chernobyl

Watch "Chernobyl" I was WhatsApp'd. So I did.

It's all about filling the vacuum. I'm hazy about the facts. That in 1986, the Germans detected radiation that was too high in Sweden before the Russians came clean. The delays and modulations created by the apparatchiks of the Russian bureaucracy.

That a single reactor could potentially have wiped out most of Europe. With a historical perspective, this was ten years ahead of Three Mile Island, right on the edge of Europe.

Chernobyl showed the explosive melt-down of a reactor core. spraying graphite and nuclear dust into the atmosphere. Even the water glowed with ionisation with the extreme fusion let loose.

The series is based upon Alexievich’s book about Chernobyl, published in Russian more than ten years after one of the reactors at the Chernobyl power plant exploded.

The Russian hierarchical authorities do much to protect their reputation and to present "nothing to see here, move along" narratives both to the populous and to the media.

It's a dark tale, shot as workers struggle through contaminated water in a building burning with an irradiated haze. For television story-telling, some of the main actors have been compressed into single personalities. The physicist represents all physicists involved, some of the politicians represent the wider state. The firefighter and his family that are zoomed in upon becomes a proxy for many.

There's a kind of levelling irony that the series shows. After a Shakespearean rallying call, we see the politician Zharkov later being herded onto the same evacuation bus as everyone else.

There's a power gradient. It's downwards. "Do what I say or I'll have that soldier shoot you," exemplifies the state control and the compliance of many to the sometimes apparently irrational commands issued from central briefs, ill-informed to make decisions. Caricature, I know, for effect.

Like the device that was the use of the voice of reason scientists to state the way things would actually play. That was against the "cut the phone lines and no-one leaves" of authority. Seldom did the white-uniformed operations guys get to the grey suits. And when they did they were foaming at the mouth or projectile vomiting.

Confront the power with truth. The physicist explains to the politician, but “Yes, I worked in a shoe factory. And now I’m in charge.” comes the riposte, "have some vodka." It is L. Frank Baum territory but you have to look for the tin man, straw man and lion here. "Contain the spread of misinformation. That is how we keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labour." The yellow brick road must be followed. Brick by graphite brick. The Central Committee prevails, justice must be blind.

And blind also the scientists that are represented by the Emily Watson character, Khomyuk. She has the omniscience of a showrunner, instantly working out that it is all too radioactive when the window is opened. It's signalling, of course; she is the brains that will face off to Gorbachov.

Then we get to it. The slope of power. The quest for promotion. Many are on this slippery pole and a few misbehave in ways that lead to the terrible outcome that Chernobyl represents.

It should really be a lesson - the cost of truth against the cost of lies? But current times suggest this isn't even on the radar.

box set flashback - never the Dane

Now the box set flashback shows that twenty years ago this leadership hopeful was off the rails like a Withnailian fishing trip- "I will never play the Dane."

In contrast, a similar weighty Boris spinning montage adds dozens of inappropriate colourful themes.

Like we are looking at the Netf(l)ix index wondering what to watch next.

These Nielsen lists worryingly illustrate time already consumed. But like a politiican's CV there's still notable ommissions.

Even with a part two, there's still insufficient data to build the whole picture.

As Marwood put it: "Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day, and for once I'm inclined to believe Withnail is right. We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell."

Game Over floats over UK's economy like a Striking Viper

Game Over for the PM comes at the same time as Game Over for the economy, whilst the boys from Eton shout "bully-bully".

The financial institutions have fled, the car companies have declared they are getting out and the high street sinks into retail mayhem, led by a blighted knight.

A well-known trust fund has just crashed to its knees, shorted to oblivion. That Politico cartoon is becoming more accurate by the day.

All the while, we get a roll-call of squabbling politicians using wishful thinking to manoeuvre. Nothing has changed except the remaining length of the road.

Game Over might not float as prominently as in Striking Vipers, but it's there.

it started before it starts

Trumpi revealed the contents of his executive briefcase when he said that the NHS was 'on the table' for trade talks. He subsequently changed his tune in an interview on morning television, when he retracted the statement.

Perhaps Boris Johnson's £350 million of red bus savings from Brexit will, instead, go to the USA to pay for NHS capabilities?

