–They’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and spooky, they’re altogether very often ooky, the Brandon family. Colonel Brandon, like Edward Ferrars, seems to be the pick of a not great litter. He has a deceased father who was a pretty bad lot, a deceased older brother who was a thoroughly bad lot, and a deceased cousin/childhood sweetheart named Eliza, apparently the same age as himself. The two tried to elope to Scotland when they were both sixteen or seventeen(1) but were caught through the treachery of Eliza’s maid. The future Colonel was forcibly packed off to India (implying somebody in the family had ties to the East India Trading Company). Cousin Eliza, who was an heiress, was bullied into marrying the Colonel’s older brother so her fortune could be used to pay off the debts Bad Dad Brandon and Bad Brother Brandon had incurred.
Category: Uncategorized
Happy Independence Day
You know what, it’s June 29th as I write this, I had a nice feel-good patriotic song all queued up for the Fourth of July, but then I ran across some of those online people who absolutely cannot shut up about the historical failings of a certain movie which came out a quarter of a century ago to very mediocre box office returns and has largely been forgotten since then. Solely out of spite for these screed writers, I’m going to link to a clip from the film they hate, which is one I usually ignore. This, too, is the American Way.
Minireviews of Sense and Sensibility Adaptations
Note on Margaret Dashwood: in the book, she’s Marianne’s teenaged (but not “out”) sidekick and echo, sort of a Kitty Bennet analogue. She blabs two different secrets of her sisters (“his name begins with an F!” and “he took a lock of her hair!”), accompanies Marianne on the outing where she twists her ankle and meets Willoughby, keeps Mrs. Dashwood company after Christmas while Elinor and Marianne are in London, and by the time of Marianne’s marriage has reached an age for dancing and courting and providing fodder for the romantic speculations of Sir John Middleton and Mrs. Jennings. She is a very underdeveloped character in the book; nothing like the obnoxiously cute wittle moppets of S&S 1995, Kandukondein Kandukondein, or S&S 2008. People who whine about her being left out of the older TV versions are really just pining for the version Emma Thompson wrote for S&S 1995, and showing their ignorance of the novel in the process.
Some Jane Austen novels were popular enough to see tv adaptations very early on, which were not preserved for posterity: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion. Some were so (comparatively) uninteresting to the TV/movie-viewing public that people only started adapting them in the 1980s (Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey). And then you have Sense and Sensibility, which was studiously ignored by the adaptors(1) until 1971, at the dawn of proper TV archiving, and then received a positive torrent of adaptations and modernizations that have continued at the rate of one or two a decade down to the present. Here are my thoughts on the ones I’m aware of. If I don’t say it’s a miniseries, assume it’s movie length (two hours ish) or tv movie length.
Continue reading “Minireviews of Sense and Sensibility Adaptations”Habemus Papam, Americanus Est
Here’s a profile of him written before his election: https://collegeofcardinalsreport.com/cardinals/robert-francis-prevost/
His twitter handle is @drprevost (feed into xcancel.com or some similar website if you don’t have a twitter account.) There, he mostly retweets things others have said about one or two hot button issues (immigration, ecology), while seeming pointedly disinterested in other issues popular with the same people.
He’s been accused of mishandling sex abuse cases as bishop of Chiclayo, although I will say that I don’t see how a US-born bishop in charge of a Peruvian diocese would ever be in full control of the diocesan bureaucracy: they would never fully accept an outsider as one of their own.
He’s taken the name Leo XIV. The previous Leo was best known for this encyclical.
Golden Age Mystery Writers: A Quick Guide to the Big Guns
Pretty much all of these authors have good and bad works, and most have a point at which they stop being consistently good, although possibly by that point you’re fond enough of their work to keep reading. Here’s my advice about what to read by them. Please note that I assume you already know these people starting writing nearly a hundred years ago, and the most prolific of them died about fifty years ago. Their beliefs, prejudices and assumptions were different from those common today. This is a big post, and I’m not going to cudgel my brains trying to remember which books contain scenes which would be considered offensive.
Continue reading “Golden Age Mystery Writers: A Quick Guide to the Big Guns”80th Anniversary of Audie Murphy Facing Off the German Tanks at Colmar
From the citation for the Medal of Honor he earned for these actions:
Second Lt. Murphy commanded Company B, which was attacked by six tanks and waves of infantry. Second Lt. Murphy ordered his men to withdraw to prepared positions in a woods, while he remained forward at his command post and continued to give fire directions to the artillery by telephone. Behind him, to his right, one of our tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn. Its crew withdrew to the woods. Second Lt. Murphy continued to direct artillery fire which killed large numbers of the advancing enemy infantry. With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, 2d Lt. Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer, which was in danger of blowing up at any moment, and employed its .50-caliber machine gun against the enemy. He was alone and exposed to German fire from three sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans and caused their infantry attack to waver. The enemy tanks, losing infantry support, began to fall back. For an hour the Germans tried every available weapon to eliminate 2d Lt. Murphy, but he continued to hold his position and wiped out a squad which was trying to creep up unnoticed on his right flank. Germans reached as close as 10 yards, only to be mowed down by his fire. He received a leg wound, but ignored it and continued the singlehanded fight until his ammunition was exhausted. He then made his way to his company, refused medical attention, and organized the company in a counterattack which forced the Germans to withdraw. His directing of artillery fire wiped out many of the enemy; he killed or wounded about 50. Second Lt. Murphy’s indomitable courage and his refusal to give an inch of ground saved his company from possible encirclement and destruction, and enabled it to hold the woods which had been the enemy’s objective.
Continue reading “80th Anniversary of Audie Murphy Facing Off the German Tanks at Colmar”State of the Author, Start of 2025
My plans for the New Year are always kind of vague, because “Mann tracht un Gott lacht” (Man plans, and God laughs).
Continue reading “State of the Author, Start of 2025”Weird Wednesday: Google Thinks Its Hardware Is Talking to An Alternate Universe
https://www.newsweek.com/google-quantum-chip-parallel-universes-willow-1999224
Yawn, wake me up when they find that alternate universe with all the airships, and good film adaptations of Georgette Heyer.
How to Use Claude.ai for Cleaning Up Transcriptions
This article is primarily about the Claude.ai feature called “projects,” but Dibakar Ghosh’s example project is about using Claude to cleanup the nasty, incoherent speech-to-text output that Word and similar programs spit out. I’ve tested the commands involved in the free version of Claude, and they work reasonably well. I still went back and reworded and expanded a bunch of stuff after I used it, but it was nice having something that would reliably cut out the nonsense words and repetitions and add some kind of punctuation. Here are the commands; just copy and paste into Claude’s chat window, and upload a short document with your latest chunk of dictation. As always with AI, check the company’s privacy and training policies before feeding it anything of a personal or sensitive nature.
Continue reading “How to Use Claude.ai for Cleaning Up Transcriptions”Dan Zeidler Has a Substack
Dan is a writer in a Discord I belong to, who writes fantasy and military science fiction. He’s a cool guy who designs his own starships in Blender, worldbuilds his universes a mile deep, and has done Roman-themed historical reenactments. His first substack essay ties in to his interest in history, and deals with the ancient Egyptian game of Senet.
Jaglion Press 