The Spectator is often enlightening, sometimes exasperating, and always entertaining – in other words, the ideal magazine. In a recent issue, Rory Sutherland wrote of self-driving cars, and of how, ideally, they should learn the customs of the countries in which they operate. In Japan, he wrote, employees who arrive early for work often park far from the entrance, leaving closer spaces for those who come later and are in more of a hurry. He noted the poor driving habits of people in Boston, which I knew about (having lived in Rhode Island), but, oddly, I had never heard the name by which, he said, they are sometimes called: Massholes.
The headline in today's Miami Herald - "Less Space Coast launches in store as Space X pulls back on Falcon 9" - reminds me that I need to work on a cartoon in which "less" visits a cemetery and pays respects at the grave of "fewer."
Last night we watched the eighth and final episode of Between Us, the series about two young couples in Copenhagen. Before that, we had watched both seasons of Love Me, about the grown members of a Swedish family. I am working my way around the world trying to find shows that, like the Israeli series Shtisel, are about "love, loss, and the doldrums of daily life." Every country should make at least one, though the predilection everywhere seems to be for crime dramas.
Time magazine and The Spectator have both panned the Odyssey; Deborah Ross in the latter called it “shallow and tiring.” Apparently this is an instance in which the epic poem is better than the movie.
James Delingpole, remembering his father in a recent issue of The Spectator, wrote: “He had the gift of both being very interested in other people’s lives and being peculiarly interesting himself.”
Yesterday we went to see Pressure, the movie about the Scottish meteorologist James Stagg who persuaded General Eisenhower to delay the D-Day invasion by one day because his calculations convinced him that the weather on June 5th would be too treacherous for a landing. The film was pure Hollywood – clichéd dialogue, over-the-top dramatization, a (fabricated?) clash of dissenting meteorologists – but it left me in awe of two things: the advances we have made in weather forecasting and the bravery of the men who took part in the operation. Archival footage toward the end of the movie showed troops storming the beaches, many of them getting shot down even before they reached the sand. I will think of them tomorrow with a renewed sense of gratitude.