MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 
AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 111, 112, 113 ... 145, 146, 147  Next
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Yes, I did the same thing at the same place and discovered the same thing. The Golden Nugget, as the lowest rung of the casino world, was ideal.

PS I can't see hands-on Chinese doing this but Arab millionaires would grow bored and go off to enjoy other aspects of the Playboy Club leaving their hangers-on to continue covering the table with their employer's chips in his absence. Precisely what satisfaction is gained by this is not immediately obvious.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

It is one of my duties each day to go through the cable tv schedules in case an old people's home rings up wanting to know what to prop the biddies up in front of. Yesterday, my attention was drawn to

Louis Theroux: Law & Disorder in Johannesburg
Louis Theroux: Law & Disorder in Lagos

Not because either programme is in any way suited to an elderly English audience of an already nervous disposition but because, while Louis gets fairly blanket coverage for similar investigations of American cities on British terrestrial channels, these seemed not to have been given the same prominence. I must investigate this twin lacuna. It may be contractual.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

SKY ANNOUNCE NEW FOUR-PART DOCUMENTARY SERIES
The four-part docuseries BRANSON debuts in the UK
Sunday 4 December on Sky Documentaries

I will be recommending this however. Not because it is likely to stir any untapped entrepreneurial ambitions among our senior citizenry but because of my own association with the great man. I used to play bridge at a house whose owner claimed to have gazumped Branson when purchasing it. It had a working water mill attached which lent some credence but since the claimant was playing for ten pence a hundred with ... um ... a claimant, I had my doubts about the overall veracity of the story. The point is my Branson connections go way back.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Britain's Communist Thread (BBC Radio 4)

We often think of communism as a threat to the British way of life, but in this series
historian Camilla Schofield explores a century-long thread of communism in Britain.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001f5fv

First surprise: it's a woman! The CPGB was such a male-dominated enterprise -- women were strictly for making tea and spying for Russia --- that its activities have hitherto been chronicled by male historians. Second surprise: she's left-wing. During the Cold War anything to do with communism was the preserve of right-wing commentators. Left-wing ones being too embarrassed.

It's an excellent series, worth the listen, despite the tendentiousness. Camilla wears her heart so conspicuously on both sleeves that her breathless glorification of 'the struggle' can go in one ear and safely out the other.
Send private message
Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Seems to Wiley that by the time the CPGB had gotten going, most of the graft of doing away with the nasty bits of capitalism had been done, eg abolished by factory acts. So its date of formation would imply that it is really an anti war party. Nothing wrong with being anti war, if you can stop the next one starting, trouble was Uncle Joe's conception of anti war and anti imperialism was really being pro soviet. When most of the comrades realised they simply left, leaving CPGB a minority party.

It's a sort of anti war party, unless it's an American intervention when they are up for the fight, but when it is the Soviet or Russian tanks they make excuses.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Seems to Wiley that by the time the CPGB had gotten going, most of the graft of doing away with the nasty bits of capitalism had been done, eg abolished by factory acts.

Without endorsing the tendentious term 'capitalism' I reject this utterly. They have been passing 'factory acts' ever since Ug demanded Og stay late to complete a rush order of flint axes. Life is one giant round of coping with the fact that what humans want they want as soon as possible and as cheap as possible and all human beings are both consumers and producers.

So its date of formation would imply that it is really an anti war party.

The Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 as an anti-war party but by the time the CPGB started up in 1920, the war was over.

Nothing wrong with being anti war, if you can stop the next one starting, trouble was Uncle Joe's conception of anti war and anti imperialism was really being pro soviet. When most of the comrades realised they simply left, leaving CPGB a minority party.

Without a timeline I don't know what you are referring to. Comrades left in some numbers in 1939 when Uncle Joe opted for non-war and the Soviet-Nazi Pact. They left again in 1956 and 1968 but Uncle Joe was gone by then.

It's a sort of anti war party, unless it's an American intervention when they are up for the fight, but when it is the Soviet or Russian tanks they make excuses.

