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paulinedorchester · 4 years ago

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London, July 1943: Excerpt from a work in progress

After nearly twenty minutes, Foyle decides that he might as well walk.

A cab pulls up at the entrance to the Victoria Coach Station every few minutes, but the drivers favour passengers in uniform. Difficult to resent that in wartime, but it quickly becomes clear that they’re really looking for the Americans – ready, willing and able to pay twice the normal fare. There are throngs of them in London: on leave, newly returned from North Africa, giddy with the success of the Sicily landings. Foyle keeps looking for familiar faces but sees none.

It’s barely a mile to Charles and Pamela’s place, if he recalls correctly, and it’s a fine day. After almost three hours cooped up in the coach it’ll do him good to stretch his legs. He hasn’t brought much with him and his suitcase is easy to lift. He picks it up and sets out.

Travel remains slow and uncomfortable, as it has been for the past few years. The discomfort is as much psychological as physical. Posters with such inscriptions as Must you travel? and Is your journey really necessary? are still displayed at every station, and Foyle had weathered a few cold stares from passers-by as he entered the coach stop at Hastings.

But it’s Charles and Pamela’s twentieth wedding anniversary on Saturday, and it had been kind of them to invite him. He really doesn’t feel the need for a change of scene, as they seem to feel he must, but he is curious to know what London looks and feels like with no official duties to discharge, even in the midst of the war.

And the war is everywhere he looks. Westminster has been spared neither bombing nor the depredations of the war effort. The railings have been removed from the familiar public garden he passes as he walks north along Buckingham Palace Road, and the garden has been cut up into allotments.

Buckingham Palace itself, he recalls as he makes his way past it, was hit repeatedly in 1940; it’s hardly a moldering ruin, but clearly only stopgap repairs have been carried out, the King and Queen waiting out the shortage of manpower and materials along with the rest of the country.

And as he walks across the Green Park he sees that it’s the public garden writ large: stripped of ironwork, much of the land being used to grow food.

At length – it’s a longer walk than he’d remembered, after all – he reaches Arlington Street and the drive in front of Arlington House. In 1936 Charles and Pamela had given up the fine Georgian house in Highgate that they’d taken before their son Alan was born and moved into a large flat in this mansion block, just completed at the time in the height of modern style. The move was a practical one, they had said: the place was and is an easy walk from the Admiralty, where Charles’ duties were demanding increasingly long days, and their daughter Averill’s school – now evacuated to Yorkshire – was also fairly close by.

Arlington House still stands, but it’s sandbagged and most of its metal ornament is gone. Some windows on the lower storeys, Foyle observes, have been blown out and boarded up.

‘My name is Christopher Foyle – I’m here to visit Commander and Mrs Howard,’ Foyle tells the elderly porter, who looks him up and down in an appraising way.

‘Yes, sir. They’re expecting someone by that name,’ the porter concedes, sounding a bit skeptical. At once he adds, ‘May I see your identity card, please?’

Foyle had suspected, and still suspects, that Pamela was privately relieved at the end of the Howards’ conventional existence in the suburbs. As he waits for the lift he reflects, not for the first time, that it’s hard to decide which seems more unlikely: her decision to leave her earlier life of vaguely Bohemian gentility for marriage to a Naval officer, or Charles’ choice of her as his wife.

Not that they aren’t well suited. They were both born into well-to-do families whose fortunes had been made during the previous century from the more refined aspects of trade: fine printing and engraving in the Howards’ case, textiles for the Fourniers. Pamela’s parents, though tolerant of their daughter’s artistic inclinations, had put the kibosh on her youthful ambition to become a ballet dancer.

Of age by the time the last war began, she had joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, driving an ambulance between Calais and a point that was often unnervingly close to the front. After the war she’d been one of the countless women to whom marriage had seemed an unlikely prospect, if only given the small number of surviving men. Although she had no real need to earn her own living she’d found a position at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as a Deputy Company Manager, the first woman ever to fill that role.

And then, one evening in 1922, she’d somewhat reluctantly accompanied her father to a banquet at Drapers’ Hall. There she had been seated to the left of 1st Lt Charles Howard, R.N., a junior executive officer in attendance to represent the office that supplied Naval uniforms, still a bachelor at nearly thirty-two. (Foyle has never been entirely clear about how old Pamela is.) They were married nine months later. The wedding was a spectacular business in a Regency chapel of ease in St John’s Wood; Andrew, five years old and saucer-eyed throughout his first visit to London, had been a pageboy.

The brevity of their courtship had caused some talk, according to Rosalind. Still, it was a conventionally appropriate match – but also, Foyle knows, a very happy one. Pamela found Charles bright, witty and kind as well as quite handsome. His determination to remain in the Navy – in the teeth of his family’s expectation that, as the only surviving son, he would return to civilian life and enter the family business – had struck a chord with her, even as the novelty of life as a mildly rebellious bachelor girl with a toe in the demi-monde was beginning to wear off. Charles’ sense of duty was counterbalanced, and his own long-neglected aesthetic interests reawakened, by Pamela’s creative impulses and artistic connections.

It is Pamela herself who answers the door of the flat and laughs gently when her brother-in-law is unable to conceal his surprise.

‘Jill was called up,’ she explains, ‘and there’s really no hope of replacing her. They’ve all been called up! Not to worry, though — I haven’t yet taken over the kitchen. Mrs Ellis is still with us, bless her, so we won’t starve! It’s awfully good to see you, Christopher, and I’m very glad you’ve come. It means a great deal to Charles, as it does to me.’

Rosalind and Pamela had taken to each other at once, and became quite firm friends, Foyle recalls.

Mrs Ellis brings in tea, apologises for its meagerness and withdraws to the kitchen.

‘Would you care for something a bit stronger than mere tea?’ Pamela enquires. ‘I can imagine that you might need it, after travelling in this day and age. There’s no whiskey of any description, I’m afraid, but we do have a bottle of rather good Portuguese sherry.’

‘Well, um, perhaps a very small glass. Thank you.’

Sounding less facetious, she asks after Andrew.

