Wednesday Media Consumption Roundup

[mousetrappling]

Books

Fiction: Finished "Clear & Present Danger", Tom Clancy. Mission finally went pear-shaped - time honoured message of "politicians will sell you out for victory in an election year". Just started "Without Remorse", Tom Clancy ... this is the back story for one of the recurring characters & while I remember liking it when I first read it I'd forgotten the primary plot driver is the death of first his pregnant wife & then his subsequent manic-dream-pixie-girlfriend-who-pulls-him-out-of-his-grief-but-has-a-tragic-past (who's not dead yet in the bit I've got to but I've remembered what happens).

Non-fiction: still reading Gerald Harriss's "Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461" - still reading the chapter on domestic politics 1369-1413. After Richard II reaches his majority & reasserts his intent to rule in his own name there's actually a 7 year period of uneasy peace in the elite of the country. Richard actually rules with a council, who manage to return the Crown finances to a more solvent state, and everyone steps carefully around each other. Sadly Richard's mostly using this period of peace to firm up his notions of the specialness of kings, so the fragile peace is not to last. Richard's also fairly unconcerned by his childlessness despite over a decade of marriage & after his wife dies he doesn't marry someone who might give him children soon. (Instead he marries the 6 year old daughter of the King of France, which seals a truce but isn't good for heir-getting.)

Maps: 1914-1923 CE. The First World War & it's aftermath. I was vaguely astonished that Germany & her allies held things to a stalemate for as long as they did, given the resources available to the other side. It was very clear on a map coloured mostly red for the one side with just this bit of central Europe coloured blue for Germany & co.

Listening

Podcasts: ep 88-92 plus supplementary episodes of Renaissance English History podcast. The last regular episode was basically an hour long plug for the tour she's running to Tudor Wales, which sounded like it'll visit some pretty good places. That's me up to date with this podcast, so next I'll be catching up with the others I listen to before starting on something new.

Sunday podcast: ep 21 & 22 of Our Man in the Middle East - the complexities of the war in Syria and how it's sucked in a lot of foreign powers on either side; the Saudi war against Yemen, which is actually all about Saudi conflict with Iran.

Music: while running I listened to the Beach Boys greatest hits album & also to The Raveonettes "In and Out of Control".

Watching

ep 4 of Eight Days that Made Rome - Octavian reading Mark Antony's will out to an appalled Senate (it showed he'd been seduced by the wiles of Cleopatra & Egypt into abandoning good Roman ways). So this was effectively the death knell for the Republic, even tho they didn't realise that yet.

ep 4 of Blue Planet II - the environment of the middle of the oceans, which is the ocean equivalent of a desert in terms of available resources to live on.

ep 2 of Rick Stein's Road to Mexico - bit further down through California, still full of a combination of food that makes us feel hungry and food with too many legs.

ep 2 of Nile Rodgers: How to Make it in the Music Industry - this was all about his career as a producer in the 80s after disco was dead. It was astonishing how many things I hadn't realised he'd been involved in, yet hearing it all back to back you can really hear the common sound.

Man U vs Newcastle - not the result we were hoping for ;)

ep 2 of Elizabeth II's Secret Agents - which actually took us up to the death of Elizabeth, as Robert Cecil who was her spymaster at the time goes on to work for James VI&I. Mostly covered the Earl of Essex thinking himself too pretty for Elizabeth to really get annoyed with, which didn't go well for him in the long term ;)