Don't we all.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

The Secret World of... (Channel 4)

I had been stolidly collecting these programmes in my digi-cache -- as is my squirrel-like wont -- but not watching them on the twin grounds of a catchpenny title and Jo Brand as frontman. I had assumed they would be of the adult pretends to be child and oohs and aahs about how great everything used to be genre.

But no, Ms Brand turned out to be confined to the well-behaved role of documentary voice-over and the programmes detailed the various British marketing campaigns re ice cream, burgers and other consumer non-durables of the last fifty years. With the now elderly marketing gurus discussing their triumphs and disasters. I was even involved tangentially in some of them myself in my days as a PR man. Not only fascinating but offering up a wealth of AE lore along the way.

When we got to the ingress of Burger King I was so engrossed that I decided I needed one to be delivered forthwith. (It comes out of the research budget and hence is not subject to health concerns.) I was surprised to find that you can't get a hamburger from Burger King. I mean in the sense of a slip of meat in a bun. Of which I planned to order two. Only Whoppers and above were available, which are a right pain to eat with a normal sized mouth and no appetite for assorted juices running down one's chin and arms.

So I had to pass. And now I pass this on to you.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

The first programme I watched involved 'sweets', which have never been a big thing with me. I discovered early on the effort was never proportional to the reward. Still it was interesting to watch how my compatriots have been faring over the last fifty years. It would seem when it comes to persuading Britons to pluck toothsome objects out of bags every sugary nook, every textural cranny, every flavour in the book, every variation on a theme had been explored in that time.

Save one, it slowly dawned on me. So I emailed the Nestle product development team with the following suggestion

There are twenty 'sweets' in a bag. They are all the same size, shape, texture and chewiness (whatever happens to be the nation's current favourite, I leave it to you). They are all one colour (preferably black). They are all completely indistinguishable one from another. Here's the twist: you don't know what (intense) flavour the one you've picked is going to be until you start eating it (of which there will be, say, six different ones in each bag).

Because that something is surprise. You've got to admit it's never been tried. And if it has... well, how much does an email cost? It will be nice to know that Mick's Mix will live on long after me.
Send private message
Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Seems to Wiley that by the time the CPGB had gotten going, most of the graft of doing away with the nasty bits of capitalism had been done, eg abolished by factory acts.

Mick Harper wrote:
Without endorsing the tendentious term 'capitalism' I reject this utterly. They have been passing 'factory acts' ever since Ug demanded Og stay late to complete a rush order of flint axes. Life is one giant round of coping with the fact that what humans want they want as soon as possible and as cheap as possible and all human beings are both consumers and producers.


Maybe, but as parliament was actively regulating and enforcing these Acts, this meant that by the time the CPGB was being formed, there was a established way for further improving rights, eg once you have estabished a legal minimum working age, even if it was 8 and you have then later improved it to 9, it was not going to be long before it became 10, 11, 12.... as the very hardest part of the argument, ie it is not for individual factory owners and parents, but parliament to decide "the minimum age" of those who worked in factories. A nationally imposed minimum age had become the new orthodoxy.

Sydney Webb wrote:

The system of regulation which began with the protection of the tiny class of pauper apprentices in textile mills now includes within its scope every manual worker in every manufacturing industry. From the hours of labour and sanitation, the law has extended to the age of commencing work, protection against accidents, mealtimes and holidays, the methods of remuneration, and in the United Kingdom as well as in the most progressive of English-speaking communities, to the rate of wages itself. The range of Factory Legislation has, in fact, in one country or another, become co-extensive with the conditions of industrial employment. No class of manual-working wage-earners, no item in the wage-contract, no age, no sex, no trade or occupation, is now beyond its scope. This part, at any rate, of Robert Owen's social philosophy has commended itself to the practical judgment of the civilised world. It has even, though only towards the latter part of the nineteenth century, converted the economists themselves – converted them now to a "legal minimum wage" – and the advantage of Factory Legislation is now as soundly "orthodox" among the present generation of English, German, and American professors as "laisser-faire" was to their predecessors. ... Of all the nineteenth century inventions in social organisation, Factory Legislation is the most widely diffused.[2]: Prefac
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I am completely baffled by this, Wiley. The CPGB might, on occasion, operate on the factory floor for tactical reasons but it never had a significant presence there. Why bother when you could control, say, the ETU or the CPSA by a few bods on their Executives? Indeed this massive lacuna was much exploited by Trotskyists, Maoists and other deviationary-Marxists from the sixties onwards.

