When Hoffa Went On Cavett

 

 It was 1973, and the height of Watergate (I'm using "height" here, in its current sense, to mean "first act"). He talks about his time inside, and prison reform, and where he was when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and there's some gay panic - which Cavett surprisingly makes a slight apology for towards the end (not that Dick Cavett isn't hip: his "So much for those foreigners" at 39:17 is a typically dry puncturing) – and there's recourse to lie detector transcripts, then a lawyer called Melvin Belli comes on to talk about F. Lee Bailey's latest porn venture, then someone called Charles Ashman who's just published a book about corrupt judges, then they all start talking about "the system", with occasional breaks for messages from the sponsor. And then the credits roll, and they look like this:

 

 

 Like so much Cavett on youtube, it's electric. I sought it out because, as we he head into this third "lockdown" which looks like it's going to last until at least March, I finally today got round to watching all three and a half hours of The Irishman. I'd known very little about James Riddle Hoffa going into it; I didn't know our lifespans had overlapped, and I certainly didn't know he'd done the chat show circuit. But, despite the protests in the description of the Cavett video that "it's an awful movie, anyway" I don't think the former head of the truckers' union comes out of the film that badly, especially when I remember the episode of Ships, Sea & the Stars that detailed how atrocious working conditions currently are for those who work on ships. I really wasn't expecting to be reminded of that. And I thought I might be sick of gangster films, but I'd forgotten they're also secret histories, and everyone in The Irishman talks like Trump. Maybe it's all the Frankenstein movies I've been watching, but I didn't find the digital de-aging of De Niro that distracting either –

 

 It was less distracting than trying to work out where I'd heard the diegetic music, anyway. (Frontier Psychiatrist! That's it!) 

Darwin's Bassoon Wasted on Worms

 The mainly non-mythological constellations of the southern hemisphere, 

including Chameleon, Compass, Toucan and Telescope (source.)

 

 The final Ships, Sea & The Stars of this series is up now, in which you can hear me read an A. A. Milne poem that was completely new to me (at 29:00) and a terrific account by Charles Darwin of his attempts to test the hearing of worms (at 4:17). The theme of this episode – in coordination with Heritage Open Days – is "Hidden Nature" which, according to guest and "preventive conservator" Maria Bastidas-Spence, unambiguously means bugs. It's rare to see an insect expert who actually hates insects, and weirdly rewarding. In addition to carpet beetles and constellations, the team discuss ship's mascots. It seems pretty much every species has at some point been considered for mascothood, including a polar bear. 

 This isn't him though, this is "Trotsky". As soon as I learnt of his existence, I whatsapped my Finnemore colleagues and... well, long story short: John has finally decided on a name for his first child. Unfortunately though, Trotsky – the photographed Trotsky above, not the putative Trotsky Finnemore – would be shot dead by a sailor tragically unaware that "ship's bear" was a thing. A very sad death then, but I can't say he was necessarily on the wrong side of History.

 

Same Day

 

Not a ship.

  This week's Ship, Sea and the Stars doesn't seem to have gone up yet, but that's okay, because I still haven't posted last week's, so here it is. The subject is "Stranded Seafarers". You can hear me reading accounts of friendlessness from Frankenstein at 4:48, and faithlessness from an old Charles Dibdin ballad at 30:43, but the episode's main focus is a lot more contemporary. At least four fifths of the world's trade is still transported by sea, which is obvious if I think about it, but I don't normally think about it, and Covid has seen pretty much all the contracts of those working these ships extended, or even doubled, meaning they will be at sea now for anything from six months to over a year, their shore leave perpetually threatened with cancellation in order to meet "Same Day Delivery" commitments. One of Helen's guests is a chaplain, and that's not because the workers are doing okay. Another illuminating engagement with something ignored but essential, I really recommend it, even though it ultimately has very little to do with Frankenstein.

Icebergs, Sirens and A Thing that looks like The Biggest Thing

 HMS Captain, which sank on its first night out with the fleet 

because it was too heavy and weird-looking (image source).

