Van Helsing, Schmutz-Spotter!

 Further to last night's Question One, I really enjoyed Big Faced Frank Finlay's first appearance as Van Helsing here in this BBC adaptation from 1977, (which is hopefully where this video starts). His bedside manner's very convincing. He feels like an actual doctor, which makes the vampirism all the more convincing as a disease. There's a lot I liked about this adaptation, which I came to via this piece in The Chiseler praising the focus given to Judi Bowker's Mina (and I bet you money Mel Brooks watched it). As the Count, Louis Jordan gives the impression that he at least thinks he was perfectly cast, which might be all one needs, it's certainly all he needs, and the cutting-edge, nineteen-seventies video effects used sparely, but unahsamedly, to signal Dracula's reality-fracturing otherness is a pretty good match for the proto-modernist surrealism of Stoker's book. The only real problem is its fidelity to the source, a problem no adaptation I've seen has managed to solve. Cure's aren't thrilling. So the opening's superb - staying at Dracula's castle is a hard episode to get wrong - and the fall of Lucy is similarly gripping - there's no obvious nod to The Exorcist, but attention has clearly been paid - but once Lucy's "saved" there's no escaping the fact the climax is a band of heroes who all get on chasing, basically, just a box, accompanied by a heroine who needs to lie down a lot, which is hardly Jaws.

 "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Nice ship you've got here, gents. 

Shame if something... happened to it." Count Dracula

  And I haven't seen the final episode of the latest BBC Dracula yet, but given that the first two roll out the usual Gatiss/Moffat triumph-of-the-will pissing contest between intellectual bullies whose every move is nevertheless either two steps behind the audience or too stupid to have been entertained, I'm not gagging for more. I mean, I'm honestly sure Mark Gatiss is a properly lovely man, but everything he writes suggests someone who loves the past without being remotely interested in history, and it's hard not to feel right now that that's making the world shitter.

My Round Again

Chuck Jones originally referred to this character as "Antwerp"

apparently because he looked like both an ant and a twerp.

 We did another quiz. Here's my round. No pictures. It falls apart a bit at the end. I've posted the answers in the comments.  

 1. ODD ONE OUT
Which of these actors has never played Van Helsing:
Laurence Olivier, Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Plummer,  Herbert Lom, Hugh Jackman, Mel Brooks, Dolly Wells, David Suchet, Frank Finlay or Weird Al Yankovic?

 2 & 3. THE GAME OF THE THRONES
"Standupstraight Taily" and "Ignore Subtractty" are the opposite of WHICH TWO ACTORS who played royalty in the show? (Someone suggested a whole "Game of Thrones" round but not enought of us had seen it. I, for example, hadn't seen it.) 

 4. ODD ONE OUT (AGAIN. A LOT OF THESE WERE GOING TO BE ODD ONE OUT.)
 Which of these is not a Font: Hoe Down, Saddlebag, Van Cleef,  Paleface or Wantedo? (This took far longer to research than I hoped, because nearly everything, it turns out, is a font.)

 5. VAGUE THREATS
Which film came first?
A. "It! The Terror from Beyond Space"
B. "It Came From Outer Space!"
C. "The Thing (From Another World!)"
D. "Them!"

 6. SPECIFIC THREATS
Which of these is the second Godzilla movie?
A. "Son of Godzilla"
B. "Destroy All Monsters"
C. "Godzilla Raids Again"
D. "Godzilla versus King Kong"

 7. TERRIBLE QUESTION
What do these directors have in common, given Question 8: Peter Weir, Alan J. Pakula, George Lucas, or Mike Nichols  
(Noone got either of these. It was a rushed question. I... I'm not sure it even makes sense.)

 ... & 8. TERRIBLE QUESTION FOLLOW-UP
What director is double the answer to Question 7? (See parenthesis to 7)

 9. ODD ONE OUT AGAIN
Yeah. Just which of these is the odd one out?
Barney Rubble, Captain Caveman, Marvin the Martian, Elmer Fudd?