I notice that there's already a degree of US interest in the NHS. The supplier's list includes several well-known US-based companies. There's Cerner, for example.

Cerner Corporation is a Kansas-based supplier of health information technology solutions, services, devices and hardware. Then there's DXC Technology.

DXC Technology is an American multinational corporation, based in Tysons, Virginia that provides B2B IT services. And then there is Intersystems, a Cambridge, Massachusetts supplier of Electronic Patient Records.

I'm wondering if this is really the way to examine the supplier list? The longer lists show more of the pickle of suppliers in use.
Naturally, all of the consultancy houses are there, mostly with alliances with other suppliers. McKinsey (New York), Boston Consulting (Massachusetts), Deloitte (New York), GE Healthcare (Chicago), Oliver Wyman (owned by Marsh and McLennan, New York)... the lists go on.

Curious too, that all four of the big four are represented. Why have one consultancy when you can have several? An invoice of advisors, to use the collective noun.

salvation of the world (Salvator Mundi)

Whilst walking across to the helipad the other day, I mused the heights some reach and yet they still can't get the staff. Today's news mentions the refusal by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to loan the Salvator Mundi (salvation of the world) picture to the Paris Louvre.

Gossip suggests that it might be because it could be found out to be a fake, or at least 'from the premises of Leonardo da Vinci' rather than painted by him. All that wealth yet he can't get enyone to tell him if the picture is real, let alone before he bought it. I'd want to be pretty certain if I'd paid $448 million for it. Come to think about it, I'd want to buy it from someone trustworthy, not a chain with a Russian oligarch and a disgraced art dealer. Let's follow the paint spots.


‘Salvator Mundi’ dates from around 1500. It was first recorded in the Royal collection of King Charles I (1600-1649) and thought to have hung in the private chambers of Henrietta Maria – the wife of King Charles I – in her palace in Greenwich. It was later in the collection of Charles II.

It goes quiet until Salvator Mundi is recorded in a 1763 sale by Charlie Sheffield, the illegitimate son of the Duke of Buckingham, auctioned it following the sale of Buckingham Palace to the king.

It then disappeared until 1900 when it was acquired by Sir Charles Robinson as a work by - wait for it - Leonardo’s follower, Bernardino Luini, for the Cook Collection, Doughty House, Richmond.

By this time, its authorship by Leonardo, origins and illustrious royal history had been forgotten, and Christ’s face and hair have been overpainted.

In the dispersal of the Cook Collection, it was ultimately consigned to a sale at Sotheby’s in 1958 where it sold for a modest £45.

It disappeared once again for nearly 50 years, emerging in 2005 when it was purchased from an American estate at a small regional auction house. Its rediscovery was followed by six years of painstaking research to document its authenticity.

Then, in 2005, an undisclosed consortium of American businessmen purchased the painting. The painting was brokered to the disgraced Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier for $80m.

He sold it to the boss of AS Monaco football club, one Dmitri Rybolovlev, the potash billionaire. Rybolovlev paid $127.5 million as part of a job lot of 37 paintings flogged by Bouvier to Rybolovlev for £2.1 billion. A tidy way to clean up the cash from the *ahem* potash sales.

Bouvier's commission was $45 million. So what would Rybolovlev do? Sue Bouvier for overcharging, of course. The legal action is in cash-friendly Monaco, but Philippe Narmino, Monaco’s justice minister, took early retirement in September 2017 after 'friendly text messages' with Rybolovlev’s lawyer Tetiana Bersheda and other Monaco officials were published (aka “the existence of a secret network affecting the local courts for the benefit of Rybolovlev”) .

So we now have a painting, allegedly by Leonardo da Vinci, refused for display in the Louvre Paris by Crown Prince MBS, the Head of State for Saudi Arabia. He's bought it from a Russian oligarch, via a discredited art dealer and it might be a fake.

Easy come, easy go.

There's quite a few times when 'don't do it' could have been uttered in this chain of events - unless the motivation was other than related to the artwork?

And now the kicker. That Russian football club owning potash billionaire also bought something else of interest. A mansion - the Maison de L'Amite. For $95 million. In Palm Beach. From Donald Trump. But we knew that was coming, didn't we?