 At the 3:26 mark of the latest Ships, Sea and the Stars from the Royal Museums Greenwich I read Lawrence Beesley's astonishing eye-witness account of the sinking of the Titanic. The subject of the show is marine archeology and the guests are Andrew Choong, who loves boats, and Helen Farr, who loves time, which is handy. Helen Czerski's the host, and I feel she would have described the Titanic sinking in a very similar manner to Beesley; both share an attention to not just detail but exactly the right detail, and a clarity of insight into just what it is about that detail which makes the processing of it so unforgettable. Catching up with a Science Shambles from a couple of weeks ago, in addition to some excellent talk about astronomy for the blind, what the big bang looked like, and why candles don't work in zero gravity, eleven minutes in I heard Helen offer this great vignette: "I remember the biggest thing I've ever seen - and it wasn't the biggest thing I'd ever seen, but my brain thought it was - and it was a tornado. And the thing about a tornado is that clouds are normally there, but you don't normally see them connected to the ground. The cloud base was probably three kilometeres. So I was looking at something three kilometers big."
 I've no idea what the actual biggest thing Helen's seen is.

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.

Return of the Thwack

A celebrity variant from the Aberdeen Maritime Museum

 This week's Ships Sea and The Stars sees the return of baffling seaside atrocity Mr. Punch, previously squeamed on this blog back in March. I don't really begin to share or even fully understand curator Sue Prichard's diagnosis of cartoon violence as a malign influence on real-world power structures, but I've also just been literally blowing chef's kisses at Release The Hounds on ITV2+1 so what do I know? Dickens agrees with me however, and you can hear me reading him do so at 30:37. I'm back at 40:28 to read from Tales of a Tar a list of extraordinarily-named games carved into tops of masts, including "Jack and Bet footing in a pas de deux" and "the Saucy Temeraire at Trafflygar", both of whose rules I think I'd rather invent than learn. There's also spoken word and a really beautiful biscuit.

I'm guessing this picture was a commission though.

Einstein on the Molehill

 This is the Shepherd Gate Clock at Greenwich. Note the twenty-four hours. Wired to the "Shepherd Electric Impulse Clock" within, entrusted with cabling standardised time not just nationwide but eventually as far as Massachusetts thanks to the transatlantic cable, it was the first clock ever to directly show Greenwich Mean Time to the public, and is one of Louise Devoy's contributions to this week's Ships, Sea and the Stars. Actual Greenwich astronomer Ed Bloomer presents its sequel - the atomic clock, while psychologist Steve Taylor brings along a book he wrote and a child's safety seat for some reason, and the excellent Helen Czerski refuses to be fazed. I was asked if there was any good bit of Shakespeare relating to Time I could read, and immediately thought of this...

... but instead suggested something I've always loved but never performed from Henry the Sixth Part Three - an uncharasteristically trance-like meditation on routine from, as Helen perfectly summarises, "a slightly depressed king on a hill who just can't tell if he's a bit useless". Yes! Another one! Centering on another kind of shepherd's clock, it's one of the most sustainedly simple things Shakespeare wrote - one of the reasons I love it, and you can hear me read it at 2:50. Then Helen asked me to read the closing words to Einsteins' fourth paper on General Relativity, (28:30), and I really enjoyed that too. It's been far too long since I last performed words nobody's meant to understand. *

"You need to know how big your clock is."

Awaymania

One of Margaret Gordon's original Womble designs. I don't remember this bit.

 There's a fine Brian Aldiss quote I can't find now about how humanity's greatest schism with the ecosystem was not the invention of the motor car but the flush toilet, which meant that instead of returning waste to the soil we now flushed it to the unrelated sea. Actually the flush toilet was invented a good few years before Bazalgette's sewer, so originally although waste was being flushed into the Thames it was then just left to rot on the banks.

The construction of the Embankment enclosing Basalgette's sewers. 

Notice the open-top ,steam-powered London Underground, bottom left. (Source.)

