The Hallucinating Goose

I can't be bothered to debate this. Wish I hadn't said anything now... Same as always...

Yeah, thinking about it I'm probably being a bit naive here in that because I'm into history I'm interested in seeing a variety of subjects talked about whereas the BBC executives don't give a toss and are only interested in viewers and money and so know that more people will tune into a subject they've heard of than something completely new to them. The general public are tuning into that new Marie Antoinette series because it's the latest BBC drama about someone they've heard of, not because they're interested in the historical subject matter. People wouldn't tune into a drama about, say Eleanor of Aquitaine because far less people have heard of her, despite her of course being far more important to history. I know that fact as a history nerd but the casual TV viewer doesn't and isn't interested in finding that out. It's just a shame that this is the way the media goes. A couple of years ago I was looking for a good Napoleonic Wars series and couldn't find one until a stumbled on a fantastic series on YouTube, made by people who actually have an interest in history but have to use that platform to present their great programmes because no mainstream network is interested in less talked about subjects.

I've done a lot of research into my family history and I've found that most of them moved round following work in the mines. I don't know for sure about my father's side of the family because they're really hard to trace once you get back to Ireland. We have a really Irish second name which is really rare in Britain but common as muck in Ireland so I trace it back to the mid 19th century and lose it. However I have found that the Irish portion of the family originally lived up near Darlington when they first came here so that could have been for mining. My mother's side is more certain. I've traced that back a few hundred years to Cornwall. They then move to the West Midlands in the early 19th century and to West Yorkshire in the later 19th century. All mining areas so its fair to assume they were following work as well. I ended up over East Yorkshire because my grandparents moved over this way in the 50s. My father's family ended up in Hereford but don't know why.

Genuine question. Why do filmmakers rehash the same subjects over and over again? Last night there was a new series on Marie Antoinette starting. There has been so much made about her in the past, why did the executives at the beeb think it a good idea to make yet more stuff about a subject massively overdone already? There are hundreds and hundreds of other Queens they could have made a series about but no, they chose one that has already been done. A prime example of this is the masses and masses of World War 2 documentaries we get shoved down our necks. Yes it's a subject people are interested in but I must have seen a million WW2 documentaries and again, so many of them are about the same topics. I can't remember the last time I saw a documentaries on the war in the Caucasus or the Middle East or the Balkans, to pick just a few areas off the top of my head but there are constant streams of documentaries about D-Day and the Battle of Britain and Stalingrad etc. etc. I just want to see something new and different occasionally. Thousands of years of history, millions of stories to tell and its always the same stuff redone again and again. There must be a reason for this?

Loved it as I do all of Detectorists, a great addition to my favourite series. Particularly liked the cameo from her!

The war is over! Napoleon has been exiled to St. Helena and Richard Sharpe has become a farmer in Normandy. 21 down and just 1 to go in the Sharpe series. This has been a blooming long journey. It seems an age since I first started reading about Private Sharpe in India. I think I started reading this series in January so it will in the end have taken me almost exactly a year to read all 22 novels.

After a couple of postponements I've finally been able to get back to some nonleague football. Extroadinary comeback from Beverley Town against Parkgate with goals in the 80th and 95th minutes to get Bev their first win since 22nd October. Beverley Town 2-1 Parkgate Attendance: 285

What I'm calling a museum is more an exhibition I suppose and it's in the coliseum now. I assume it's still there anyway, it's been over 6 years since I was last there.

I remember seeing the lines on the road that runs in front of the podium where a racetrack had been marked out. I presume it is used For DTM. When I was talking about emotional I was meaning the whole complex of ruins and the museum there is there. Standing on that podium really did give me shivers though, as I say to think I was standing in the exact spot Hitler had stood in. In that museum there was a photographic exhibition which I bought the accompanying book for as well; it was photographs of survivors of concentration camps that the photographer had tracked down. The emotional bit of my visit was to see old people, say in their 90s, who still had numbers tattooed on their arms and other marks of their time in the camps. Imagine living your whole life with, firstly the memories of the camps but also actual visual reminders etched onto your body. I've not been to an actual concentration camp yet though on my next visit to Berlin I will go to Oranienberg which is just north of the city. It is a smaller camp and after being liberated was taken over by the Soviets and used as a military camp.

This is very true. I suffer from anxiety issues from time to time and find myself worrying about the most minor of things, things very insignificant that I find dwell on my mind for hours and I end up arguing with myself, telling myself to stop being silly, whatever the thing is really doesn't matter, telling myself I'll have forgotten about it in a couple of days anyway. Reason I tell you this is because there was a moment in 2016 that really hit me in terms of my realisation of how sheltered and boring my life is, and indeed how little my problems matter in the grand context of humanity. I was undertaking a 3 week rail journey around central Europe and on day 1, I got the train from Hull to London and then got the Eurostar to Paris where I would catch my 3rd train of the day to Heidelberg. This was only a few months after the Paris terrorist attacks. When the Eurostar arrived in Paris, innocent little goose here stepped off the train and found myself face to face with a French soldier holding an assault rifle. When I was waiting for my train, I sat on some steps and watched soldiers patrolling the main station concourse, just walking up and down, up and down. Yeah I might be from a working class Northern city but it's pretty quiet and boring round here, at least it is in the area I'm from. The kind of things I worry about are whether i remembered to buy milk or whether my colleague remembered to order stationary or something along those lines, not being shot in the street by terrorists and seeing those soldiers really hit me that this was the reality of the world, the kind of thing I saw on tv but never actually experienced. It made me realise my life is cozy, comfortable, relaxing compared to so many other people and I tell myself all the time now when I start worrying to just get a grip and remember that some people would do anything to have my "rubbish" life.

