2344

I’ve spent a lazy day at home today and was listening to Radio National this afternoon and they were talking about Dubai and from what I heard this is one place I don’t think I’ll bother visiting. They seem to have this obsession with building great huge phallic structures in their desert kingdom. Built by workers from the Indian sub-continent who are paid a pittance and the person who was being interviewed was told confidentially that up to fifty workers a month die on the building site of the much touted Al Burj project which will be the tallest building in the world, once it is completed. See this article on the building in the Daily Mail –

The world’s tallest building

A perfect example of the wastefulness we can no longer afford. Dubai seems to be a Middle Eastern version of that faux-city Las Vegas.

I went and saw Vicky Cristina Barcelona yesterday as I thought it would be amusing. I must admit Woody Allen is not particularly creative with this film. Nice shots of Gaudi’s works in Barcelona and I wouldn’t mind going to Oviedo from the few places they showed in the film but the film wasn’t that great. It was mildly amusing and all it seemed to be saying was that Europeans are oh so cultured, sensitive, expressive and ingenious while those poor Americans are bland, dull and totally materialistic. Very cliched and didn’t seem to get beyond the stereotyping. I assume it’s based on Allen’s own anger at his fellow Americans at their rejection of him and his behaviour. Javier Bardem was likeable, Scarlett Johansson’s character  was annoying and not sure what all the raving about Penelope Cruz’s performance as the psychotic ex-wife is about, I found it just as irritating as Johansson’s. The voiceover throughout the film was I assume meant to be funny but it didn’t raise too many laughs with me.

Perhaps I’ll go to the Maritime Museum tomorrow or the aquarium.

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2343

Interesting article in The Age this morning written by an Israeli peace activist, Uri Avnery. I assume it was initiated by the current horror that is Gaza –

I dream of another Israel

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2342

It’s the summer silly season on TV with not much worth watching, so I’ve been listening to the radio and they too are repeating stuff too, but most of it is of reasonable quality, like this series of debates put on by the ABC, the Sydney Morning Herald and the St James Ethics Centre. If you want to download or listen to any of the debates click on the link below –

IQ2 Debates

Though I have been enjoying the series, Dickens in America with Miriam Margolyes following in his footsteps around the US and pondering on his thoughts on those places he visited as recorded in his American Notes and last night I watched a docudrama called Princes in the Tower. It is a speculative drama about what happened to the Princes in the Tower. Were they killed by Richard or did one escape and come back to claim his throne or was he Perkin Warbeck, a brilliant imposter? It covers his interrogation and certainly brings out an interesting theory about their deaths.

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2341

As I have some enforced time off this week and the beginning of next week, I thought I’d catch a few movies and as there is a reasonably strong line up, it’s not too bad. Today I went to see I’ve Loved You So Long, a French production with Kristin Scott Thomas in the lead role and whole lot of French actors who I don’t really know filling out the other roles.

Scott Thomas is certainly quite brilliant as the despairing Juliette, a ghost of a woman with what it seems all life, hope and joy crushed out of her. The interaction between her and her sister, her younger sister, so eager to help, so wanting to make her believe she had never forgotten her big sister or ceased loving her, no matter what she had done, is the centre of the film. It was fascinating seeing the Juliette character’s interaction with the people she meets as she starts to widen her circle of acquaintance and see the change in the way she interacts with them, her increasing confidence and assurance and the occasional back sliding into despair when faced with shocking news about a man she had liked and when faced with a place that brought back the horrors in her past. Her fragility is perfectly displayed. The ending has been questioned in the sense that it felt like a justification for her actions and undercut the original premise and it being too much of a compromise but it didn’t worry me.

Here’s the IMDb link –

Il y a longtemps que je t’aime

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2340

I was listening to Hindsight on Radio National yesterday afternoon and they’ve just put up the links for downloading or listening to this show –

Into the Ice World: Captain Cook and Georg Forster in the Antarctic

It is part documentary, part radio play using Georg Forster’s book, A Voyage Around the World as well as Captain Cook’s Journals and a novel, The German Traitor as a base.
 
Georg Forster was a German naturalist, ethnologist, travel writer, journalist and revolutionary. Does that remind you of a certain someone? *g*  Or are all sea-going naturalists born revolutionaries. He accompanied his father on the second voyage of discovery made by Captain Cook on the Resolution, after the famous Joseph Banks’ dummy spit. They were his replacements when he pulled out at the last moment after Banks quarrelled with the Admiralty about his accommodation aboard the Resolution.

Forster was admitted to the Royal Society at the age of twenty-two on the basis of his reports of the voyages and he had very interesting if somewhat spotted career, ending his days in Paris impoverished and ill and deemed a traitor and outlaw by his country even though he was still admired by such men as Alexander von Humboldt.

The links are only usually active for four weeks so if this interests you make sure you download before then.

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Very welcome arrivals

I got a card from the Post Office today and to

And here he is dressed in an elegant nautical scarf

And meeting the family –

He then decided to fly up to his roost –

On the bookshelf ovelooking my pc and so he can have a clearer lookout for any approaching boobies –

I got your card and those interesting little photo cards. I’ve never seen anything quite like them. I didn’t realise you were married to an Angell. *g*

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2338

The lions and meerkats got early Christmas presents at Taronga Park Zoo –

Festive feline fun

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2337

Today was my last day at work and I’m going up to Newcastle tomorrow morning where I’ll have no access to the internets. I hope everyone on my f-list has a lovely Christmas and will experience the best year yet in 2009.

Special love and hugs too for those on my f-list whose loved ones are ill or in pain.

I saw this pic today of a poor moggy who from the look of outrage on his face objected to his santa suit –

That look says, why me? What did I do to deserve this?

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2336

I liked the Sydney Morning Herald’s photographic review of 2008 –

2008 Year in Review

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