscapes to a modernistic score performed by what seems to be a string quartet with occasional piano, with authentic 1930s paraphernalia such as motor cars, clearly numbered acts and a very wide screen, the movie begins with an impressive cattle drive which defines the central location of the story.
The title is taken from Psalm 22:20: “Deliver me from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dog.” Director Jane Campion (of Top of the Lake) has said "The power of the dog is all those urges, all those deep, uncontrollable urges that can come and destroy us". It also felt to me to have a sense of the "black dog" of depression.
I mulled over how much to tell of the whole story or to avoid spoilers for you. I have tried to follow a middle path, to tell enough to encourage you to watch the movie but not to make it a fruitless exercise. I might not succeed so you may want to watch it before reading further.
Phil and George Burbank own a ranch and the film centres on their relationship. They are shown as very different siblings; Phil is the practical, physical rancher and George the manager. They don't really much like each other. Both are lonely but deal with that differently: Phil relishes being on his own whereas George seeks to alleviate his loneliness by marrying local inn owner Rose, whom Phil takes an instant dislike to and calls a "suicide widow". There's a scene where George says to Rose "how nice it is not to be alone".Rose has a son Peter who is mocked by Phil and the ranch hands for his effeminate ways.
These are the four characters whose journeys we follow. There are hidden depths to Phil and Peter; eventually Phil comes to see great worth in the young boy and helps him develop ranchers' skills, particularly when he discovers that Peter saw his father hang himself and now his mother is deteriorating into alcoholism. Peter responds, growing surprisingly self confident and determined.
George and Rose are frankly less interesting and become peripheral to the narrative.
Phil himself has hidden depths. In one scene the Governor, visiting the ranch, reveals Phil was "Phi Beta Kappa in Classics at Yale". This is my main reservation about the film: none of Phil's background is explored or explained - how did this educated and cultured man end up as a cattle herder? - and I wanted there to be more to this character, less of it hidden. He helps Peter to grow but doesn't do so himself.
In Top of the Lake, Campion has a clear feminine focus, so strong that "men are bad, women good" pretty much sums up the theme. Here she hints at effeminate male sexuality with some homoerotic scenes and suggestions - but no more than that, it's subtle suggestion, nothing more. I'm not sure it adds anything to the film but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a second reservation for me.
My final issue is that the strong, wide visuals and excellent musical score really mean that I wished I had seen it in the cinema to get the full experience. This may be a reservation about my TV rather than the film. Overall I believe this a worthwhile film, it's pace is near perfect, the acting is excellent and the characters well-defined and well contrasted. If you watch it, let me know whether your thoughts are different from mine.
I've written before about the esoteric names of football clubs - the Go Ahead Eagles and the Stuttgarter Kickers. But today is about nicknames. I don't know how or by whom these names came into being but Arsenal (originally Woolwich Arsenal) are the Gunners, Wycombe (home of the Windsor chair) Wanderers are the Chair Boys, Ipswich (home of Ransomes) Town the Tractor Boys.
I'm not sure whether their womens' teams are the Chair Girls and the Tractor Girls [Ed: actually the latter: Yes]; sounds like a good name for a movie. According to CNN, a 20-year-old woman nicknamed "Chair Girl" was filmed hurling a chair onto a freeway from the balcony of a high-rise building in downtown Toronto. Someone called Patrick Walsh has an album called Tractor Girls. In the interests of rigour, I got my researcher to listen to track 2 Girls With Tractors; he said it sounds like every other country and western song that's ever been written.
Moving on, my interest in nicknames has been re-stimulated by watching the (mens) African Cup of Nations. Today was Nigeria (the Super Eagles) vs Egypt (the Pharaohs). Yesterday I watched Morocco (the Lions de l'Atlas - Atlas Lions) vs Ghana (the Black Stars).
By and large the names of animals predominate. I challenge my readers to guess which countries are represented by (NO CHEATING):
the Desert Foxes
the Eagles of Carthage
the Lions of Teranga
the Falcons of Jediane
the Elephants
the Lions of Chinguetti
the Scorpions
the Blue Sharks
That morphed into a Geography quiz I think. Answers in two days' time. I'm expecting a plethora of 100% correct answers from my erudite audience.
I'm looking forward to the commentators' attempts when Comoros (wherever that is) play: they are The Coelacanths.
Frankly these are all deeply unoriginal, if authentic. Much better, the Ethiopian team is known as the Walias, which are "on the sweeter side of Ethiopian beers with tones of fruits and honey. It’s very light and golden in colour and retains its head much better than some of its competitors" according to youngpioneertours.com I'll have one of those please!
I know, it's a brand name. But so are Red Bull Salzburg and Bayer Leverkusen.
His Royal Humbug who marched his troops up to the top of the hill?
The inventor of the Platinum Pudding idea?
I'm going for Martin Reynolds, the principal private secretary to the Prime Minister. His crime? Being stingy. "Bring your own booze"? What kind of party host does that? A mean one, that's who.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 is an entertaining dramatisation of the events surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Protesters attempted to storm the convention centre to protest the Vietnam War and, in particular, Hubert Humphrey's apparent support for - or at least non-opposition to - the war. Those on trial in September 1969 were prominent activists and, although they were all accused of conspiracy, they were mostly unconnected and just met in the protests. There were originally eight defendants but one, Bobby Seale the co-leader of the Black Panthers, was eventually separated from the others - in the movie by a declaration of mistrial after several highly amusing altercations between Seale and the judge.
Aaron Sorkin paints each of the defendants in bright dramatic colours: Sasha Baron Cohen is a highly intelligent but crazy Abbie Hoffman, Jeremy Strong (aka Kendall Roy in Succession) is Jerry Rubin; they are founding members of the Youth International Party, known as Yippies, dedicated to revolution. They engage in student level stunts, constantly disrupting the trial and arguing that it's a political trial. In contrast Eddie Redmayne is the straight man of the group, a teacher and co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society, who argues for a non-violent, non-confrontational presentation of their defence, a stance which lessens as Frank Langella's Judge Hoffman behaves increasingly erratically and antagonistically towards them.
Mark Rylance does his droll thing as their lawyer and the film is well worth a watch, particularly for fans of Sorkin's writing. The energy never fades and there is a typical Sorkin set piece speech to round it all off.
Inside Man is a heist movie from 2006, mostly straightforward in its use of a hostage negotiator (Denzil Washington) and his interaction with the leader of the robbers (Clive Owen). There's a sub-plot involving Jodie Foster and Christoper Plummer which feels contrived but turns out to be a crucial part of the plot. So far so ordinary. What intrigued me, however, were the tactical devices used by the robbers.
There is a clever robber leader, who has thought of all possibilities and tactics, one of which is to have the hostages wear clothing and face masks identical to those of the robbers, so as to allow the robbers to escape by exiting with the hostages. Sound familiar? If you've seen Money Heist, it will be. No Dali masks here but otherwise it's a rip-off. Feels like obvious plagiarism which, given this film is from 2006 and Money Heist from 2017, makes me a little less enthralled by the latter. There's even a common musical device: We know that Money Heist uses Bella Ciao as a kind of leitmotif; Inside Man does a similar thing with the Bollywood love song Chaiyya Chaiyya, the latter making no sense whereas Bella Ciao at least represents anti-capitalist protest. Putting aside the disturbing plagiarism, I would class this movie as a mildly entertaining and undemanding couple of hours' watch.
Fracture pits Anthony Hopkins against Ryan Gosling in a courtroom drama. I guess you couldn't find two actors more unalike in terms of their usual roles. Hopkins, in Hannibal Lecter mood, is some kind of super-genius engineer who discovers his wife is having an affair with a police detective. He's clever enough to plot out the perfect crime, shoots her and confesses. Gosling plays a laconic, smug La La Land Assistant District Attorney who is plotting a lucrative move to the private sector but has time before that happens to take on this final "open and shut" case, given the confession. Things don't turn out quite like that, as you may guess, and he is eventually intrigued by the challenge of taking down his clever antagonist.
There's a strong musical element in the film. On occasions - particularly in the opening seven minute sequence with no dialogue - it feels like a symphonic exposition. Sometimes a bit distracting. There are clever references to the movie's title in the opening titles
but it's not at all clear to me what Fracture means in the context of the plot. Overall it's the kind of film which depends on excellent chemistry between the two leads and they provide that. A good thriller.
Above Suspicion is a crime thriller set in a run-down Kentucky town and based on a true story. The dark local culture contrasts with the arrival of a clean cut rookie FBI agent and he recruits a local young unmarried mother, desperate to escape her past and present circumstances, as an informer. It is fairly mundane but does have Emilia Clarke (aka the Mother of Dragons) in a gritty role.
Four movies in four days? I know, but there was a distinct lack of TV football.
This movie is a lemon. Lemons are not edible fruits; they exist only to add zest to other food. No-one eats a lemon on its own. The film is a dud; something which has no meaning or point. It describes a week in the life of the making of an episode of the 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy, starring Lucille Ball and her real life husband Desi Arnaz.
The original was a gentle, charming comedy of a type which would make no-one laugh today. So why regurgitate its memory and focus on the mechanics of making an episode? It's reasonable to suppose that there is something more to this: a tragic element, a remarkable difference to this episode rather than any of the other 179; the lemon must be the seasoning for something. But no, it just trundles along, the only hint of drama being the fact that it was during the making of this episode that Ball was "outed" as a Communist - the era of McCarthyism in the United States. If this was at the forefront of the movie, making it about the horrors of that period, there might have been a point to it. But no, it's just a bit of colour to support the dull essence of the "Monday read through, Tuesday rewrites, Wednesday first rehearsals", etc.
