Celebrating the TV of my youth...
some kids tv classics
Posted by 70s 80s 90s kids this is how we rolled. on Saturday, 24 October 2015
Living, as I have done for most of the past 17 years, just 5km or so from the battlefields of Waterloo, means that I have visited the site often.
Only recently, however, following last year's commemorations of the 200th anniversary of the battle, and a visit in March 2016 to the excellent new visitor centre, did its full ongoing significance become clearer to me, not least the suffering of the wounded and dead, many of whose final resting places have never been discovered...RIP all who fought there.
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Theodore Zeldin believes in the powerfully transformative role of conversation:
"Individuals are no longer what they used to be, each is unique. That makes a big difference to how they work. Each one is an enigma. There are six billion people whom we need to discover. We are now in the same position as the scientists of the last century, discovering the different elements and molecules of the natural world. So there is no need to feel lost or aimless. There is a wonderful adventure before us."
If the past is replayed too fast, life seems futile, and humanity resembles water flowing from a tap, straight down the drain. A film of history for today needs to be in slow motion, showing every person who ever lived as a star, though dimly visible in a night sky, a history still unexplored - Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity
A call to action. Time to explore these unexplored histories together.
In 2015, the millennium development goals (MDGs) – launched in 2000 to make global progress on poverty, education, health, hunger and the environment – expired. UN member states are finalising the sustainable development goals (SDGs) that will replace them, so the Guardian analysed what the SDGs aim to achieve, how they differ from the MDGs and assessed whether the MDGs made much progress.
Imagining not allowing our "projections" to hold us back, as argued in this thoughtful piece? The idea that we are often very wrong in the assumptions we make about what other people are thinking and feeling strikes a chord. Is there a word for "false empathy" - i.e. for trying to put ourself into the other's shoes, but coming to completely wrong conclusions? Maybe we'd benefit from "cognitive reframing".
So often we seem to impute to others far worse feelings and motives than we subsequently learn were really there, and often isn't the truth that the other person was focused on his/her own problems and, far than condemning us, was probably not thinking about us at all? Even if/when they were, what harm does it really do us?
Children’s book illustrator and Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak, in an NPR Fresh Air interview less than a year before his death in 2012, made a heartwarming call to "live your life, live your life, live your life".
Azeem Azhar in conversation with Yuval Harari on how the advances in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence will transform humans and human society. Fascinating - and worrying - ideas include:
Even major news providers now go for niche over only mainstream publishing. Niche publishing is at the heart of what Halcyon is about. What's the point of us rehashing stories you'd have already read, often supported by high quality commentary, in the established media?
No, our way is to point you towards stories with universal appeal, whose relevance persists over time (i.e. we are not trying to be a pseudo-news broadcaster) and which touch on our deepest shared problems and possible solutions to those problems.
This way, fleas like Halcyon can compete with the elephants.
...Aloud". Relative latecomer, perfect and tiny; seeping into my senses in my imperfect and tiny Mini arriving at the tennis club during the summer of 1986, just before calm convention came fat, content and unexpectedly into view on the horizon, arrived and stayed.
Grown ever deeper roots down the years. Wistful rather than yearning. Moment(s) in time. Ultimate line is the ultimate line, and, I'm living it a little more - if not outwardly every day yet as I should - then steadily and a little more nonetheless, for which I'm grateful...
Aristotle coined the term "phronesis", meaning practical intelligence. It's the kind of wisdom that emerges from the long training of mind, body, character and engagement with a tradition.
This chimes perhaps with Malcolm Gladwell's assertion that acquiring true expertise in a discipline requires an average of 10,000 hours of practice.
Karl-Erik Sveiby on aboriginal cultures:
We can be at our most reflective, and perhaps society could be at its most reflexive, around St John's Eve and the other, similar seven calendar points...
Goin' ridin' down by Avalon
Would you meet me in the country
In the summertime in England
Would you meet me?
In the Church of St. John . . .
Down by Avalon . . . .
- from Summertime in England, by Van Morrison
I first heard the album Odessa at New Year 1978, and it filled me with excitement immediately. Its eponymous title track was no.1 in my many (unsent, but circulated within a very small, select group) Radio Caroline Personal Top 30 listings.
What attracted me too was the coincidence that the opening lines of my then favourite song - "Fourteenth of February, eighteen ninety nine, the British ship Veronica was lost without a sign" - so closely echoed my then favourite film, Picnic at Hanging Rock, set exactly 12 months later, on Valentine's Day 1900.
According to Open Culture, Orwell's Animal Farm was almost never published. The manuscript barely survived the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, and then initially T.S. Eliot (an important editor at Faber & Faber) and other publishers rejected the book. It eventually came to see the light of day but, reportedly, Animal Farm still can’t be legally read in China, Burma and North Korea, or across large parts of the Islamic world.
However, the Internet Archive offers free access to audio versions of Animal Farm and Orwell’s other major classic, 1984.
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Please see below an evolving set of forecasts for 2019. This is work in progress, due for completion before the end of January 2019.
Introduction
Yann Arthus-Bertrand's movie, Home was an environmentally conscious tour of the planet through panoramic vistas that focuses on human impact - our mistakes and possibilities for improvement.
Yann also answered a few questions for the TEDBlog by email, going beyond his TEDTalk to give insights into his attempts to document and save our home and humanity.
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I attended several TEDx events over the past decade and viewed/listened to many other TED talks. While I have paid TED less and less attention in recent years, as I've increasingly found the format to be rather overproduced and formulaic, there have undoubtedly been some thought-provoking talks along the way, including, for me, the following:
