Non Civil War Books and Movies

I was being sarcastic Matt, which has always been my tendency, in this case directed towards @Tom 's post about your need to gather cranberries. Thursday is coming quickly. But I still intend to see it.

 

I've finished volume 1 of Freeman's George Washington biography, and reading it reminded me of the early days of reading about the Civil War, when every page I turned brought new information that I did not know before, and it was a genuine delight to learn. Information is apparently scarce about much of Washington's life as a child and young teen (fables about cherry trees aside, which Freeman confines to the appendix), so the early chapters are built around Washington's grandfather and then father, and the Virginia society of the mid to late 1600s and early 1700s in order to give the colonial history and ultimately the society in which George Washington grew up. It's a tangle of land grants and multiple marriages due to high mortality rates and gets hard to follow at some points, but again it's history that I knew very little of. And I wonder about the state of education when Freeman wrote this in the 1940s, given how he refers in the foreward to people and events that "every man knows about" but which I knew nothing about. Washington's life was apparently far more well-known in the past than it has since become.

Once the narrative reaches Washington's teen years, he spends time as a surveyor, idolizes his older brother and spends time on a survey expedition to the Shenandoah. He keeps a careful account of the money he earns, and then when his brother died at the young age of 32, is appointed to succeed him in the Virginia militia, and leads several military expeditions into the Ohio which lead to conflicts with the French, since both France and England claim the same area.

It is an excellent book, and I still have volume 2 to look forward to. I'll need to keep my eyes open for volumes 3-6 at an affordable price online somewhere. My library only had volume 7, or else I could have checked these out from there as I did Lee's Lieutenants and the biography of Lee.

 

Can you get the other volumes through interlibrary loan?

 

I finished watching both seasons on Netflix. Other seasons exist, and I hope Netflix acquires them.

The people haunting this tiny restaurant are people who haunt all night places in some cases: a yakuza(mafia type criminal), police detectives, a taxi driver, people who work in other bars or clubs that close in the wee hours. But a lot of them seem like regular folks that shouldn't be up after midnight: salarymen and office ladies, retirees.

 

The tone is melancholy. The customers are people who seem (I'm quoting a review that is right on this) not to really like the people they turned out to be. The dishes they ask for and consume are often the simple, home cooked meals of their youth.

 

I'm pretty sure some of the meaning is "lost in translation." There are rituals around eating and family interactions that are cultural and some that are universal.
I spend half of one episode wondering why one couple couldn't communicate or even read the other's letter until I realized that one person was Korean. The subtitles of course are all in English.

 

well: Dr Herbert W. Franke - Der Elfenbeinturm
most of You unfit to read it, but brilliant

 

Why are we unfit to read this work...

 

That's a possibility, though if I can keep finding deals like the $22 I paid for the volume 1 and 2 set, I'm happy to buy copies to keep for myself. It's a bit of history that's well worth owning, in my opinion.

 

Midway
Saw it at the movie house last night, the only place to see it. Jam packed with plenty of action, a little incoherent, and no cliché remains unsaid.

Considering its complexity, I think a miniseries is in order. Plenty of incredibly dramatic moments.