 In this week's Ships, Sea & the Stars you can hear me read an account by Dickens of the smell. I also get to read some Wombles by Elizabeth Beresford, and there are further typically good insights into plastic, amber, the influence of rationing on seventies kid's television, how the London Sewer could be said to have started the mania for just sending stuff "away", and a schooner whittled from mutton bone.

The Subtle Machinery of Aw

 This evening was the first time I'd been to the South Bank since lockdown, and dumb as it might sound, the first time the reality of these closed spaces really sunk in, taking me with it. I didn't often go to the National Theatre or the BFI, and I hardly ever went to the Hayward or Royal Festival Hall, but I went here all the time. Just to be here. A public space made possible by things that are no longer happening. The space is still there, but not the public, and I felt a bit awful. Speaking of awe, in this week's Ships, Sea & The Stars I got to read some Carl Sagan. Absolutely no one delivers Carl Sagan better than Carl Sagan, but it was still a joy. Ed Bloomer makes a beautiful point in the video about Sagan's writing that's often overlooked: "It's quite kind." I once looked up the derivation of "kind". Like "like", it means both how we'd prefer to be treated, and also "our type". We like our kind, and we are kind to those like us. Sagan welcomes us. Aw man, so did the South Bank Centre. I really look forward to the welcome resuming.

 

Pineapples, Poop, and Princes to Act

 The Royal Museums Greenwich's weekly webcasts are back, with an episode on the newly reopened Cutty Sark (or "Skimpy Skirt" if you don't speak Scottish). The glamour of pineapples is discussed, traders who still sail are buttonholed, and Helen Czerski is on hand as usual to ask every question playing on your mind as if by magic. I give a couple of readings too, including a dramatic account of a storm at sea for which I had to repeatedly say "poop" with a nautical accent and a straight face. And in other news...

 God, I'd have loved to seen Gene Wilder play Richard II, but in his absence I've decided I myself shall take on the role of that most pineapply of monarchs as well as every other role in Richard II of course as I return to Simon Goes Full Shakespeare next week. I know I said I'd do the War of the Roses next, but this play comes earlier historically even if it was written later, and has far fewer characters than Henry VI, far fewer explosions, and far more sadness, self-indulgence, and sass, so seems the more comfortable choice. Also I've got the hair. I'll save further spoilers for next week, but here's where I found that painting of Richard looking like a pineapple, and here's where I found that pineapple that looks like Richard II.

Sea Change

 This is methane ice, which is a thing, There's estimated to be more than one thousand trillion cubic metres it at the bottom of the ocean. Not all of it stays there. The warmer the ocean gets, the more of it is released up into the atmosphere, warming the air, which warms the ocean, which releases more methane, and so on. And by "and so on" I mean of course "until this planet is as uninhabitable as Venus" but currently however, fortunately, ninety percent of the methane's absorbed by little flitting microbes as it rises to the surface. I picture them flitting anyway, but not vividly enough to see upon what. Good for them. All this and more I learnt on Monday which was "World Ocean Day", from the frankly exciting Dr. Helen Czerski in World Ocean Autopsy: The Secret Of Our Seas - featuring an actual porpoise autopsy, be warned - which screened that evening, and is now viewable here.

 Michael Pinsky's Pollution Pods

 Earlier in the day Helen joined the Royal Museums Greenwich again to host an Ocean Day Special, packed with experts, no expert more immediately invested in the fate of the oceans perhaps than Lisa Koperqualuk of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, co-managing the new world as the ice melts. The show is typically inspiring and surprising and just plain kind, and I'm so pleased to have been involved with these (obviously the grumpiest guest is the artist.)

 In an article for the Washington Post, climate expert Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Robinson quotes Toni Morrison: "The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work" and that article's now behind a paywall so I'm also sharing this that she wrote for Scientific American: "To Save the Climate, Look to the Oceans". According to Helen Czerski, they're engine of the world, and that's a hell of an image. To end with here's a great little tour of the engine's highways, cities and volcanoes, accompanying a tuna in May's epic Sea Shambles. And that on the wall behind Helen is apparently a "bait ball". I'll post a real one tomorrow, because they're amazing.