‘He’s, um, he’s well,’ Christopher replies. ‘Not that it’s easy on him – not that I wouldn’t prefer to see him in some sort of nice, safe job at a desk – but he holds up all right on the whole. How’s Alan?’

‘Happy as the day is long — adores the Royal Naval College, talks constantly about the Painted Hall, and is quite convinced that we’ll win the day just as soon as he’s on active service!’

‘That’ll be, um, another two years, won’t it?’

‘Quite right,’ Pamela says dryly. ‘A bit long to wait, in my opinion. He has a chit for the week-end. He’s asked after you.’

‘It’ll be very good to see him. What about Averill?’

‘I’m afraid not — she won’t be here, I mean. Keighly’s a long way off, fifteen’s a bit young for such a long journey on one’s own — as I see it, at any rate — and they’re keeping those girls busy year ’round there. We haven’t seen her since Easter — and we went there. Quite a trek in these conditions! But there’s some good news on that score — the school’s coming back to London in September. I don’t know that I was meant to tell you that,’ she adds, ‘but there it is.’

‘Is that wise?’

‘Charles and I have had a few conversations about that, I can tell you! But Keighly’s not all that far from either Bradford or Leeds, and they’ve both been Blitzed. I suppose that the governors think that they may as well take their chances! In any case the decision’s been made — and it’ll be marvelous to have her home.’

‘Of course. I understand you have a new job,’ Christopher adds.

‘Yes. I’m afraid I wasn’t much good at making Sten guns — they showed me the door, Christopher, to be perfectly honest! — so I’ve joined CEMA as a sort of manager-at-large.’

Christopher frowns, puzzled.

‘Seema?’ he asks. ‘Oh, the Committee, um... ’

‘Or the Council, as it is now, for the Encouragement of Music and Arts.’

‘That part of the Government?’

‘No, not as such. It was run strictly on private funds at first, but Parliament has awarded us a hundred thousand pounds per annum — and Mr Bevin absolutely loathes us!’ Pamela adds with great glee. ‘Some of the people we’ve reached,’ she continues, sounding more serious now, ‘have never seen a live performance of anything before — they’ve simply never had the opportunity — unless it was the village amateur dramatic society, I suppose. It’s truly wonderful, Christopher — we’ve had letters from people who tell us that we’ve opened up whole new worlds for them! War does break down barriers — as dreadful as it is to think of it doing anything beneficial!’

‘I’ve often heard – um, the young woman who was my driver – I’ve often heard her say much the same thing.’

‘Would that be Miss Stewart?’

‘Oh – yes.’

‘We’ve heard some very encouraging things about her.’ Pamela smiles and sips her tea. ‘As it happens, CEMA is looking for a regional officer for the Hastings area. We have someone in Brighton, but she has her hands full with that region — and she’s expecting a baby in January.’

‘This a paying position?’

‘Oh, of course! Not lavishly, I’ll admit — two guineas per week to start with, plus travel expenses.’

‘That isn’t too bad,’ Christopher considers. ‘If I can think of a likely candidate I’ll let you know.’

‘I’d be quite grateful for that.’

Modern as the flat may be, it has a hearth and a mantel, with a clock sitting atop the latter that now strikes the hour.

‘Charles promised to come home at a reasonable time today,’ Pamela notes. ‘Christopher, I ought to tell you that he left here this morning in — I was about to say “in a foul mood,” but “in a highly unsettled state” might be a better way of describing it.’

‘What about?’ her brother-in-law asks, trying and failing to picture this.

‘I don’t know! I can tell you what brought it on, though — a letter that arrived in the morning post. But I didn’t see it — not the letter itself, I mean — and Charles didn’t tell me what was it said. All I know is that it seemed to agitate him a good deal. He took it away with him. Well, when I say that I didn’t see it, what I mean is that I didn’t read it,’ she goes on. ‘Of course I didn’t. But I did see that it was typed — on rather better paper than one is accustomed to seeing nowadays, and that the paper was marked.’

Christopher smiles dimly.

‘I’m no longer with the police, Pamela,’ he reminds her.

‘Well, no. I know that, of course. But isn’t it interesting, nonetheless?’

‘Depends on what’s in it.’

When the door to the flat opens a few minutes later; Pamela excuses herself and goes into the hall to greet her husband. Foyle hears both of them saying his name, and Charles using the words apologise and upset. After a few moments the Howards return to the sitting room.

‘Christopher! Wonderful to see you! Thank you so very much for joining us,’ Charles begins, shaking his brother-in-law’s hand. ‘How was your journey up? We’ve been hearing the most terrible stories,’ he goes on. On the surface he’s the same as ever, but something has changed behind his kind eyes. Something has rattled him.

‘Oh, can’t complain,’ Christopher replies.

Charles asks after Andrew and – with a vagueness that seems almost deliberate, as though the subject were slightly too indelicate to bring up – enquires as to whether Christopher is keeping himself satisfactorily occupied these days. These subjects having been discussed, there is a short silence during which he looks first pensive, then determined.

‘Pamela tells me that she’s put you in the picture about my... well, my loss of an even keel this morning.’

‘Well, um, she told me that it occurred,’ Christopher replies.

‘Mm. There was a letter in the morning post that gave me quite a shock. As the day went on, though, it dawned on me that it concerns both of you as well,’ Charles continues, glancing at Pamela and then back to Christopher. ‘Please correct me if I’m wrong, Christopher, but I don’t believe that you ever met my brother – and of course I know that you never did, Pamela.’

‘Knew him only by reputation,’ Christopher affirms. Captain Nicholas Howard, 4th Battalion, Royal Surrey Regiment, had been killed in action on the first day of the Battle of the Somme and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

‘Yes. Well. It seems that there was at least one thing about him that I didn’t know either.’ Charles falls silent again, looking perplexed. He reaches inside his jacket, brings out an envelope and removes its contents, which he offers to his wife and brother-in-law. ‘Perhaps it would be best if you both simply read this.’

