KEV67

A slightly interesting thing is that the picture on the front of my Penguin Classic copy of Rob Roy is a scene from the book. It was a painting called The Death of Morris the Spy (1827) by Camille Roqueplan, in the Musee des Beaux Arts, Lille. Rob Roy was first published in 1817. Presumably, it was translated into French and sold well there. I wonder how they translated all the Scots.

The chapter I read today was brilliant. It was a chapter in which a troop of Red Coats are ambushed by Rob Roy's men. Rob Roy and Waverley puts me in mind of Heart of Darkness. First Francis Osbaltistone relocates from France where it is reasonably urbane and civilised to Northumbria, close to the Scottish border. It's a bit rough and ready up then, but it's still England. Then he moves onto Glasgow, which is a little bit foreign. Then he goes out to the Highlands and he has gone back in time five centuries. Law does not really exist.

The story is set about 1715 and Sir Walter Scott wrote it about a century later. One of the characters was talking about how the Act of Union would allow Glasgow to develop, because it could participate in the trade of cotton and tobacco, so basically slave produce.

I will have to read Ivanhoe one day.

Still enjoying it. Scott does not let his main characters say a dull sentence. I don't know how he managed to get so much erudite wit into his books. Presumably he had to get so many words down a day. There is quite a bit of poetry. Characters quote it, and each chapter is prefaced by a verse. In Waverley there was a character who used to quote reams of Latin all the time. I think Walter Scott had a big brain.

He was good, so it is a bit of a surprise he is not as well regarded as he was. He used to be a literary superstar. I think Rob Roy is a little similar in theme to Waverley (so far), but he is different to just about everyone else (OK maybe not entirely different to Robert Louis Stevenson). His style is unique.

I have to say the characters of Sir Walter Scott's novels have great powers of expression. I envy them that.

Another bit of repetition from Waverley is the lovely, young lady whom young Francis Osbaltistone meets on Osbaltistone Hall. She is beautiful, clever, witty, and a Jacobite. She and young Francis have an entertaining chat at dinnertime.

Another similarity between Rob Roy and Waverley is that the narrator is a young Englishman. First he goes north to Northumbria. If it's like Waverley he crosses the border to where the wild men live.

I have started reading this. I have read one other book by Scott, Waverley, which I thought was a great book. I quite like Walter Scott's style. It is rather dense, but it is almost cinematographic. In the first couple of chapters the protagonist is holding an argument with his stern father. The protagonist does not want to be a merchant like his father. It is sort of like accountancy. The protagonist wants to be a poet. At this point there is no indication where the story is going. We just know the young fellow has a romantic and independent streak. I especially liked the bit where the lad's father found a poem his son has wrote and critiques it. It seemed like quite a reasonable poem to me.

I attended a Unitarian meeting online a fortnight ago. They seemed pleased with Adrian's birth. The average age of the Unitarians is about 65 by my reckoning. It might be higher than that. The pastor (I am not sure that is position) was intrigued to see a room full of Kazakh surrogate women.

I have not been to any Orthodox Church services, but I have poked my head in. They don't have stain glass, but they have a lot of religious paintings. They tend to use metal in their religious art. I am not sure whether it is all silver and gold, but it looks like it. They don't have pews neither. Everybody stands. This is one of their cathedrals. I can see it five miles away.

There have been two or three film adaptions of Journey Into Fear. One did have Orson Wells, but he was playing Col Haki.

I thought this was going to turn into something like Death on the Nile or Death on the Orient Express, but it took a different turn. I am afraid my knowledge of 1930's black and white film actors is not extensive. So far I have cast: Mr Graham, engineer protagonist, David Niven Dr Haller, elderly German historian, ? Banat, Romanian hit man, ? Josette, nightclub dance, Marlene Dietrich Jose, her boorish husband, ? Kurtvetli, Turkish businessman, Peter Lorre, M. Mathis, French passenger, ? Mme. Mathis, his wife, ? Signora Baronelli, Italian widow, ? Signor Baronelli, her son, ? Purser, ? Steward, ? Col Haki, Turkish head of secret police, ? Kopeikin, Turkish agent, Orson Wells Maria, nightclub hostess, ? I can cast Orson Wells, but I don't think I can cast American actors such as Humphry Bogart. Marlene Dietrich is almost too glamorous.

This is my second Eric Ambler book. It was written in the late 30s. Like the other one I read, The Mask of Dmitrious, it is about an Englishman who finds himself in deep water in Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe in Ambler's books starts around Paris. I quite like all the clipped English speech, and the courteous language, which somehow sounds threatening, when spoken by a member of the underworld or secret police. Think Peter Lorre, think Orsen Wells, think Marlene Dietrich.

There have been eight Clive Cussler books since he died. The titles are proceeded with "Clive Cussler's" He was 88 when he died. It must have been that dangerously young girlfriend that did for him.

Maybe that explains why it was written by Graham Brown. The copyright page says it was first published in 2022.

Finished it. Glad to report that Also glad to report So, not exactly like a Joseph Conrad book or a Thomas Hardy. But that is why Conrad and Hardy are great authors, but Cussler probably has his own executive jet, a superyacht and a very pretty young girlfriend. I don't know any of the above is true. If Clive Cussler is reading this then I withdraw all these remarks without reservation.

And some have Georgian writing on them. The Georgian language has its own alphabet.

I preferred the black and white pictures. Some of them have Russian writing.

I was passing a graveyard in Tbilisi, so I had a look around. I was impressed by the pictures on the tombstones. I do not know how they transferred the images, but they did a really good job at catching the person's appearance as well as personality.

I was thinking about the supercomputer McGuffin. Unless these computers were a huge leap in technology it hardly seems worth the bother. I seem to remember a time when people talked about these amazingly powerful computers, but a year or two later there would be even more advanced computers. I saw a supercomputer at Reading University. I think it was used for predicting the weather. It was a basement full of racks of PCs all connected up together. There are technologies like quantum computing and parallel processing. I have not been keeping up, but I think the idea of quantum computing is that the bits can have more states than 1 and 0. Not sure about that. Anyway, I would have thought the designs were more important than the actual computers. I would think it was pretty difficult to reverse engineer a supercomputer with a novel architecture. The book talks about trading one or two of the computers for the operating system and source code. There are people around clever enough to write operating systems. Again, I would have thought it would be even more difficult to do without the designs. I used to work at a company where one of the brainier engineers wrote the operating system to a product. How do you even go about doing that? Then the company hired an even brainier engineer to write code for its successor product, including its operating system. I sometimes saw job adverts for bare metal micro-controller coders. Micro-controllers are easier than micro-processors, but still take quite a lot of knowhow. I attended a public lecture by one of the academics from Cambridge University who designed the Raspberry Pi. He intended it as an educational tool. He recounted how he was initially disappointed when one of his students said she could not get on with its operating system, so she coded her own!

Definitely Tom Cruise material. TBF it would make quite an entertaining film.

This is the first Clive Cussler book I have started reading. I thought I would give one a go. Only I noticed it was written by Graham Brown. So how does that work then? Actually it is quite a good story. It is fairly cinematographic. I could imagine Tom Cruise in it. A freighter carrying two supercomputers has been sent to the bottom of the sea. You would think that would be be bad for the computers, but no, because they are liquid cooled anyway. I wondered about that, because water is not very good for integrated circuit boards, especially salt water. You would think it would short circuit the PCBs. I suppose the PCBs were coated with some waterproof covering.

My entire knowledge of this comes from a woman off YouTube. She could have been telling me anything. It reminds of a Hawkwind album I had. It was about these 2 dimensional alien invaders. You could see them on the album sleeve.