Stuff around the internet

 So if Elon pays someone to make another version of the Odyssey, which one would you watch?

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Someone on line mentioned the movie Quigley down under, which I had never watched, and so I found it on Internet archives and while checking it out found a lot of louis L''Amour type westerns there too.

ah, remember when movies had people you liked trying to do the right thing and the films actually had a plot?

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big meeting of Gov Shapiro and Trumpieboy et al to announce investments in the Pennsylvania industries including reopening the Philadelphia Naval yard. However it doesn't seem to have gotten a lot of publicity for some reason.

gee, wonder why.

but if you do a search on youtube for the Phila shipyard you will get lots of videos for the hoax Philadelphia experiment.

Which says a lot about what Youtube thinks I am interested in.

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Rubio is in Manila for a big ASEAN meeting and has this pithy answer to the never ever biased MSM:

QUESTION: Have you made any progress on Ukraine today? Is Russia serious about peace this time? SECRETARY RUBIO: I mean, you think we settled the war in Ukraine in our 30 minutes here in Asia?

 there   is a  big push for technology in the Pax Silica plan, ere is a including an AI site, using the old Clark AFB site, so the usual environmentalists who never complain about China destroying fishing in the west Phil sea are complaining about it in the SCMP> which used to be a good news source before China took over Hong Kong and it's media.

The state of the nation address will give more information and I probably should post more about this, but it is to the west of our area: Our area is more famous for the huge solar energy farm to supply electricity to Manila.

In the meanwhile, because Rubio is here, China decided to attack another Philippine vessel in the West Philippine Sea, just to show they can cause trouble.

Sigh.

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Finally, there seemed to be a big astroturfed series of attacks against JD Vance, including one report in a major US MSM complaining he missed a meeting (luckily X added a content explanation: He wife was having a baby).

In addition one of his SSA was leaking information on his location to one of the MSM news sites. Even I am aware he had to move to a military housing for protection.

But anyway, I was wondering WTF was causing the hysterical and coordinated attacks at this time. Maybe because as a  veteran he has questions about the war in Iran pointing out that people there do not think like Americans.  

Then my automatic feed that I was listening to (I run discussions and podcasts in background when I sleep)  sent me to his interview on Joe Rogan. I awoke to this part with a discussion on unions HERE. About unions and the minimum wage and how Europe pays new employees below minimum wage as apprentices, but it is illegal in the USA. 

Imagine a discussion without empty rhetoric. 

And he is also on other non MSM podcasts discussion his latest book in which he goes into losing and then finding his religion. 

the MSM is absolutely hating it of course.

but the alternative media is out there now so we can learn what it is about:

No I haven't read it yet, but will keep an eye out if it gets posted on Scribd//Everand in the near future.

Dante lecture

the online lectures about Dante are usually boring but this one explains stuff much better and hey it's narrator is so quiet you can just put it on to put you to sleep.

excuse the typing errors. I blog at night and touch type.

Another day another tropica storm

 we have been having a lot of monsoon rains lately: usually this means thunderstorms in the afternoon or evening. 

But now we have a tropical storm hitting north of here, so not a lot of wind but it's very dark outside and constant medium to heavy rain.

And the roof is starting to leak. Yuck.

and it is again threatening the newly planted rice. Sigh.

TROPICAL CYCLONE BULLETIN NR. 11
Tropical Storm #CrisingPH (WIPHA)
Issued at 11:00 AM, 18 July 2025
Valid for broadcast until the next bulletin at 2:00 PM today.

“CRISING” SLIGHTLY INTENSIFIES WHILE MOVING WEST NORTHWESTWARD TOWARDS
MAINLAND CAGAYAN – BABUYAN ISLANDS pic.twitter.com/s8gcVo7UhR

— PAGASA-DOST (@dost_pagasa) July 18, 2025

....

and so I am busy listening to cozy mysteries that are posted on youtube. This one is about Christmas but unlike most of the series has no murders, just a lost cat and some lonely old ladies. Enjoy.

Internet archive: Back on line

Internet archives is back on line, so I can download classic books and films again.

But was the hack by those pushing copyright claims, or was it to interfere with those seeking knowledge of the past, or was it a way to destroy the Wayback Machine?

 

Download Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record

Cyber attacks, like those against the Internet Archive, British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library and Calgary Public Library, are a new threat to digital culture, disrupting the infrastructure that secures our digital heritage and impeding access to information at community scale.

 

The Vanishing Culture report arrives today at a critical moment: While @internetarchive recovers from a cyberattack, it’s a reminder of how fragile our access to knowledge can be. Preserving culture & history requires resilience—and collective action.

🔗 https://t.co/IcGMa396TJ pic.twitter.com/I1BBGh6a3f

— Internet Archive (@internetarchive) October 30, 2024

book of the week

 Internet archives has Hillbilly Elegy 

to download or borrow the ebook.

they also have the audiobook  

if the copyright cops remove them, you might want to listen to the machine read version on youtube:

they also have the classic history of the area. Night comes to the Cumberlands. That book inspired JFK and others to try to improve the economic condition of the area.

Although I lived for a couple years in the coal mining area of Pennsylvania, our miners were mainly from Eastern Europe so it was a different culture in our town.  But the culture of poverty and how people have to migrate to work and how lack of opportunity leads to despair is found in many poor rural area.

 my son and my cousin did volunteer work in Kentucky repairing homes.

Library of Congress lectures

 I won't have time to watch them all, but the yearly Book festival is going on in the Library of Congress, and it has a lot of interesting lectures there about recent books.

Human rights: Uighar and forced to work in the USA:

and this one is about modern medicine: and cancer treatment

how about horror books?

Lots of discussion with best selling authors... Most of the lectures are on cutting edge topics in fiction and non fiction (e.g. history).

new book to read

Right now I am listening to this on Scribd. this is an excerpt on youtube.

The medical part is accurate, alas but if you have a weak stomach don't read about the difficult childbirth scenes. And I thought that the syndrome was Wardenburg syndrome, but it's a congenital neurofibromatosis 2 syndrome causing an acoustic neuroma...something I read about in medical school but never saw a case.

Sigh

Happy Towel Day

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Kristin Lavransdatter

 I really haven't been following the Vikings craze on TV: not my culture, and the dirty little secret is that they kidnapped people to sell as slaves to mainly Muslim countries who needed cheap labor.

I always am leery about history that ignores what ordinary folk might be doing or thinking: as they say: The past is another country, and if there is anything I have learned about working with people in four countries and a half dozen different countries is that people in different cultures think differently and have different priorities.

I enjoy reading historical fiction and fiction about different cultures, but am leery when they follow the modern memes, or have a hero or heroine who thinks like a 21st century feminist. 

Yet to be successful, a writer has to have a character who bridges the gap between the modern and the other culture. So Hobbits are stolid middle Class Englishmen in a world of high chivalry, or with the dwarves, folks with an honor culture. Or in Outlander, we have Claire, a modern women thrust into the highland culture of 18th century Scotland.

In Kristin Lavrensdatter, I happily found that Kristin doesn't think like a modern woman, for all of her independence and fighting against the culture around her to marry the man she loves. But she is close enough to modern day thinking for us to sympathize with her.

A long novel, which can be downloaded HERE, or you can buy a more modern translation of the novel on amazon.

One longs for the story to be told in a long miniseries: because the acclaimed film version of the first book has many flaws: simplifying the complex backstory of the many characters, something that can be blamed on the limited running time of modern film.

But the main flaw of the movie is the man cast as Erlend is a dork, not a charmer as he is in the book.

Technically, the novel includes many details on homelife of medieval Norway that were known to Undset because her father was an archeologist. But one suspects that some of the plot was inspired by her life as a feminist rebelling against society in pre WWI era.

There is an essay on the life and marital travails of the author, Sigrid Undset, on the Plough website.

Undset’s grounding in Norway’s past made Kristin Lavransdatter a masterpiece of national and world literature, but her keen moral realism and understanding of the human heart sprang from her own history: the humbling failure of her own marriage, and the spiritual quest for eternal truth inspired by research into the faith of the past.

Outlander is back

 no, not the series (until next year) but the latest book, which takes place toward the end of the Revolutionary war and has Claire and Jamie and kids caught in the middle of what was essentially a civil war between loyalists and rebels

I am listening to it on Scribd and am only a few hours into it.

But someone posted it (probably illegally) on youtube, so if you can't afford the book, download it before the copyright cops find it's there.

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Lecture series of the month

 

Classics without tears

The Internet archives is a treasure for stay at homes like myself. 

I've sent them donations a few times, and recommend you do the same: They have greatly expanded their library there, and of course, they also include the "wayback machine" to check for older, often removed web posts.

most of their books are for borrowing (free registration) but some of the older best sellers that are hard to find elsewhere due to copyright issues are posted by the Library of India or other sites.

and since many of their listings include torrent links, you can download them via bittorrent while you surf the net.

Librivox is one place to find free dictated books, either at their web site, on you tube, or on the Archives.

But a small selection of audiobooks can be found at internet archives.

 For example, this link and this link has newer audiobooks for your listening pleasure 

and lots of BBC radio shows for your listening pleasure.

 But today the OnLine books page has a link to the old Classic Comic books that they have there. 

For example, here is Don Quixote

much easier to read than that long long book.

Back when I was in high school, this was the way most of the kids managed to figure out the plots, by reading these classic comic books, including those listed here.

I was an avid reader but I hated most of the books we were assigned: part of the reason is that we were not given background information that made them easy to understand, and no, we never discussed the ideas behind the books that were the reason they were considered "classics"... 

Maybe the problem was bad English teachers, but all I know is that I ended up hating all the books I was forced to read back then.

Have things improved? Not really. My granddaughter was forced to read "Modern" classics such as  "Beloved" which she was forced to get through in her class.

Yes, I know, it's a classic... and well written. But the dirty little truth is that it is as boring as hell. Of course, I thought Great Expectations was boring too...

but luckily for today's students, they don't need comic books: Lots of discussion of books on Youtube so you understand what the author is trying to tell you.

duh.

I also pay for the book service at Scribd.

They have most of the recent best sellers that I like to read,  and often have them as audiobooks.

Since I often fall asleep during audiobooks, usually I read novels and listen to history etc. as audiobooks, where it doesn't matter if you miss a chapter or two.

Right now, I am listening to VDHanson's book the Second World Wars: I play it in the background when I do other things, because it is quite technical. And the next one I plan to listen to is The Boundless Sea, which from reviews sounds interesting.

of course, you can still buy books if you like.

We used to have used book kiosks here, but not anymore: you have to go to larger towns to find used books, or buy them full price at the National book store.

one of the problems is that years ago they had a cheap book rate to send books overseas, mainly for donations to schools etc. but someone noticed that Chinese merchants were sending used books to sell, and they made a profit. How dare they!

but what the anti profit types didn't realize is that middle class types could not afford news books so bought these used books. (A similar problem comes up about used clothing: the westerners hate it and see it as undermining local industry, but that's how we buy decent quality clothing in our town, the alternative is expensive clothing at the mall, paying a seamstress to make a dress for you, or to buy cheap fall apart Chinese stuff).

and the local books such as they use for school, are often with cheaper paper that deteriorates quickly from the heat and humidity.

Sigh.

Sit back and smile

 There is so much angst and hysteria on line that I thought I'd link to Minnesota nice.

Garrison Keillor's essay today is about returning home and just having supper with friends.

It was a jovial two hours and because I am fifty years older than either of them, I did not natter. There was no nattering, no reminiscence about the Swinging Sixties back when pop songs made sense.

I asked them questions about their lives and it was illuminatory and inspiring, to hear about real things. Two hours, during which we did not spend one minute talking about the issues and crises that newspaper columnists have been agonizing over for the past five years. The political fortunes of Vlad the Impaler did not occupy us for five seconds.

She is heading into the business of listening to troubled people and he is managing a venue for punk bands and stand-up comics and both are doing well and this makes me happy: young people avoiding the many dark corridors available and pursuing what makes them happy. This gives me hope for the future, which I have much less of than they, that friendship will see us through whatever happens.

For awhile Keillor was in a bitter period but now he's back to being the mellow fellow who gives you hope.

and his Writer's Almanac podcast is now on Youtube:

 

and more: Prairie Home Companion on youtube

podcasts of the Prairie home Companion and some of his books are on line at internet archives LINK

War, refugees, and forgiveness

Canadian blogger David Warren who is recovering from heart surgery has a short post, mentioning that he is reading the classic Kim, and also the book Essays in Idleness, link2 by the Buddhist monk Kendo. Which is of course the name of his blog.

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if you want to be depressed, read Michael Yon's reports of refugees at the Darien Gap, a dangerous area in Panama that is being transversed by those hearing the US border is open and deciding to risk their life to get there before they decide to close the border.

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one of the least reported stories about Rwanda is the reconciliation program (includes video). Background of the genocide can be found here.

another video here discussing the need to forgive. Caution: uses the G word (God), so not PC for the elites who run Google and blogger.

 

The conflict was tribal not religious in origin.  and like Yugoslavia, there were visions of the Virgin Mary a couple years before it happened, with the Virgin warning of the need to reconcile with each other or war would break out. 

Imaculee has several books about her hiding from that holocaust that could have been stopped by the west but Clinton and the UN/European powers, even the local UN "peacekeepers" decided not to intervene. 

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Nothing new here of course, as posts on strategy Page about Somalia, Nigeria, and the DRC/Central Africa relate. Sigh.

It would be easy to blame all these wars on failed colonialism (Which it is) but a lot of the tribal conflicts predate the European landgrab of Africa. And now one wonders if China will be able to do a better job in developing stealing African mineral and agricultural resources than the Europeans.

China is already moving military assets there to protect their people. and have propaganda films to teach you they will protect their people there:

my take? The US should stay out: the Europeans may not have "broken"the continent, whose tribal wars predate European imperialist takeover, but they made it worse and stole millions of dollars of assets, so maybe they should stay and help fix it.

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as for China: They are pushing into Philippine territory and just laugh and threaten to fight if the Philippine objects or tries to defend our fishermen that have fished there for centuries.

Sigh.

In the meanwhile, the Philippines is busy with trying to give out the vaccine, despite anti vax propaganda (much of it encouraged by China and Russia) that makes a lot of people afraid of taking it.

Lots of propaganda articles out there how China successfully controlled the virus with fewer deaths (80 thousand according to one official report), and they are using this to manipulate the news about India's latest outbreak. Yet one does wonder: Their vaccine only protects 50 percent of those who get it. So one wonders exactly how many cases are there in the past and even now. Presumably we will find out the truth about the 40 million covid deaths there in a decade or so.

Old Fashioned books

 I find a lot of modern books boring. 

Actually, not just "modern", but maybe I should say "popular" books that someone is pushing as reading for their lady audiences.

Not a new problem:  I read a lot as a child, but when the local library had a "win a prize" for reading books, I found I had no interest in the books on their list. Usually the ones for girls were existential angst about boyfriends and growing up. I preferred biographies (you go girl role models), or borrowing my brother's Sci Fi books, which introduced me to Asimov, Heinlein and CS Lewis.

Now, of course, teenage fiction has lovely characters to encourage girls to get a back bone, while not making them into amoral isolated individuals but including the importance of family (e.g the Hunger Games Triology) and it is the highfalutin adult books I see recommended to me on Scribd that make me roll up my eyes and wonder why I should care about a 30 year old attractive blond yuppie's existential problems. (yes, I hate Hallmark movies for the same reason), or pushing cliches about the gay lifestyle or racism themes that have little or nothing to do the humanity of the protagonists, and the racism stuff has little to help you understand the the problem of keeping your kids safe from drugs and gangs and promiscuity and the amorality of today's world.

It's not just me, of course: 

One writer pointed out why K Dramas are so popular: They tackle complex modern problems, stress working to get ahead, and everyone has a family, even if it was 800 years ago in a past life (e.g. Goblin). And there is an underlying sense of right and wrong. Heh. Who wudda thot?

Well, anyway, what brought on this rant was an essay on this blog: about Elizabeth Goudge.

Cynical Modern types would dismiss her as a writer of fluff, but you know, they aren't: and the characters are quite detailed in some of her books.

another blog with related essays with photos of Devon are HERE and HERE.

I brought two of her books with me: The Dean's Watch, and the Scent of Water, but now I have discovered more of them to read at ScribD, and enjoyed them.

the Scent of Water is about a woman retiring to the country who finds renewal in her life (i.e. the water here refers to the living water of the Scriptures). And I believe it was one of Oprah's book club selections.

