Well, hello there! I hope everyone is having a lovely weekend. If you are in the US, this is a long holiday weekend for some of us. Not me, though. I have to go to work tomorrow. Good thing, though - management won't be there!
There are a couple of new sections to my website that I've been planning for a while and I got one of them up this week - check out my Godzilla Chronicles! I talk about what prompted this journey on the page but, basically, even though I had never been into Godzilla movies (although I did enjoy watching them occasionally) it was after I watched the TV series Monarch: Legacy that I became interested in becoming more familiar with this franchise. I'm not going to do any in-depth reviews because those are all over the web and YouTube but I will let you all know what I thought of each movie. I'm 4 movies in and my next one will be Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster.
This week I read about or watched a few things that I wanted to share with you:
- Lucy Worsley Investigates: The Black Death - I watched this on my local PBS station. This is the 2nd episode in her Investigates series. Common folk didn't really leave written records back then so most of what we know has to be inferred from official records. It was fascinating watching her put together a profile of some of the people of this particular village, just from what could be sussed out from things like what judgements were made against them in court! She also goes into detail of when the Black Death hit England's shores the eventual progression to a particular village. She also spoke with an expert who described the different forms of the plague. Even though the general subject of the Black Death isn't new to me, I loved the details she presented.
- Gochujang Cookies - OK, I made the note but not where I read about this. I follow a lot of RSS feeds and it probably came from one of those. The article I read didn't have a specific recipe but I Googled it and wow, they are out there! It just struck my fancy because can you just imagine the spiciness of Gochujang mixed with the sweetness of the cookie? Taste of Home describes it as a spicy Snickerdoodle and I think it sounds delightful. This is going on the "make it one day" list. If I do get around to making it, I will definitely let you all know if it lived up to my expectations.
- Infrastructure and architecture fascinates me but I don't have any professional background in it. I just think it's cool. I follow a really neat channel on YouTube, DamiLee. She is an architect and I find her videos fascinating. Her latest one is titled "Are We Ready to Live in a Nuclear Silo" and in it she compares the Silo from the Apple TV series/Hugh Howey books with silos that people buy and plan to live in (you know, like people who are certain the end of things as we know them is imminent). The fictional Silo was created to contain a specific population. The way the living areas were designed fostered community. But she pointed out the immense depth of the structure and number of floors (and time it would take for a person to travel up and down stairs) effectively also served to limit the free flow of information (just another form of containment). Modern day silos function to isolate a group and it fosters more of a "Me against the world" kind of feeling with no real community between other silos.
- How Massive Feral Goldfish Are Threatening the Great Lakes Ecosystem - that video came up in my suggestions and the term "feral goldfish" caught my eye. I never thought of goldfish as being feral! This is all about how the fish find their way into the lakes and what's being done to mitigate their effects. It was a lot more interesting than I would have thought.
- The Lost Apple Project: The Great Fruit Hunt of the Pacific Northwest - I've read before about people who hunt for lost apple varieties. It sounds really cool and adventuresome, in a botanical way, to look through old records and journals, interview oldtimers and explore remnants of old orchards to look for an apple variety that may have been forgotten.
Reading
I just finished a book today, The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp by Leonie Swann. Loved it! It's a mystery involving a group of elderly people who all live together. There's a reason they are all together and that is revealed later on in the book. But they are all, each and every one, an absolute character. Oh, and there's a tortoise who has opinions. When I'm elderly, I want to be with a group of people like this.
My next read is Patricia McKillip's Alphabet of Thorn. I just recently read another book of hers and loved it so I'm ready to dive back into some fantasy.
Watching
I don't usually go to movies alone but Dune 2 was playing at the bargain theater. I had to be on that end of town for something else anyway so yesterday I went and watched it. I loved it and I'm glad I saw it on a big screen. I can't really compare what I thought of the movie versus the book because even though I read the first Dune book I only remember it vaguely. I am very much looking forward to Dune 3, which I've read is already in the works.
Sunday evenings always seem to get away from me. It's getting late so I'm going to go make a cup of tea and read a bit before bed.