The Tokyo Olympics finished yesterday. We had got used to the Olympic Breakfast programme every morning on BBC1, catching up on the overnight action, and we’ll miss it. The show usually involved news of gold medals for Team GB, right up to yesterday morning when Jason Kenny (Keirin, cycling) and Lauren Price (boxing) completed the medal tally to leave GB fourth… Continue reading Word of the week: Sayonara
These “Word of the week” pieces have become rather less frequent in recent months, for no particular reason. I have drafted several posts without finalizing them, but there are still over 170 finished pieces (and over 100,000 words of text) dotted throughout this site about words that have been in the news or come to… Continue reading Word of the week: crucify
Uno, as you probably know, represents the number one in at least two languages (Spanish and Italian are the ones that I am familiar with). It is used specifically for nouns that take the masculine form, though this is not always straightforward. The word for a car is masculine in Spanish (“coche”) but feminine in… Continue reading Word of the week: Uno
Reflections and facts about winners of the Academy Award for Best Director. [1100 words here, followed by a table containing 26 rows of data.] The 93rd Academy Awards ceremony took place last month. As in the majority of previous ceremonies the same film won for Best Picture and Best Director. For only the second time, the Best Director award went to a woman, Chloe Zhao for “Nomadland”. The… Continue reading Oscars Trivia: films that won Best Picture but not Best Director
Most Saturday afternoons the BBC2 schedule includes a movie and a show called “Talking Pictures” that features interview clips with the director or star of the film. Yesterday the subject was Ingrid Bergman, a true Hollywood star. After a screening of “Joan of Arc” (1948, directed by Victor Fleming), “Talking Pictures” included interviews with Ms Bergman from 1971, 1973 and 1980. The interviewer in the 1971… Continue reading An afternoon with Ingrid Bergman
Following on from our Christmas Eve viewing (“Casablanca”) we settled down on New Year’s Eve to watch another film that won the Oscar for Best Picture: “Rocky”. My wife is a big fan of the “Rocky” movies but the only ones we had watched together were 21st century additions to the franchise, “Rocky Balboa” and… Continue reading Word of the week: Rocky
Of all the lines in all the movies that I watched with my father, this is probably the one that he repeated most often: “Get this boy a bib”. There were plenty of lines that he quoted from dozens of films (“The Godfather” series, those starring Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, westerns like “The Magnificent… Continue reading “Get this boy a bib”
My 14 year old daughter suggested that we watch a film on Christmas Eve. Much of our TV viewing involves live sport, quiz shows and “Strictly Come Dancing”, and series like “Friends”, “Big Bang Theory” and “Modern Family” on Netflix, but over the years we have made an effort to watch films on Christmas Eve… Continue reading Word of the week: Casablanca
Have you noticed how frequently characters in films and on TV open and close their laptops? Often, if someone is working away and is interrupted by another character, however briefly, they simply close up their computer. They don’t save their work, they don’t have to deal with any prompts onscreen, they simply flip the screen… Continue reading Flipping laptops
Sonofabitch (alternatively sunuvabitch, son-of-a-bitch or even “son of a bitch”) is an old-fashioned exclamation or term of abuse that I have been hearing a lot over the last month while I work my way, very happily, through all 11 series of the sitcom “Modern Family”. (I wrote about the show in this earlier post.) I… Continue reading Word of the week: sonofabitch
The Compartments 