Thom's Link Emporium - 0009 - 18 March 2022

Links

• Five books about the BBC. The BBC is such a fascinating institution, fusty and imaginative at times, bold and groundbreaking at others. But I reflected, as Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo leave the BBC that they could probably charge something in the region of the license fee just for their podcast. It’d be pricey, but I’d consider paying it myself. Shows the value you get from the BBC compared to the pay-for-every-subscription free-for-all emerging elsewhere.

Thinking of which, if you fancy subscribing based on that throwaway comment about the value of the BBC, here’s how you’d go about it.

• John Hoare's wonderful Dirty Feed blog looks into the reuse of some Red Dwarf sets in series 5. I originally added a snarky “back when it was still good) to this link, but I share John’s weariness with repeatedly going over the quality of those later shows.

• Albrecht Dürer was really good at drawing pillows:

(from the long-running and still marvellous Swissmiss blog)

• I admit that I play the lottery semi-regularly. I understand the maths, I really do, but it’s fun to see it play out in this simulator that plays the UK lottery 1000 times every second. There’s something mesmerising about watching the money pour away while the centuries tick by. There’s some interesting things to take from it. By chance, you’re likely to pick up literally thousands of smaller prizes before you win the main one. I enjoyed this in the comments:

Can we run this simulation multiple times with different numbers to find out which are the luckiest numbers?

• And while we’re thinking about statistics, here’s an absolute load of data taken from people sharing the output of their daily Worldle games. It does seem as though people are getting worse (or it’s getting harder?), but it’s equally (if not much more) likely that people are just more willing to share their failures.

• Vladimir Putin has fallen into the dictator trap. There’s something slightly comforting about this story (assuming firstly Putin’s downfall, and secondly that he doesn’t take us all with him) but it’s much less comforting when you realise that most dictators are replaced with either another dictator or years of military rule. Anyway, this seems like a fair assessment of where we are:

Autocrats such as Putin eventually succumb to what may be called the “dictator trap.” The strategies they use to stay in power tend to trigger their eventual downfall. Rather than being long-term planners, many make catastrophic short-term errors—the kinds of errors that would likely have been avoided in democratic systems.

Listening

• I find it weird to think this Stormzy show in Newcastle was the tour that would have followed on from the Glastonbury show I was at two and a half years ago had the pandemic not intervened

• I’ve been really enjoying the album Ants From Up There by Black Country, New Road (Spotify,  Music, YouTube) - a bold album that's rock at its heart, but with strokes of jazz, folk and even minimalist classical music brushed across it. And, yes, that makes it sound a lot like a prog album (and I accept there's an argument to be made there) but it feels very natural and unpretentious. My favourite album of the year so far.

Reading

• For months now, I’ve been reading The The Making of the British Landscape by Francis Pryor. It’s a wonderful book and I’m enjoying the detail of it immensely. It has a huge scope (the subtitle is "How We Have Transformed the Land, from Prehistory to Today") but Pryor explains it in a very immediate and enjoyable way. Those of a certain age will remember Francis Pryor from Time Team

Watching

• The Baftas took place this week, and I didn’t watch them but I thought as usual they were pretty sensible. Glad to see a lot of recognition of Dune. I’m yet to see The Power of the Dog as well as a few others, but Summer of Soul is a very deserving winner for documentary.

Quote

“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”

George Santayana, Quoted in this Lawrence Freedman piece on Russia's potential for negotiating peace