Ships, Sea and the Snark

  
A whatsapp map created for refugees,
presented by Professor Marie Gillespie,

in which distances are measured in money.

 This week's episode of Ships, Sea & the Stars from the Royal Museums Greenwich might be the the ships-sea-and-the-starriest one yet, because it deals with navigation. Not just the treasures of cartography, but the Pacific star maps being recommitted to memory by modern Hawaiians like Nainoa Thompson - an account of which you can hear me reading at 5:25 - and the Global Positioning System, or GPS, originally reserved for the American military until it was unscrambled for general use in January 2000. Other systems are now available of course, just not the EU's, because we're leaving it. On a completely unrelated-to-Brexit note, I also get to rattle through some Hunting of the Snark at 34:30. 

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

   But we've got our brave Captain to thank

(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best—

   A perfect and absolute blank!"  (Source.)

 Marie Gillespie also brings a bag refashioned by a refugee solidarity network on Lesbos from one of a million lifejackets now left on the beaches of Greece, and if you fancy further clicks Extra Credits just produced a nice series on Austronesian navigation which you can watch here, and you can give to the Refugee Council here.

Ian Holm And Lewis Carroll A Sitting On A Gate.

 I'm surprised I haven't posted this clip before seeing as I always seem to be introducing people to it, but here's Ian Holm's stratospheric turn as the White Knight in a 1998 adaptation of Alice Through the Looking Glass not short on intelligent readings – Penelope Wilton's also in it, and Geoffrey Palmer in dundreary whiskers, and Steve Coogan as a gnat, all giving precisely judged comic readings rather than just putting on a costume and being loopy because it's Lewis Carroll. I also really like how Kate Beckinsale's adult Alice listens, a credible mixture of attention and distraction. The Buster Keaton make-up is a bit distracting maybe – although its heart is in the right place – and Holm had already played Lewis Carroll, so this might just be stunt casting, but it still takes my breath away twenty-two years later. This is how you do it. Thanks, Ian Holm. I'm sorry you've gone.

Follow Your Treacle!

 

1870's marketing's answer to sticking "MAX" on the end of "Lemsip" (source.)

 Here's the final episode of me reading aloud Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, in which a number of returning Londoners decide to purify their houses by setting fire to them, and we learn "what befell the quacks". There's a little more to say about this passage than could be fit into the intro, so here goes. It's notable that the fictional narrator specifically pours scorn on the idea that the plague was killed off by the Great Fire of London, for example, and the dates of course back him up. Also, I looked up "Venice Treacle" as recommended by the narrator's friend Dr. Heath, and was led to this wikipedia entry for "Theriac" where I learnt that "treacle" was simply a slang word for "remedy", and so the Treacle Well mentioned by the Dormouse in Alice In Wonderland is actually pun (and here's the original:)

 St Frideswide's treacle well

 
 Whether theriac itself was a homeopathic dose of venom (literally "snake oil") or just a load of opium is contested however. And finally, I've just really enjoyed doing these, and so I'm going to do more. I thought I might want a break, but even waiting for this final episode to upload, already not just my brain but my body is reacting to the idea of suddenly stopping this routine the same way it might react to the idea of suddenly stepping off a speeding train, so moving's how I'm going to stay put.

or treacle.

"The Walking-Stick of Destiny" by Lewis Carroll

Here's a little bit of Lewis Carroll juvenilia that I found in a second-hand bookshop, as performed by me on my third coffee. Christmas!

I am happy to go on record as finding very few things as funny as someone being interrupted, particularly someone interrupting themself.

Or Else

Yes, to hell with this campaign even if she does have nice eyes. And to hell with the dead children that Tfl ("TFL"? "tFL"? "TfL"?) keep plastering across the daily commute. To hell with all the punishing, public-funded, landscape-poisoning Mene Mene's. Here's an alternative approach from the traditionally more relaxed New Zealanders which proves it's perfectly possible for an effective public information campaign to be warm, kind, even funny, and its slogan had me punching the air. Excellent work, Don Draper.

As for what the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea was thinking here...

Still thanks for the laughs. (Picture taken while rehearsing Alice in Wonderland on bikes. A council's shed is full of polling station signs, road signs, unused street lamps. it's like being backstage at reality.) 

 In other news the outstanding National Office of Importance joins the blogroll over on the right, as does the the great, glogg-serving, theatre-doing, actual science-writing Michal Regnier's fab blog.