Wednesday Media Consumption Roundup

[mousetrappling]

Books

Fiction: Still reading "Without Remorse", Tom Clancy ... I'd forgotten the protagonist's mother was also fridged. He is, of course, being saved by the love of a good woman who has come to see that all of his murderings are for a good cause. Or something. As you can tell, I'm eye-rolling rather a lot reading this - 20-something yo me had poor taste in books at times ;)

Non-fiction: still reading Gerald Harriss's "Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461" - now reading about England's relationships with her (non-France) neighbours during this period. I've read about the Irish & the Welsh so far, both subjected to English rule in this time. Both are effectively colonised by the English, but in Ireland you get a situation more like later colonisation (English officials in charge of everything, not much fraternisation) whereas in Wales there was a bit more intermarrying and later in the period the English rulers tended to be absentee landlords and it was the Welsh that actually ran things. Scotland is up next.

Maps: 1942-1950 CE. WW2 and the developing Cold War. The big surprise here for me is how long bits of British Empire are still kicking around.

Listening

Podcasts: ep B44-B48 of the Ancient World - caught up with him again, these episodes were mostly looking at Palmyra & the history of & context for Xenobia's conflict with Rome.

ep 149-157 of the History of Byzantium - up to date here too, mostly these episodes were about the long reign of Basil II, which was mostly spent fighting the Bulgarians (that war was 4 decades) combined with the occasional stomping of the Arabs in Syria to remind them who was boss.

ep 83-84b of the History of Egypt - these episodes wrap up the reign of Amenhotep II, who the podcaster wasn't fond of.

Sunday podcast: IOT episode about Constantine the Great. As always with figures from this far back in history there's a lot of vagueness about facts & dates, but the bit that reduced Melvyn Bragg to laughter was the Edict of Milan, which is not an edict, not issued in Milan and not written by Constantine the Great, despite being a significant part of the later story of Constantine's Christianisation of the Empire.

Music: while running I listened to Del Amitri's greatest hits, and "Brothers in Arms", Dire Straits.

Talk: "Artificial Light in Ancient Egyptian Ritual", Meghan Strong - about what we know about how the Egyptians used light in their rituals. Including what the light sources were, and video of some experimental archaeology to show how a painted coffin might look in "candle"light.

Watching

ep 6 of Eight Days that Made Rome - death of Nero, as not just the death of a poor emperor but the end of the dynasty and the first time an Emperor was "just" a military strongman rather than having some other legitimising claim. (Well, since Augustus established the Empire anyway).

ep 6 of Blue Planet II - the coasts, including lots of turtles, lots of penguins and lots of puffins. I don't think I knew that king penguins moulted all their feathers in one go every year.

Soup Cans and Superstars: How Pop Art Changed the World - Alastair Sooke failed to sell me on Pop Art, but interesting to see some of the British underpinnings rather than just focusing on the US side of it (like the exhibition we saw earlier in the year did).

The 21st Century Race for Space - Brian Cox talking to the entrepreneurs who are working on making space tourism & space industry an actual thing. An astonishingly optimistic programme, obviously it was also a piece of propaganda for the companies involved but they made the idea of mining asteroids & moving dirty industry into space sound like achievable mid-term goals.

ep 3 of Elizabeth I's Secret Agents - which actually covered the early years of James I & VI and the Gunpowder Plot, as Robert Cecil's career continued past Elizabeth's death. Over all a bit too much hyperbole and glossy graphics that didn't say much, but some interesting stuff in there.

ep 1 of Digging for Britain (Series 6) - Alice Roberts's annual roundup of archaeology during the last year in Britain. This was the West, and covered some stuff about finding houses near & in Avebury's stone circle amongst other things.

Venus Uncovered: Ancient Goddess of Love - Bettany Hughes looking at the development of Venus's mythology from her origins in the fusing of a Cretan goddess of fertility with Ishtar through to her turning into something more like a rich man's pin-up during Renaissance Europe.

Comments

[magid]

Digging for Britain sounds super cool.

[mousetrappling]

It is! At one point when I was a kid I wanted to be an archaeologist (but I gradually realised I don't particularly want to spend my life outside grubbing about in mud) so it's right up my street :) It's a mix of video diaries filmed by the archaeologists themselves during digs (so full of people getting excited about what they're finding) and then some of the objects themselves brought into a "lab" (museum backroom) to be talked about once they know more. And because it's all recent/ongoing work there's not much attempt to force it into a narrative that doesn't quite fit, which is what often winds me up about history/archaeology programmes.