HISTORY'S PEOPLE

I finished reading Bill Bryson's One Summer last week, and started reading Margaret MacMillan's History's People:  Personalities and the Past, based on the Massey Lectures she gave last year.  It's about leaders and such.  I noticed that when she talked about Mackenzie King she dated Canada's conscription referendum at 1940, when it was actually 1942! (You'd think an editor would have caught that goof.)

Wednesday night the History Discussion Group screened the video of the MGM movie The Good Earth, which I saw for the third time. (I'd borrowed it from the library.) Debi the host and I were the only people who saw it, because I was careless and forgot to post the event till a few days before!  But we had a good time anyhow.

I've started watching The Adventure of English on Youtube.  It's a British documentary series about the history of the English language, hosted by The South Bank Show host Melvyn Bragg. (The puppet satire Spitting Image made fun of Bragg's post-nasal drip, always showing him with nasal spray!)

I just figured out that I can do a zoom-in on the window of my Safari browser by pressing the plus sign with the command key. (I discovered it by accident, pressing the minus sign with the command key and getting a zoom-out!) So I reduced the browser's minimum font size from 24 to 18, and when I read the movie box-office figures at http://boxofficemojo.com --I'm a geek about things like box-office figures, though I pay them less attention than I used to--now I can see the movie title and its budget at the same time without shifting the scroll bar.

I finally finished reading Why Read Moby-Dick? a book John Snow gave me by Nathaniel Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea). Moby-Dick, I imagine, is one of those books whose meaning deepens with each successive reading.  He might have talked more about Elijah, the old sailor they meet in Nantucket who warns them that Ahab is nuts and the Pequod is doomed.