If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing

[austin_dern]

The Dean would like a meeting with the whole department, including graduate students and non-academic staff. I hope it's an effort to make himself more accessible and to see all the people under his care, but I'm going to have a nervous wait.

On the office Internet Radio front, the old-time radio stations I like best still aren't working, but a third favorite, that does just mysteries, is fine. I can't fault the shows -- Suspense and Inner Sanctum and such are always reliable, and maybe more fun when they're arch to the point of self-parody. But the filler is odd; would you fill the pause between I Was a Communist for the FBI (talk about self-parody) and Murder at Midnight with the full version of the theme from The Addams Family? They also had a dramatization of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World with such a slow narrative pace as to risk going backwards, but starring voices that, if they weren't Leonard Nimoy and John de Lancie, are the best impersonators around.

I spotted on the news a new housing development outside Shanghai. Its theme is England. Their Thames Town will even be building a little local replica castle to look over Tudor houses. I suppose it's only fair after opening all those Chinatown franchises over the world that somebody should open an Englishtown (Englandland?) in China, but it's still a jarring sight. I wonder if it was built by cheap Irish immigrant labor ...

Trivia: The Department of Defense assigned 92 aircraft and 15 ships to support the Gemini IX-A flight. Source: On The Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini, Barton C. Hacker, James M. Grimwood. NASA SP-4203.

Currently Reading: Cosmic Time Travel: A Scientific Odyssey, Barry Parker.

Comments

Nimoy and DeLancie

[whiffert.livejournal.com]

It was them alright. They started a radio theater to do classic Sci-Fi stories. Oddly enough, the performances were televised.

But then, the BBC regularly adapted TV shows for Radio.

Re: Nimoy and DeLancie

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, huh ... that's ... baffling. I guess a TV broadcast explains the length, though; it did have more of a TV show pacing.

Somehow -- and I can't really explain it -- I haven't got into BBC radio programs, even though they should seem to be natural fits for my taste.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

And I suspect that fairly few actual Englishmen will live in the Englishtown. Though you'd figure there's probably somewhere in Singapore a vaguely british neighborhood that lingers on, with a pub and a cultural hall..

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

There are bits of Singapore that are quite English -- well, Victorian, really -- although not so much neighborhoods. Somehow during 140 years of direct British rule the process of building good homes never really got addressed, and at Independence a lot of the population was living in kampongs. Building high-rise public housing was a huge priority so the neighborhoods -- as opposed to registered historic buildings -- are very contemporary.

Mercifully, they tried -- as soon as the housing crisis started to be resolved -- making sure any high-rise looked different from others, so the city isn't a monolithic SimCity 2000 map, but it was a near miss. This was also why they tried to avoid too many straight roads, which makes the city a lot harder to navigate, but also makes it feel bigger.