"Who Gave A Mermaid Her Voice"

 Above is this week's Ships, Sea and the Stars which I think will be the last for a spell. It's about mermaids, presumably organised to coincide with the beginning of Pride month, but given a little extra pang of relevance yesterday by J.K. Rowling. I don't sing on this one but I get to do a little reading of Oscar Wilde, and the guests are as superb as ever. Watching it, I kept being reminded of the brilliant video essay below about Howard Ashman's work on The Little Mermaid. I'd no idea how big a part his vision played in it, nor that Ashman and Menken's first ever musical was an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut, which I obviously found exciting. (I also never knew until today that when the cartoon was first dubbed into German, Ariel was voiced by Ute Lemper.)

The Armpits of the Thames

View from the Trafalgar Tavern

 "The river was a place for children... but it wasn't a nice place for children." Mudlarker Lara Maiklam, maritime historian S.I. Martin and senior curator of the Royal Observatory Louise Devoy join Helen Czerski for a look under the hood in this week's Ships, Sea and the Stars, while I can be heard reading a nineteenth-century engraver's gush. It is, as ever, the good stuff.

The Hallelujah Moon

 My guess is Stephen Cheatley took this. It's Blackpool, last night. I saw the crescent myself over Shepherd's Bush roundabout, as I'd finally let myself out for a walk, and I'd been looking out for it because I'd just learnt that it signaled Eid. That's not why the crescent moon's the symbol of Islam though - strictly speaking there actually is no "symbol" for Islam. The founder of the New Crescent Society, Imad Ahmed, gives a beautiful account of his coordination of nationwide sightings of this moon in the episode of Ships, Sea and the Stars below, for which I provide a reading of one of the happier moments in Ernest Shackeltons' life. Beyond its Judeo-Christian roots I'd always known next to nothing about Islam, other than a conversation I'd had in Berlin where I was corrected on an assumption made that Muslims also believed that God was Love: "I don't believe that. I believe God is Time." And according to Ahmed, the Arabic word for crescent moon, hilal, comes from a Semitic root meaning 'to scream out for joy', the same root in fact as hallelujah.

 Still on the subject of outlines, last week's episode featured this map of British shipping routes from 1937. I found it extraordinary to suddenly look upon the land as negative space...

 And the episode's packed with wonderful instances of making the invisble visible. There's a lot about shipping containers to, and the history of Greenwich, so obviously I was reminded quite a bit of The Boy who Climbed Out of His Face, and I'm reading some Conrad in this one (Heart of Darkness was one of the inspirations for the show, besides The Water Babies) and a poem called "Cargoes", which appears to have been something of a set text, but was new to me.

Boatless and Tuggs

 During this pandemic thousands of rock stacks have appeared in Whitley Bay. The contributors stand and wait and take their turn, a crowd in time but not space. Nobody's suggested the piles are memorials, which is a relief because they're prolific. Owen Humphreys, who took these photos and more, is a guest on today's "Ships, Sea, and the Stars" which focuses on the coast.

 I say "focuses" but it's a pretty holistic episode, taking in everything from where best to see the Northern Lights (an aeroplane with the lights out) to things it's unlucky to say on a boat ("rabbit" is out), and I provide another couple of readings, one a nearly two-centuries-old account of a trip to the seaside by Charles Dickens, for which it was suggested I do a voice, and the other a poem from the Shetlands based on a Viking proverb - Bound Is The Boatless Man - for which it was suggested I didn't:

"Boisterous" Goings

The Terror. Or the Erebus, which means Darkness - son of Chaos. One of the two.

From a time before the names of boats were put to a public vote.

 Having uploaded today's Full Shakespeare I realised I'd rushed it a bit - well, it's always going to be rushed, but I wanted another tweak, so it's down now and it won't be up again before midnight, apologies. But to fill the voices-I-can't-really-do void, here's this week's "Ships, Sea, and the Stars" from the Royal Museums Greenwich, featuring another couple of readings from me, including a "nautical". I would not by the way recommend doing an image search for "Terror and Erebus" if you're just looking for nice pictures of ships.

