Aka Monday 6th
July - Sunday 12th July 2020
…another quiet week
this week, back in the office, which is nice, a change of pace and scenery…and
when I wasn’t at work, I was watching lots of Spookyastronauts, who is a Youtuber who makes videos about
Horror films (and related issues). Spooky does a great job in conveying her
love for Horror, providing helpful recommendations and discussing the issues
that Horror films raise. And she does a great job in making her videos feel
like a chat between friends, with them feeling nature, but with obvious care
and attention gone into them. Well worth watching.
Also well worth
watching is ‘Doom Patrol’ Season 1, which I picked up this week:
…the team behind
this series have done a marvelous job of catching the spirit, the humanity,
strangeness and weirdness of all the different comic book versions of the Doom Patrol and combining them into a unified whole. And as a Grant Morrison fanboy
it’s great seeing his (and Richard Case, who illustrated most of Morrison's Doom
Patrol run) contributions to the Doom Patrol come alive. Just an amazing series,
with nearly note perfect scripts, cast, direction, sets, costumes, etc, and
possible the best comic book TV show ever (although the Harley Quinn cartoon series comes a very close second).
The postman
delivered Mick Herron’s ‘The Catch’ and Noelle Stevenson’s ‘The Fire Never Goes Out’ arrived, both of which I’m very much looking forward to reading (below is 'The Fire... in it's dust jacket and without, and I'm not sure which is the best cover!):
…and I got this
week’s New Comic Book Day comics and the latest Electronic Sound issue:
…which includes some
nice features on Soulwax, who recorded their new album with an ancient synth, the
EMS Synthi 100, The Grid’s ‘Flotation’ and The Beloved and their Second Summer
of Love-era album ‘The Happiness’.
…no Long Walk this
week, too tired/woke up too late, but I did this
week’s G2 Crosswords:
And Monday’s crossword gets the week of to an okay start,
we only had to cheat on an eighth of the clues (three out of 24). We did
stumble on a couple of the clues, for ‘eat away’ we misspelt corrode and went
with ‘crode’ and not ‘erode’ and for ‘Indian flatbread’ we didn’t bother to
check the intersecting letters and went with ‘naan’ instead of ‘roti’. But the
rest of the clues were pretty straight forward and fell like skittles to the
little grey cells. And we learnt that a ‘mock orange shrub’ is called a
’syringa’…
…and Tuesday’s crossword is a repeat of Monday’s, a nice
stroll for the little grey cells and we only had to cheat on an eighth of the
clues (three out of 24). We did slightly cock up 6 down ‘Armstrong or Sharman,
say (9)’ by assuming it referred to famous Alexanders, when it was actually
about ‘astronauts’! Again, we forgot to check the intersecting letters when we plumped
for ‘emblem’ for ‘logo (6)’, when the answer was ‘symbol’, which we would have
known if we checked the intersecting letters. And we really should have gotten
‘greatly’ from ‘much’, but aside from that a pretty good grid today…
…and Wednesday’s crossword goes practically perfectly with
us only having to cheating on one of the 21 clues. The answers for the bottom
half of the grid were straight forward, but we just had a total mind block on 1
across ‘selfish (13)’, which also blocked us getting many of the other clues in
the top half of the grid. But once we were given the answer, ‘inconsiderate’
the rest of the top half just came lickety split…
…and things go downhill with Thursday’s crossword, as we had
to cheat on a fifth of the clues (five out of 23). Whoop an Illuminati score,
the only upside from today’s grid! We found this grid a bit too chewy and just
couldn’t get into it and getting the answers that we did felt like a major
achievement! But it does mean that we learnt lots! That ‘Iona’ is a ‘Hebridean
island, where in 563 St Columba founded a monastery’, that ‘Copers’ is the old
name for horse dealers, that ‘avowal’ is a synonym for ‘statement’ and that
‘Dido’ was the founding Queen of Carthage, hopefully tomorrows grid will go
better…
…nope, Friday’s crossword went even worse as we had to cheat
on a quarter of the clues (five out of 21). This a bit of an odd grid, the 16
clues we got came easily enough, but we just couldn’t get our head around those
last five. We should have gotten ‘chip’ from ‘fragment broken off’, ‘ashamed’
from ‘sorry’ and ‘alarmist’ from ‘one who worries others needlessly’, but we
just couldn’t, like we had some kinda word blindness to those answers! And a
tad annoyed that we didn’t get ‘sceptre’ from ‘ceremonial staff’, through that
is because we thought staff meant workers and didn’t think it meant staff as in
an object! But we did learn that ‘Echo’ was the ‘Nymph who loved Narcissus’,
which is cool…
…things take a bit of an upswing with Saturday’s crossword,
as we only had to cheat on an eighth of the clues (three out of 23). This was a
bit of a chewy grid, but with a bit of time, for pondering, the little grey
cells managed to get most of the grid. For some reason we just couldn’t get
‘ghastly’ from ‘gruesome’, even with the intersecting letters, but we did learn
that ‘alacrity’ is a synonym for ‘eagerness’ and that the ‘lyre’ was the
‘instrument played by Orpheus’…
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