AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

The Secret of Kells (2009) Film on Four, Sunday

[Mick Harper]

Why Ships Crash (BBC-2)

Despite its ridiculously catchpenny title this was an excellent account of how and why the South Korean mega container carrier got itself wedged in the Suez Canal and how this brought world trade to a juddering halt. This being a BBC programme, it did pull a few diplomatic punches but it demonstrated, quite beyond any argument, that the incident was down to the Egyptians.

Not 80-20, not an act of God, not a concatenation of unfortunate accidents, just Egyptian Canal pilots (a) not knowing what to do when high winds affect very large ships in restricted waterways and (b) having one set of pilots conducting the approaches to the Canal and another set of pilots taking over inside the Canal proper. There were plenty of exculpatory factors -- it was an accident waiting to happen as ships using the Canal got bigger and bigger -- and, despite reports at the time, the Egyptians did a pretty good job getting the ship freed, so what's the AE point? Twofold...

[Mick Harper]

It begins with the official Egyptian spokesperson, the bloke in overall command of all things Suez. It was not their fault at all, he told us, ships' captains are ultimately responsible for the safety of their vessels. Now this is legally true but completely irrelevant because no captain is allowed anywhere near the controls when ships are contingent to the Suez Canal. Egyptian pilots give direct commands to the wheel house ("Left ten degrees, stern rudder") and the engine house ("Half ahead, increase to ten knots"). This is completely standard practice and applies to all ships in controlled waterways.

It would be understandable if the Head Honcho was taking this line because legal proceedings were still ongoing but this is not the case. The cost of the snafu (the programme put it at nine hundred million pounds) has been agreed between the parties in 'an undisclosed settlement'. Undisclosed apart from one disgruntled British gewgaw importer who complained not only had he lost fifty gees because his gewgaws were nine months late but he was obliged to shell out a further twenty grand as his contribution to getting the container wherein they lay, liberated from an Egyptian maritime lock-up.

So what's the first AE point here? Well, if the Egyptians believe what they are saying, and if the world is taking them at their word, we can expect more ships getting stuck in the Canal because for sure ships' captains of ever larger ships are going to be using the Canal from here on in and they will be wrestling like mad for the controls of their ships every time things don't go as per usual. But then there is...

[Mick Harper]

Our gyppo stereotypes. People of my generation were brought up on stories of how the Brits used to run the Canal with peerless efficiency (they hadn't built it but had nicked it from the French who had) but in 1956 that nasty Colonel Nasser had nicked it from us and was sure to turn the whole enterprise into a right dog's dinner.

We then found ourselves in a liberal multicultural country and it turned out that, after the the Americans had prevented us nicking it back from the Egyptians, the locals ran the Canal with peerless efficiency and all was right with the world. (This does seem to have been the case, as far as one can tell, and in between Israeli attempts to prevent anyone using the Canal at all.) Until this Head Honcho bloke pitched up on our screens.

Not only was he a Nasser lookalike - the jowls, the military mustache, the brilliantined hair, the fractured public school English -- but he was a Nasser soundalike. "Eet is all the fault of the feelthy Breetish." Though he called them Koreans for some reason.

[Mick Harper]

It is one of our principles that 'crazies' are a good source for AE-ists because (a) they devote their lives to researching things even academics don't devote their lives to and (b) they can inspire 'crazy' theories of our own. https://medium.com/@viorelsecareanu85/the-strange-ring-of-tutankhamon-3e2b9459034a is a good example of one such and what he has to say about Tutenkhamun's tomb (q.v.). I specially liked his last sentence

[Hatty]

[Mick Harper]

You might be interested to know that Massachusetts was where machine-tooled mass production industry was invented, using interchangeable parts made from dies and moulds. Because it was America, this was initially to turn out cheap (and extremely reliable) guns which hitherto had been made expensively by bespoke craftsmen. The New Englanders however soon turned their hand to other cheap and cheerful consumer items, including the mass-manufacture of jewellery items.

"Bud, have you got the Tutankhamun stamp?"

[Wile E. Coyote]

Macclesfield think they have a Tut ring.

https://macclesfieldmuseums.co.uk/finding-tutankhamun

[Mick Harper]

The Gunpowder Plot BBC4

'ere, I juss fort of summing. Does gunpowder in barrels blow up anyway? Explosions are tricky things to arrange, as I know from my days in the scouts and as James's dad, Darnley, discovered at Kirk o' Field. The propellant, as we call it, has to be 'contained' as we call it and a barrel is not ideal. Too much air inside, too weak to contain the initial ignition. And putting staves round them would surely excite suspicion.

Come on, academics, let's have some experimental archaeology. Probably best when a long vacation coincides with a state opening of Parliament. Keep my name out of it, I'm fed up being cited in peer-reviewed journals.

[Mick Harper]

It's tough watching US elections on the telly. It didn't use to be, you just turned on CNN and settled down to the bestest coverage you ever saw since the last CNN election coverage. You have to pay for CNN these days so now you're lumbered with BBC, Al-Jazeera, Bloomberg and NBC. Forget the BBC, stone age. Forget Al-Jazeera, patchy. Bloomberg makes a gallant effort but it is outgunned by the resources of NBC. But that's pretty terrible too -- think in terms of the BBC's coverage of British elections. All-embracing but dullsville.

Coupla tips for Euro-AEists. Red means right in America, blue is left. Obviously you don't mind who wins (unless a real nut-job is running) so long as it is excitingly all-change. Having said that I'm rooting for Herschel Walker for the Georgia senate seat, despite being 'Trump-endorsed', on account I used to root for him when he was a running back in the NFL.