He watches for a moment as Pamela and Christopher stand side by side, each holding an edge of the letter paper, taking in its contents. Then he looks out of a window.

#foyle's war fan works #works in progress #christopher foyle #charles howard #an original character #a new one #please bear in mind that this is a draft #wip wednesday

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fiefgoldenlake · 6 years ago

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I adore Tammy Pierce but am new to the fanfic scene. Tortall recs please?? (My favorites are Alanna and Daine’s series)

Hi, thanks for your ask! I hope it’s okay to respond publicly so that other people can add their own recommendations. There’s a POTS list here for anybody interested in that, but SOTL has always been my personal favourite. There’s another SOTL rec thread here by @valentinegoestotortall, and I’ve recced a couple previously, to be found in our fic rec tag.

fate, show thy force, PG-13 by @rain-sleet-snow - Delia, Thom, and the Great Resurrected Duke Scandal of 439 HE.

So Mote it Be, PG-13 by @lisafer - Raoul learns the joys and pains of complicated love before finding the right one.

A Knight Like No Other, R by ineptshieldmaid - It’s funny, he thought later, how much the clothes became the person. How little you knew them, with something else on. It wasn’t that he hadn’t known by then that Alanna was a girl, but sometimes he could go whole days without thinking of it, and then it would come back in a rush, at some perfectly normal moment. That’s Alanna; that’s my squire there, pouring wine, and she’s a girl. No one knows my squire’s a girl. Locked to AO3 users.

A Year of Sarain, G by russian_blue - After fleeing to Tortall, Thayet and Buri find ways to mark the passage of time.

Discovery, PG-13 by Ankhiale - Alan of Trebond gets two progress reports. An AU diverging in the middle of In the Hands of the Goddess.

Changes, G by @ladylingua - A drabble set during Lord Alan’s funeral.

Five Midwinter Gifts, G by Carmarthen - Five times Buri gave Thayet a Midwinter gift.

Sand in the Wind, PG-13 by rain_sleet_snow - Kourrem bint Kemail fulfils a dream.

Finds but riddling shift, G by lotesse - George finds Arram Draper juggling in the snow.

A Dream of Otters, G by anthean - Pregnancy, for a Wildmage, has some unexpected challenges.

The Pony’s Tale, G by Mardy - No company, no apples, no decent grass. Behind her, the infant immortal’s chewing of horsehair continued unabated. And no kicking, trampling, or biting. Lovely.

And if you’re looking for Daine/Numair specifically, Sylvanius has some lovely fic.

#fic rec #song of the lioness #immortals #tortall #tamora pierce

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lewiskdavid90 · 8 years ago

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thejustinmarshall · 7 years ago

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The 80s Cruise Omnibus: Cruise Scrapbook

This is a part of our full coverage of the 2018 80s Cruise. Read more about the floating music festival here.

The bands, the costumes, the ports, oh my! Here are some lingering thoughts and pictures from passengers following this year’s Cruise.

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Favorite Costumes

The 80s Cruise wasn’t just about concerts, it was also 80s cosplay. Here are some of passengers favorite costumes from this year:

Bryan Do as “Long Duk Dong”. Photo by TuKe Photography

Claudine Edwards had to have the Smurf costumes shipped to and from Ft. Lauderdale. Photo by Tuke Photography

The Yip Yips tied for first place with The Smurfs. Photo by TuKe Photography

Brad and Katy Williams’s Tron costumes looked even better in the dark. Photo by TuKe Photography

Only on the 80s Cruise would someone find the Hamburgler offering up a cheeseburger. Roy Fredericks and Christopher Olivas by Chuck Coverly

The music, the magic, you know you can catch it! Solid Gold dancers on the 80s Cruise. Photo by Chuck Coverly

“Islands in the Stream” by Chuck Coverly

Amanda Olivas, dressed as Terri Nunn, and Terri Nunn

Possibly the best Beetlejuice costume ever seen on the Cruise. Now maybe everyone can retire the Beetlejuice theme.

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Ch-ch-ch-changes

Everyone loved the Cruise, but there were a few things they would change if they could.

Most people agreed that scheduling was an issue:

“I realize it’s hard to get everything in but less overlapping of the bands would be a start.” – Myley Rosenbaum

“I didn’t like was the counter-programming where I had to miss things I wanted to see/do because of our red card show on the main stage.” – Chuck Coverly

Maybe it’s time for new theme nights?

“Change theme nights to have an 80s horror night…” – Dave August

“…they do get a bit boring or repetitive if you’ve cruised before.” – Ziva Gottesman

While we’re talking about themes…

“I would suggest they put up some sort of jumbo tron/video screen so that everyone can see the costumes during the judging.” – Fulana Perez

“All the theme nights winners should be chosen by the fellow cruisers.” – Regina Kroll

Everybody loved the 80s music, some just wanted more of it:

“Too much top 40. (There was) so much more in the 80’s, especially for dancing to.” – Mina Credeur

“I would have liked to hear say the top 100 from any given day out of the 80s, not just the top 20.” – Melanie Zarth

But there really wasn’t much to complain about…

“Make days last 36 hours.” – David Drill

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Celebrity Sightings

Passengers took every opportunity to get pictures with their favorite musicians:

Kelly Scruggs and Terri Nunn

Cindy Bensur with Fee Waybill

Dan Galvant and Ziva Gottesman with Rick Springfield

SMelanie Lozinak and Rick Springfield

Wendy Molony and Mike Reno

Deb Kinar and Mike Reno

Deane Draper and Tommy Heath

Jennifer Belk and Alan Hunter

Camdria Low, Mark Goodman, and Alan Hunter

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“Thank you for being a friend”

Overwhelmingly, the thing people like most about the Cruise was the the camaraderie they shared with other guests.

