09:00 Lois and I tumble out of the shower just in time to take
delivery of our next week’s groceries and next week’s meat-and-cheese,
organized by 2 local shops in the village – as often happens, although they’ve
both got all morning to do it, they both choose to deliver at exactly the same
time. What a crazy world we live in - a
bit more joined-up thinking: that’s what we need here!
A quiet sort of a lockdown day - Lois has a second go at baking “Weetbix Slices”, a New Zealand Weetabix-based cake: “Weetbix” is the name used down-under for the UK’s “Weetabix”.
Lois had to get the recipe off the internet, but the ingredients and method are only described in a video that has no “pause” option – nightmare! It was recommended by a friend - and everybody likes Weetabix / Weetbix breakfast cereal, don't they??? [No they don’t - Ed]
Oddly, despite their similar but not identical names, both “Weetbix “ and “Weetabix” were developed by an Australian, Bennison Osborne, in the mid-1920s, with the UK version launched shortly after the original Australian breakfast cereal. I found this out on the web, but it still sounds like an odd story to me. Why the slightly different names? I think we should be told! Perhaps “Weetabix” with an “a” means something rude in Aussie/Kiwi slang, but that’s something I’m not completely sure about.
What a crazy world we live in !!!!!
I can imagine that when Aussie go-getter Bennison Osborne tried to
market “Weetbix” in the UK in the mid-1920’s, the British market may have been initially sceptical about the clashing sound of the “t” and the “b” in the
middle of the name: we Brits are famously cautious about anything we may eat for
breakfast.
We need to be a bit more adventurous, like our American cousins. Witness this story reported on the influential American news website, Onion News, recently, about a local man, Barry Hodge.
HUNTSVILLE, AL—Barry Hodge, a 37-year-old Huntsville resident and
assistant shoe-store manager, has no fear of trying new or unfamiliar
snack-food items, it was reported Monday.
"Even when I make a mistake," Hodge continued, "I never regret it, because at least I know I tried to expand my horizons. Like that new Oreo breakfast cereal: I wound up not liking it all that much, but I won't spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, wondering what it would've been like to try it."
We want more risk-takers like Barry in the UK – there’s no doubt about that. What’s wrong with us in Britain? The EU will be more than glad to be rid of us when Brexit finally happens – that’s for sure!
This was a quick canter through the output of the likes of Coleridge,
De Quincey, Piranesi, Robert Schumann and others. We see a lot of the nightmarish
images they came up with, both in painting and in poetry, sometimes under the
influence of drugs like opium and laudanum. Their lives were all very
self-indulgent, we feel, and they don’t really give us any ideas we can make
use of – damn, we’ll just have to think of some of our own!
Lois comments on how self-centred many of these writers and artists were – Robert Schumann tried to stop his wife Clara from composing music – it was obviously regarded as the husband’s prerogative in those days. And Coleridge didn’t do anything much to support his wife and children: he left it to his “more sensible” fellow-poet Wordsworth to come up with the necessary cash. What madness!
20:30 A few days ago the “Sky Arts” channel was made available free on Freeview, so we decide to sample the first in a series about “Hollywood: the Singing and Dancing”, which covers the silent movie era and the appearance of the talkies in the 1920’s.
It’s nice to see some of the famed stars of the Silent Era and
Early Talkies: we don’t get to see them that often. We would have liked to see
a bit more of them actually singing and dancing, but like with a lot of
show-business documentaries, they only show a few seconds of actual performance
before it’s interrupted by various “talking heads” giving their opinions, which
is a bit of a shame.
Lois knew, but I didn’t, that the big studios didn’t immediately embrace the new “Talkie” technology and were initially for a few years reluctant to make full-length talking movies. They had stables full of stars that were in their element in the silent era, and a lot of these had talents that wouldn’t easily transfer to talkies. Various stopgap measures were tried, including trying out theatre stars, but many of these bombed on the big screen.
It was only the massive commercial success if “The Jazz Singer” in 1927 that persuaded the studios that they had to start taking talkies technology seriously. And Lois and I didn’t know that the film’s big song, “Sonny Boy”, sung by Al Jolson, which always reduced my late father to tears, was initially written as a joke: it was such a schmaltzy song that the writers never really expected it to be accepted. How fascinating!
21:30 We finish the evening with a nostalgic look at an old “Adventures of Sir Lancelot” episode from the late 1950’s, when ITV was just starting up and challenging the BBC.
We always like to find flaws in the plots of these old Children’s
TV series, and it’s usually quite straightforward to find some.
Tonight’s episode revolves round the use of a homing pigeon that’s been trained by Merlin, King Arthur’s in-house wizard. When Lancelot and his squire Brian, out on a mission for Arthur, get captured and imprisoned by the evil King Mark, the two men use a pigeon in Brian’s jacket-pocket to send Arthur an appeal for help. Of course it’s a homing pigeon so it flies straight back to Arthur’s castle: Arthur gets the message and sends help as requested.
That’s all fair enough. But Arthur uses the same pigeon again to send a message back to Lancelot and Brian in the cell where the evil King Mark has imprisoned them. Pigeon-post was a bit like texting in those days. But the writers of the show failed to take account of the fact that the pigeon was a homing pigeon – there’s no way it would have flown back to Lancelot and Brian – it would just have come “bouncing back” to Arthur, no question about that. How crazy !!!!
22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzzz!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment