In the news

October 12, 2019

A state of mind

Recent weeks have been a bit of a downer, or to express it with an Anne with an E gif, the weeks have left me feeling like this:

Anne with a E pms

The vertigo I had a couple of years ago has come back with a vengeance and has left me with not being able to do much. But, thankfully, it slowly does seem to be improving now, so hopefully I’ll see the end of that soon. The only comfort has been my laptop, where when I wasn’t resting, I was able to while away the hours watching stuff that is not the news, because oh my gooodness, the news is absolutely relentless again these days! It seriously depresses me even more than my dizziness and scares me too! So, I have been disappearing into the world of Anne obsession (these following gifs are from last week’s season 3, epsiode 3 – not too spoilery, I hope).

And I understand this dance will be happening in episode 5 in a little over a week:

Anne Gilbert dance

Seriously, I can hardly wait for the next episode. Is it weird that I should love a show about teenagers so much? 😉

Anway, I was dismayed when earlier this week, in addition to the horrible world news and my vertigo, my laptop crashed and big time too. Nothing I could do could bring it back to life. Mr E and I took it to a repair shop and there the news was that the harddrive had died – forever!! Nothing, no data, could be restored. Thankfully the more important stuff was back-upped on our home network drive and I didn’t lose all too much. A new harddrive has been placed, the laptop is working better now than before it completely crashed (when it was agonizingly s-l-o-w) and everthing is configured again (what a hassle to figure out which of your standard passwords have been used for which sites/accounts!).

I guess I can now state that personally things are starting to look up again (please let the improvement continue and the vertigo be gone soon!). If only I could also say that about the state of the world. I can’t wait for the day that the disastrous president Trump is gone and please please please let xenophobia be a thing of the past… SOON! That would improve my state of mind immensely.

August 1, 2019

The good things in life

Let me start with the bad things in life. Specifically Boris Johnson as new prime minister of the UK and a Burqa-ban which has come into effect today in The Netherlands are upsetting me and so, for my own sanity, I keep my news intake to a minimum right now. Instead, I try to focus on the good things in life. For instance: my summer holiday started on Wednesday, the technique of using baking powder to clean my two pairs of  Birkenstock slippers sorta worked (I walk on them all day every day in the summer, I kid you not), today Mr Esther, my daughter and I will go on a day trip to a city near the German border, and tomorrow I am going to meet my ex-coworker’s two week old baby girl! When we exchanged chat messages earlier this week, she said she was very low on bibs for the baby, so I got her these (that 5th item is a shirt and not a bib)…

baby gifts

It’s always good to focus on babies over politics. 🙂

What also makes me happy is the new Picard trailer. I think I have watched it 10 times already. I love Jean-Luc Picard (and Patrick Stewart as well) and I so very much wish for leaders like him in the real world!

I can hardly wait for this in 2020!

Next up: as I love Roman Holiday so very much, I had to watch last weekend’s Hallmark movie Rome in Love, which was about an unknown actress getting ready to film a Roman Holiday remake and she herself falls in love with an American journalist in Rome. Kinda meta, I know. I watched the movie, it was OK, but had nowhere near the charm of Roman Holiday, which I just needed to watch again for the zillionth time. That movie is always the best pick-me-up movie! It got me back to zipping through some Audrey Hepburn movies again and boy was she good and gorgeous! The last movie she did was a small role as an angel in the Steven Spielberg movie Always. I re-watched her scenes in that and was struck by this image of her in the movie at one point…

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The humanity and kindness in her face in that sunset light is just breathtaking.

And there are more goodies to be focused on! On Guylty’s blog the other day she was asking about ‘other gods’ we like besides Richard. In the comments section I mentioned the other (male) gods present in folders on my computer…

I have several side attractions: Colin Firth, Gregory Peck, Hugh Jackman, but I also have some David Bowie, Keanu Reeves, Pierce Brosnan, Simon Baker, James Stewart, Lucas Bryant (yeah, not known), Richard Chamberlain and Viggo Mortensen folders. However those folders are tiny compared to my Richard Armitage folder. Just did a check, I think the largest folder after Richard is Colin Firth with some 400 items. Richard’s folder has 3000 items… 🙂

This triggered me to check out what my more recent actor-crush, Lucas Bryant, has been up to. He’s been pretty quiet of late, not many new roles to speak of, but I did find out that he’s been doing a few M.A.R.V.E.L. Agents of Shield episodes recently. I don’t watch that show but have watched (parts of) the 3 episodes he’s in last night and boy, did he look fine! The camera sure does like him in close-up.

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Last but not least, I watched the newest Suits episode this morning (season 9, episode 3) and in it there was a Louis Litt dream sequence which was so funny! Louis is a judge and a lawyer in that dream and the jury turns out to be made up out of 12 Harveys!

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Gabriel Macht, who plays Harvey on Suits, directed this episode and I wonder if this court scene was the funniest thing he has ever directed and how much fun did he have embodying those 12 Harveys? The eye-scratching middle finger and the one where he holds a cat like that (cats are Louis’s obsession, not Harvey’s!) are the highlights for me. All of Louis’s insecurities, especially with regards to Harvey, are on display here and that just cracks me up. Rick Hoffman as Louis remains a highlight of this show. Oh heck, here’s the whole scene…

I’m so glad there are also so many joys in this world. 🙂

April 10, 2019

Supermassive black hole

After doing some chores around the house today and before going out for groceries (I always have Wednesdays off work), I sat down for a little breather and switched on the TV news. Just starting was a press conference that was being held about the first ever black hole picture. Now, I am not scientifically minded at all and I know next to nothing about astronomy, but the excitement at this news conference was so palpable, I was sucked in. The world was presented with this image:

first black hole image.jpg

This is apparently a supermassive black hole surrounded by a ring of gas in a distant galaxy far far away.  From what I understand, this proves that Einstein’s black hole theory was correct. This BBC news item describes it all way better than I ever could. Science theory (and fiction in a way) has become science fact! How very cool is that? I wish we had a Captain Picard who could go and explore for us.

Apparently the black hole in our own galaxy is harder to discover but the existence of black holes now seems to be proven. This really is pretty exciting stuff! And what is extra beautiful to me is how this has been achieved with people and organizations all over the world working together. An organisation called Event Horizon Telescope was formed with this aim in mind, to work together internationally and study black holes together. With all the focus in the news nowadays on egomaniac policies and politicians, this news is such a breath of fresh air.

And now for the past few hours, I’ve had this Muse song ghosting around in my head…

I think my older scientist sister, who now works as a computer programmer, but who has also studied chemistry at uni, has always been fascinated by astronomy and actually understands all of what Einstein’s theory of relativity is about, will be over the moon excited by this news. Heck, even I am excited now. 🙂

March 24, 2019

Brexit protest – will it help?

Been catching up a little with the news again today after I took a small time-out for a few days because it all got a bit much. So, it seems yesterday there was a huge march in London protesting Brexit. Hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million, marched! March 29th as Brexit date is looming (only 5 more days!) and I doubt this protest will change much, but I can only hope. Protest signs last year during the Trump visit were good, signs protesting Brexit yesterday were just as good! As I’ve been reading, I’ve been collecting images. In support of protesting Brexit, here’s a collection of the signs I enjoyed most (click on images to enlarge).

The Revoke Article 50 petition is up to 5 and a quarter million signatures when I checked just now:

… but I doubt that even that will stop Brexit. I don’t think anything will stop it now, unfortunately, but I will keep on hoping.