Saturday, March 14, 2009
The Dude Abides
I return from a Highland Jaunt across the isles of Lewis, Harris and Uist. More of that later. Meanwhile, read me in The Sunday Times on War Horse. Link tomorrow. Here it is!
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
The life of Riley, these journalists.
ReplyDeleteWas it freezing and windy? I almost got killed by a flying bin in Glasgow today.
ReplyDeleteAh, Bryan, welcome back. My Google Reader was tingling; it sensed your presence in the Force. I expect you were out of range up there, so let me fill you in on the last week.
ReplyDeleteDawkins has found God - well we all knew that was coming some time. Liverpool played Real Madrid and Man U, scored eight, conceded one. What else? Oh, that whole Credit Crunch/global recession thing? Turns out it was all a big hoax. Yeah, everything's ok after all.
Other than that, same old same old, really.
Ah thanks for that, Brit, much as I suspected. My wife says she's very happy I'm back among my imaginary friends.
ReplyDeleteI have seen both National Theatre performances: "War Horse" and "His Dark Materials". Both plays are brilliant and the puppetry is truly awesome: strongly recommended, even for those without teenagers to take.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I feel the need to add correction concerning the use of horses in war; in this I am relying on David Edgerton's excellently informative and surprising book ""The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900.
I quote from pages 34-35:
"... but by the middle of 1917 the great new mass British Armies had 591,000 horses, 213,000 mules, 47,000 camels and 11,000 oxen. ... This was not a question of a deluded commitment to cavalry. ... the great majority transported the vast quantities of material required for modern war ...
An even starker example of the continuing importance of horse is provided by the Second World War. ... The horse was the 'basic means of transport of the German Army' ... At the beginning of 1945 it had 1.2 million horses; the total loss of horse in the war is estimated at 1.5 million."
The book has some very interesting things to say about use of bicycles too, and many other things where our typical perceptions of use of technology are different from the actuality.
Best regards
They had some of those wiry animals near Edinburgh's St James centre, someone nicked them.
ReplyDeleteThe western Isles in March ? you really are nutty as a fruitcake then, how where the locals, the ones that go baaa.
Brit failed to mention the fact that he held an in depth discussion on testicle fondling.