Nicole Kidman as Lucy and Javier Bardem as Desi deliver Aaron Sorkin's rapid fire script as best they can and it just feels like Amazon Studios thought that the combination of those three would be enough to disguise the paucity of the story. It isn't. In many ways it feels like a stage play, which seems alien to Sorkin's normal "walk and talk" style and only goes to make the movie even more static.
It's probably fundamental to the subscription model of the streaming companies that they have to provide a constant diet of new content in order to guarantee continuing subscriptions, so it's hardly surprising that the quality varies enormously. The Plot section of this film's Wikipedia entry comprises just one sentence. Tells you everything.
I frequently find myself at odds with film critics when they (and sometimes I) review a film. Our approaches, and goals, are different. Critics assess films from technical, artistic and historical points of view: "aspects of Kubrick", "Monroe at her best channelling her inner Bergman", "great use of wide angle lens" and so on. I want to be entertained but, more than that, I want to see a film which I'd be happy to see again and to recommend it to others, and it's not a chore to keep going to the end. Funnily enough, I was quite entertained by this film but only in a "nothing else to do" way. I saw it through to the end but I don't think it would have mattered to me if I had abandoned it halfway. I'm glad I'm not a professional critic required to watch film after film and never sneak out after half an hour.
Everyone knows that a mile is 5,280 feet. 1,760 yards. But that was just the Romans. In the British Isles, the Irish Mile was 6,720 feet and the Scottish Mile 5,952 ["We think na on the lang Scots miles" - Robert Burns, Tam o' Shanter].
Enter the 9th century Persian astronomer Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Farghani [which name is pretty much a family tree in itself]. He used a measurement of somewhere between 6,500 and 7,000 feet for his "Arabic Mile".
Which brings us to Christopher Columbus. Columbus believed the earth was round; also that Asia was a very long (west to east) continent and he set out across the Atlantic fully expecting to make landfall in Japan before long. Using al-Farghani's "mile" he calculated the length of Asia as being around one-third more than it actually is, so it was a lot further away than he thought. It's not known whether his first words to the Lucayan people he met on the Bahamian beach of Guanahani were "Kon'nichiwa, Kyōto e no michi o oshiete moraemasu ka?"**
If you've ever wondered why it takes so long to walk the 136 miles from Dublin to Cork, now you know. Mother Goose knew about different miles:
There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile, He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile; He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse, And they all lived together in a little crooked house.
My daughter laughs at me because I iron everything, even socks. Usually I time it to coincide with the repeat of an old fashioned series like Inspector Morse so that I can watch and iron at the same time. But over the post Christmas period there has been such rubbish on that I’ve been reduced to watching WWII documentaries.
And I fell to thinking about my French mother and her family. Two older brothers were killed in the first war and her younger brother in the second. My older twin sisters were killed in a bombing raid when they were only three.
Her cousin Yvonne and her husband kept a little estaminet near Gravelines. They had a son named Emil who had what was called ‘creeping paralysis’ probably MS. He lived in a self contained flat in the basement and was obsessed by radios which he built himself.
His parents were ostracised by the local community because from the time of the occupation they served German soldiers and were thought to be far too friendly with them. In 1944 Yvonne, Jean-Pierre and Emil were all shot dead by German soldiers. They were members of the Maquis. It emerged that Emil had been broadcasting the information obtained by his parents from the German soldiers in the estaminet. Someone had betrayed them. They were never discovered.
In 1947 my parents were asked by our parish priest, who was himself half German half Dutch, and had fled to Quarr Abbey in 1939, to accept for Christmas a German POW. Fr Putmann was the only German speaking priest in the diocese and had therefore been instructed by the Bishop to act as their chaplain.
My mother was torn. On the one hand she was moved by the stories of these young lads who had been conscripted with no idea what would happen to them, and on the other, given her family history she had no love for the Germans.
Anyway, they agreed and I’m able to remember Michael arriving. He was a thin blond lad and had brought a present for me of a bag of wooden bricks which he had carved himself from pieces of timber he had found in Colwick Woods where the camp was situated. I remember him playing with me, and us all sitting round the table singing French, German and English carols. He continued to visit when he was allowed and when he was repatriated my father sent him home with this letter.
He was the son of a butcher in Kleiner Graben, had married at twenty and had a wife and two little girls - he was captured early in the war. The privations in Germany were even worse than ours.
There is also a later letter which explains that the gifts had to wait to be sent to Germany until it was allowed.