“It is crazy how everyone on the cruise instantly became family as if the 80’s were some magical bond.” – Margo Popkowski

“The friendliness of the other guest! Totally inclusive environment!” – Kathy Machacek

“Everyone is just happy!” – David Drill

“I think its a good mix of people that enjoy the music and enjoy participating in a week long ‘Halloween type event’. – Gary Flanagan

“Now that we’re three years in, the cruise feels like a summer camp/class reunion where we get to hang with people we only get to see once a year…” – Robin Legat

“Favorite part of the cruise was being with like minded people that made you feel that you are actually back in the eighties again.” – Laura Ann Nitka

“All of the friends we have made in the past two years!” – Amanda Olivas

LJ Moskowitz is a photographer and writer based out of New Jersey specializing in concert, product and fine art photography. She is a member of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) and Professional Photographers of America (PPA). You can find her at Shutterchick Photography, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

The post The 80s Cruise Omnibus: Cruise Scrapbook appeared first on Concert Blogger.

from Explore http://concertblogger.com/2018/05/the-80s-cruise-omnibus-cruise-scrapbook/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

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fillthevoid-with-space · 7 years ago

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I’ve been dropping the word ‘spectroscopy’ with only minimal explanation for quite a few episodes now and it’s high time I expanded on this topic. Join me for the double-digit episode of this podcast to learn about the history of spectroscopes and spectroscopy, how it taught us about the Sun and stars, and what advancements were made to take spectroscopes into the 20th century.

Below the cut are sources, music credits, a vocabulary list, a timeline of all the astronomers and chemist and physicists I mention, and the transcript of this episode. Let me know what you think I should research next by messaging me here, tweeting at me at @HDandtheVoid, or asking me to my face if you know me in real life. And please check out the podcast on iTunes, rate it or review it if you’d like, subscribe, and maybe tell your friends about it if you think they’d like to listen!

(My thoughts on the next episode were probes through the ages or the transit of Venus. I could also talk about more modern spectroscopy, and I’m planning to interview a friend after the eclipse next week about her graduate-level research into the history of the universe. Let me know by the 17th and I’ll have the next podcast up on August 28th, barring any new-job-related delays.)

Glossary

absorption lines - dark spectral lines that appear in a spectroscope when a gaseous or burned-up element has light shone through it.

angstrom - a unit of length—one hundred-millionth of a centimeter—that is usually used to express wavelengths and the distances in atoms.

emission lines - bright spectral lines that appear in a spectroscope when you burn an element up.

Fraunhofer lines - a standard set of spectral absorption lines observed by Joseph von Fraunhofer. He mapped 574 lines and designated them alphabetically from red to violet in the spectrum with the letters A through K, with weaker lines assigned other, lowercase letters.

incandescent - luminous or glowing due to intense heat.

spectroscopy - the study of light from an incandescent source (or, more recently, electromagnetic radiation and other radiative energy) that has its wavelength dispersed by a prism or other spectroscopic device that can disperse an object’s wavelength. The spectra of distant astronomical objects like the Sun, stars, or nebulae are patterns of absorption lines that correspond to elements that these objects are made up of. This area of study is the major source of the study of astrophysics as well as advancements in chemistry, astronomy, and quantum mechanics.

Script/Transcript

Sources

Prisms vs. diffraction gratings via CSIRO

Definition of ‘angstrom’ via Encyclopedia Brittanica

Definition of ‘incandescent’ via Merriam-Webster

Current uses of spectroscopy in astronomy

Some past and current satellites with spectroscopic capabilities via a John Hopkin’s professor’s old webpage

Spectral classification of stars via University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Common, A. A. “Astronomy.” In Popular Astronomy 8 (1900), 417-24. Located on Google Books preview.

Hirshfeld, Alan. Starlight Detectives. Bellevue Library Press: NY, 2014.

“the Fraunhofer lines, as they were soon to be called, originate in the sun itself, and are neither optical artifacts of the spectroscope nor the result of selective absorption of sunlight within earth’s atmosphere” (168-9).

“the flame’s radiance did not ‘fill in’ the dark D [sodium] lines , as [Kirchhoff] had expected, but reinforced the absorption of these wavelengths of light” (178).

Kirchhoff: “the dark lines of the solar spectrum … exist in the consequence of the presence, in the incandescent atmosphere of the sun, of those substances which in the spectrum of a flame produce bright lines in the same plane” (178).

“a body with a propensity to emit light at a given wavelength must have an equal propensity to absorb light at that wavelength” (178).

“expresses the wavelength of a spectral line, depending on its derivation angle and the density of grooves in the grating” (187).

“mosaic of the solar spectrum assembled from prints of twenty-eight negatives” (187).

“visual confirmation of the chemical unity of the Sun and stars” (203).

Doppler “claimed in 1842 that the perceived frequency of a wave is altered by one’s state of motion” (209).

“In Doppler’s schema, waves from a steadily approaching source are compressed: as their frequency is increased, their wavelength is shortened. Waves from a steadily receding source are stretched: as their frequency is reduced, their wavelength is elongated” (210).

“Yet history has shown that credit for an evolving theory or field, such as stellar spectrum photography, often goes not to individuals who are first to publish, but to those who most convincingly establish the validity and worth of their results” (223).

“Vogel confirmed that the Sun does not rotate as a solid body; Its rotation rate varies with solar latitude, fastest at the equator, progressively slower towards the poles” (231).

“The deviation of the star’s G line from its solar position revealed the star’s Doppler shift and, via a mathematical formula, its line-of-sight motion” (232).

“What Pickering had accomplished for stellar spectral classification with the Henry Draper project, Campbell had accomplished for stellar radial velocities with the Lick catalog” (233).

Johnson, George. Miss Leavitt’s Stars. Atlas Books: NY, 2005.

“When Kirchhoff and Bunsen made the discovery, the existence of atoms was still controversial. Once they were discovered, the effect could be simply understood: when an atom is energized, its electrons jump into higher orbits. When they fall back down they emit various frequencies of light. Every kind of atom is built a little differently, its electrons arrayed in a specific way, resulting in a characteristic pattern. For similar reasons, if you shine a light through a gaseous substance, like hydrogen or helium, certain colors will be filtered out. The result in this case is a characteristic pattern of black ‘absorption’ lines interrupting the spectrum—another unique chemical fingerprint. (The same colors marked by the absorption lines would appear as bright emission lines if the element was burned.)” (102-103).

Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. 2nd ed. Simon & Schuster: NY, 2012.

Timeline

William Herschel, German/English (1738-1822)

Thomas Melvill, American (1751-1832)

William Hyde Wollaston, English (1766-1828)

David Brewster, Scottish (1781-1868)

Françoise Arago, French (1786-1853)

Joseph von Fraunhofer, Bavarian (1787-1826)

William Henry Fox Talbot, English (1800–1877)

George Airy, English (1801-1892)

Christian Doppler, Austrian (1803-1853)

Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, German (1811-1899)

Anders Ångström, Swedish (1814-1874)

Lewis Morris Rutherfurd, American (1816-1892)

William Allen Miller, English (1817-1870)

Pietro Angelo Secchi, Italian (1818-1878)

Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Fizeau, French (1819-1896)

William Huggins, English (1824-1910)

Gustav Kirchhoff, German (1824-1887)

Giovanni Battista Donati, Italian (1826-1873)

James Clerk Maxwell, Scottish (1831-1879)

Henry Draper, American (1837–1882)

Mary Anna Palmer Draper, American (1839–1914)

Hermann Carl Vogel, German (1841-1907)

Edward Charles Pickering, American (1846–1919)

Margaret Lindsay Huggins, Irish/English (1848-1915)

Henry Augustus Rowland, American (1848-1901)

Williamina “Mina” Fleming, Scottish (1857–1911)

William Wallace Campbell, American (1862-1938)

Annie Jump Cannon, American (1863-1941)

Antonia Maury, American (1866-1952)

Vesto Melvin Slipher, American (1875-1969)

Edwin Hubble, American (1889-1953)

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

#podcast #space #outer space #spectroscopy #science #history

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starringemiliaclarke · 7 years ago

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Press: Game of Thrones: How They Make the World’s Most Popular Show

TIME – The battle for Westeros may be won or lost on the back of a lime green mechanical bull.

That’s what it looks like on a January Monday in Belfast, as Game of Thrones films its seventh season here. Certainly no one believes the dragons that have thrilled viewers of HBO’s hit series exist in any real sense. And yet it’s still somewhat surprising to see the British actor Emilia Clarke, who plays exiled queen Daenerys, straddling the “buck” on a soundstage at Titanic Studios, a film complex named after this city’s other famously massive export.

The machine under Clarke looks like a big pommel horse and moves in sync with a computer animation of what will become a dragon. Clarke doesn’t talk much between takes. Over and over, a wind gun blasts her with just enough force to make me worry about the integrity of her ash blond wig. (Its particular color is the result of 2½ months’ worth of testing and seven prototypes, according to the show’s hair designer.) Over and over, Clarke stares down at a masking-tape mark on the floor the instant episode director Alan Taylor shouts, “Now!” Nearby, several visual-effects supervisors watch on monitors.

Clarke and I talk in her trailer before she heads to the soundstage, at the beginning of what is to be a long week inhabiting a now iconic character. Behind the scenes it’s more toil than triumph, though. The show’s first season ended with Daenerys’ hatching three baby dragons, each the size of a Pomeranian. They’ve since grown to the size of a 747. “I’m 5-ft.-nothing, I’m a little girl,” she says. “They’re like, ‘Emilia, climb those stairs, get on that huge thing, we’ll harness you in, and then you’ll go crazy.’ And you’re like, ‘Hey, everybody! Now who’s shorty?!’”

She has reason to feel powerful. On July 16, Clarke and the rest of the cast will begin bringing Thrones in for a landing with the first of its final 13 episodes (seven to air this summer, six to come later). Thrones, a scrappy upstart launched by two TV novices in 2011, will finish its run as the biggest and most popular show in the world. An average of more than 23 million Americans watched each episode last season when platforms like streaming and video on demand are accounted for. And since it’s the most pirated show ever, millions more watch it in ways unaccounted for. Thrones, which holds the record for most Emmys ever won by a prime-time series, airs in more than 170 countries. It’s the farthest-reaching show out there—not to mention the most obsessed-about.

People talk about living in a golden age of TV ushered in by hit dramas like The Sopranos, Mad Men and Breaking Bad. All had precisely honed insights about the nature of humanity and of evil that remade expectations of what TV could do. But that period ended around the time Breaking Bad went off the air in 2013. We’re in what came next: an unprecedented glut of programming, with streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu jumping into an ever-more-crowded fray. Now, there’s a prestige show for every conceivable viewer, which means smaller audiences and fewer truly original stories.

Except for Thrones, which merges the psychological complexity of the best TV with old-school Hollywood grandeur. You liked shows with one antihero? Well, Thrones has five Tony Sopranos building their empires on blood, five Walter Whites discovering just how far they’ll go to win, five Don Drapers unapologetic in their narcissism. Oh, and they’re all living out their drama against the most breathtaking vistas not of this world.

The phenomenon is fueled by a massive worldwide apparatus that, in a typical 10-episode season, generates the equivalent of five big-budget, feature-length movies. Even as the series has grown in every conceivable way over the years—it shoots around the globe; each episode now boasts a budget of at least $10 million—it remains animated by one simple question: Who will win the game in the end? And if Thrones has taught us anything, it’s that every reign has to end sometime.

1. the fiction

It all started with a book. In 1996, George R.R. Martin published A Game of Thrones, the first novel in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. (Back then, he conceived of it as a trilogy. Today, five of the planned seven volumes have been published.) As a writer for shows like CBS’s The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast in the late ’80s, Martin had been frustrated by the limits of TV. He decided that turning to prose meant writing something “as big as my imagination.” Martin recalls telling himself, “I’m going to have all the characters I want, and gigantic castles, and dragons, and dire wolves, and hundreds of years of history, and a really complex plot. And it’s fine because it’s a book. It’s essentially unfilmable.”

