In Netflix “Victoria and Abdul” when her idiot son Edward and ultimate successor tried to accuse Queen Victoria of being insane.
Her reference in this clip to smashing a Faberge egg is not considered literal by historians but rather about Victoria’s overall hostility toward Russia.
me too, boss.
for the stage struck among us who also love her, there’s a fascinating video where she reminisces with some other great brit ladies of the stage. here’s what amazon says about it:
patd – Tea with the Dames was fascinating. I just came across it on Hulu (I think) and almost clicked on it.
Just survived almost one of the worst Thanksgiving Days in my life, norovirus like attack. I do not recommend catching things like that. My best guess is that things like stomach flu bugs hit us hard because we have not been around them for almost two years and do not have some immunity to the new variants.
black friday or black-out friday?
BB, are you okay now? flu like that usually grounds me for days.
on the bright side, maybe you just had food poisoning and it’ll be over after a few rounds on and at the “throne.” 🙂
that’s one of the many hazards (choking – whether on food or by a hostile relative – is another) of thanksgiving dinners.
I am better today, a bit dehydrated and tired. There was no turkey for me yesterday, mostly cool water. Things like that make me so afraid for many people about the flu season which is starting. The side effect of so many people hiding from diseases is the possibility some diseases might die off, and others might mutate and hit harder. Masks, hand sanitizer and lots of washing. Good habits in a strange new world.
World War One was a family spat.
wapo:
sturge, your comment and the above story on ukraine reminded me of these verses from henry wadsworth longfellow’s “christmas bells”
the backstory and a more modern rendition of the song
I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day / Peace On Earth with the backstory of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, set with Civil War and Iraq War images.
While watching a rerun of Columbo something clicked about what I did not see, Post-It Notes, yellow sticky notes. Not one, nothing like them anywhere. I enjoy looking for old memories, IBM Selectric typewriters, rotary phones, phone booths and needing a dime to make a call and much more. But, it is the missing that is more interesting. In this case Columbo was showing pictures in a book to a criminal, Dick Van Dyke, and the pages appeared to be paper clipped for ease of flipping. Today I would use yellow sticky shreds, no more paper clips.
This brings me to one of my favorite past times, comparing eras. From today back to nineteen seventy-four is about forty-seven years. From nineteen seventy-four back forty-seven years is nineteen twenty-seven. That gap shows that much of modern life in the twenties was mostly not comparable to life in the seventies. So much has changed that a time traveler would have understood much of life in the seventies, but would be completely out of touch with things. A time traveler from the seventies suddenly popping up in middle America today would recognize much of life. The houses would be the same in the same suburbs. The cars would be larger then today, but the pickups and utility vehicles would be similar. Many seventies vehicles are still on the road, or returned to the road, today. Yes the rotary dials would be replaced, but at the time phones were changing to digital so touch buttons would be the same. The biggest differences would be with all things computerized. But many of the form factors are the same. My cameras from the sixties and seventies are recognizable today. My keyboard is very similar to the ones I used in the seventies.
Post-It notes were a seventies development, not getting into public sales until around nineteen eighty.
In the seventies, only the Dick Tracy cops had two-way wrist radios.
I am currently a Columbo addict…..I love catching the old actors, and like you say the technology…..also is the fact that columbo filmed up until 2003, which allows for much tech development along the way…..the musicians are of special interest (Mancini for one) as are the directors, (Spielberg for one) and the writers, Falk even wrote one……and the cars…..lots of land-yachts and high end sportsters…….I’ll get tired of it at one point or another but for now I’m diggin’ it. Every time I see another episode, no matter how many times I’ve seen it, there’s something new…….
Unfortunately coming on in the middle of the night are 3 prime candidates for old time stuff, Cannon, Mannix, and Barnaby Jones; I have to let them slide by, unwatched save in times of insomnia which seem to be on the rise.
Tea With the Dames is delightful particularly when they gossip about the men in their lives. Joan Plowright has always been a favorite and she is in two films you might want to check:
Enchanted April
Tea With Mussolini
Also of interest to some, on the internet is a one-hour tv show of the first Columbo written by Levinson and Link and aired in ’60 or so…..black and white with a different actor playing Lt. Columbo. Some of the Columbo effects are already in place, the cigar, the raincoat, the style, etc…..then ten years later with Falk in the lead they re-filmed the same story as a pilot with Gene Barry as the murderous villain.
