Category Archives: what’s on your bedside table

The Monday Movie(s)

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Sharknado-2-riding-sharkI feel bad doing Monday books because it’s hard to get some books these days and I don’t want someone trying to go out. We will go back to them when the libraries reopen, or if the book can be guaranteed online.

Meanwhile, time for a true confession; post-apocalyptic movies are my secret guilty pleasure. When I despair over the state of the world, or my place in it, I watch actors try to battle off giant invaders, figure out how to make engines from rusty nails, etc. It’s fun. Because it isn’t real life.

Now that our lives are a little weirder than normal, and online games have become quite the rage, how many disaster movies can you find in our present situation? Here’s a list to get you started; play along in comments.

Perfect Sense – losing taste and smell as the most evident symptom that something is going wrong

World War Z – US government response is to manufacture and push fake cures as national health, ignoring actual problem

How it Ends – no one can pin down how it started but sure would like to find someone to blame

A Quiet Place – people send up flares to communicate they’re still here – we have Facebook

Containment – the slow erosion of social norms due to hoarding inside a cordon sanitaire – a phrase everybody just LOVES to keep saying

Outbreak – media hyping already tense situations to make it even more fun!!

Zoo – some asshole reports a tiger has COVID and gets a whole bunch of pets killed with his irresponsible conflating of cat coronaviruses (they are COMMON) and human coronaviruses (we don’t catch them from each other)

I Am Legend – the cure is worse than the illness

Left Behind- I got nothing on this one; anyone?

Shawn of the Dead – yes, people can be that stupid in real life. Been on Facebook?

Rollover – the world economy goes belly up but the really pretty people survive (Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson, namely)

28 Days Later – I literally had a colleague (his name was not Jim, though) backpacking in New Zealand who walked back into civilization intending to catch his plane on to India and … say what now?

Think of this as one of those picture puzzles online. How many movies can you spot in the way we live now? :]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Monday Book – Americans in Paris

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Jack gets to do the Monday book review this week –

paris

Americans in Paris – Charles Glass

Some years ago I met up with a fellow Scot and close friend who was in the middle of a French adventure. We met in Vichy on Bastille Day and helped the locals celebrate into the wee small hours. The following day we took a train down through the Massif Central to Bordeaux, sharing our compartment with an elderly couple. As we passed through various small towns they pointed out walls where ‘resistantes’ had been shot, but also where immediately after the war ‘collaborateures’ had also been shot. Vichy, of course, was the Capital of the collaborating French government under Marshal Petain.

So Glass’s book which chronicles the experiences of a wide range of US citizens in the lead up to, and during world war two and who lived in Paris during that time was a fascinating read.

There are a number of intertwining stories throughout – The American Hospital, Shakespeare and Company bookstore and the political machinations of the Vichy government are the main ones. The hospital and the bookstore somehow managed to continue, even after the US declared war on Germany. They become important waystations for escaping British and American soldiers and airmen, and their directors took enormous risks.

The writing is engaging and based on well documented research.

I knew very little of the tensions within the Vichy regime or between it and the German government, far less the attitude of the US towards Petain and Laval and their rivalries. Glass’s book, therefor, filled in many gaps in my knowledge.

Although I found the many personal stories of individuals intriguing, I think it was reading them within the broader political and wartime context that really caught my attention.

I thoroughly recommend this to anyone with an interest in France, Paris or the politics of the period.