It's been 12 months of mostly unexpected, partly severe-seeming illnesses - everything but CoVID, so we will omit that in this blog entry, as well! - plus a job change within the last quarter of that dozen, so I have been silent. One reason was also the Ukraine invasion, which left a continuing feeling of incredulity & great sorrow. (Cf. below.)
A lot of pretty serious stuff has piled up, and I have gathered a few backward glances in developments important to me in "chapters" below, but the nearest in a sense have been the events around important - some positively historic! - people this last fortnight:
- End of August, Gorbachev & Ströbele died; one a Russian premier who basically sealed the "fall" of the Soviet union, at the same time making German reunification possible - the other the most famous normal parliamentarian of the Green party, the lawyer Ströbele (cf. an election poster within the last 2 decades, above), who single-handedly "saved" the German Greens from the supposed scandal of repeatedly not having any directly voted-for parliamentarians, as did every other party. He managed to do this from 2002 on, by standing on his particular, partly non-party-conformist manifest, in his Berlin district.
- Trump had to endure a razzia of his Florida resort/home, because as it turned out, he'd decided to keep secret & top secret documents, which weren't his, and may have been seen (illegally) by visiting third parties. Trump's dog star finally seems to be losing his bite, and is barking up against legal odds. But let's not forget, who put him there - Koch millions, & Christian nationalists; and voters who could know better, if they had learnt to consume a spectrum of news sources, instead of low-reputation news channels and a brownish tidewash of (a)social media. Also, I am waiting for the office of the president to be disempowered; Trump's "reign" has shown the world, if not U.S. citizens, apparently, that this concentration of power on one hopefully (!) honourable person has become a seriously bad idea!
- Finally, HRM Elisabeth II died after weeks of illness; the only queen of note I have ever known to any significant degree^ - except perhaps Holland's Beatrix - and so an astonishingly moving vacuum that has formed, inside. I think she could be very strict, but seemed also to be diligent, and truly concerned about keeping what has remained of the Empire together, not for political gain, but it seems to offer a modicum of solidarity in fast-changing, & lately trying, times!
Streaming
I have been a paying subscriber to Netflix since it first appeared in Germany. I sort of like, to this day, the global breadth of offerings this seemingly endless financial fountain for new film (& series) offers, but quite soon after starting got a bitter taste in the mouth when their CEO at the time said in an interview he aimed to destroy cinemas. Probably for this reason, I have never subscribed to another "streamer", since in the end, they all have this aim, it seems; cinemas are still closing down in Germany at an alarming rate (even if this is not quite as apparent here in the capital).
Since important Marvel stuff was in '22 only debuting on DisneyPlus ("D+" from here on in) I talked to a good friend who already had it in subscription, and asked if I could join him now and then to watch some of that stuff - having been a (paper) Marvelite since days of being a wide-eyed 10-year-old! - i.a. also due to the crazily formulated general Terms of Use of D+, much of it unclear. As a give-back, here is a list of worthwhile D+ movies I had promised him at the time:
° SPLASH
° ZOOTOPIA
* Almanya
* Birdman
* Brooklyn
* Color of Money
° Enemy Mine
* Far from the Madding Crowd
* Grand Budapest Hotel
* Hello, Dolly!
° John Carter
* Joy
° Ladyhawke
* Life of Pi
* Master & Commander
° Never let me go
° New Mutants
° Solaris
° Tron
* Westside Story
* Working Girl
These recommendations do not represent universal worth, mostly, but are personal hits, in terms of meaning - perhaps at the time they came out - and impact to/on me. Also having a worthwhile story to tell, something I often find sorely missing in current film fare.
Of the "oldies", Color of Money and Enemy Mine are favourites because they show plain old brilliant casting, and how a story, and the protagonists in it, can turn, and steer the conclusion toward unexpected depths. Apart from that, Color is also brilliantly shot, maybe one of the best "cinematic" films I have ever seen!
Hello, Dolly is the oldest oldie here, and it's to me just a brilliant homage to Barbra Streisand's singing, and introducing her major acting talent, too. (Also an inadvertent homage to Omar Sharif, to the way, in my mind, he really was, also outside the studios...)