Characteristically, Donny sold substandard property. Rybolovlev has demolished it.

rocketman and others.

We were chatting on the way to see Rocketman. I wondered whether there'd be a sudden spate of popstarpix, to follow Bohemian Rhapsody (which we'd seen) and the somewhat delayed Rocketman.

I realised that I've seen Elton around three times - once with Kiki Dee back in the olden days, at Alley Pally. Then for a new year party when he was doing his red piano thing (I snapped it above), and once when we got out of the elevator at the wrong floor and stumbled into an Elton John party at Kensington Roof Gardens.

And this story of Elton (played by Taron Egerton), with Bernie Taupin (played by Jamie Bell) through the early years fairly zoomed along. There were so many good songs to choose illuminating the story and they were reasonably handled by the cast in a manner that didn't scream 'musical number' at every turn.

I enjoyed the simple story-telling and was quite happy to suspend disbelief whenever required. Yes, and we came out singing the tunes.

As for the other movies about pop stars. Electric Church (Hendrix) was playing in the same cinema later in the evening. I saw the encrypted and tracked film stacked in the corner of the foyer. Atlanta in the unforgettable Band of Gypsys era.

But that's not all, how about "Blinded by the Light", the 2019 British comedy inspired by journalist Sarfraz Manzoor's obsession with Bruce Springsteen? Not set in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Oh no, try Luton in the 80s.

And then, imagine. Imagine if a freak event wiped the collective global memory of every Beatles song. That only one person remembered. Yes, it's Yesterday.

I may need a season ticket to the Picturehouse.

fast cars go slow

Above is my quick recreation of every episode of Top Gear Grand Tour, which is being heavily promoted at the moment. I honestly thought that the three middle aged men with dressing up disorders had been banished to the tumbleweed of Dave and Youtube.

I somehow doubt that they will lead with the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) story about car production volumes. SMMT described as “extraordinary” that just 70,971 vehicles rolled off the UK production lines in April, down 44.5% from 127,970 in the same month of last year.

The SMMT’s figures show that for the year to date, car production in the UK is down 22.4% to 441,260, with exports hit hardest – down 23.3% compared to an 18.5% fall in production for the domestic market.

Mike Hawes, SMMT Chief Executive, said,

"Today’s figures are evidence of the vast cost and upheaval Brexit uncertainty has already wrought on UK automotive manufacturing businesses and workers. Prolonged instability has done untold damage, with the fear of ‘no deal’ holding back progress, causing investment to stall, jobs to be lost and undermining our global reputation.

"This is why ‘no deal’ must be taken off the table immediately and permanently, so industry can get back to the business of delivering for the economy and keeping the UK at the forefront of the global technology race."

production values #felfie

It is fascinating to watch the current leadership bids, not least because of the variable production values being used.

At one end we can see colour corrected wide screen scripted sound-bite pieces with lower thirds titles and background music. In the middle we get camera-stabilised bulleted-list voice-to-camera with hasty subtitles. And then we get the pretend hand-held videocams with blustery background effects and rock solid stabilisation. I can't work out whether it tells a story about the funding of the various campaigns too, nor of their authenticity.

"Come visit me for a chat," tweeted one old-Etonian candidate, from within Kew Gardens,(entrance fee £16.50). In fairness, he added "It's all fake," when asked about the video selfie.

soviet postcards from generative adversarial networks

As well as the artificial intelligence to create new faces on movies, there's another kind that allows photo-realistic scenes to be created from 'Paintbrush'-style blocks of colour. nVidea Research has been working on this for some time, along with other tools to remove people, creases, captions and so on from pictures.

It's very clever, if somewhat rudimentary, and works better with simple source material. I tried it with this 1 minute attempt by me to blot out a well-known political folly. One can still spot his hands and his suit cuffs. I had to use Photoshop to clumsily drop the tell-tale tophat mask over the scene.

I like the softly spoken narrators in these clips, giving the world software which can create facsimilies of art. What's that law of unintended consequences? Imagine the scene: "Alexa, Paint a street crowd. Paint on a few angry captions..." In the style of Tabloid, of course.

a rip in the fabric

Like the worm Ouroboros, it continues.

I watched some of the results come in and noticed that only around 38% had bothered to vote. I suppose I get it.

