Consortium of Seven: Year 2

    Two full years of Consortium of Seven: A Daily Blog! We've all had a really good time and we hope to keeping having a good time for a long time! Last year around this time we switched from  the Blogger site where we did the first year to this site.   Now we've moved on to the Year 3 site .      

Sadly, Scotland is not known for its terrific statistics around healthy weight gain & good diet, in fact quite the opposite. We do however manage to have a sense of humour about it. Sometimes this is reflected in the art we make. What is also reflected is the spare & austere diet of the past. An island nation still reliant on a large-scale fishing industry & an all too willing participant in the hunting business – at least if you’re a landowner – our climate (not much sun, plenty of rain, probably cold) doesn’t lend us anything more than simple fruit & vegetables that could quite honestly survive if you planted them on concrete. This has meant that many of our multicultural successes have been in the food industry. Our food isn’t great, so we do one of two things. We either deep-fry it in batter or we import it & the people whose families first brought the better food here are genius at it. Our Indian, Chinese, Italian & increasingly Mexican restaurant & tak...

    Another week already?!    Too much going on for me at work, medical concerns, and then the remnants of Ida tearing through to make Wednesday and Thursday a bit of a mess. As a result, this is likely to be more a case of quick looks at things on my list to check out.       Disney's ticked me off by sticking to a theatrical release only for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings , a wholly irresponsible thing to do during a resurgent pandemic. This makes it the first Marvel Cinematic Universe release since 2008 which I won't have seen while it's new. Evading spoilers for a few days is a reasonable aim, but not for the length of time involved here. I'm peeved and disappointed, which I say both as a nearly life-long Marvel fan and as a much more recent Disney shareholder.        Moving on to brighter things...     While it's been available since mid-July, I've only just started to look at McCartney 3...

 Happy fall, everyone!  Fall has started here in the North Hemisphere as of yesterday, September 1st, so now it's time for falling temperatures and spooky movies and cider and all all that good stuff.  I've a good amount of horror in this week's offerings so let's get to it. _______________________________ Let's start with something that might seem a little silly but really isn't  Part of the excellent run of Pocket Books that expanded on the Star Trek (original series) stories, this is a tale of Kirk, Scott, Chekov and Sulu stranded on a shuttle and desperately struggling to survive and passing the time with telling the tale of how they all tried to beat famously the unbeatable Kobayashi Maru test.  Some of it gets interestingly dark (the Sulu story is sad as hell), some of it is just plain funny (Scotty, for instance) and then there is Chekov completely misunderstanding the assignment and both winning the scenario and losing. Author Julia Ecklar is a Hugo-winn...

  Everybody's doing themed mystery series these days, with titles that are puns, catchphrases, and so on. But two writers who were doing that a long time ago were Rita Mae Brown and Stan Cutler. I came across a mwention of Cutler's Rough Cut recently among the books listed in They Died in Vain , a collection of short reviews of overlooked or forgotten books.             I remember Cutler's Hollywood mysteries from the 90s, and just reserved three out of four at my local libary. Well no, not my local library but the statewide network of libraries which is the modern version of what used to be called "interlibrary loan." Overlooked books require a bit more searching than bestsellers. And I found the fourth book on eBay for two bucks plus shipping. So I'm ready to go through the four books featuring Cutler's team of two mystery solvers.  It's been so long since I read these that I couldn't remember the order of the mysteries, but a book-rela...

      This week, we're looking at the 1933 Greta Garbo film "Queen Christina." In my opinion, people focus a great deal on the scenes which involve hints of bisexuality and  gender flexibility, so much so that they overlook the film's other virtues.    At the sae time, I do see why people care so much about these issues. The film edged in just before the enforcement of the previously all-talk 1930 code recommended by the Hays Commission. This change, which happened just after thr release of "Queen Christina," put the kibosh on pre-Code references to sexual matters.  Ninety years ago,  lesbians and other LGBT+ folk really had to search hard to find positive role models.    And of course this Garbo movie is a biopic, so how the real Swedish ruler lived her life is to some extent a matter of record. Next week, we'll take a short look at all this gender and sexuality stuff. Wondering about the title "More Regal Than Royal" for today's post? ...

 by whiteray I had a huge James Bond jones when I was a kid.  I was eleven in 1964 – in sixth grade – when the growing popularity of the novels by Ian Fleming and the first two films based on those novels, Dr. No and From Russia With Love , burst into full-blown Bondmania with the release of the third film, Goldfinger .  I wanted to see the movie, but my parents weren’t sure. After all, the ads looked like they showed a naked woman painted gold. I won’t deny the attraction that held, but it was truly the story of 007 saving the world – or at least the world’s gold supply – that grabbed me. But the folks said no, a little regretfully, I’ve always thought.  They also weren’t sure that I should be allowed to read Fleming’s novels; Dad bought a copy of Goldfinger to see if it would be appropriate for the somewhat precocious urchin I was, but he read it in the evening, just before retiring, and he read at most four or five pages at a time. I despaired as I saw his...