This was over seventy years ago, just a simple story of two working class families caught up in the horrors of war. And how it’s possible to stop hating.
My friend Tony doesn't like card games so, when he was given one for Christmas, he passed it on to me. It's called Shot In The Dark Xmas. [As a child I was taught to regard Xmas as an unacceptable, perhaps even evil, abbreviation but let's move on from that]
I am an inveterate and highly competitive gamer but, since I won't have the opportunity to play this one for another 11¾ months, I thought I should try some of the questions on you people. Brains at the ready! Some leeway will be allowed; bonus points for exactly correct answers.
Q1. How many Olympic-sized swimming pools can be filled with the beer that is consumed on the UK over the Christmas period?
Q2. How many medium-sized baubles are needed to decorate an average six foot Christmas tree?
Q3. How much would it have cost to buy 100g of gold, frankincense and myrrh on Christmas Day 2019?
Q4. In 2019, what was the world record for eating the most Brussels sprouts in 60 seconds?
Q5. In Greenland, what Christmas delicacy is supposed to taste like fresh coconut:
A. blubber wrapped in whale skin
B. eels cooked in milk
C. polar bear tongue OR
D. boiled penguin beak?
Q6. What is the length of the biggest Christmas cracker ever made?
Q7. In what year was the first Christmas tree decorated and by whom?
Q8. In the 1940s what was most commonly used as fake snow in films?
Q9. On what date does the average Brit eat their first mince pie of the year?
Q10. During a Christmas feast hosted by King Richard II of England in 1377, how many sheep and oxen were consumed in total?
I used to enjoy the lead ups to the Oscars and other movie award announcements. In the days when cinemas could be visited and the only dangers were teenagers flicking popcorn at each other and fellow oldies sniffling and coughing their way through winter colds and spreading their flu germs. Ah the good old days. Nowadays it's Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ in our sterile homes. Life is a constant stream of movie nights. I posted previously about Oscar-winning films but here is this year's update.
Last night I watched one and a quarter movies. Starting with The Lost Daughter starring Olivia Colman, whom I have liked only once in a film - as Queen Anne in The Favourite. It is billed as a psychological thriller but in the half hour before I gave up there were no thrills and many long sequences of Colman practising her range of facial expressions. I like my films to have either a narrative or a point - where is this movie going and why has it been made? For me it was dreary in the extreme and, to the extent there was any dramatic motivation, a disturbing and discombobulating focus on unhappy childhood scenes and memories. A thinking person's film. Not for me.
In contrast, Don't Look Up is a riotous, crazy, satirical film about a comet going to crash into the earth. And inept politicians. And greedy capitalists.A non-thinking person's film. A cast of Hollywood A listers led by Meryl Streep, Leonardo di Caprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill and Cate Blanchett seem to all have been told by the Director "here's your role; just over-act as if your life depends on it" - i.e. the comet is going to kill you all - is backed by impressive cameos by in particular Mark Rylance and Ariana Grande. And a Muppet. Streep is a (way OTT) President, Hill her son and Chief of Staff who calls Lawrence's grad student "dragon tattoo boy", Leo the Professor Nerd who goes bonkers with Blanchett's chat show host (you'll have to check it out to get my meanings). Grande provides some musical class; Rylance is the world domination tech guy with more than a touch of Dr. Strangelove.
It's pantomime. Not to mention the most glorious, Laugh Out Loud post credit moment you will ever see (I've learned my lesson). Oh, and once you've seen that, there's an endless (well five minutes' worth) list of boom operators, set decorators, casting directors' second assistants, matte artists, dolly grip thingies and whatnot - and finally ... another post credit scene (not such a good one though). Enjoy!
When invited to join hands and sing Auld Lang Syne, I generally hummed the tune and mumbled some vaguely Scottish sounding words. Which is I guess what most (English at least) people do, since the actual words are incomprehensible and ... well, foreign (And we'll tak a right gude-willy waught). However, it for some reason represents the dawning of the new year and, in an earlier post, I promised to publish my New Year resolutions. So here I go. Not necessarily in order of importance, imminence or achievability.
Lose 20 kg
Finish the Star Wars jigsaw puzzle
Finish reading David Copperfield and publish my Charles Dickens blog post
Locate the source(s) of the St Austell River and publish the blog post
Watch The Blair Witch Project
Not to forget my sons' wedding anniversaries
Anyway, have a happy and safe 2022 everyone. I'll keep working on blog posts to hopefully entertain you. And even maybe provide progress reports on my resolutions.
Finally, two New Year Resolutions I request from you, dear readers:
Continue to comment on my posts (I read them all)
Encourage a member of your family or friend to read my blog and write their comments
If you find an interesting post on my blog, share it on your Twitter or Facebook feed and in a WhatsApp group
