Fabulous Huawei

And so begins my campaign to attract Chinese followers. Although the fact that this blog is written in English might be a problem. You'd imagine though that Chinese intelligence agents have foreign language skills.

I have been watching a lot of ads for Huawei phones. Is it true they take the best photos? Perhaps that would get me some nice Camel Trail photos, MiceElf. Maybe Huawei could sponsor the blog; are you listening guys?

The West, America in particular, seems obsessed with China as Enemy Number One. We Brits know better; they don't call us Perfidious Albion for nothing. Actually they don't call us that at all; that was Elizabethan England. Wait, we are Elizabethan again. Maybe Perfidious Britannia. So we'll wag a finger at China for its (obviously legitimate) actions in Hong Kong but welcome Huawei into our 5G infrastructure. "Don't worry, Donald, we won't allow it", then we do. Very perfidious.

I like the Chinese people. Fine, upstanding chaps. Keeping the world safe. So they have a President For Life. He's doing a great job, so why not? @GoXi

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A milestone - and a Marvelous name

I've reached 50! Not my age, that was a long time ago. This is my 50th post on this blog.

When I started writing, I had no idea what to expect. With the support of some loyal readers, to whom I give thanks, I have continued my ramblings - I do enjoy a ramble.

I really am grateful for the support of family and friends. I try to tailor my content to their interests, as much as my own. Walking, films, TV, football; that's the diet you'll get here (sums up my lockdown lifestyle). Little or no politics, although I'm not averse to the occasional dig at the whole political class. I don't really aim to be opinionated or controversial, just hopefully interesting.

Writing has proved an enjoyable pursuit for me in difficult times. I'm a quite private person, so opening up my innermost thoughts (occasionally) has been a difficult judgement but the blog can sometimes be about me as well as the world at large.

I get enjoyment too from researching topics, often set off by an article I read in the Times or other online content. A reference to a book leads not only to reading that book but to a blog post too. That was the case with the Three Body Problem and Freakonomics.

I'm watching football on TV while writing this and am intrigued by one of the Aston Villa players - Marvelous Makamba. What a name! He's Zimbabwean, so is Marvelous a common African name? Or is it a nickname? I found Marvelous Marvin Hagler, an African American boxer; that was at first a nickname but he changed his name to become Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Very modest. Other than that, nothing. But all credit to Makamba's Mum  and Dad; good name. Although checking out his footballing skills, he may be struggling to live up to it. For balance, I should report that he is actually a Zimbabwean international.

Ten minutes to go and Villa are one goal down. Maybe Marvelous can score an equaliser?

No, he's been substituted. Anyway, Villa are a hopeless case I think. They are probably going down.

More rambling.

Das Boot

Das Boot is a TV series, originally aired on Sky Atlantic. At first sight it doesn't seem like something you'd want to watch - life on a German U-boat in WW2 sounds like dark, moody soap opera at best. I didn't actually watch it when it first came out, for that reason. But I have recently watched season 1 and it is much better than it promised.

There are two strands to the story. The crew of the U-boat provides one, French resistance activists the other. Connecting the two narratives is a a young Alsacian woman working as a clerk for the German occupying power in Vichy France. Her brother is on the submarine. The series is their tale.

A tale of love, death and betrayal. The more remarkable in that it is made by German TV and shows the occupation of France by Nazi Germany in all its rawness.

And that's just season 1. I'm about to see the second season and will report back in due course.

Sharp Objects

I've not really connected to Amy Adams in  the past - I suppose early in her career. I actually haven't seen her in many movies. The one I do remember was a tsunami disaster movie with Ewan MacGregor. I can't remember what it was called and can't be bothered to look it up. I wouldn't say it was bad but it wasn't gripping - as disaster movies are supposed to be.

However, the TV series Sharp Objects is absolutely outstanding and stars Amy Adams.

I have an aversion to TV series which get an unwarranted second season - not because they are too bad to warrant it but precisely because they are too good to warrant it; they have said what they have to say and to contrive a follow-up undermines the quality of the original. So I hope Sharp Objects doesn't get a second season, because this is The Best.

It's easy to list TV shows that went on too long. Even the classic West Wing - should have finished when Bartlet ended his second term; there was no point to the rest. Homeland - should have finished when Brody died; the Carrie/Brody relationship was good, afterwards Carrie just went crazy.

Conversely, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (like West Wing, written by Aaron Sorkin) was so good and there was plenty left in it. The characters were ripe for further development. Don't know why the studio cancelled it. Ratings, I guess.