Technically, if they had a position at all, they would be opposed to Factory Acts as tending to lower revolutionary consciousness. The Webbs may have been fellow-travellers but they were still the arch-enemy.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

When I discovered from The Secret World of... that Deliveroo had become uber-massive, I recalled that it actually started round my way and I thought to myself at the time, that'll never catch on. Those dozy Australians. How wrong I was -- the presiding mind was Chinese. Anyway I thought I'd combine twin research tracks by ordering two Burger King Whoppers from Deliveroo. The fact that you got ten pounds off your first order (but it had to be more than fifteen pounds) played only a small part in my calculation. Here's my report:

The Deliveroo site is a complete nightmare to navigate. Yes, I know, it wasn't designed for an elderly polymathic genius but even so if your raison d'etre is ordering meals off the internet you'd think it would include catering for polymathic geniuses. Most of us round here are. You are then bombarded by tracking news that it's getting nearer and nearer which, I thought, rather detracted from the exercise but eventually, after forty minutes, my first ever home-delivered burgers were delivered to my home. They were, at best, luke warm.

But here's the twist. As I discovered when I microwaved the second one later, they are designed to be luke warm because bolting down the first one was, by some distance, the most heavenly experience I have ever had outside of writing books.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

A Spy Among Friends (ITV-X)

Yes, you read that right, it's ITV's new streaming service upon which, industry scutllebutt has it, ITV's future depends. In which case, bye-bye ITV since not only is it ten years too late, not only is it full of loading longueurs, not only does it rely on super-expensive bought-in product but it appears to have a business model consisting of persuading zillions of Brits to (a) sign up for free in order to (b) watch adverts rather than fast forward through them. (You can't on ITV-X, I tried.)

It could work if the product is super-terrific so was Spy Among Friends? It certainly wasn't at all bad. The story (Kim Philby's escape to Russia in 1962) has been done to death and the genre (fictionalised account of true events) is highly dubious but it rollocks along quite well, thanks to the above mentioned super-expensive bought-in (from Sony Entertainment) nature of the series.

It's certainly bang up to date in terms of faux stereotyping. What are the chances that MI5's ace interrogator in 1962 would have a markedly northern accent? If it was 2022, I would have a hard time believing it. What are the chances that MI5's ace interrogator in 1962 would be a woman? In 2022 I would have a hard time believing it. What are the chances any senior woman in the MI5 of 1962 would have a black husband? If it was 2022, I would have a hard time believing it.

But I've learned to accept this kind of thing without rancour so I just about recommend signing up to watch A Spy Among Friends.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Loading longueurs? ITV-X just crashed my whole system. Apparently quite common. Dear old ITV, they can never do anything right. Reminds me when they had to declare bankruptcy because they had paid 500 million for the rights to non-Premiership football (one, maybe two noughts had strayed in by mistake) and they couldn't get out of the contract any other way.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Has anyone got Apple TV and if so have you checked out Slow Horses, the second series of which has just started? Hatty and I are big fans of Mick Herron's books about Slough House, the place where spies are dumped because they're useless but know too much to be sacked. Is it worth taking out a free subscription to watch?
Send private message
Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
View user's profile
Reply with quote

A Spy Among Friends (ITV-X)

As a side note, it is interesting that none of the main characters, including Elliot or Philby, mention the Oxford ring.
Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 111, 112, 113 ... 145, 146, 147  Next

Jump to:  
Page 112 of 147

MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 


Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group