[Mick Harper]

CBC Docs POV "UFO Town" (Sky History)

Anyone who browses cable channels with the assiduity I do will have come across references to The Curse (Mysteries etc) of Skinwalker Ranch. I never watched any of them assuming it was some long lost treasure or ghostly apparition or whatever. There are depths to which I will not go. However when the above popped up I watched it because both CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) and Sky have some heft. It turned out to be about Skinwalker Ranch.

Basically it's a standard aliens-visiting-earth story. I knew within the first two minutes it was a hoax but I hadn't realised why I knew. These accounts must have the following characteristics (1) it's some kind of crash landing, otherwise they would be away with the evidence or they'd have set up an earth government in New York, and (2) it's in some reasonably accessible area with a UFO-savvy population, otherwise we'd never get to hear about it.

These particular aliens crash-landed in a swamp thirty miles from Ottawa. What I hadn't realised is that they also have to (3) land in reasonable proximity to a military base of some kind. Because the one part of the story that cannot be hidden from public view is that the military will be all over it and we will certainly notice that. If it's a hoax the military won't be anywhere to be seen. The aliens crash-landed in a swamp a few miles from a US/Canadian base with several thousand military personnel always conducting exercises in the area.

The programme itself featured the usual parade of oddballs -- why are aliens so attracted to such people? How do they even know about them from their vantage point a billion light years away? (o.n.o.) It is well worth an hour of any AEist's time both in terms of the sociology-of-belief and as a guide to what is required to get an hour of cable television prime time.

[Mick Harper]

FIFA Uncovered (Netflix)

Terrific four-part series about how FIFA is (still) an unindicted criminal enterprise with tentacles stretching into every political nook and cranny. [Cut to Nelson Mandela and Sepp Blatter playing keepy-uppy.] I have just finished watching the third part which deals with how Qatar came to be hosting the World Cup. Basically this required a majority of twenty-four men in suits agreeing to it and is superficially not possible on account of Qatar having no football stadiums, no football team (to speak of) and football not being playable there in any month when world cups are held.

The three African members of the twenty-four (by now twenty-two because two had been suspended for corruption) could be persuaded it might be possible to overcome these difficulties if they were paid a million and a half dollars each. The Europeans were proving a harder sell. Their leader was the redoubtable Michel Platini who was firmly in the Anyone But Qatar camp. However his leader was the even more redoubtable Nicolas Sarkozy who explained that if expensive French jets went to Qatar and cheap Qatari gas went to France, Platini would be plus redoubtable if he shifted to the Nobody Except Qatar camp.

But there were to be tears before bedtime...

[Mick Harper]

One of the all-time great interviews was held between a Netflix interlocutor and the youthful but go-ahead chancer put in charge of the Qatari bid. "We were so happy about being the first Arab nation to be given the honour of holding a world cup but the criticism about how we did it is [rubs fists in eyes until tears well up] very close to racism."

But other races were now in the frame. North American football was in the hands of a Trinidadian crook and a Brooklyn crook who had been deploying the fifty-odd countries of CONCACAF (in FIFA it is one vote per member association whether you are Brazil or the Turks and Caicos Islands) for several decades to the great benefit of the two crooks. Not any more. Mr Trinidad had -- for whatever reason -- gone over to the Qataris without telling Mr Brooklyn who thought, very reasonably, they were supporting the USA's bid.

So piqued was he that he went to the Feds and the Feds started putting together a RICO-light. Exeunt eventually Blatter, Platini, Sarkozy, Trinidad, Brooklyn (he forgot to tell them he had not filed any tax returns for twenty years so his plea deal was only saved by him dying from overindulgence), assorted Arabs, Africans, Thais and other suits. It was a clean sweep. The next generation, groomed in the ways of FIFA, were forced to take their place. See you all in Qatar!

[Mick Harper]

The Relief of Kherson (All channels)

Resplendent in their Barbour flak jackets, the war correspondents were unanimously on message. Kherson is liberated, the Russians have fled, the citizens are rejoicing! Except the media citizens were all embedded with Ukrainian troops fifteen miles away, so how did they know? Roll VT, studio. And yes, there they were, in Liberty Square rejoicing like mad. I counted several dozen of them as the (amateur) camera panned round.

One thing we know about liberated cities. They come out in their hundreds of thousands, nay millions. Must be all those booby traps and squaddies 'dressed in civilian clothes' the Russians left behind.

[Mick Harper]

I am right, Netflix is the largest streaming service in the world? English-speakers are far and away their biggest market, aren't they? Dubbing and subtitling are a trifling expense but critical to watching the product, am I right? So this week's failing is particularly weird. It's called The King and the Crook and features King Haakon of Norway's relationship during the Second World War with Norway's' most notorious crim. It was, according to the list, made originally in English and does indeed feature a nicely-spoken British lady as the narrator. We settle down to a slight but mediumly-interesting docudrama i.e. re-enactment cut with talking-head interviews and spoken narration.

Everyone bar the narrator is speaking Norwegian! We wait for the overdub, we wait for the subtitles, neither arrives. We are baffled. The only recourse is to turn on the English CC subtitle track -- mainly for the hard of hearing and describes all the sounds not just what is being said. So we start reading the dub when English is being spoken, then when we realise we don't have to, we forget to read the dub when it switches into Norwegian and can't get to the end (Netflix takes no prisoners -- when the dude has finished speaking the subtitles have too). We cannot easily go back to find out because Netflix uses the same wretched frame rewind that BBC I-Player does. We give up on The King and the Crook.