Bits, pieces and a picture of my house
I'm working entirely from home this week, as it's 'reading week' at Warwick (although I still had to teach first years on Monday, because they don't get one). In the garden outside my window, lots of little birds are hopping around, rummaging for seeds and grubs, and chirruping as they do so. It's rather nice to have them keeping me company as I continue to edit chapter 3.
On this topic, I'm going to try out LJ's new 'insert picture' function, and see if it will let me put in a picture of my flat, so you can all see the garden I'm talking about. Here goes:
Hmm, it's worked, but the image is smaller than I'd like. So, experiment conducted, but I think I'll use methods which allow me more control over my pictures in future. Anyway, the front part of the ground floor of the building in the photograph is my flat, so all the windows you can see at that level are mine. I am working just inside the window in the bottom right-hand corner, and the birds are jumping around in the large bush-type thing in front of it (although that is now, of course, leafless). Please pause to admire my rose (pink) and clematis (lilac).
Hell, let's have a picture of my bridge while we're at it. I've been meaning to post this for a while:
This crosses the railway to approach my house, and although it was built by the Council, it is, self-evidently, my personal property. I cross it every single time I leave the house, and my friends never cross it for any reason other than to get to my house. Ergo, mine. It is my equivalent of the large gates and tree-lined avenue which told visitors they were entering into the territory of a stately home. On the bridge, you can see the small, retreating forms of edling, johnnydefective and angeoverhere.
Last night was the last episode of Six Feet Under, but I haven't watched it yet, 'cos I was out in the pub, so DON'T TELL ME WHAT HAPPENS. I'm looking forward to seeing it, and will be all sad that it is over, of course. But I am broadly in agreement that it was time to draw 6'U to a close, as I didn't think season 5 lived up to all the programme had once been. It had become a little soap-operaesque, I felt, with the old flair for stark, yet surreal, realism gradually ebbing away. And I miss the way that the deaths they dealt with each week echoed and reverberated with the family's own issues, in a manner which felt unforced and genuinely coincidental, and yet also strangely unsettling and spooky. "Is there any meaning?", the programme used to demand, week after week. And now the meaning is all too obviously centred around maintaining viewing figures by giving us regularly metered-out shocks.
Anyway, I will be thoroughly consoled for all this by Rome, which starts tonight. This post by swisstone, and the late-night browsing which it inspired on the soi-disant 'Rome revealed' section of the HBO site has got me quite excited about the sets. They're certainly not entirely historically accurate, as swisstone points out, but the ways in which they aren't (or nearly are) are incredibly interesting. I'm particularly fascinated by the evident interest in evoking the feel of a multi-ethnic city, which I've noticed cropping up before in things like Cleopatra (1999) and Gladiator. The Classical past is no longer the privileged reserve of the educated white European, but is becoming home to a much more varied cross-section of humanity, and that can only be a Good Thing.
Oh, and all you legions of people who don't have exler_rss on your friends list - you do know that it's a regular Dilbert feed, don't you? There are occasional short articles in Russian as well, actually, but they are easily ignored for the much higher proportion of daily Dilbert cartoons which you get. Just spreading the love, there.
Time for more of chapter 3, I do believe...
On this topic, I'm going to try out LJ's new 'insert picture' function, and see if it will let me put in a picture of my flat, so you can all see the garden I'm talking about. Here goes:
Hmm, it's worked, but the image is smaller than I'd like. So, experiment conducted, but I think I'll use methods which allow me more control over my pictures in future. Anyway, the front part of the ground floor of the building in the photograph is my flat, so all the windows you can see at that level are mine. I am working just inside the window in the bottom right-hand corner, and the birds are jumping around in the large bush-type thing in front of it (although that is now, of course, leafless). Please pause to admire my rose (pink) and clematis (lilac).
Hell, let's have a picture of my bridge while we're at it. I've been meaning to post this for a while:
This crosses the railway to approach my house, and although it was built by the Council, it is, self-evidently, my personal property. I cross it every single time I leave the house, and my friends never cross it for any reason other than to get to my house. Ergo, mine. It is my equivalent of the large gates and tree-lined avenue which told visitors they were entering into the territory of a stately home. On the bridge, you can see the small, retreating forms of edling, johnnydefective and angeoverhere.
Last night was the last episode of Six Feet Under, but I haven't watched it yet, 'cos I was out in the pub, so DON'T TELL ME WHAT HAPPENS. I'm looking forward to seeing it, and will be all sad that it is over, of course. But I am broadly in agreement that it was time to draw 6'U to a close, as I didn't think season 5 lived up to all the programme had once been. It had become a little soap-operaesque, I felt, with the old flair for stark, yet surreal, realism gradually ebbing away. And I miss the way that the deaths they dealt with each week echoed and reverberated with the family's own issues, in a manner which felt unforced and genuinely coincidental, and yet also strangely unsettling and spooky. "Is there any meaning?", the programme used to demand, week after week. And now the meaning is all too obviously centred around maintaining viewing figures by giving us regularly metered-out shocks.
Anyway, I will be thoroughly consoled for all this by Rome, which starts tonight. This post by swisstone, and the late-night browsing which it inspired on the soi-disant 'Rome revealed' section of the HBO site has got me quite excited about the sets. They're certainly not entirely historically accurate, as swisstone points out, but the ways in which they aren't (or nearly are) are incredibly interesting. I'm particularly fascinated by the evident interest in evoking the feel of a multi-ethnic city, which I've noticed cropping up before in things like Cleopatra (1999) and Gladiator. The Classical past is no longer the privileged reserve of the educated white European, but is becoming home to a much more varied cross-section of humanity, and that can only be a Good Thing.
Oh, and all you legions of people who don't have exler_rss on your friends list - you do know that it's a regular Dilbert feed, don't you? There are occasional short articles in Russian as well, actually, but they are easily ignored for the much higher proportion of daily Dilbert cartoons which you get. Just spreading the love, there.
Time for more of chapter 3, I do believe...