Screen roundup

I managed to miss all the last few David Attenborough BBC wildlife documentaries -- there seems to be one along every minute nowadays -- but caught the latest one on Sunday evening. ( Read more... )

"World on Fire" started out well and has continued excellent, with new depths unfolding with every episode. ( Read more... )

I never saw the feature-film adaptation of "The Name of the Rose"; I read the novel and didn't particularly care for it, which is often a good thing when it comes to screen versions. (Great books rarely make great films, and conversely if you are particularly fond of a book then someone else's vision of it rarely accords with your own.) The first episode of the new BBC adaptation looked promising, but I'm having increasing difficulty in following what's going on :-(
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I watched the film adaptation of "Reach for the Sky" with Kenneth More, and was rather disappointed. I'd assumed it would be better than that, and indeed thought I'd seen it before and enjoyed it. But again it suffers from a tendentious narration problem (in fact they've actually created a fictitious best-friend character to do the narrating, which doesn't work very well). Parts of the film are excellent, and I think some of the problem is that they just tried to fit in too much of Bader's life story; ironically it also doesn't help that I know Paul Brickhill's original book too well and was aware of the things that had been altered and left out.( Read more... )

Rebound!

I spent Sunday in the multi-stage process of applying new endpapers and a strengthened and hinged cloth spine to my disintegrating hardback manuscript book. (click to view whole image)



The results would have been neater if I had had a sharp craft knife instead of scissors (I threw away my old disposable one because it was getting too blunt), if I'd bothered to construct headbands and turn in the spine over them (or just turn in the ends of the spine), and if I'd proceeded to the fourth step of pasting down siding-papers to make the boards look prettier and hide the raw edge of the cloth. I may yet live to regret this final omission if it ends up fraying a lot from handling, but I really didn't want to have to deal with A4-sized pieces of damp millboard, which tend to warp horribly when wet...

At least the boards, which were dangling by a literal thread (or two or three), are now securely fixed back onto the rest of the binding, which was in pretty good condition. Now I just have to get used to a new search image...

I have no idea where those scraps of cloth originated. Possibly one of my mother's home-made dresses, though I have no recollection of anything quite that... spotty!