Week in review: Week to 29 November
Nov. 30th, 2025 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. Having finished last week's post by saying I was feeling well-rested and energetic for the first time in a while, I immediately came down with the Dreaded Lurgi, which has been hanging around all week trying out various combinations of coughs, sneezes, and interesting mucus. I'm not sure if I caught it from someone at the concert, but sitting in a cold hall for several hours and getting rained on as I left probably didn't help my immune system, and in retrospect I wish I'd at least thought to wear a hat. (I'm not really self-conscious about my thinning hair when it comes to appearance, but it is getting to the point where the top of my head feels the cold much more easily.)
. Consequently of the lurgi, I had to miss the weekly board game meet again this week.
I did, in the brief space on the weekend before the lurgi struck, get to play some board games with friends, including Hellboy: The Board Game. It's a co-operative game, where each player takes the role of Hellboy or one of his allies to investigate a spooky location and defeat the monsters lurking there. There were a lot of moving parts to keep track of, and it was one of those occasions where in retrospect we realised we'd overlooked several things that would have affected the outcome if we'd applied them correctly, but we had fun and that's the important thing.
. On the plus side, I got a lot of reading done -- which is just as well, because I signed up for an unwise number of reading challenges this year, and had fallen badly behind on several of them. Apart from the progress on the Book Chain, I also caught up on the Buzzwords challenge and made up some ground on the monthly random challenge.
For the September Buzzwords prompt ("Events"), I read Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, an Australian classic I'd never read with a famous film adaptation I've never seen. It begins with the eponymous picnic, a class excursion at which three students and a teacher go missing, and continues on to depict the unfolding aftereffects on the school and the surrounding community. I found the prose style more approachable than I somehow expected from a classic (possibly because, although it's set in 1900, it was written significantly more recently), and I -- "enjoyed" might not be the right word, because it's not exactly a happy story; it starts with a shocking event and for some of the characters things just get worse. If I were the kind of reader who consciously investigates Themes in what I'm reading, I think I'd have quite a bit to work with here; there's definitely something going on about the relationship of white Australians with the landscape they've inserted themselves into.
For the November Buzzwords prompt ("Never"), I read The Man Who Never Was, Ewen Montagu's memoir of his involvement in Operation Mincemeat, a deception operation carried out during the Second World War in which a dead body was dressed up as a British officer carrying sensitive military documents and planted where the documents would fall into the hands of the Germans and provide them with false information about the British plans for the next stage of the war. The edition I read had a new foreword, added around forty years after the original publication, which pointed out that Montagu's version contained some significant omissions because there were aspects of the story that were still classified or politically sensitive (and was only published at all because the authorities became aware that a journalist was on the trail of the story and they needed to get an official account out before the unofficial account broke).
This made me curious enough to check whether there were any more recent and complete accounts available, and Libby had Ben Macintyre's Operation Mincemeat, so I went straight on and read that as well. Macintyre's account is more detailed and includes much (if not, who knows, all) of the key information Montagu omitted, as well as information that Montagu himself wouldn't have known. It also, having more distance from the subject, is a lot more willing to point out the weak points in the plan and all the times when it might have failed. Like a significant proportion of the books I've read about the War, I came away with the impression that the operation's success was due to the weaknesses of the German command as well as to the strengths of the Allied operatives.
For the October random book selection, I'm reading The Deeper Meaning of Liff, "a dictionary of things there aren't any words for yet, but there ought to be" by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. Perhaps inevitably, uneven in results: some entries prompt chuckles and nods of recognition, some prompt winces, quite a few are just whatever. I doubt I'll actually use any of the words, even for the things and experiences that struck a chord, but of course that isn't really the point. I've also -- the occupational hazard of being a jackdaw for trivia -- spotted an entry for something that there is already a word for.
. I've been vaguely intending for some time to expand my exercise repertoire beyond a brisk walk, and one of the things I've been considering trying out is Zombies, Run!, an app which makes your exercise part of an ongoing story about a small group of humans trying to survive the zombie apocalypse.
In retrospect, trying it out while still recovering from a respiratory illness was not the brightest choice I've ever made, but I found it worthwhile enough that I intend to give it another shot some time when it won't result in me spending the next half an hour wheezing.
I appreciated the fact that the first chapter makes a point of saying that, the title notwithstanding, running is not necessary and that if you can manage to move faster than a slow shamble you'll probably do fine. (Indeed, even that's not strictly required, as the app also has an option for using it in conjunction with stationary exercise, though in that case there's probably more of a disconnect with the story the app is telling.) I essayed a run for the high-impact sections (i.e. the bits where the companion voice goes "There's a zombie right behind you! Run for your life!") and stuck with a brisk walk the rest of the time, and that seemed to be sufficient.
. On an evening when I didn't feel like reading, I watched an episode of The Muppet Show -- which turned out to be the one where they have to try and keep the show going without Kermit because he's at home with the flu.
. Consequently of the lurgi, I had to miss the weekly board game meet again this week.
I did, in the brief space on the weekend before the lurgi struck, get to play some board games with friends, including Hellboy: The Board Game. It's a co-operative game, where each player takes the role of Hellboy or one of his allies to investigate a spooky location and defeat the monsters lurking there. There were a lot of moving parts to keep track of, and it was one of those occasions where in retrospect we realised we'd overlooked several things that would have affected the outcome if we'd applied them correctly, but we had fun and that's the important thing.
. On the plus side, I got a lot of reading done -- which is just as well, because I signed up for an unwise number of reading challenges this year, and had fallen badly behind on several of them. Apart from the progress on the Book Chain, I also caught up on the Buzzwords challenge and made up some ground on the monthly random challenge.
