April Pieces Of My Mind #1

funster
Ice gone. Soon there will be boats.
  • Movie: Visages, villages. Artist travelogue and buddy movie strongly reminiscent of cheap Swedish 1980s kids’ TV. Grade: fail.
  • Bought myself two presents. 1) Expensive boardgame: Gaia Project. 2) Genealogical DNA analysis of my mom’s cousin to help sort my DNA relatives into tribes.
  • The human character in the hit scifi boardgame Gaia Project is an androgynous brown person with corn rows.
  • Birthday: Drink lots of tea. Log four geocaches. Lunch with wife. Art exhibition including lots of brother-in-law’s work with wife and her buddy. Cake. Pakistani dinner with wife, Jrette and Cousin E. Blackbird song. Reading.
  • At one time I listened to albums I didn’t like much simply because I had them as mp3s on my early iPod. No broadband connection. Ripping CDs was slow.
  • Made up the semanticore, a monster that’s friends with the thesaurus. Found that the word already had 2,430 google hits. /-:
  • The new Dungen album is mainly instrumental groove pieces without much melody. /-:
  • Movie: Ready Player One. A race to find the ultimate Easter egg in the ultimate MMORPG. Grade: OK.
  • Bought frozen Polish dumplings. Don’t know the language. Can’t read the fine print anymore. Found out that they’re dessert dumplings with strawberry filling.
tussi
First coltsfoot!

 

Author: Martin R

Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, boardgamer, geocacher and father of two.

89 thoughts on “April Pieces Of My Mind #1”

  1. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to figure out why Aard blocked me from posting a link to a completely uncontroversial list of lactose percentages of dairy products. Oh well.

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  2. Just remember, I watched the Netflix series Troy so that none of you have to.

    OTOH, if you like westerns, Godless is pretty good.

    But OTOOH, the Robert Redford produced docu-series The West is tediously slow and repetitive, and very light on historical detail.

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  3. Watched The Shape of Water (finally) – yeah, pretty good. Particularly liked Sally Hawkins’ performance.

    Also Darkest Hour. Also pretty good. Thing to bear in mind – Churchill is known to have told self-aggrandising porkies in his memoirs. So e.g. in the scenes with him and George VI alone together, no one has any idea what was said between them except maybe what was recounted by Churchill himself, which is unreliable. Also the stuff about Dunkirk – British navy destroyers played a bigger part than given credit, either in this or in the film Dunkirk. I get upset about details in historical films.

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  4. The British destroyers were dangerously few since Chamberlein had not spent much on the navy, but he did spend some £££ on the RAF. I find it surprising that Britain did not build al least a few escort carriers before the war. If the government understood the importance of air power, why not more aircraft carriers?
    – – – – – – –
    Raul Castro, 86, steps down.
    “After six decades of Castro rule, Cubans greet end of era with a shrug” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/18/raul-castro-cuba-step-down-leader-miguel-diaz-canel

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    1. Aircraft carriers are highly specialized ships. Their purpose is to project air power in a location far from the carrier’s home port. England is close enough to continental Europe that carriers would not have been needed for any European war the UK might have fought. In addition, their defensive capability is just about nil, as deck guns would be obstacles for the airplanes taking off or landing on the carrier. It would be too easy for a submarine to slip into close range and torpedo the ship, which would likely mean the loss of all aircraft attached to the ship, even if they were airborne at the time. The US Navy usually sends its carriers accompanied by other ships that are better suited for naval defense.

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    2. Also, in truth, Germany didn’t have that much of a navy, so what would British carriers go after? Chamberlain was focused on defence of the home islands and against going to war in Europe, plus there was France with its very large army and ‘impregnable’ defence line buffering Britain from Germany, hence focus on land-based fighter plane production and trying to negotiate a treaty with Germany. Sending Britain’s whole professional army across the Channel as the British Expeditionary Force to bolster France was really very close to a total disaster, and the Dunkirk evacuation nothing short of miraculous, enabled only because, after two weeks of non-stop high speed warfare, the German armour needed to stop for maintenance, giving enough of a slim time window to get most of the British troops withdrawn to Dunkirk and then picked up. The speed with which Germany invaded France and defeated the French army shocked everyone. No one expected that. But definitely yes, the Brits could have done with a lot more destroyers to combat German U-Boats. One of the scenes in Darkest Hour shows Churchill on the phone to Roosevelt pleading with him to send them destroyers, and Roosevelt replying that he was prohibited politically from doing that. In reality, Roosevelt despised Imperialism almost as much as he despised dictators, and Churchill was a staunch Imperialist. It was surprising that Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin could cooperate as much as they did to bring down Germany, given how much they all disliked each other. Contrast with the Axis Powers, who cooperated with each other not at all.

      Japan had carriers, but thought that the naval war in the Pacific would come down to a big decisive battle between battleships (so they were making the same old mistake of fighting the last war, not the current one), so they held back their truly awesome battleships in reserve for the big battleship showdown that never came, while the USA manufacturing capacity that was supporting the Pacific War was churning out carriers as fast as they could go.

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  5. Rise in violent crime unrelated to police cuts, Tories and criminals agree.
    UK Government unveils new ‘British Nuclear Winter Time’
    Urban foxes making annoyingly specific food demands
    http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/urban-foxes-making-annoyingly-specific-food-demands-2015052098461 Urban fox Wayne Hayes said: “This woman left me out a bowl of milk – probably not even organic – seemingly unaware that I drink only espresso made with single-estate beans.

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  7. Disorientated, had a dream in which Martin had posted April Pieces of My Mind #2. I hate it when I dream things that could be real, I can’t always check if I dreampt it or am remembering it.

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      1. It is just one of those things I’ve had to get used to. I once managed to dream a whole day of school, so when I got to school working on the belief that it was the following day I went to the wrong classes, until sent to the head mistress by a teacher who thought I was taking the piss. Frtunately Miss Laws believed my, even sat me down and gave me a cup of tea which was quite unheard of; whether it was because of my by then obvious disorientation or because she had similarly realistic dreams I never found out.

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  10. Mermen live!

    People have known about female Japanese free divers for a very long time, unfortunately famous and photo-worthy mostly because they do it topless, so there was little focus on the other bits of their physiology that enable them to do what they do.

    This is today’s (actually yesterday’s, considering the frenzied discussion is going on in the USA right now) big news in the genesphere:

    Physiological and Genetic Adaptations to Diving in Sea Nomads.

    (Japanese free divers are not nomads – in this case, the ‘sea nomads’ are the Bajau people of SE Asia. There seems to be a similar population on the western coast of southern Thailand called the Sea Gypsies.)

    http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)30386-6

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