Shot In The Dark Answers

Brief answers. For more detail, buy the game from @ShotintheDarkGames (FB) shotinthedarkgame.co.uk

Q1. How many Olympic-sized swimming pools can be filled with the beer that is consumed on the UK over the Christmas period? 57

Q2. How many medium-sized baubles are needed to decorate an average six foot Christmas tree? 81

Q3. How much would it have cost to buy 100g of gold, frankincense and myrrh on Christmas Day 2019? £3,733

Q4. In 2019, what was the world record for eating the most Brussels sprouts in 60 seconds? 33

Q5. In Greenland, what Christmas delicacy is supposed to taste like fresh coconut:

• A. blubber wrapped in whale skin A
• 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? 63.1 metres

Q7. In what year was the first Christmas tree decorated and by whom? 1536 by Martin Luther

Q8. In the 1940s what was most commonly used as fake snow in films? Cornflakes painted white

Q9. On what date does the average Brit eat their first mince pie of the year? 2 December

Q10. During a Christmas feast hosted by King Richard II of England in 1377, how many sheep and oxen were consumed in total? 328

Let me know your score!

Being The Ricardos

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.

Miles and Miles

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.

** こんにちは、京都への道を教えてもらえますか?

75 Years

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.

Shot In The Dark

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?

Answers will appear on 9 January.

Acknowledgement to @ShotintheDarkGames (FB) shotinthedarkgame.co.uk

Movie Nights

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!