For the September Buzzwords prompt ("Events"), I read Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, an Australian classic I'd never read with a famous film adaptation I've never seen. It begins with the eponymous picnic, a class excursion at which three students and a teacher go missing, and continues on to depict the unfolding aftereffects on the school and the surrounding community. I found the prose style more approachable than I somehow expected from a classic (possibly because, although it's set in 1900, it was written significantly more recently), and I -- "enjoyed" might not be the right word, because it's not exactly a happy story; it starts with a shocking event and for some of the characters things just get worse. If I were the kind of reader who consciously investigates Themes in what I'm reading, I think I'd have quite a bit to work with here; there's definitely something going on about the relationship of white Australians with the landscape they've inserted themselves into.
For the November Buzzwords prompt ("Never"), I read The Man Who Never Was, Ewen Montagu's memoir of his involvement in Operation Mincemeat, a deception operation carried out during the Second World War in which a dead body was dressed up as a British officer carrying sensitive military documents and planted where the documents would fall into the hands of the Germans and provide them with false information about the British plans for the next stage of the war. The edition I read had a new foreword, added around forty years after the original publication, which pointed out that Montagu's version contained some significant omissions because there were aspects of the story that were still classified or politically sensitive (and was only published at all because the authorities became aware that a journalist was on the trail of the story and they needed to get an official account out before the unofficial account broke).
This made me curious enough to check whether there were any more recent and complete accounts available, and Libby had Ben Macintyre's Operation Mincemeat, so I went straight on and read that as well. Macintyre's account is more detailed and includes much (if not, who knows, all) of the key information Montagu omitted, as well as information that Montagu himself wouldn't have known. It also, having more distance from the subject, is a lot more willing to point out the weak points in the plan and all the times when it might have failed. Like a significant proportion of the books I've read about the War, I came away with the impression that the operation's success was due to the weaknesses of the German command as well as to the strengths of the Allied operatives.
For the October random book selection, I'm reading The Deeper Meaning of Liff, "a dictionary of things there aren't any words for yet, but there ought to be" by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. Perhaps inevitably, uneven in results: some entries prompt chuckles and nods of recognition, some prompt winces, quite a few are just whatever. I doubt I'll actually use any of the words, even for the things and experiences that struck a chord, but of course that isn't really the point. I've also -- the occupational hazard of being a jackdaw for trivia -- spotted an entry for something that there is already a word for.
. I've been vaguely intending for some time to expand my exercise repertoire beyond a brisk walk, and one of the things I've been considering trying out is Zombies, Run!, an app which makes your exercise part of an ongoing story about a small group of humans trying to survive the zombie apocalypse.
In retrospect, trying it out while still recovering from a respiratory illness was not the brightest choice I've ever made, but I found it worthwhile enough that I intend to give it another shot some time when it won't result in me spending the next half an hour wheezing.
I appreciated the fact that the first chapter makes a point of saying that, the title notwithstanding, running is not necessary and that if you can manage to move faster than a slow shamble you'll probably do fine. (Indeed, even that's not strictly required, as the app also has an option for using it in conjunction with stationary exercise, though in that case there's probably more of a disconnect with the story the app is telling.) I essayed a run for the high-impact sections (i.e. the bits where the companion voice goes "There's a zombie right behind you! Run for your life!") and stuck with a brisk walk the rest of the time, and that seemed to be sufficient.
. On an evening when I didn't feel like reading, I watched an episode of The Muppet Show -- which turned out to be the one where they have to try and keep the show going without Kermit because he's at home with the flu.
no subject
Date: 2025-11-30 03:24 am (UTC)I remember reading "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (and/or seeing the film) at school, and disliking it, but I remember nothing more about it than that. I have a feeling there was a vague sense of unpleasantness coupled with a lack of explanation or anything actually happening, which was profoundly unsatisfying to my adolescent mind; doubtless I was missing all the intended subtext, whatever it was...
I also remember being given "The Meaning of Liff" --yours is probably a sequel-- as a present by some member of my family, and finding it disappointingly unfunny ("just whatever"), given its pedigree :-(
I assume I have probably mentioned "Operation Mincemeat" the musical in the past... it has made its way into the West End since the days when I saw it, and thanks to that continued success is now running an offshoot on Broadway. Ewan Montagu is featured as one of the major characters in that, apparently with the blessing of his descendants who feel he would have appreciated the joke.
https://theatre.reviews/review/operation-mincemeat/
no subject
Date: 2025-11-30 09:24 am (UTC)One of the things I did know about Picnic at Hanging Rock going in was that it famously never explains what did happen to the people who disappeared, so I was prepared for that. There's a kind of vague hint that it was maybe something supernatural, but even that's never narrowed down.
(I gather that the first draft of the novel included a scene at the end which depicted what happened, but the author decided or was persuaded to leave that out of the final novel. She kept the manuscript to herself while she was alive, but some people got to read it after she died. I've never heard that any of them thought the novel would have been better with it included.)
no subject
Date: 2025-11-30 12:13 pm (UTC)on Picnic at Hanging Rock: there is a truly dreadful 'extra chapter' that was published many years later which kind of explains things. In a really weird and unsatisfying way. Sadly, I did not make reading notes on it so I can't actually tell you what happens. Except that it was tonally very different.
edit to add: and now I realise that you mentioned that, and I am too tired and missed it. So yes, the extra chapter does not improve the novel. Interesting in the way a train wreck is.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-01 04:45 am (UTC)I can see why I would have found that frustrating...