(no subject)
Jun. 26th, 2013 07:58 pmI'm handicapped by not having seen the movie yet (soon, I swear), but ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
twistedchick has a very interesting rebuttal to this Atlantic article. And as a commenter points out, Shakespeare's wife was pregnant with their first child when they got married. Warning: both the articles linked above have minor spoilers for Much Ado About Nothing. Wait, hold on a minute, I'm not warning for a five hundred year old play! That ship has sailed.
I'm reading Max Hastings' "Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-1945" and it's a little...bombastic. Possibly Hastings was subliminally influenced by the rhetorical stylings of his biographical subject, because I remember Hastings' tone being more measured in his other book that I've read, "All Hell Let Loose". Cheerful title, that one. "Finest Years" isn't a bad book at all so far (in fact, it's quite engaging), but it's taking me a while to adjust to the style.
I did have to laugh at one anecdote, though. Late one night in 1940 Churchill was on the phone with General Alan Brooke (later Lord Alanbrooke), when he suddenly bellowed, "Get off, you fool!" Brooke was furious at being treated like that, and the next morning it fell to an unfortunate underling to explain that Churchill was in bed when he took the call, and was admonishing the cat, who'd been biting his toes, not admonishing Brooke.
Hastings doesn't tell us whether the toe-nibbling cat in question was a Downing Street resident of long standing (possibly a mouser), or Churchill's own pet, brought with him when he became PM. Inquiring minds want to know. Of course, it's also possible that Churchill really was fed up with Brooke, there was no cat, and the unfortunate underling had to come up with a plausible explanation for him losing his temper.
I just made a wonderful discovery. There's a community called![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
tightpresent which ran a challenge a little while back for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles vids. There's a page with links to all fourteen vids created in the challenge, and I watched one vid, then bookmarked the page to revisit later, because time was short. I then forgot all about it until I was going through my bookmarks just now, so now I get to watch all these vids.
In American news, Texas's anti-abortion bill is (temporarily) history, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was struck down by the US Supreme Court, the same court also declined to hear a challenge on Proposition 8 (the California ballot initiative which outlawed same-sex marriage in that state), and the Voting Rights Act has been gutted. Those justices have been *busy*. No, I don't live in the US so none of these things affect me directly. But they're still interesting.
Signal boost:hily is considering home schooling a high-school aged child, and would welcome any resources/suggestions/etc.
twistedchick has a very interesting rebuttal to this Atlantic article. And as a commenter points out, Shakespeare's wife was pregnant with their first child when they got married. Warning: both the articles linked above have minor spoilers for Much Ado About Nothing. Wait, hold on a minute, I'm not warning for a five hundred year old play! That ship has sailed. I'm reading Max Hastings' "Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-1945" and it's a little...bombastic. Possibly Hastings was subliminally influenced by the rhetorical stylings of his biographical subject, because I remember Hastings' tone being more measured in his other book that I've read, "All Hell Let Loose". Cheerful title, that one. "Finest Years" isn't a bad book at all so far (in fact, it's quite engaging), but it's taking me a while to adjust to the style.
I did have to laugh at one anecdote, though. Late one night in 1940 Churchill was on the phone with General Alan Brooke (later Lord Alanbrooke), when he suddenly bellowed, "Get off, you fool!" Brooke was furious at being treated like that, and the next morning it fell to an unfortunate underling to explain that Churchill was in bed when he took the call, and was admonishing the cat, who'd been biting his toes, not admonishing Brooke.
Hastings doesn't tell us whether the toe-nibbling cat in question was a Downing Street resident of long standing (possibly a mouser), or Churchill's own pet, brought with him when he became PM. Inquiring minds want to know. Of course, it's also possible that Churchill really was fed up with Brooke, there was no cat, and the unfortunate underling had to come up with a plausible explanation for him losing his temper.
I just made a wonderful discovery. There's a community called
tightpresent which ran a challenge a little while back for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles vids. There's a page with links to all fourteen vids created in the challenge, and I watched one vid, then bookmarked the page to revisit later, because time was short. I then forgot all about it until I was going through my bookmarks just now, so now I get to watch all these vids. In American news, Texas's anti-abortion bill is (temporarily) history, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was struck down by the US Supreme Court, the same court also declined to hear a challenge on Proposition 8 (the California ballot initiative which outlawed same-sex marriage in that state), and the Voting Rights Act has been gutted. Those justices have been *busy*. No, I don't live in the US so none of these things affect me directly. But they're still interesting.
Signal boost:
hily is considering home schooling a high-school aged child, and would welcome any resources/suggestions/etc.
