Rate my day

 I find the YouGov ratings thing quite bizarre.

How can you say you dislike or like a whole country? It's surely lazy and based on negative news or stereotypes to do so, unless you've spent considerable time and research there, and even if you have, there must be redeeming factors for most places? 

"I happen to like fjords, I think they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent" - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

And what possible use is a context-free thumbs up or thumbs down of some random nobody like myself on an entire country to anyone? 

But anyway, that said, I did spend some time rating Tory politicians without knowing much about them. Ha! I daresay some of them have redeeming qualities too. Maybe. 

Finished: The Couple at No.9 - Claire Douglas

Whoa

 I've just finished the new episodes of Love Death & Robots on Netflix, which were pretty great. Scalzi wrote another for his 3 robots, and that was fun, although not hugely subtle in its message. They were all engaging, some stronger than others, but yes, well worth a watch.

And then there was the episode "Jibaro". Whoa. Loved it. Stunning visually, mythic, dark.

Spoilers: A war party take a rest beside a lake. Jibaro, one of the knights, a deaf man, goes to the shore to drink and picks a piece of gold out of the water. This stirs the spirit of the lake, which manifests as a bejewelled siren, who screams to call the knights and their party racing into the water, killing each other as well as they hurtle to their deaths in the depths. All, except the bewildered deaf man, who sees it all and rides away in a panic to escape. 

He is knocked unconscious from his horse and is tracked by the spirit when he continues on foot. He falls asleep on the riverbank and the spirit, fascinated by him, approaches and stays with him, draping herself over him seductively. When he awakes, she flees, but when he grabs her arm, a ruby comes off, embedded in his hand. He pursues her and finally she stops at the top of a waterfall, where finally she approaches him and they kiss, leaving his mouth bloody, as she is covered in gems. It grows passionate and he gets on top of her, when he attacks her and knocks her unconscious. On the shore, he rips the jewels and gold from her body, rolling her into the water when he is done. He then leaves with the jewels in his bundled up cloak. 

The siren's body washes back into the lake where the water turns to blood. Jibaro has stopped to drink again, not noticing the water turning to blood as he does so, and his hearing is cured. He panics to be hearing for the first time in his life and runs hectically. The siren rises from the lake, bloody and battered, and screams to call him, puppet-like, dancing, into the lake to his death. She sinks to her knees, a shadow of what she was. It's maybe a metaphor for what people do to nature, that could offer so much and they would rather strip it and defile it. 

The egg-man

 I don't understand the whole, "hey, let's raise a statue to this person" thinking. What is that all about? 

I don't think there can be many people whose legacy is entirely unquestionable and worthy. Everyone has faults and flaws, makes mistakes or worse, and their actions may not stand up to the scrutiny of later years. I mean, FFS, there was one of Saville at one point, wasn't there? 

Putting someone on a pedestal, literal or figurative, is a bad idea, in their lifetime, and after it. In my opinion. 

I'm not against statues generally, just think they should represent ideas, not specific people. 

And bloody hell, this is a statue of Thatcher they've put up. 

FB Meme

Bring on the egg-man. 

Food bank Tory

"The last cooking session we did, which we publicised - where we had four MPs here - we made I think 180 meals for fifty quid, which is 30p each." - Lee Anderson

Right, so in fact it seems he's talking about bulk cooking, while in a commercial or institutional kitchen.

Having bulk-bought the ingredients with £50 all at once. and having cooked the food with someone else's power supply, where exactly does he think a low-income family would store their 180 identical meals? 

Quordially yours

I feel quite good about that. I know it's not the most interesting thing to post about, but meh.

Finished: After the End - Clare Mackintosh     OMG!

What I'm watching

 Lately we've been watching a lot of Korean tv series on Netflix. Every night we have tea and watch an episode together.

Really loved All of Us are Dead, which I think I've said before. LOVED it.

After that, we watched Sweet Home, which was also very good. An apocalypse in which some humans turn into monsters of their own desires. The monsters reminded me a bit of Harryhausen's style. 

Next up was Extracurricular, which was about a high-school boy secretly pimping. Not as much fun, but engaging.

I really really loved The Uncanny Counter, which featured a group of reapers dealing with evil spirits possessing people and supposedly keeping out of human affairs, but ending up needing to fight that battle too. The main characters and their interactions were just adorable, the way they teased each other and supported each other, and the series was a whole lot of fun. 

Then we started watching Alice, but it was a real struggle. Park Jin-gyeom's mother is killed mysteriously, but as an adult, he is confused when he meets someone identical to her. It's time-travel, and it's convoluted. There's a lot of emoting with background music, and a lot of not actually talking honestly to each other. It seems a bit of a theme in these series that characters stay silent instead of being open when actually it would be incredibly helpful. There was a disturbing romantic undercurrent between the two and a rivalry between his wannabe-girlfriend & his probable-mother. Park is supposed to suffer from alexithymia, which I guess might explain some of the strange dynamics, but it was just a bit boggling and it seemed like he was on his way to being his own father. I don't know if that was the outcome, as this was a series we decided to abandon. I'd basically given up four episodes ago and started faffing on my laptop, which means I was no longer reading the subtitles so had lost the plot, while T was more persistent. But, eh, it was just a bit much, that whole dynamic, so we  were relieved to agree to call it a day. 

Now we're onto The Guest, which is about evil spirits possessing people again, and we're really enjoying it so far. I love the arse-kicking female detective and the shaman particularly. I've also enjoyed seeing some of the Korean countryside as most of what we've watched has been set in cities, but this one has spent some time in the rural village our protagonist grew up in too. 

Carping about carpets

 There have been a few stories I've noticed lately about people moving into social housing and being shocked & depressed that the carpets and floor coverings have been ripped out, by policy (example - BBC article). As I understand it, this is to prevent infestations continuing and because it's quicker and easier to turn the property around for its next tenants than attempting to clean it. 

This was the case when we moved into our council house a good few years ago. In fact, I still don't have carpets/floor coverings in some of my rooms because I've never had the money (or arguably, I've chosen to spend it in other ways). I am very proud of my living room carpet that I saved up for and paid for installation as well (luxury!) only a couple of years ago. In the meantime, we had had a large rug bought from a B&M or similar, and painted or varnished the floorboards where visible. I guess I'm lucky that the house has floorboards, but the utility room is concrete, and that I painted that as well. In the early days, I wanted most urgently to carpet the kids' rooms and we were given some by a neighbour for one, and managed to buy some for the other after a while. Once that was done, making do until I could afford better was fine. 

I don't think it's a wrong policy - I've lived in some flats and moved into some places that felt bloody filthy and made my skin crawl, and some of these were supposedly cleaned for rental. And into places with fleas. Ugh! 

I worked for a Housing association and saw some pictures of houses being turned round for the next tenants and they can be left in a horrific state - there was no chance of salvaging carpet out of those. 

I'd rather a bare floor than someone else's dirt. 

Plus removing carpet and floor coverings yourself is a big job, especially if you're on your own with kids - so if the carpets were left, you might want to get rid of them, but it wouldn't be practical or affordable for you, and then you'd be stuck with it. 

At least with a bare floor, you can get it really clean, and you can chuck some paint down and some rugs as you go on. 

I'm just really grateful that we were lucky enough to get this tenancy and the chance to make it our home. Yes, it's not perfect, and I'm still working on getting it how I want it, more than a decade later, cos I'm on a low income despite working full-time. 

Other people have it far worse, of course, than I ever did, but hard as it is, I do think a clean slate of a house is better.