“You’ve been so helpful, there’s just one thing i’m having trouble with, if you could help me understand…”
dat mean you goin’ to jail
…am curious if Dame Judi had the “Harvey [Weinstein]” tattoo removed from her posterior 🤔
”Copland” is my favorite Weinstein movie i feel guilty watching
Update: she “claims” it was a temporary tattoo😒
…rather shameful the DoJ spends so many resources prosecuting palookas and hillbillies while the ringleaders run around doing cable TV, heckuva job Merrick😒
“We locked up a mentally-ill guy, the state of the union is strong”. GTFO
“The loose ends [points to head] it’s like a traffic jam up in here.”
—Columbo on the cruise ship.
Faye Dunaway: “What’s your first name?”
Columbo: “Lieutenant.”
For me, lately it’s been Errol Flynn, and Alexis Smith . I always watch “San Antone” , they were having such a good time.
3 things that never sleep –
Gravity
Rust
Viruses
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-11-26/covid-will-keep-spawning-variants-like-b-1-1-529-till-the-world-is-immune
“Escaping from immunity is something that viruses do really well,” said Ian Mackay, an associate professor of virology at the University of Queensland. “If there are lots of populations that are still susceptible, we’re in the same kind of hamster wheel of this that we’ve been in before.”
Something came up the other day that reminded me of the Kojack series and the Koljak series. Enjoyed them both back in first run days.
I forgot to tell about my experience with the import issues. My Ford F250 4X4 diesel croaked a year ago October. I finally gave up trying to fix it and had it towed to the shop for repair. That was about seven months ago. Yesterday I finally drove it home. And, the mechanic was working on it up to the point I took it. The slowness was primarily parts stuck somewhere and not locally or in my truck. One part took a little over three months to arrive. But, it is home and still has one issue that it was sent in with. Need to decide about that.
David Niven wrote a couple books where he told about how much fun it was to make movies with Flynn, but the best one was this week’s
Book of the Week:
BRING ON THE EMPTY HORSES
Flynn, sword / sandal, and those Viking movies got me into leather work.
There is a fort on Hadrian’s Wall called Vindolanda, they have the largest collection of foot ware of the ancient world , over 200 Roman sandals.
I wrote them once , about printing a pattern book as a fund raiser.
No reply. But that was before the modern sandal revolution took place.
From the WHO –
https://www.who.int/news/item/26-11-2021-classification-of-omicron-(b.1.1.529)-sars-cov-2-variant-of-concern
OK
Omicron is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet.
We need to name these things like hurricanes.
jamie, yes, Tea with Mussolini was packed with some of the best. cher & tomlin did themselves proud amongst all those venerable icons of the theatre.
for those who haven’t seen it, here’s how amazon reviewed it:
This is frickin’ cool –
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/26/crazy-floating-all-in-one-renewable-energy-gizmo-has-everybody-suddenly-talking/
The Russian coal mine story that just broke, reminds me that renewables don’t kill their workers like fossil fuels. And they don’t sicken and kill unknown thousands down wind of their operations.
Sure, you can fall off a roof , or a wind turbine , but you’re in a harness you ain’t gonna die.
That is a point the Greens never really took up.
NPR –
The biggest problem facing the U.S. electric grid isn’t demand. It’s climate change
The power grid in the U.S. is aging and already struggling to meet current demand. It faces a future with more people — people who drive more electric cars and heat homes with more electric furnaces.
Alice Hill says that’s not even the biggest problem the country’s electricity infrastructure faces.
“Everything that we’ve built, including the electric grid, assumed a stable climate,” she says. “It looked to the extremes of the past — how high the seas got, how high the winds got, the heat.”
Hill is an energy and environment expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. She served on the National Security Council staff during the Obama administration, where she led the effort to develop climate resilience. She says past weather extremes can no longer safely guide future electricity planning.
“It’s a little like we’re building the plane as we’re flying because the climate is changing right now, and it’s picking up speed as it changes,” Hill says…In 2021, the U.S. saw electricity outages for millions of people as a result of historic winter storms in Texas, a heatwave in the Pacific Northwest and Hurricane Ida along the Gulf Coast. Climate change will only make extreme weather more likely and more intense.