My brother just phoned to tell me of this. We've lost an all time great. Well Maxi, now you can spend eternity teaching God to actually be a DJ! You've finally cured your insomnia! RIP you legend!

https://www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/news/23208682.buffoon-exposed-trying-pay-alcohol-penis/ This is the kind of strange local news story I started this thread for. Precisely why I always buy a local paper when I travel somewhere!

I'll chip in a set of thumb screws, some pliers and some electrodes for when we've caught the #####.

Ellis was a bit of a dick but Takagi seemed like a decent enough fella so I'll spare a thought for him.

A**ehole.

I don't intend to get everyone's Christmas down but my uncle died yesterday. Yesterday was also my late grandmother's birthday. Today is my grandfather's. He's in bits at the moment and I'm going to be spending the entire weekend sat on his sofa with him. Merry Christmas!

The Nuremburg rally grounds are an emotional place. I remember standing on that podium and just getting shivers right through my body at the thought that I was standing on the exact spot, the exact little tiny bit of concrete that Adolf Hitler also stood on. I'm getting shivers just thinking about it now. One of the most amazing places I've ever been.

Chen Zifan banned now. Another low ranked nobody. About 95th in the world in think. That makes 8 now.

Specials of Motherland and The Cleaner tonight!

I've been to the museum and memorial in the former customs hall and taken trains from the station but never saw it when it was divided in two. The museum is very emotional.

Did you go through Freidrichstrasse Station and the Palace of Tears?

I think what we need to be looking at here is not necessarily whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie but rather what elements make up a Christmas movie because some of the arguments being made here could be applied to films people consider established Christmas movies. Let's to The Grinch for example. The Grinch is not about Christmas. Yes it takes place at Christmas but Die Hard does and people here are saying that is not what makes a Christmas movie. You see, The Grinch is not about the title character hating Christmas but actually his hatred of people and thus his desire to ruin the time of year that makes them happiest. Christmas here is used as a tool to move the main theme of the film on, not to act as the main theme in that the film could have been set during any other celebration or holiday and still have been the same film. Christmas is not what makes The Grinch what it is. It could have been set at Easter and had him stealing people's Easter eggs or set at Thanksgiving and had him stealing their Turkeys and you would still have got the same effect. So what are the key elements that actually make a Christmas movie?

My fascination for history stems from similar reasons to yours in that I love to learn about ordinary people living their ordinary lives and social history rather than so much material out their on history which is about Kings and presidents and generals and generally the most famous and privileged people throughout history. My love of history in general comes from my love of stories and storytelling. I love model railways and model villages for the same reason because when I look at the tiny little characters in these scenes my mind starts to race making up life stories for them, giving them names, feeling desperate to know every little detail about them. I do this when I walk down the street. For example, this morning, walking to work in the dark through the council estate I would pass houses where there would be a small light on in a window or something like that and immediately I would want to know who lived there and why that light was in and thus I'd want to know everything about them. History is just like this in that it is an endless source of stories about people. I have often said to people that I do genuinely have an addiction to learning. Probably the greatest feeling I've ever had from seeing something was the first time I ever travelled to Berlin and I saw the Brandenburg Gate. I don't really know how to describe the exhilaration I felt from just seeing this building I'd seen a million pictures of all my life, the thought of all those people that had passed through it, all the stories those people could tell, all the random events that had taken place around that building. One of my most prized possessions is a tiny fragment of the Berlin Wall that a German friend got for me. A tiny little piece of concrete that encompasses so much history. The soldiers that patrolled it, the dissidents that escaped over it, the teenagers that graffitied it, the ordinary folk that passed through it's checkpoints on a daily basis, the demolition crews that finally pulled it down in the end which would lead to me owning that fragment. I could go on but this post is getting ridiculously long and I am actually at work so better get on!

The Thing always gets me in a Christmassy mood. Violence, fear and aliens, the three main components of Christmas Day I thought.

I don't really know about the arguments put forward in this case but I do know both sides of the debate when it came to dropping the atomic bombs on Japan and I wonder if its similar. Essentially what was argued about Japan was that despite the number of people the atomic bombs killed, dropping them ended the war a lot quicker than it would have ended otherwise and that as a result the number of people killed is predicted to be less than had the war carried on and the US eventually invaded Japan, something that was being seriously considered at the time.