February Pieces Of My Mind #3

From the slow end sequence in The Parallax View where the pacing is all wrong

• I just learned about “tipsy tubing”, a youth activity where you float slowly down a tropical river on a large communal swim ring while getting shitfaced on Mekhong rum (no, it has no similarities to whiskey).
• At the end of the Viking Period, there were in all likelihood a lot of shipwrecks at a depth of less than five meters in Lake Mälaren and along adjacent stretches of the Swedish coast. They were all lifted out of the water by isostatic rebound, chewed up by the waves and ice along the shoreline when at surface level, and finally their last timbers rotted away when they came up into the air.
• I wonder when the Roma quit practising a recognisable Hinduism.
• “Groovy Kind Of Love” has extremely inane lyrics and rhymes.
• A bird is singing the snowmelt song here!
• Reading an excellent 1830s travel book by the energetic Victorian polyglot George Borrow, who married late, had no children and is strangely preoccupied with describing good-looking men that he meets. Another striking set of Borrow’s attitudes is that he admires Roma, respects Muslims and despises Jews.
• Is the Škoda Enyaq named for Enya, Q and ENIAC?
• The ageing body: at 50 I still have my six-pack, but I’m developing faint wrinkles between the beer cans.
• Movie: Sunset Boulevard (1950). Middle-aged former silent film starlet Gloria Swanson expertly plays insane middle-aged former silent film starlet Norma Desmond. Erich von Stroheim plays her valet. Buster Keaton has a cameo. Grade: good!
• Funny thing about the male gaze in Sunset Boulevard. It seems to me that we’re supposed to find 50-y-o Gloria Swanson’s character hopelessly unattractive, and instead have the hots for 21-y-o Nancy Olson. She is presented as the proper and natural mate for 31-y-o William Holden, who looks like 40. Now, as a healthy 50-y-o man in 2023 with a healthy wife my own age, I feel that entertaining Olson would strictly be a job for my son. The reason that I’d rather not get too friendly with Swanson’s character is that she’s nuts, certainly not that there’s anything wrong with her looks!
• Movie: The Parallax View (1974). Journalist uncovers the trail of an enormous murderous conspiracy that kills US senators and witnesses to the murders plus truckloads of unrelated bystanders. Would have been interesting to know even vaguely why. Grade: OK.
• There’s a chimp playing the 1972 video game Pong in The Parallax View.
• Sigh. There’s a new paper about “A non-normative Roman imperial cremation”, and I’m like yay, have they identified the grave of a member of the Imperial family!? But it turns out it’s just some anonymous everyday townsperson who died during the imperial period.
• My great grandfather’s parents had some unusual ideas about names. He was named Sven Isidor. His brother was named Otto Villehad.
• Saw reporting on a sexological study aiming to identify the sex position that was most likely to give the woman an orgasm. It had a really odd basic design, because what they studied was penetration without any use of hands, the woman’s own or the man’s. I’m trying to find a simile. This is like a football tournament where all the players have one leg tied up behind their asses. Sure, one team or another will win the tournament. But what does this really tell you about football?