And that has forced utility companies and other entities to grapple with the question: How can we prepare for something we’ve never experienced before?
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/24/1040529860/the-biggest-problem-facing-the-u-s-electric-grid-isnt-demand-its-climate-change
10 or 13 years ago when I was on this like junk yard dog , Amarillo had one of these extreme rain events. Something like 6 inches in 2 hours. Afterwards at the city council meeting the city manager was attacked by angry citizens . “How could this happen ?”
He told them that the system was not designed for such an event.
This guy careful, measured, for him this is panic: Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University School of Public Health, on CNBC said that while other variants have come and gone, this one “cannot be ignored … We haven’t seen another variant outcompete Delta this effectively.”
Strug this one’s for you.
LONDON — A team of archaeologists from the University of Leicester in central England certainly appears to have the golden touch.
Nearly a decade on from uncovering the remains of King Richard III under a car park near Leicester Cathedral, the university’s archaeological team has unearthed a Roman mosaic featuring the great Greek hero of Achilles in battle with brave Hector during the Trojan War — this time in a farmer’s field about 100 miles north of London.
https://www.ksl.com/article/50291619/richard-iii-archaeologists-strike-again-with-roman-mosaic-find-in-england
Vindolanda Roman Shoe Webinar
My number is way way off …….
Okay, Omnicron. Is that the latest version of the Big O?
If sleeping with men was the first profession , leather work came in second .
Well, for some reason I became interested in the Dead People Server over twenty years ago. At the time I ran a website to memorialize people who died due to Hepatitis C. A few were “celebrities” and so they were to be listed on the Dead People Server. It is now mostly on Facebook. Sigh, there are a lot of names Baby Boomers know.
VindolandaTrust
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKK6YkVV5CaPDsxxcBjzX8g
This place is so wonderful because of it’s anaerobic conditions , no O2 to feed the bacteria that eat organic matter. We have letters written on birch bark from common soldiers , asking home to send warmer socks.
BB –
Life’s a bitch , and then you die.
We have all just lived in the most amazing sweet spot in human history , think about all those Roman troops building roads , and getting paid in salt.
Guts won the world , despair not so much.
As a life long manic depressive who was sent to the Big Springs Sate Metal Hospital for 54 days by a judge , after one of my suicide attempts .
I have a complete and total understanding of despair.
An icon of musical theater has passed away at age 91
RIP to Stephen Sondheim
Sturgeone
David Niven’s books grace my shelves. The Moon’s A Balloon is his other memoir of early Hollywood and its denizens.
If ever there was a voice that never should have been silenced by ALS, it is Niven’s.
I seem to have the bit in my tooth.
Blue –
Sorry , for the comments above , but life is front of us , and while we have it
take it and hold it close.
https://youtu.be/dPF9vAOPe0U
RIP Stephen Sondheim
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/26/entertainment/stephen-sondheim/index.html
“The Ladies Who Lunch”
“I’m Still Here”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xz1TUgdG6A
“I got through all of last year and I’m here.”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35182350-queen-victoria-s-matchmaking
“By the 1890s, Queen Victoria had over thirty grandchildren, and to maintain and increase British royal power she was determined to maneuver them into a series of dynastic marriages with the royal houses of Europe.”
https://www.history.com/news/queen-victoria-grandchildren-matchmaking-wwi
“…by marrying off her grandchildren, Victoria inadvertently helped stoke a world war. Here’s how the queen’s matchmaking helped create—and destroy—modern Europe.“
Adam Kinzinger Calls Lauren Boebert “Trash”
Joe Manchin needs to understand he is like Victoria. Propping up a dead system .
Nite all , sunny side up , rubber side down.
BB – I think Omega will be the most worrisome variant…if anyone is left to worry.
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/new-covid-variant-south-africa-11-26-21/index.html
“United says it will not scale back its Africa service due to the new covid variant — and is moving ahead with new and seasonal service to the continent. “. “CNN reported earlier that Delta will continue its service to South Africa, too.”
How many lives will greed continue to take? The longer this goes on, the longer it takes us to get out of it.
Weirdest ballet on PBS now. It’s a mashup of Coppelia and Blues Clues, from the look of it. The addition of animated figures with blue screen sets and poor lighting for the human dancers…it’s more off-putting than The Polar Express.
NEW THREAD