Wednesday Media Consumption Roundup

[mousetrappling]

Books

Fiction: Still reading "Clear & Present Danger", Tom Clancy. Mission still hasn't gone pear-shaped, though it's still clear that's imminent.

Non-fiction: still reading Gerald Harriss's "Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461" - still reading the chapter on domestic politics 1369-1413. Relations between Richard II and his lords still tense, and when he starts to make plans to accuse those who had forced a council on him traitors three of the lords (who came to be known as the Appellants) make a pre-emptive strike. But they fall short of deposing the king, that's still almost unthinkable, and so store up trouble for themselves later.

Maps: 1871-1912 CE. The high water mark of European colonial dominance just before it all starts to unravel. By the end of this period Britain is still leader in everything but industry, but that's almost over.

Listening

Podcasts: ep 78-87 plus supplementary episodes of Renaissance English History podcast. She hosted an online "Tudor Summit" so there are several supplementary episodes of those talks/interviews.

Sunday podcast: ep 19 & 20 of Our Man in the Middle East - the revolutions in Libya & Syria, two more ways that could go wrong.

Music: I got a new phone, which takes a microSD card, so I have more music on my phone for running to now. I listened to Police "Every Breath You Take", LCD Soundsystem "LCD Soundsystem", The Pipettes "We Are the Pipettes" and the beginning of the Beach Boys' Greatest Hits.

Watching

ep 3 of Utopia: In Search of the Dream - looking at utopia as a way of life rather than as an attempt to make a new society. Included things like House Music in the 80s/90s, Sufi music & mysticism in general amongst may other things. Weakest episode of the series I think. Overall an interesting look at the human desire for utopia.

ep 3 of Eight Days that Made Rome - Caesar crossing the Rubicon, and the beginning of the end of the republic.

ep3 of Blue Planet II - coral reefs. Not quite as crushingly depressing as other programmes about coral reefs have been, he held out hope they could regenerate.

ep 1 of Army: Behind the New Frontlines - three part series about things the military does now when we're not actually at war. This ep was about training Iraqi & Kurdish troops in Iraq for an assault on Mosul against ISIS.

ep 1 of Rick Stein's Road to Mexico - it always surprises us that we like Rick Stein's shows, given neither of us are that fond of seafood. This time he's travelling from California to & across Mexico. Spent a lot of that evening feeling hungry ...

Babel: The Real Stairway to Heaven - part of Channel 5's Ancient Mystery series. As always voiceover man needed a new script - this one was heavily simplistic and outright wrong in places. But the academics were interesting. This was talking about the real building that was an inspiration for the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel - there's evidence from documents of the time (including drawings) and from archaeology of a large ziggurat in Babylon.

Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race - a look at Russia's space programme, including interviews from people actually involved. They got most of the firsts (first rocket launch, first satellite, first man in space etc) except the first man on the moon. Mostly because they took way more risks than the US space programme did.