Some of them can be found on internet archive, for your reading pleasure: most need sign in to borrow, but a few of them are posted by the Library of India so you can actually download them to read at your leisure/ including the Eliot family saga the Bird in the Tree Pilgrim's Inn 

 Two of her books were made into popular movies, both of which are under copyright and not available for free: Green dolphin street and  the Secret of Moonacre,  Probably guarded by copyright cops.

The first is an oldfashioned melo rama, but alas I never watched the second one all the way through, because the cinematography was ugly, but fans seem to love it in youtube reviews... 

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another old fashioned book I ran across on archives and on a webpage HERE is the old novel: the World the Flesh and Father Smith. 

A Bread and butter story of a priest working in the slums of Scotland, and those he works with..., and like Goudge, the people are not twisted and evil as one sees in "modern" novels, not even the bitter veteran who is executed for murdering his wife. Despite being a pre WWII era novel it does bring up a lot of the way that the church gives lives meaning:  meaning that the PC post Vatican II types get it wrong when they see the church as merely something to manipulate to push their pc agendas.

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and for those interested in the pre Vatican II cloister story: Mother Catherine Thomas' book My Beloved can be read at Hathi Trust. 

more cheerful and like most of the nuns I have worked with, she is more down to earth than the usual books of this type, which tend to hagiography or emphasis on scandals.

and of course living in an Oklahoma cloister is  less dramatic than a more famous story popular in the 1950's: The Nuns story LINK which was made into a movie with the luminous Audrey Hepburne. 

that is a fictionalized biography of MarieLouise Habets: the Wikipedia page suggests the story is a bit more complicated: But it is interesting to note this part:

...(she) later moved to California, where she nursed Audrey Hepburn after a horse-riding accident which occurred during her filming of The Unforgiven.

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Finally, I am listening to the Summer of the Great Grandmother, by Madeline L'Engle. (at Scribd) I brought the book with me along with several other of her "Crosswick journal" books. This one is about her mother's slow dying of Alzheimer's disease, and the story of various ancestors and members of her extended family.  soundcloud excerpt

Like the previous books, the anti Christian bigots will simply shrug and ignore her books, but actually it was recommended to me by a friend, an agnostic Jewish psychiatrist, who knew that I was facing the problem of an aging parent.

Some of her essays including some of the Crosswick Journal books can be read for free registration on internet archives LINK and her scifi/fantasy books are there too.

Youtube has several of her sci fi books as audiobooks LINK 

Alas, the main book A Wrinkle in Time, was made into a film that not only had bad cinametography (Svorski crystals on Oprah's eyelids? Give me a break... and WTF is that part about the flying cabbage?) but my main problem is that, although it was recasted as a biracial family (ok with me) they made the important character of Charles William a white kid. What? No young black child actors available? The movie explained this as saying he was "adopted". Sigh.

so anyway skip the film and listen to the audiobooks on youtube.

and here is Ms L'Engle discussing her writing:

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update: This is one of the few "coming of age" stories that I enjoyed: Jacob I have loved.

because it is about a girl who is always seen in the shadow of her older sister and how she finds her own place in the world.

a comfort to those of us who only made the "B" list in high school.

LINK

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Cider with Rosie

 Brian Sibley has been posting a series about authors he has met.

Today he writes he met Laurie Lee, the author of Cider with Rosie, a growing up/coming of age story.

the story is interesting, but what makes it a classic is the beauty of his writing.

Audiobook on youtube:

alas, that is an abridged version, albeit in one piece.

You can find the unabridged version posted as single chapters. Start here.

...

or borrow it from Internet Archives.

or watch the 1971 film:

and a BBC discussion of the book:

CS Lewis remembered

CS Lewis passed away on Nov 22 1963, the same day as JFK and Huxley. 

He was ridiculed by his more PC peers for his old fashioned approach to Christianity, but you know, those PC attitudes are now considered quaint: I mean, the Fabians had the headlines then and maybe now with the Great Reset, but seeing the deaths from socialist utopias in the past makes one wonder if Lewis will outlive them all as a prophet: in That Hideous Strength fortells what is happening today: the elite who despise ordinary folk making a technocratic utopia.  Hmm... I thought the Great Reset was a myth made up by idiots, but hey, it's happening in front of us and if you go against them, hey, you will be deplatformed and banished.