The books became a hit, especially after 1999’s A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords a year later. Martin, who writes from his home in Santa Fe, N.M., was compared to The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien. Like Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Martin’s Westeros is a land with a distinctive set of rules. First, magic is real. Second, winter is coming. Seasons can last for years at a time, and as the series begins, a long summer is ending. Third, no one is safe. New religions are in conflict with the old, rival houses have designs on the capital’s Iron Throne, and an undead army is pushing against the boundary of civilization, known as the Wall.

Thrones’ vast number of clans includes the wealthy and louche Lannisters, including incestuous twins Cersei and Jaime. She is the queen by marriage; he helped ensure her ascendancy through violence. Their brother Tyrion, an “imp” of short stature, is perhaps the most astute student of power. Then there are the Starks, led by duty-bound Ned. His children Robb, Sansa, Arya, Bran, Rickon and “bastard” Jon Snow will be scattered throughout the realm’s Seven Kingdoms. Daenerys is a Targaryen, an overthrown family that also—surprise—has a claim to the throne. Soon enough, Thrones devolves into an all-out melee that makes the Wars of the Roses look like Family Feud.

In the wake of director Peter Jackson’s early-2000s film trilogy of Tolkien’s masterpiece, Martin was courted by producers to turn his books into “the next Lord of the Rings franchise.” But the Thrones story was too big, and would-be collaborators suggested cutting it to focus solely on Daenerys or Snow, for instance. Martin turned them all down. His story’s expansiveness was the point.

Two middleweight novelists, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, had come to a similar conclusion and obtained Martin’s blessing at what the author calls “that famous lunch that turned into a dinner, because we were there for four or five hours” in 2006. The two writers thought Thrones could only be made as a premium-cable drama, and they walked into HBO’s office with an ambitious pitch to do so that year. “They were talking about this series of books I’d never heard of,” says Carolyn Strauss, head of HBO’s entertainment division at the time. “[I was] somebody who looked around the theater in Lord of the Rings, at all of those rapt faces, and I am just not on this particular ferry … I thought, This sounds interesting. Who knows? It could be a big show.”

HBO bought the idea and handed the reins to Benioff and Weiss, making them showrunners who’d never run a show before. Benioff was best known for having adapted his novel The 25th Hour into a screenplay directed by Spike Lee. Weiss had a novel to his credit too. The two had met in a literature program in Dublin in 1995 and later reconnected in the States. “I decided I wanted to write a screenplay,” Benioff told Vanity Fair in 2014. “I’d never written a script before, and I didn’t know how to do it, so I asked [Weiss] if he would write one with me, because he had written a bunch already.” It never got made.

The Thrones pilot, shot in 2009, got off to a rocky start. Benioff and Weiss misjudged how much planning it would take to bring Martin’s fantasy to life. To portray a White Walker—mystic creatures from the North—they simply stuck an actor in a green-screen getup and hoped to figure it out later. “You can maybe do that if you’re making Avatar,” says Weiss. “But we need to know what the creatures look like before we turn on the camera.” They also had trouble portraying Martin’s nuanced characters. “Our friends—really smart, savvy writers—didn’t [realize] Jaime and Cersei were brother and sister,” says Benioff of the ill-fated first cut. Ultimately, they reshot the pilot.

When Benioff and Weiss look back at that first season, they see plenty to nitpick. Their fealty to Martin’s text, for example, made Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion “Eminem blond,” per Benioff. (His hair was later darkened.) Still, the elements that have made the show a monster success were there—and audiences (3 million for Thrones’ first season finale) picked up on them. Arguably the most groundbreaking element was a willingness to ruthlessly murder its stars. Ned Stark, the moral center of Season 1, portrayed by the show’s then most famous cast member (Sean Bean, who starred in The Lord of the Rings), is shockingly beheaded in the second-to-last episode. By the third season’s “Red Wedding,” a far more gruesome culling, the show had accrued enough fans to send the Internet into full on freak-out mode.

Thrones had by then become the pacesetter for all of TV in its willingness to forgo a simple happy ending in favor of delivering pleasure through brutality. Even if you don’t watch, Thrones’ characters and catchphrases have permeated the culture (the apparent death of Snow was an international trending topic all summer in 2015). Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons and The Tonight Show have lampooned the show. And the recent South Korean presidential election was called on a national news network with depictions of the candidates duking it out for control of the Iron Throne.

2. the production

Wandering around the Belfast set, the scope and the orderliness of the enterprise is staggering. The wights, zombie-like creatures with spookily pale faces and dressed in ragged furs, form a tidy line as they wait to grab breakfast burritos. Outside the stage door, a few smoke cigarettes, careful not to ash on their worn-in tunics. “At first we had a season with one big event, then we had a season with two big events, now we have a season where every episode is a big event,” says Joe Bauer, the show’s VFX supervisor. Bauer and VFX producer Steve Kullback oversee a group of 14 FX shops from New Zealand to Germany that work on the show almost continuously.

One of those big events this season is a battle whose sheer scope, even before being cut together with the show’s typical brio, dazzled me. In order to get on set, I agreed not to divulge the players or what’s at stake. (Thrones has been promising this clash all along, and when the time comes, the Internet will melt.) It will be all the more impressive knowing that the cast and crew were shot through with a frigid North Atlantic wind that whipped everyone during filming and sent them all flying to the coffee cart during resets. (The cold, a prosthetic artist tells me, is at least good for keeping the makeup on.)

The setting is as grand as the action. The battle was filmed in what was once a Belfast quarry, drained, flattened out with 11,000 square meters of concrete and painted over with a camouflage effect—all of which took six months and required special ecological surveys. This kind of mountain moving, or leveling, is par for the course for Thrones.

Each season starts with producers Christopher Newman and Bernadette Caulfield circulating a plot outline on a color-coded spreadsheet, dictating what will be shot by the show’s two simultaneous camera units, which can splinter into as many as four. It’s perpetually subject to change, given the complications of a television show this ambitious—over seven seasons they’ve shot in Croatia, Spain, Iceland, Malta, Morocco and Canada as well as locations around Northern Ireland. While I’m in Belfast, my plan to watch Jon Snow in action is canceled because of inclement weather (that same wind) that makes filming from a drone hazardous. At this point, Caulfield will grab onto any small comfort. “Now the dragon doesn’t get any bigger,” she says, “so we know that much.”

