Cracked History

Russia invading Ukraine threatens to cause a war such as Europe hasn't seen in decades. Biden is imposing sanctions, and hopefully NATO can help too. Putin can't be allowed to just annex more countries, and remake some kind of Russian Empire. I remember the Bosnian War in the 1990s, and can only hope this war won't be as catastrophic as one of the World Wars.

In the meantime I've been watching historical TV fiction like Young Indiana Jones and The Gilded Age, featuring real people like Teddy Roosevelt and Clara Barton as characters. I have the DVDs of Young Indiana Jones, and the special features include historical documentaries about the famous people and events included in the episodes. They even had young Indy meeting the daughter of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and falling in love with her. One of the documentaries explained the history of the Habsburgs, Ferdinand's marriage to Sophie, and their assassination in Serbia. His uncle the Emperor Franz Joseph was kind of heartless about it, basically glad that his nephew would not inherit the throne of Austria-Hungary. Franz Joseph apparently preferred a different heir. But that assassination snowballed into an international crisis and the Great War. He didn't live to see the end of the war, or that his precious Austria-Hungary would collapse.

Even the recent movie The King's Man gives its own revisionist take on World War I, re-crafting it as a spy thriller and comic book action movie. Thus, Ferdinand's assassin Gavrilo Princip becomes a member of an international conspiracy led by the mysterious Shepherd. The supervillain's Flock aims to start a war to destroy European monarchies (and England in particular). I found it interesting that this fictional story did keep the fact that there were multiple attempts on the Archduke. He and his wife Sophie survived an attempted bombing on their car ride before unwisely going out again that day; they wanted to visit bombing victims in the hospital. They happened to drive near a cafe where the assassin Princip took the opportunity to shoot them. That is a real chilling part of the history, even though the writers inserted their own characters into it. Also, the movie has a fairly ridiculous concept of Orlando Oxford being a pacifist while secretly operating a spy ring that plots to poison Rasputin. Oxford's son Conrad meanwhile wants to fulfill his duty by joining the war, not wanting to be called a coward. For a movie starring a British hero, it's not afraid to show a concentration camp from the Boer War. (To think, Conan Doyle wrote a pamphlet defending Britain's actions in this war! What a thing to be knighted for!) Oxford also flashes back to some war atrocities in Africa I think, when he decided to leave the army for the Red Cross. We also hear about the Zimmerman telegram, and Oxford quotes Wilfred Owen's poem Dulce Et Decorum Est when mourning the bloody horror of the war. It's a weird mix of real history and fiction.

But I hope that current world leaders do remember the mistakes of the past, and can try their best not to repeat it with our current war.

Early Voting

Early voting is still in progress for the March primaries, though mail-in ballots are still being rejected at an alarming rate, as the GOP's election law suppresses the vote. Texas limits vote by mail anyway to only a handful of reasons. I don't know if anybody will be able to get the issue fixed in time for the November elections. I did manage to vote in person last week after doing some candidate research the the League of Women Voters. Plus lots of election flyers have come in the mail lately.

Meanwhile I got my free N95 masks but I don't like the 3M design, with horizontal straps that go over your head instead of ear loops. It doesn't look very comfortable to wear, so I'm sticking with my cloth masks for now. I'm vaccinated and boosted.

I recently made a lasagna without ricotta cheese; I thought I had some cottage cheese to substitute, but it had gone bad. So I ended up using spinach and a little bit of mozzarella cheese. It turned out okay. Then I baked a nice yellow cake that smelled so good. I wanted to eat it while hot, but I let it cool because my frosting recipe said the cake had to be completely cool. So I made the frosting, even waiting a long time to soften the butter, but it still came out bad. My mixer just wouldn't blend the butter completely and the frosting kept getting stuck on the beaters. It didn't taste that good either. So I'm not gonna bother with homemade frosting again, and I can't buy the premade stuff that's full of palm oil either. Next time I'll just eat the cake while it's piping hot.

