Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Other


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No opportunity for boredom

The big news tonight was that the local parson has been quarantined, and his assistant hospitalized, being positive to COVID-19.
And, being an atheist, and having been for forty years and then some, the thing should not worry me – apart from the human compassion for people having a hard time.
But…

Seven days ago my brother met the vice-parson. They kept at a safe distance and were both wearing face masks, so this is not a “proper contact” according to the emergency number we called as soon as we got the news.
No symptoms have surfaced so far – but my brother’s been nursing a bad cold this last ten days.

Bottom line – we are sitting tight, isolating at home, and counting the days.
We are also making plans to creatively ration our provisions – I was supposed to go on a supply run tomorrow. So we’ll have to manage with the little that’s left in our pantry, and the supply drop a friend will provide tomorrow.
So yes, fear, quarantine, and rationing.

Looks like 2020 is getting ready to close with a bang for the Mana Brothers.
I’ll keep you posted.

Also, I’ll need to have a word with God when this thing is over.


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Career advice

For a lark, after dinner, I took the British Government test for assessing my skills and for career orientation.
Turns out I should be an actor or an editor.
Now this is a surprise…

Surely 20/40K pounds a year would be great.
Pity I live in the middle of nowhere, in a place in which you either make wine or you make bottles, corks or labels.


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Diana Rigg, 1938-2020

I have just learned about the death of Dame Diana Rigg, that was Emma Peel in The Avengers, without a doubt the actress and the character that have had the strongest and longest lasting influence on me, under every respect.

Today she’s mostly remembered for her role in Game of Thrones (my goodness!) but she had a long and respected career in the Royal Shakespeare Company, and was the star in the proto-steampunk Assassination Bureau, Ltd. and in a very funny horror movie featuring Vincent Price (Theater of Blood).
She also was, of course, Mrs James Bond.

http://www.kobal-collection.com Title: ASSASSINATION BUREAU, THE ¥ Pers: RIGG, DIANA / DOBTCHEFF, VERNON ¥ Year: 1968 ¥ Dir: DEARDEN, BASIL ¥ Ref: ASS002AE ¥ Credit: [ PARAMOUNT / THE KOBAL COLLECTION ] ASSASSINATION BUREAU, THE (1968) , January 1, 1968 Photo by Kobal/PARAMOUNT/The Kobal Collection/WireImage.com To license this image (10517504), contact The Kobal Collection/WireImage.com

I feel like I lost a much loved relation.


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Not exactly real

My mother was born in 1938, so she was a teenager in the late ’40s and early ’50s, when teenagers were not yet a thing, but anyway… she was an adolescent when the big thing were movies, and she was absolutely in love with movies. In my mother’s family the rule was that even if money was short, there should be books and films. So my mother went and saw all the classics, Captain Blood and The Sacrlett Pimpernel, and all those.
She had to leave the room during The Four Feathers, because the humiliations the character was going through broke her heart.
Her favorite actor was Tyrone Power.

She would buy magazines, such as gossip/celebrity rag “Confidenze”, cut the actor’s and actresses photos, and stick them in albums. We found a stack of those, when we cleared my grandmother’s attic, forty years ago. Hundreds of pictures of classic Hollywood actors and actresses, and the occasional singer (Sinatra was a big hit with mom).
I don’t know what happened to those albums – maybe my uncle got them.

My mother would often say that for a girl in the early ’50s, movies stars were something unreal, the line between character and actor very thin.

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I’m a winner, I’m a sinner, do you want my autograph?

And yes, that’s a quote from Supertramp’s Breakfast in America – but I’m not going to talk about that (great record, incidentally, part of my growing up etc.).
It’s lunchtime, not breakfast time, and as I’m skipping lunch, I’ve caught a small bit of silly fluff on the socials that made me feel like writing a letter to the director.
As we old people do.

A local influencer posted on Facebook the reason he dislikes ebooks

how do I get an autograph from the author? Do I ask the guy to scrawl his name with a sharpie on my e-reader?

Now that’s a problem, ain’t it?

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Color change

And then you wake up and find your blog color palette has been changed.
Not that I had anything to do about it – apparently during the night WordPress changed its “website identity” settings, and changed my dark brown accents to pale blue, as you probably can see.

I find it ugly and, also, irritating.
An off-handed reminder that by hosting Karavansara on their free servers I am not, after all, the owner of this place, nor do I really have any control of this blog.

Now I’ll have to throw away some time trying to work out a way to bring back the look of “my” blog.
I have checked out the new tools and options – now WordPress comes with a series of pre-set color palettes that are, in general, uniformly ugly.
And I mean eye-bleeding ugly.
But hey, now you can set your look-and-feel with a single click, like a good chimp.

I am quite obviously turning into an old man, rambling about the good old days, when we could set our own blog colors and fonts…


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Project Gutenberg can’t be reached from Italy

The big news of the moment is, the Italian authorities have sealed all accesses to Project Gutenberg, the famous open library of classical texts – if you are in Italy, what you get when you hit gutenberg.org is a warning sign from the Guardia di Finanza, that the website you are trying to reach violated copyright laws.

What’s up?, you might ask.
Well, it turns out our authorities have cracked down on those websites where you can illegally download ebooks, and in particular those that allow the downloading of magazines and daily papers.
Now, how to find these websites?
Apparently the investigators made a list of all the URLs that were traded on certain Telegram channels.
Project Gutenberg was mentioned, so Project Gutenberg was blocked.

The situation is still pretty confused, but if on one hand our authorities are currently looking like dorks, and all those that were accessing the Gutenberg archives to do research, translations or out of sheer curiosity are left out in the cold, it is also true that this is a fine example of what can happen to our freedom in a few minutes.
Ironic, considering how vocal some people are in this moment about conspiracies involving viruses, 5G cell fields and Bill Gates.
But of course a lot of those never read a book in their life, certainly not on Project Gutenberg.

ADDENDUM: in the time it took me to write this post, the Gutenberg pages were unlocked. They can be dorks, but they are fast on the uptake.
Better this way.