Another breakdown goes out to department heads, and a massive global triage begins. Costumer Michele Clapton, for example, begins figuring out if she’ll have to dress any new characters or armies and then sets out on the most complex work. “I know that Daenerys’ dresses will take the longest,” she says. Each look, no matter the character, may take as many as four craftspeople to bead, stitch and—if there’s meant to be wear and tear—break down. Deborah Riley, the production designer, begins looking for references to new locations in the outline. Tommy Dunne, the weapons master, starts forging gear for the season’s big battles. “My big thing is the numbers,” he says. “I hope they won’t frighten me.” He made 200 shields and 250 spears for last season’s epic Battle of the Bastards.

Benioff’s and Weiss’s jobs amount to maintaining constant conversation with numerous producers. The pair are usually in Belfast for about six months a year. Wherever in the world they happen to be, they get daily video from the shoots and field an endless stream of emails from staff on location. During my visit, wolves described in the script as “skinny and mangy” showed up to the shoot looking fluffy and lustrous. Around the world, new message notifications lit up smartphone screens.

When Benioff and Weiss aren’t shooting, they’re writing. And when they aren’t shooting or writing—which happens rarely—they’re promoting. The two make a complementary pair. Benioff, who wears his hair in a Morrissey quiff, is the more sardonic one. Weiss, with silver rings in his ears, is nerdier and given to hyperbole. They say they’re still having fun making Thrones, despite the stakes, and still regularly find themselves surprised by its scale. Weiss recalls seeing the buck Clarke rides to simulate Daenerys’ dragons for the first time: “We knew it would be a mechanical bull. We didn’t know it would be 40 ft. in the air and six degrees of motion with cameras that swirl.” Says Benioff: “It’s like the thing NASA built to train the astronauts.”

Despite nonstop production, Weiss says, “There’s still a kid-in-a-candy-shop feel. You’re going to look at the armor, crazy-amazing dresses—gowns Michele is making—then you’re going to look at the swords, then watch pre-vis cartoons of the scenes that will be shot and you’re weighing in on shot selection. Every one of these things is something we’ve been fascinated with in our own way since we were kids.”

“Especially dresses,” cracks Benioff. Weiss adds, “Especially the gowns.”

3. the players

The first few seasons’ worth of swordplay and gowns turned the show’s cast into recognizable stars. But it’s the complexity of their characters, revealed over time, that made them into icons. “My friends always say to me, ‘It’s like you’re two different people. I see articles about you in BuzzFeed’—but then they see my Facebook posts,” says Maisie Williams, who plays the tomboy turned angel of vengeance Arya Stark. Williams was two days past her 14th birthday when the show debuted. There’s TV-star famous, after all, and then there’s some-percentage-of-23-million-people-has-been-actively-rooting-for-you-to-kill-off-your-co-stars-for-six-years famous.

Thrones’ story doesn’t ask its actors to break bad or good, and viewers stay tuned in large part because of the characters’ moral mutability. Consider Cersei, played by Lena Headey, who is either a monster or a victim. The character has become more popular with fans even as she’s wrought greater carnage, including blowing up a building full of people last season. “At the beginning, people were like, ‘Oh my God, you’re such a bitch!’” she says. “What’s moving is that people love her now and want to be on her team.” That Headey, a Brit, uses an exaggerated American accent as she delivers the harsher interpretation of her work is revealing of nothing, or a lot.

She’s thought through every element of her character, though, including the incestuous relationship with Jaime that provided the show its first narrative jolt. “I love to talk about all of it,” she says, citing her frequent emails to Benioff and Weiss. “Cersei’s always wanted to be him. Therefore, for her, that relationship is completion. There’s been an envy, because he was born with privilege just for being a man. I think their love was built on respect.”

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the Danish actor who plays Jaime, is a bit less excited to discuss the subject. “I’ve never really gone too deep into the whole sister-brother thing because I can’t use that information. I have to look at her as the woman he loves and desires. Lena’s a very good actress, and that’s kind of what carries the whole thing.” He adds, “I have two older sisters. I do not want to go there. It’s just too weird.”

Even a character like Jon Snow, as close to a pure hero as possible as Season 7 begins, has outgrown the box he originally came in. Snow, an illegitimate child never embraced by his father’s wife, is a James Dean daydream of Sir Walter Scott. “I made mistakes and felt that he wasn’t interesting enough,” says Kit Harington of the way he’s played Snow. We’re in a Belfast hotel bar, and Harington is squeezing in a coffee before he makes an evening showing of Manchester by the Sea. “That sounds weird, but I’ve never been quite content with him. Maybe that’s what makes him him. That angst.” His character has been slowly absorbing lessons about duty and power—and “this year there is this huge seismic shift where all of what he’s learned over the years, suddenly …” Harington trails off. “He’s still the same Jon, but he grows up.”

Dinklage, too, found in Tyrion a character who surpassed his expectations. The actor says he’d never read fantasy beyond The Lord of the Rings. “That’s the part of the bookstore I don’t really gravitate toward,” he says. “This was the first time in this genre that somebody my size was an actually multidimensional being, flesh and blood without the really long beard, without the pointy shoes, without the asexuality.”

Thrones catapulted Dinklage, the only American in the main cast, from a well-regarded film and theater actor to among the most-recognized actors on earth in part because the asexuality is quite absent. Tyrion thirsts for wine, sex and, crucially, love and respect. As the offspring of a wealthy and powerful family, the first two are easy to come by. The latter not so much. “He covers it up with alcohol, he covers it up with humor, he does his best to maintain a modicum of sanity and he perseveres,” says Dinklage. “He’s still alive. Anyone who’s still alive on our show is pretty smart.”

Indeed, with just 13 episodes left, everything is possible—alliance, demise or coronation. “Every season I go to the last page of the last episode and go backward,” says Dinklage. “I don’t do that with books, but I can’t crack open page one of Episode 1 not knowing if I’m dead or not.”