Death on the Nile

I didn't like Branagh's take on Poirot in Orient Express, so I'll not be watching the sequel. Especially after reading a review that mentions more tragic romantic backstory for the Poirot. Who the fuck watches Poirot for his backstory? If you can't do the current mystery any justice, then don't pad it out with irrelevant soap opera garbage!

Luckily, I have Peter Ustinov's Death on the Nile on DVD, and I think PBS is running David Suchet's TV version soon, so I'll be able to compare/contrast those instead. The 1978 Ustinov version also has Angela Lansbury playing the flamboyant romance novelist Salome Otterbourne, which is a hoot. Based on that Poirot film, Lansbury also got a chance to play Miss Marple in a movie before she became famous as Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote.

Little known history

The Winter Olympics are starting soon in Beijing, though I heard that the US and other countries are doing a "diplomatic boycott" due to China's human rights violations. This means that athletes will be able to compete, but no government officials will attend. I mean, it's probably best to minimize people traveling anyway due to Covid-19. I've stopped watching the Olympics because I lost interest in figure skating and don't really care about the other sports.

When Amber Ruffin went to the summer games, I watched the clips on Peacock, but that's it. Right now her show is on winter break until after the Olympics, but I didn't find that out until this week. I thought she would have made an announcement like that on her last December episode. No new episodes until Feb 25, so she'll miss most of Black History Month. At least there will be plenty of specials and documentaries to watch on several networks.

It looks like PBS will be rebroadcasting a bunch of their Black history shows starring Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Just this week on his Finding Your Roots show, he highlighted in "Mexican Roots" how Spain imported African slaves to many of its New World colonies, and that they intermixed with the indigenous populations. We even saw the "casta paintings" showing how Spain categorized different castes of mixed-race people by their skin color. Sixteen subcategories to effectively promote racism and colorism.

Unfortunately, PBS could do better, because I remember them airing a very flattering biography on E. O. Wilson as a respected biologist, but the documentary let him dismiss the accusations of racism raised by his peers. Recently, Wonkette provided a link discussing the scientific racism that Wilson absolutely supported while mentoring a more openly racist professor. Scientists are human, and subject to human faults too, even though they might convince themselves that they are acting logically and dispassionately.

I got snow

Well my home is blanketed in snow. I was hoping it would melt by tomorrow so I could go to work, but it looks like that won't happen. At least I still have power and water. I know other states have it worse than Texas.

Meanwhile, Texans are preparing for primary elections soon, but I keep reading about how voters' mail-in-ballot applications are getting rejected due to the new voting law that the rightwing legislature passed. The GOP are suppressing voters with their absurd law disenfranchising long time voters. If the applications are wrong, you gotta give 'em options on how to reapply or fix the records, but no, that's too hard. 😒 Fucking Republicans. I'm also mad every time I see one of Greg Abbott's TV ads claiming that he's securing the border and such. The border is the least of our problems. We need mask mandates and vaccine mandates to get rid of Covid. We need the electric grid fixed in case of more winter storms. We need a new governor and legislature.

Happy Lunar New Year

Happy Year of the Tiger! It looks there's like winter storms over much of the country, and Texas is about to have another cold snap this week. Climate change extremes are really exhausting. I'm hoping there's no blackouts this time.

I've continued enjoying the new Around the World in 80 days on PBS, with its refreshed look at culture and race in Victorian times. Meanwhile, HBO has a new period show called The Gilded Age, created by Julian Fellowes. I don't usually like melodramas like Downtown Abbey, which are essentially soap operas in beautiful clothing. But I do like the setting of 1880s New York and I like the actors involved. Plus it's not a totally white cast, and watching it is like further research for my unfinished DIM novel about Sherlock Holmes. (Helen Stoner will move to New York for part of the novel, and she'll write letters to him, so I need to know about that time period and setting.) In the first 2 episodes so far, I'm seeing a lot of people making deals and trying to hide secrets. The romances bore me though.

Meanwhile, Netflix keeps begging me to subscribe again. I wasn't tempted until they announced a new show called Murderville starring Will Arnett. Now I've got to decide if I want to restart for just a month for this. Maybe I'll hold off a little longer until I know when Knives Out 2 comes out?