Wednesday Media Consumption Roundup

[mousetrappling]

Books

Fiction: Still reading "Executive Orders", Tom Clancy. For all I've read another hour & a half since last week I'm not really sure any of the various bits of plot have advanced much...

Non-fiction: Still reading "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat", Samin Nosrat. I've now read about all the four elements of cooking, with several "oh, so that's why ..." moments throughout. I'm now into the recipes section, which is primarily basic idea with suggested variations on the theme, going quite briskly through this as it's more something I'll come back to when I want to try things out. Right book at the right time for me, I think, it's the paradigm shift I was making anyway.

Hidden Meanings: 4.20.1-5.24.1 - Success in one's exams is, of course, followed by motifs for gaining a good (and well paid) job as an official. Despite reading it in chunks the various bits & pieces are all starting to blur together a bit. I think what I'll want to do (some day) is get a book of Chinese art and then look up the various elements of the paintings to see what it seems to mean. But still, I'm enjoying reading the various bits & looking at the example illustrations even if I'm not retaining much of it.

Listening

Podcasts: ep 3.12-3.K of History of India - he's now finished the Gupta era, and the special episodes afterwards have included one on Ancient Indian food/cooking and one on farming (including how to buy one's land and what sorts of taxes one would need to pay). I think this is now my third favourite podcast, the chap who does it is a good story-teller as well as the history coming across as well researched. (First favourite - still the History of English, which was the first podcast series I listened to; second favourite - History of Egypt)

Sunday podcast: This week we listened to an episode of In Our Time about Cicero. J's on a bit of a Roman theme at the moment as he's reading Mary Beard's SPQR, so this fitted in well.

Music: While running I listened to Paul Simon's "Graceland", Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water", Voice of the Beehive's "Let It Bee!" and "Honey Lingers", Travelling Wilbury's "Travelling Wilburys Vol 1 & 3", Joni Mitchell's "Blue", Loreena McKennit's "The Book of Secrets" and just started on Elton John's "The Very Best of Elton John". I ran 30 miles in the last week mostly at a gentle pace and had a lot of time to listen to music ... I also drowned out Cleverman that J was watching on the TV with Belly's "Moon" and "Now They'll Sleep" (I was writing a blog post, the TV in the background was distracting in a way that music isn't).

Watching

ep 3 of The Vietnam War - the US continues to slide into more & more involvement with the war without ever quite declaring war or letting the public at home know what was really going on.

ep 1 of Thailand: Earth's Tropical Paradise - terribly pretty and a good antidote to the depression of the Vietnam War series, but utterly full of woo. One gets used to rolling one's eyes at how people in far off places are always portrayed as being more in tune with nature than those of us watching, but this was the first time I think I've watched something that presented the exotic ANIMALS as being altruistically involved in the conservation of the land (e.g. the birds that were eating invasive species presented as doing so to prevent their spread rather than coz they were tasty). But nonetheless, pretty enough to just tune out the nonsense of the voiceover.

ep 3 of House of Saud: A Family at War - rather more padding in this final episode and a couple of segments where they started to tell us about a particular story then dropped it without resolution. This one was focusing on the domestic side of the Saudi regime - human rights, rights of women, etc. A good series.

ep 3 of England's Forgotten Queen - very very padded end to the series, covering the last couple of days of Jane's reign and the months leading up to her execution. Overall a bit disappointed, I think it'd've been better if they'd made a single 1 hr programme or possibly 90 minutes, and had a lot less of sinister Northumberland being sinister at the camera or seductive Mary (I mean, seriously?) being seductive.

ep 3 of Tunes for Tyrants: Music & Power with Suzy Klein - looking at Germany & Britain's use of music for propaganda & morale purposes during WW2. And also a segment about music within the concentration camps including an interview with a woman who'd played cello in Auschwitz which is why she survived. I liked this series a lot, although it did rather fit into our "depressing modern history" sub-genre.

ep 2 of Big Cats - I'm not quite sure how they're organising their cat choices for each episode, I've not figured out the thematic groupings. Still pretty (with no woo).

ep 1 of Monty Don's Paradise Gardens - another series I almost missed recording, this is about Islamic gardens. This episode started in Spain, and moved via Morocco to the origins of these sorts of gardens in ancient Persia (and before).

Ovid: The Poet & The Emperor - one-off programme presented by Michael Wood. A biography of Ovid - Roman poet who was sufficiently out of tune with the sort of Rome that the new Emperor Augustus wanted to promote that he ended up exiled to the Black Sea coast, where he eventually died in the year 17 CE. The bio aspect was interspersed with quotes from his works (in translation). Picked for watching this week as it tied in with J's current book & the IOT we listened to.