First, they said the vote shouldn't happen, then they were forced, so the candidates pulled together some half-hearted blankness. Now it is being declared as The Greatest Result of All Time.

Assuming that Brexit Party got around 32% of the 38%, that's 12% of the electorate who voted directly for Brexit. Let's add in the Conservative 9.1% and the UKIP 3.3% and we get to 17%. If I'm feeling kind I could round it to 20% and call it one fifth. It says a lot for democracy that only 2/5 voted and only 1/5 voted for a Brexit related theme albeit without a manifesto.

But the Westminster Tories have their 'what the people wanted' democracy mantra on repeat (instead of the racy "Can't risk it, we're out") and Farrago will bleat about betrayal. Labour will continue to ponder and pander vague competing vanity-isms.

Sad that with May's madness we've already given much of the United Kingdom away. Services - gone to Europe. Production - crashed or moving to Europe. Retail - crashed or crashing. May carries the dustbin for all of this.

Meanwhile, Westminsteros plans self-preservation even with the shaky arithmetic of the current House. Europe watches in bewilderment as the UK attempts to climb Zora Rach Nam's flaming peak. Theresa's contagious derangement is exemplified by her successors' calculatedly soft-spoken refrains of the same rhetoric.

Bravura makes the scenario distant, but sooner or later another emperor will have visited Brussels, met with the same frozen stare and returned déshabillé. It'll be time to break the glass, but only the box-of-frogs Nutters Club will support the 'managed' crash out no deal WTO WT*.

No one has solved the language problem. How to build for 'Victory' and then have to modify to 'Revoke' and 'Remain'? Time to find the hippogriff egg.

The worm will eat.

Max Headroom was right

I wondered how long it would be before fake versions of videos of news topics would start to appear. Sleazy Mr Trump has managed the first campaigning one, with that video of Nancy Pelosi stuttering her way through an interview. "I didn't know it was fake," declaimed Trump (or some such tosh).
There's a cheerful explanation of how to do it below. The banjo accompaniment heightens the sense that it's all fine and dandy playing around with this technology.

Max Headroom would be pleased.

spoiler alert

Yeah, well.

Now we get the dangerous clown. He's played the buffoon card and dodged with claims of schoolboy error, but behind it all, he's really quite dangerous. Let's start with his lies.

The biggest one was on that bus. He knew it was false, but he played into it anyway. Dominic Cummings might have had some of the ideas, but Boris was complicit. Then there's the minor drip feed lies. Amusing enough, banana police, bans on prawn cocktail crisps. Just enough to tip the gullible over the edge.

As Mayor of London he promised to keep TfL booking halls open (they closed) and to remove rough sleepers (they doubled).

When campaigning about Brexit, he was quick to mention Turkey as a migration threat, despite it not even being an EU member. Ironically, Turkey does have a Customs Union with the EU.

Currently, he's facing a private prosecution about the lies to the electorate during the EU referendum campaign.

He's got form for gaffes too. The road to Mandalay, Hillsborough, Letterbox, so it goes on. He can't wriggle out of all of them with a schoolboy dodge and some pidgin Latin. The formula is all about covering ignorance with self-serving wit.

The infidelities extend across his private life too, Marina Wheeler (wife 2), Allegra Mostyn-Owen (wife 1), Petronella Wyatt, Anna Fazackerley, Helen Macintyre, Carrie Symonds. No wonder he has so many properties dotted around?

Little surprise that Ashley Madison, the affairs dating site, used Boris in one of their adverts. Nor that Boris is used to handling inverted pyramids of piffle.

As the MP's lawyer told a court: “I should make it clear that ... it is absolutely denied by Mr Johnson that he acted in an improper or dishonest manner at any time.”

That's all right then.

Now we must brace ourselves for populist soundbites. It's started already. Speaking in Interlaken, Switzerland at an economic forum, Johnson is quoted saying: “We will leave the EU on October 31, deal or no deal. The way to get a good deal is to prepare for no deal. To get things done you need to be prepared to walk away.”

He also suggested Parliament could legislate to make it illegal to revoke Article 50, which he believes will focus minds in Brussels.

Look forward to a madman at the controls, democratically selected by 120,000 average age 57 mainly white middle class Conservative club members.