 10. THIS WAS GOING TO BE ANOTHER ODD ONE OUT QUESTION, ABOUT THE MANDELA EFFECT, BUT I COULDN'T THINK OF A TRUE FACT THAT MIGHT CONVINCINGLY BE MISTAKEN FOR A FALSE MEMORY SO THIS ENDED UP AS JUST A BOG STANDARD TRIVIA QUESTION
What brand takes its name from its two original main ingredients sodium perborate and sodium silicate?

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.

Sometimes this blog will just be something like "Are we all keeping up with the Gravity Industry's Jet Suit trials?"

 I'm dropping us three and a half minutes into this video because even more enjoyable than footage of somebody actually getting around in one of these (viewable if you watch it from the beginning) is the tiny loop of incredibly stirring music over somebody trying this out for the first time. See if you agree. It's no Asgardia but what can I say? Bathos makes me feel snuggly. Feel the power.

"Thank you sir from 6 to God" - The Sound of the Summer with Auto-Generated Subtitles, plus Auto-Translation

 Four no-budget one-man productions of Shakespeare is all well and good, but nothing I make this year's going to top Je Suis Mermaid, so I thought I'd put that on youtube too, and am indebted to those who told me to check out the channel's auto-generated closed captions. (At least it got that I was speaking French). Here:

[Musique] À
Je suis ma m. J'habite à la merde. J'ai [Musique]
Laissé le temps au top. Je suis dans la merde.
À nous maintenant de six: Qu'est ce que c'est que tu fais aujourd'hui
À Cannes? De nos francs, dix marocain poisson à totino médecine gland.
Je suis ma m. J'habite à la mer.
Hays s'élève á tizi disquaire day one.
Approcher sakuma cheveaux gris mat à lieu à Kiev.
Merci Monsieur merci Monsieur mais il fait aussi fonction.
Merci Monsieur de six à dieu, c'est la mer et le
cadeau dinars mais Séguinaud lance
Marie vêtus de blanc. Merci monsieur [Musique]
Si ça dure [Musique]
Remercier monsieur vers ma chère.
Voilá merci monsieur français à dieu. [Musique]

 And for those who don't speak French, youtube also of course provide an auto-translation service:

[Music] At
I am my m. I live in shit. I have [Music]
Time left on top. I'm in shit.
To us now from six: What is it that you do today in Cannes?
Of our ten francs, Moroccan fish with totino medicine acorn.
I am my m. I live at the sea.
Hays amount to tizi record store day one.
Approach his mat gray hair sakuma takes place in Kiev.
Thank you sir thank you sir but it also works.
Thank you sir from 6 to God, it's the sea and the dinars gift
but séginuad launches
Marie dressed in white. Thank you sir [Music]
If it lasts [Music]
Thank you sir towards my dear.
Here is thank you French mister to God. [Music.]

Apparently Seginaud was a French cyclist. Obviously I love this.

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.

Other Things I Only Know Because of "Drunk History"

Source.

 What a composition! I don't know how Derek Waters' Drunk History operates but I've always loved the results, and following on from yesterday's story of the brothers Booth here's more: I never knew, for example, that a century before before Michael Palin, two nineteenth-century journalists, Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland, simultaneously beat Phileas Fogg's circumnavigation of the world by over a week unaware they were racing each other because they were travelling in opposite directions...

 Or that Rosa Parks' bus protest was actually an attempt to recreate the earlier arrest of Claudette Colvin, whom the NAACP had considered too young and dark-skinned to be the face of an anti-segregation movement (although I would have also learnt this later from Paul Sinha's History Revision, but not Doctor Who)...

 Or that the Lone Ranger was real, and also black...

 Or that the film Dog Day Afternoon paid for the surgery that the bank heist it depicted failed to, or that the perps portrayed in it by Al Pacino and John Cazale were already huge fans of The Godfather...

  Or that the "Scopes Monkey Trial" was a publicity stunt designed to help the Depression-hit economy of Dayton, Tennessee...

 Or, finally, anything about Margaret Howe Lovatt and John Lilly's experiments into LSD and wanking off dolphins. (Okay, that's where I've seen Duncan Trussell before. If you've seen his cartoon The Midnight Gospel on Netflix, this explains quite a bit.)

 (Here's a little about how the show operates. I know there's a British version too now but without someone there to tell the story too, something seems out. Also, are British comedians not allowed to get as drunk?)