The Travails Of Creating Content
You will be delighted - or horror-struck - to know that I have successfully re-written all my notes for the film 'Greenland', which means you are going to get a rather citric breakdown of the film in the near future. I'm going to cross-reference with the 'Goofs' page on IMDB to confirm, handwave away or deny what they say. Plus, Netflix's software prevents any Snips from being taken, which means photographs instead. Art!
Not today. those goofs need a good proofread before utilising. Yes, this is the sort of incredibly time-consuming project I've done occasionally in the past for 'Where Eagles Dare'. If it were a job, the criteria would be 'Only obsessive completists with hair-splitting pedantry abilities need apply'.
So, Atlantis it is, because that's the next chapter in "The Seventy Greatest Mysteries Of The Ancient World", hereafter '70'. Just to prove the prevalence and persistence of this myth, Conrad cast his mind back to an animated film. Art!
Conrad has never seen it, but might be tempted to at some future date because the production designer was Mike Mignola, he of 'Hellboy' fame.
ANYWAY There was also 'Hearts In Atlantis', which has nothing to do with the myth and is only here because I recalled it during Thinking Time with Edna. Art!
Then there's this, "Atlantis The Lost Continent". Empire, continent - someone's being verrrry careless with Atlantis. A George Pal film from 1961, Conrad has seen it and remembers it as being a cheap and cheerful romp (if you can call a whole continent being destroyed a 'romp'). It got lambasted for using stock footage from other, much more expensive films, wh
ANYWAY let us return to the source of the Atlantis myth: Plato, whom describes it in his work 'Criteas', which is long out of copyright. He describes Atlantis as lying 'beyond the Pillars of Hercules', or to us here in less mythological times, beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. In the Atlantic, then. Art!
For no good reason, North is at the bottom. I could have left it inverted, in which case you couldn't read the text.
Atlantis is described by Socrates, whom Plato used as a narrative device, as being a mighty power, with it's empire stretching across the whole of North Africa. Eventually, as powers with imperial ambitions often do, it over-reached itself and attempted to invade both Europe and Asia. The Athenians - and by enormous coincidence Plato was Athenian - gave these imperialist upstarts a right shoeing, after which their island continent was destroyed by the gods, earthquakes, asteroid impact (Greenland!) or rampant Japanese Knotweed infestation <delete where applicable>.
Sadly for Mike and George, there is absolutely NO EVIDENCE for any of this, not archaeologically nor geologically. Art!
This is the Atlantic Ocean, drained: no mysterious island continent exists in mid-Atlantic.
What every bumbletuck after Plato who came along and claimed to have 'found Atlantis!' are ignoring is that he was writing a philosophical treatise on the perfect nation-state, NOT an historical work. You might consider the modern equivalent as that of being an idiot who loudly proclaims to have 'found Rivendell!' Art!
This is an illo of the Peloponnesian War, fought between Sparta and Athens whilst Plato was still around, and it must have coloured his writings and philosophy about empires in collision and conflict. Based in reality, in other words.
As for the dramatic extinction of Atlantis, there is a historical precedent in antiquity, except it happened in the Mediterranean, not the Atlantic. Art!
This is the caldera, which is scientific for 'what's left', of the island of Thera, now known as Santorini, with ships to give a sense of scale. The island was populated up until the eruption in about 1,600 BC, after which it most definitely wasn't. Art!
There are almost no readily available figures that I can find for metrics about the Thera explosion, only comparisons with the considerably smaller eruption at Krakatoa, which was no lightweight itself. The only data I could find shows that an equivalent amount of rock to a cube 4 kilometres on a side was blasted out in the event, extending out 30 kilometres from the caldera in all directions. Pyroclastic flow would have killed anyone on any nearby islands or in seaborne ships, and the detonation created a tsunami that reached and scoured the shores of Crete, well over 100 kilometres away.
Is it possible that Plato based the destruction of Atlantis on Thera? Possible, yes; definitely, no. There are no contemporary records or accounts of the explosion in any Mediterranean culture, BUT an event as devastating as this may have been part of an oral mythos, instead of being formally written down. Art!
Sorry about that.
B-Limey!
TREE LAW! TREE LAW!
Most unusually, this case comes from the Allotment Of Eden, where such a thing as a 'Tree Preservation Order' exists, which Conrad was unaware of, and which some of our neighbours ought to be wary of. Under a TPO, it is illegal to remove a tree, even if it's on your property. Art!
Despite TPO applied to it, Ms Rands got the lime tree removed 10 years ago, and had gotten away with it until a council ecologist walking down her street noticed it's absence.
Foolish woman! For she decided to fight the prosecution brought against her for £16,000.
Well, after several years of litigation she has lost her appeal and has to pay the fine.
AND £100,000 in legal costs, too. Ooops. I bet her solicitors are fat, well-fed and happy, though.
"The War Illustrated Edition 212 August 3 1945"
Yes, we are on to a new edition. Please remember that what's within TWI's pages is a fortnight out of date, thanks to editorial policy and the time it took copy or photographs to get back to the UK. Art!
The ceremony here is about the restoration of that drum to the 5th Gordon Highlanders, which had been captured along with most of the 51st Highland Division at St. Valéry-en-Caux in 1940. The story is too long to go into in detail, but the 51st was part of the French Army in that area and had been cut off from the rest of the BEF. They were almost all forced to surrender; 5 years later the delighted regiment got their drum back. Art!
Yours at auction for £600, 12 years ago.
How Very Topical And Serendipitous
More of volcanoes and eruptions. Conrad spotted this in a sidebar on the BBC News website. Art!
This is from right now, check out the time difference between the Allotment and Hawaii. Still bubbling away. The Beeb notes that this is the 31st eruption since December 2024. Whilst not reallllly what you'd want in a well-regulated neighbourhood, they are more bubble bubble boiling trouble than catastrophic explosions.
Maybe I'll get lucky and they'll burn down a few pineapple plantations.
I Have To Put This One Up
More gems from the BBC's 'Have Your Say' page about the ballfoot game between Alnerus (sp?) and Someone United.
Cheshire Cat
19:53 17 Aug
That last sentence is a skit on a lyric from 'Dark Side Of The Moon' - to wit "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way'.
I think we're done now!
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