celticman's blog

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B0B8M3WD4S/ref=atv_mv_hom_c_9U9jIg_brws_1_46?jic=8%7CEgRzdm9k Mariel (Karla Souza) is almost thirty. She’s been a fixture in Mexican diving team since she was fourteen, winning a bronze medal at the Olympics. But she’s never fulfilled her potential, never got that elusive gold. Never come close. She always seems to fuck up. Self-sabotage as her diving guru Brualio (Hernán Mendoza) puts it. ‘He saw me,’...

Evicted, Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize winning study of the American housing market was personal. He lived the life. A cri de couer . Poverty by America is a step away from that immiserating experience. His gut was telling him it was wrong. He wasn’t a cultural tourist. This is a more cognitive and rational approach to explain why so many people in America are poor and likely to remain so. His solution seems pretty straightforward. Stop...

I was looking for a book called Save the Cat . I don’t really need to find it, because anybody that has ever read any of my stories knows plot isn’t my strong point. Spoiler, when I’m writing The Cat Dies, but it’s unintentional. I’ve no idea what I’m doing, and neither has has my loyal band of fellow writers. And I blame the devil. Amazon are pushing Mindcage , which is why algorithms rule the world. It has a zillion great reviews and yet it’s...

Everything Everywhere All at Once won a stack of awards. Let’s start with the multiverse. Everything that could possibly happen does in an array of parallel realties. Nothing and nobody is ever lost, even if they are. Overworked and overwrought, Evelyn Quan Wang (Michelle Yeoh) a Chinese-American immigrant, who owns a laundry, while being audited by the IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdr (Jamie Lee Curtis), discovers that she is the multiverse...

John Gribbin writes about physics. In modern parlance, he popularises science. As a starting point, he quotes Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’. He offers some parameters: Our Universe about 13.8 billion years old (Milky Way galaxy a little younger). Solar System and Earth 4.5 billion years old Formation of single-cell, eukaryotic, life on...

I loved Tiffany McDaniel’s recent novel Betty . The Summer That Melted Everything was her debut novel. Poets make the best novelists, her words sing. She uses John Milton’s Paradise Lost as a framing device for each chapter. The first paragraph forewarns what has to come. Beautifully done. ‘The heat came with the devil. It was the summer of 1984, and while the devil had been invited, the heat had not. It should have been expected, though… ‘It...

Storyville: Nelly and Nadine—Ravensbruck, 1944, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, Director Magnus Gertten. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001lczg/storyville-nelly-and-nadine-ravensbruck-1944 Holocaust literature regularly tops the bestselling lists. Yet the story of Nadine Hwang, the daughter of the Chinese ambassador to Spain, who fell in love with opera singer Nelly Mousset Vos on Christmas day, 1944, in Ravensbruck, a Nazi’s women’s concentration...

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/derren-brown-showman Writer, philosopher, showman and a must-see, Derren Brown opens your mind, pokes about and walks away, leaving you baffled. Showman starts with Brown taking the piss. Horoscopes. He shows a horoscope for a Sagittarian (that’s me) and asks if it hits the mark. I thought it did. Others in the audience thought so too. Us Sagittarians stood together, smarter than most, bolder than most, risk...

I didn’t know who Rebecca Humphries was. Look at the title. What does it mean to you? Listen for the semi-ironic tone. The cover is a portrait of an upper-crust lady in a peacock coloured dress on a chaise lounge, pondering. In the background, a dour-faced gentleman in black, barely visible. A chapter titled ‘Brave’. Blurbs from Emma Thompson. ‘Fierce. Game-changing. Urgently necessary. Brilliant, brilliant and did I say brilliant? Marian Keyes...

‘Make death proud to take you.’ A quote from a quote from Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar , but also a starting point and end point for O’Hagan’s bestselling book, Mayflies . The tragedy of making America proud to take us is they already have, with the rise and lies of Brexit and market solutions to every aspect of life. O’Hagan’s essays were written before the rise or the moron’s moron and 42 nd American President. But in an essay on...