Month: July 2012

I am not a Daily Mail style hate everything in sight kind of person, but I was a bit anxious about how well the Olympic opening ceremony was going to go.  The preview had looked dreadful. Sheep and cows in a field?  What was that all about.  And we had the security fiasco as well.   Note to future governments, especially Labour ones, some things shouldn’t be contracted to the private sector.  One of those things is security at major national and international events.  And they definitely shouldn’t be contracted out to a bunch of incompetents.  Frankly, we’d have been better off giving an agency that hires bouncers a ring.  At least they would have turned up.

The dwarfs, Gandalf and Bilbo have now reunited but are still far from out of trouble.  Gandalf points out that the Goblins are quite likely to be chasing them soon and on top of that they are in wolf country.  As it turns out the wolves and the goblins have a working agreement, if not a complete alliance.  The situation is therefore precarious.  So it is no surprise that as night falls the party find themselves surrounded by wolves.  This is a bit of bad luck because as it happens they are on the very spot that the wolves have arranged to meet with their partners in crime for a spot of village raiding.

Millenium is a very readable and entertaining book, though its premise that the year 1,000 was a big deal in Medieval Europe isn't really justified.

The Hobbit has grown in popularity in many ways, but one of the most surprising started in the Seventies.  That was when the game Dungeons and Dragons emerged.  This was very much a cult thing, I can remember that there was a small group of us at school who knew about and enjoyed D and D.  There was another small group who knew about and loathed D and D.  But most were totally unaware of it, which gave it a delicious exclusive feel.

I have previously written about how much I love my Kindle.  Sadly, like many love affairs, the relationship has come to a sudden and bitter ending when one of the parties let the other one down out of the blue.

 

Gibbon was not alone in his fascination for the Roman Empire, and in the following generation Napoleon Bonaparte expressed his interest rather more practically by attempting to effectively refound it with himself as the new emperor.  So it is quite fitting that in one his first battles as emperor, at Eylau, he should find himself up against Cossack horsemen armed with bows and arrows.  They probably looked much like the Huns, also steppe nomads, who had played such a big role in the destruction of the empire that he was trying to revive.

Things are bad.  And they are getting worse.  Inevitable disaster looms in the not too distant future.  The only good news is that life is getting so hazardous that in all likelihood we personally won’t survive long enough to see the worst.