So, Sharp Objects, based on a novel by Gillian Flynn. Adams is Camille, a journalist who is assigned to an investigation into why a young girl - and others previously - have disappeared. In her home town, to which she is not keen to return. Camille is a seriously flawed character but gets to grip with the mysterious circumstances. She decides to stay at her family home. Her mother (Patricia Clarkson won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress) is not exactly delighted to see her and - what she (the mother) sees as - her disruption of small town life as she relentlessly probes into current and recent tragedies.

  

Eliza Scanlen (recently Beth in Little Women) plays Camille's rollerblading younger half sister and Chris Messina a detective (Willis) is brought in from another force to help with the investigation. He and Camille are the outsiders and are duly resented by the townsfolk. The interactions between these four main characters make a great show.

To tell more would be to spoil, so suffice to say that the acting is universally superb, the plot is a dark depiction of small town middle America and the music is amazing.

The 8 episode series aired on HBO in 2018, after which HBO announced there would not be a sequel. Well done, HBO! It simply doesn't need more.

One final thing: do not switch off during the final credits of the final episode; you will miss an important coda.

Freakonomics

This is a book jointly written by a journalist and an economist. It has one central theme, which I describe as "don't confuse correlation with causation". In other words, if two measures X and Y both move in the same direction by the same amount, you cannot infer that either causes, or even influences, the other.

If you are a person who, like me, has spent his life absorbed by and interested in numbers, statistics and politics, this book has nothing to say to you. If not, however - maybe you are more interested in words than numbers - the book has lots of entertaining examples of how this matters. And because there are lots, it becomes quite repetitive and you may well get to the point where you say "OK I get it; move on".

Which is what I did, after reading half the book.

It is pretentiously sub-titled "A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything". Don't let that encourage you. Or put you off. This is not Douglas Adams (Life, the Universe and Everything). It's a publisher's tag line.

Newspaper sub-editors often ignore the correlation/causation issue. Misleading headlines abound, even though they may be negated by the detail in the article. Do they want to encourage lazy readers? We - you and I, valued readers - know that just because the number of covid-19 positive tests goes down one day, it doesn't necessarily mean that fewer people have become infected.

Donald Trump knows: "Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!"

Camel Trail 2

After a good number of non-walking, i.e. light drizzle and 13 degrees days, yesterday was dry and hot.Very hot. Too hot to go for a walk? Maybe, but I went anyway. To walk a bit more of the Camel Trail - see earlier post for details of a stretch near Bodmin.

The walk started at Wadebridge, going towards Padstow. Although not the full 5 miles. 10 miles in the heat is too much for me.

There is no car park near to the start point in Wadebridge, unless you are prepared to go into Lidl and purchase a 69p bottle of Petronas zero alcohol beer and leave it in the car in their car park for 2 hours. That strikes me as rude so I didn't do so, leaving myself with a 15 minute walk from the nearest car park to the trail start point. So I'm tired before even getting started.

The river is in sight for pretty much all of this stroll, although it was low tide. The Camel Estuary is a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and hosts a plethora of bird life. Waders on the salt marshes in winter and migrating birds such as the occasional Osprey in Spring and Autumn. The river's pièce de résistance, though, is the colony of Little Egrets. Partly because I had no binoculars with me, I sadly saw none of these beautiful birds yesterday. Those I have seen on previous occasions have been nearer to Padstow, I think, so perhaps they nest further down river. Maybe next time.

 The first exciting thing encountered was a cafe selling ice cream in scoops. Needing energy in the heat (as though I needed an excuse) I had a scoop of salted caramel and one of honeycomb. Mm, delicious.

The second, less exciting spot was a sewage works. More correctly the Water Treatment Works - an obfuscation of gentrification presumably meant to make it seem to smell less. It doesn't.

There are lots of people along the way, mostly cyclists. These vary from jovial, relaxed chaps (that's gender-non-specific, FYO) who give a cheerful "hi" to fierce, determined individuals presumably looking to set a PB and who don't even see, let alone acknowledge me. And why are they all going in the opposite direction to me? Not one cyclist has overtaken me, although that could easily be because they can't keep up with my pace. More likely, they have ridden to Padstow in the morning, had a pasty and an ice cream there and are now on their way home.

There was one jogger, who looked so hot and bothered that I wondered "why are you doing that?". She was gone before I could ask her. Just as well,  I guess.

In all honesty, my pace wasn't its usual brisk one, conserving energy in the heat. There is a fair amount of tree shade though, which helped. Other walkers panted an exhausted "hello" in response to my equally brief and weary greeting.

On the way back from my halfway point, I wrote this post. In my head. So it wasn't all a waste of time!