Ukraine
Half a terrible year in, I don't know what to say about this, having seen so much atrocious video, heard the pain cried out just a few hundred km's away, read & thought so much about possible motivations... except these short epiphanous visions:
- Russians, as martially inclined and idiotically proud as they seem to be, are probably right to worry about their indefensible ground-level borders with their larger neighbours to the West.
- This does not explain why they have been acting like war criminals in Syria (via the air) and in basically every Ukrainian village & town they briefly occupied, leaving mauled & annihilated civilians in their wake. This they will not live down, for decades on!
- What fools Western nations were to underestimate the hold Russia and a disabled Ukraine have on certain major resources (gas, locally, and wheat, world-wide!). Diversify in future!
- May the people of Kyiv, which I know a little from 2 week-long visits some years ago, and all Ukrainians be allowed to return to some form of industrious normalcy. May both nations get rid of suicidal nationalist tendencies, and old feuds, which have partly fired this conflict.
Climate change ad extremis
(Warning: A "denier" holds forth!) I am aware that things have been pretty different this year and last - quite hot, mostly dry summers in Germany - but I have never said that current climate behaviour, at least Europe-wide and in Southern Africa, is not unusual. I have, several times over the past 15 years or so, also in this blog, doubted that climate change modelled as developing toward no-return-beyond-this-point scenarios is as certain as many - climatologists, politicians, Greenpeace - say. I don't believe CCC (the first C standing for "catastrophic") is inevitable, or even fully controllable; mainly because the planetary surface (above-ground for several km upward) is a huge and highly complex system, and because we haven't yet fully understood how the world's climate engines - esp. Antarctica - work and will react to temperature increase in the mid term.
I am writing this because I happened upon a pretty noteworthy (German!) YT clip, which sounded very credible, but again used statistically "smoothened" graphs about temperature development over the past centuries, where I am unsure, due to some of the (older) critical literature, whether that smoothing is "factual", and not just mathematical/statistical modelling. And predictions in increases in heat are predicted to a near-fatal-looking degree by a fearful world map going into deep red basically everywhere in the 2nd half of this century; this prediction said to be "just as reliable" as the 'hindcast' from the 80's till today, which I strongly doubt. (Here I'll just mention the mathematical method of Taylor series approximation, as a possible way to 'hindcast' a limited set of N measurements to produce a general temperature function f(t), where t is time; one that may however be totally wrong once N goes way up for future measurements.)
My main challenges are still: Show me how this scientific theory is falsifiable. (If you can't, reliably & in the mid term, it isn't really a hard scientific theory, but just a prediction. The previous climatological one - in the 70s, new ice age apparently imminent - was a major fail.) And once you have shown me, let's set down some 95%-sure or better probable values to be measured in future the way they are now, and see how your theory holds up at that future time. Predict/measure/repeat as is usual in hard science, even if it does take a decade or two; and, should the predictions fail more than 5% of the time, let's de-hype CCC a.s.a.p.!
Until then go easy on the equivalence of CCC and the Holocaust, please. (When applying the description "deniers" to both equivalently...)
YT mobbing
One of the things I really hate about Youtube is that people who mob celebrities get so much "air time" (i.e. appear in "personalised" search results). Until this day, old videos about how hated Brie Larson is "in Hollywood" still pop up regularly, even idiotic ones that predicted how badly her 1st MCU outing would fail.
Recently I thought Ms. Heard, re her U.S. trial versus Mr. Depp, was (and, yes, still is) being hit too hard, based on what little reliable evidence there is that Mr. D. was well-behaved after all. Perhaps it's that I liked Mr. D. more in his early films, and less from his "Pirates" phase onward; in the latter, part of his body & speech acting implies constant drunkenness - personality-changing drunkenness is one of the main challenges Ms. H. presented about where their relationship went (violently, she claims) awry. Perhaps it's that I quite liked her in AQUAMAN, and find it sad that she is now apparently being thrown out, there and in many other film projects.
We are probably not even close to 100% in the know about what really went on. But the reputation cooker in Hollywood and its louder orbits runs hot relentlessly. One reason to think about stepping off the celebrity fan train more often in future!
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