Personally, I find Lewis a bit brittle in his writing, but I first read him as a sci fi fan with the book Out of the Silent Planet. 

some of the themes are the evils of colonialism by positing earth men who aim to settle humans to displace the peoples of Mars...  in other words, OOTSP was a novel about racism:

On Malacandra, three races live in perfect harmony under the rule of the benevolent spirit Oyarsa. Lewis contrasts the happiness on Malacandra with the turmoil on Thulcandra, or Earth, where racism has led to widespread discord.

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 A PilgrimInNarnia blog publishes a transcript of CS Lewis' Obiturary.

again, it sees Lewis as old fashioned and out of date, opposing the trends of modernism that ruled Oxford in those days.

Dr. McGrath wrote a biography of CS Lewis and has a lecture about his influence here.

Yum! Eels!

 My mother relates a family story about how her German Great Grandmother used to cook eel the traditional way in the good old days, until her husband saw her preparing the snake like live eels to cook and after that he refused to eat them any more.

yes, we eat eel in the Philippines, but the dish is not common in our area, so we have only eaten it in restaurants.

This video of preparing Eel Adobo (a Pampanga specialty) will give you the idea of why my grandfather decided to stick to plain fish: :

What brought this topic up was because HisotyExtra podcast has a discussion on why eels were a popular dish in Medieval England, and they refer you to Dr. Greeenlee's website for more information on how eels were not only eaten, but used to pay rent and taxes in Medieval England.

or as he tweets:

Surprised Eel Historian, PhD @greenleejw · Dec 12, 2019 So you're a medieval landlord, collecting property rent from your peasants in eels. How do you measure them? Eels were usually counted in units called sticks (25 eels) -- likely from the number of eels you can smoke on a stick at one time. 10 sticks of eels was called a bind. 

Surprised Eel Historian, PhD @greenleejw · Dec 12, 2019 So may great questions! I'll try to get to them in coming days. But, briefly: There were LOTS of eels in medieval England. People ate them, traded them, wrote about them, & paid taxes in them. In 1200 there were 500k+ eels being paid in in-kind taxation each year. Here's a map!

Eels are part of a subplot in the latest historical novel by Ken Follet:  History extra podcast LINK

the protagonist is digging a drainage ditch for his water logged plot of land and river eels swim into the drainage pond, giving him and his family a new source of food and income so they don't starve to death.

The Evening and the Morning is about Anglo Saxon England,

here is Follett discussing the book.

read a book

 the Library of Congress is having their annual book festival.

Check out their website for your favorite author. or for suggestions on what you might enjoy reading....if they aren't there this year, then check out previous years. older archive in pocast form lINK.

One of this year's lectures:

audiobook of the week

Librivox has the main part of the Tale of the Genji for your listening pleasure. (the second part about his kids might not be part of the original story). It is considered by some to be the world's first novel, which was written by a court lady 1000 years ago.

Genji, the son of the emperor by a concubine, was designated a commoner so that he could serve the court but never be their rival. One result is that as a youth he goes around being a famous playboy seducing one woman after another... but after seducing the wrong woman, he is sent into exile and so in the last part of the book he actually grows up.

I was impressed by the Buddhist influences in the book: one of the alternatives for unhappy women was to become a Buddhist nun (often staying home in a small chapel).

this lecture puts it into cultural perspective:



Note the educated women used a different script for their books because hey, women weren't supposed to be involved in the government.

this article discusses the hiragana script.

Kanji represented the world of careers in Japan, and Hiragana was more related to leisure, hobbies, or cultural aspects of life. Writing novels, writing a love letter, exchanging poems in Hiragana helped Japan to attain its uniqueness and its own culture to bloom. The first significant literary masterpiece in Japanese history, “Genji Monogatari“, was written by a noble woman using Hiragana in the 11th century.

I'm not an expert on the complexities of Japanese writing systems but there are lectures about these things on Youtube if you want to investigate this aspect of the book.

There are lots of translations of Genji out there, and internet archives has several versions to borrow and this one to download:
Ebook here, and manga version here.

Summary HERE. and the main site has links to places mentioned in the book and lots of beautiful photos.


Wikipedia describes the technical details of the novel and the problems of translation.