And had to be contented.

 Here's today's Royal Museums Greenwich Live, hosted by Helen Czerski (who gives her own great sea-borne insights into isolation here) with a couple of readings from me. Victorian sailor, Henry Ralph Harvey's discovery of the recuperative powers of ship-bound box-building remind me a bit of Dan Harmon's Minecraft mania. Sue Prichard's question "but then what do you put in the box?" also struck a chord: I've been given some beautiful little boxes in my life, but I have no jewellery, so I use them for hoarding my frayed dongles. Speaking of which: not mentioned above (thankfully – I'm thinking mainly of Captain Graham Westgarth's feelings here) is something the Museum shared with Helen when she first emailed them on the topic of what seafarers did to stay sane: "and it is really grim... but there are accounts of specific species of fish being nailed to a piece of wood and used as a communal masturbation tool."
 Specific species.

A little skrimshaw. Far more here.

 I also liked Sue's observation that the increase in sales of crafting materials during this "lockdown" period doesn't point to our turning away from a life online, but in fact goes hand in hand with it, because it's only now online we're learning how to use these materials. I can't boast of any improvements in the output of my own hobby, but here's today's Defoe, in which I misidentify a mass-grave at Moorfields as one currently being exhumed outside Liverpool Steet Station. I muddled my Bedlams, in other words.

Beebe's Sea World's Surface

 "Those who knew Beebe knew that he wanted nothing elaborate or overly mechanical."

 How's everyone doing? Here's polyamorous ornithologist, and sub-aquatic garden enthusiast, Charles William Beebe* in his "bathysphere", seconds before being joined in its four-foot span by its equally lanky designer Otis Barton, to embark together upon an unprecedented, two-mile dive off the coast of Nonsuch Island, Bermuda, and report back to fellow bathynaut Gloria Hollister, and illustrator Else Bostelmann, humanity's first ever sightings of in situ underwater bioluminescence:

 Two of Bostelmann's illustrations (source here).

 Basically "bathynauts" were astronauts, but steampunk, and with open marriages and actual aliens. Here's silent footage of one of their later expeditions (with a bunch of annoying pop-ups over the fish images):

 And here's an excellent image of an angler fish Beebe spotted off Port-au-Prince in 1927, I guess as a result of dredging, because he was only doing helmet dives back then (source here):

 And most importantly, here is how I first heard of all this, the second episode of Royal Museum Greenwich's utterly fascinating live stream. To quote guest Jon Copley: "more than half the world is covered by water that's more than two miles deep... it's the reality of most of the surface of our planet." So the Earth is Ocean. And here's a more recent find from the hot springs in the deep Antarctic, BILLIONS OF CRABS:

 In addition to the above sources, here's Beebe's wikipedia entry, containing a wonderfully comprehensive and quite personal biography of the man (*Robbie Hudson, if you're reading this, I assume you know about this guy, I mean he seems entirely up your street) and here's a contemporary newspaper splurge. And here's today's Defoe:

Tip jar here too, ta!

"And the Skinside is the Inside"

 As you can see from the above photographs, Abbey Road studios opened up especially yesterday, just to let me record a couple of pieces, written over a hundred years ago at the South Pole, for the Royal Museums Greenwich's (hum, weird phrase) isolation something-or-other... Podcast? Video? I'll know when it goes out, which is noon today*, but it should be great so – unlike me in the photo above – heads up! (This is not my bed duvet I'm using to deaden the acoustics, it is my living room duvet, it's fine.)

It's now up on youtube. The readings are at 8:37 and 40:50.

 On a bleaker comic note, if you've never heard Dylan Moran's short monologue "The Expedition", I really recommend sneaking a listen to it here, as it's phenomenal. (Moran has always sounded like he's got a duvet over his head.) 

In other news, I myself finally ventured outside this evening, and Regent's Park was full of bats. Here's today's Defoe:

 *Thursday today, not Wednesday today.