4. the drama

The size of Thrones’ controversies have, at times, been as large as its following. Its reliance on female nudity, especially Daenerys’, was an early flash point. “I don’t have any qualms saying to anyone it was not the most enjoyable experience. How could it be?” says Clarke. “I don’t know how many actresses enjoy doing that part of it.” That aspect of the role has faded as Daenerys found paths to power beyond her sexuality. This evolution from a passive naïf into a holy terror who rules by the fealty of her subjects is what has earned Daenerys, according to Clarke, the audience’s loyalty. “People wouldn’t give two sh-ts about Daenerys if you didn’t see her suffer,” she says.

More controversial still has been the prevalence of sexual violence. Many of the major female characters have been assaulted onscreen. In a 2015 sequence, Sansa, the Stark daughter played by Sophie Turner, was raped by her husband. According to the logic of the show, the plot gave her character a reason to seek revenge and power of her own. It nonetheless generated substantial blowback online and clearly turned some fans away from the series for good. “This was the trending topic on Twitter, and it makes you wonder, when it happens in real life, why isn’t it a trending topic every time?” says Turner, who is 21. “This was a fictional character, and I got to walk away from it unscathed … Let’s take that discussion and that dialogue and use it to help people who are going through that in their everyday lives. Stop making it such a taboo, and make it a discussion.”

Benioff and Weiss claim to have seen no other possible outcome for a character stranded in a marriage to a psychopath, in a skewed version of feudal society. “It might not be our world,” says Benioff, “but it’s still the same basic power dynamic between men and women in this medieval world. This is what we believed was going to happen.” Adds Weiss: “We talked about, is there any other way she could possibly avoid this fate that doesn’t seem fake, where she uses her pluck to save herself at the last? There was no version of that that didn’t seem completely horrible.”

Even if Benioff and Weiss don’t always admit it, the show has changed. Scenes in which exposition is delivered in one brothel or another, for example, have been pared back. It’s at moments like these that the success of Thrones seems a precariously struck balance, thriving on a willingness to shock but always risking going too far.

5. the end of the end

Benioff and Weiss claim to have sworn off reading commentary about the show, good or bad. When I visit them in Los Angeles in March, they’re writing the next and final season. I peek into a fridge in a lounge area in their offices, a room dominated by a Thrones-branded pinball machine Weiss proudly points out, to find three cases of beer with Westeros-themed labels, low-calorie ranch dressing and yellow mustard. At this point, they have full outlines of the final six episodes. In fact, they’ve been working on the very last episode, possibly the most anticipated finale since Hawkeye left Korea. “We know what happens in each scene,” says Weiss.

The fact that they know is remarkable considering the show will reach its conclusion long before the books. The last new Thrones novel came out in 2011, the year the show began. The author describes his next installment, the sixth of seven, as “massively late.” “The journey is an adventure,” says Martin, who, at 68, has fought criticism that he won’t finish the books. “There’s always that process of discovery for me.” But with young, and rapidly maturing, actors under contract and a community of artisans awaiting marching orders in Belfast, the show can’t wait.

Benioff and Weiss always knew this would happen. So they met with the novelist in 2013, between Seasons 2 and 3, to sketch out what Martin calls “the ultimate developments” after the books and show diverge. The upshot, they say, is that the two can coexist. “Certain things that we learned from George way back then are going to happen on the show, but certain things won’t,” says Benioff. “And there’s certain things where George didn’t know what was going to happen, so we’re going to find them out for the first time too.”

In preparation for Season 7, Benioff and Weiss have gotten more possessive. That has further fueled fans’ curiosity even as it has created security challenges. In the run-up to Season 6, paparazzi shots of Harington—and his distinctive in-character hairdo—in Belfast tipped the Internet off that Jon Snow wasn’t, in fact, as dead as he’d seemed the season before. “Look at how difficult it is to protect information in this age,” says Benioff. “The CIA can’t do it. The NSA can’t do it. What chance do we have?”

It’s also changed the on-set dynamic. Coster-Waldau says Benioff and Weiss have “become much more protective over the story and script. I think they feel this is truly theirs now, and it’s not to be tampered with. I’ve just sensed this last season that this is their baby: ‘Just say the words as they’re written, and shut up.’”

Then there’s the end of the end, the finale likely to air next year or the year after. Benioff and Weiss are not writing the Thrones spin-off projects HBO revealed this year that could explore other parts of Westerosi history—some, all or none of which may end up on air. In the meantime, they claim not to be worrying about the public’s reaction to their ending. (Benioff says that when it comes to endgame stress, “medication helps.”) Weiss says, “I’m not saying we don’t think about it.” He pauses. “The best way to go about it is to focus on what’s on the desk in front of you, or what sword is being put in front of you, or the fight that is being choreographed in front of you.”

What’s currently before them seems like plenty. When I first met Clarke in Belfast, she was shooting on the back of a dragon. When I leave a week later, she’s still at it. “Thirty seconds of screen time and she’s been here for 16 days,” the episode’s director, Taylor, remarks at one point. Later on, I’d remember this moment of exhaustion when Weiss described seeing the buck for the first time. He went on to add, “It probably feels a bit less amazing to Emilia, who sits on it for eight hours a day, six weeks in a row, getting blasted with water and fake snow and whatever else they decide to chuck at her through the fans.” The table with the espresso machine—just beyond Clarke’s line of sight—is well trafficked.

Clarke doesn’t seem bothered, though, smiling and chatting with the crew from atop the buck. As the state-of-the-art hydraulics move her into position, her posture shifts from millennial slump to ramrod straight. In an instant, she converts herself into the ruler of the fictional space around her. On cue, she looks over her shoulder with a face of marble. She casts into an imagined world some emotion known only to her. She’s gazing into a future that, in the flickering moments that the story remains a secret, only she can see.

Press: Game of Thrones: How They Make the World’s Most Popular Show was originally published on Enchanting Emilia Clarke

#emilia clarke #game of thrones #game of thrones cast #GOT cast #daenerys targaryen #me before you #terminator

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