the last duel [not a film review]

The incoming film, The last duel, directed by Ridley Scott, is about one of the last trials by combat (ordalie) in France, in 1386 under the mad king Charles VI. Where the Norman knight Jehan de Carrouges fought a Norman squire, Jacques Le Gris, who stood accused of the rape of Marguerite de Carrouges, Jehan’s second wife. It is inspired from Eric Jager’s book on this story and I found it of some personal interest in that the original events take place in Normandy, near my wife’s hometown… Although the film was shot in completely different locations, including Ireland and the south of France! The rape story is presented there from three perspectives, as in Kurosawa’s (immense) Rashomon, but without the ambiguity of the later,

the rising [book review]

When I received this second volume of the Alchemy Wars, the rising, it was most fortunately a weekend, and I devoured it within the two days! As hinted at by the title, hence not truly a spoiler!, this book ends up with the rise of the robots, thanks to the main characters already there in the first volume, Jax (reXened Daniel) the freed robot, Bérénice [missing her acute accents] the French master spy (code name Talleyrand), and Longchamp the charismatic commander of the Montréal (renamed Marseille-in-the-West) fortress. While the author seems to have invested more in the language of the Dutch Empire than in the one of the remaining French exiled to Québec, I did not spot crimes de lèse majesté on my native language (except for the above accents). A mystery remains though as to how, when crossing the Atlantic ocean, fugitives end up in Honfleur, east Normandy, and far inside the Channel. Returning to the plot per se, while its pace is breathless, with the revolutions of the characters’ paths bringing them into predictable contacts, and the dialogues are still great, the recourse to a hidden subterranean complex irked me as usual, while the repeated escapes of Bérénice from certain death, capture, brainwash, are just too much, even with the help of dei ex machina. This second volume is also less into pondering the meaning of free will and freedom, even though the sad discovery by Jax (sorry, Daniel!) of Neverland being somewhat a mirror of Netherlands is well-thought. Now waiting for the last volume and another free wekend (or a trip to Marseille!).

þe norse farce shoppe

As an on-going multilevel pun (started with my misreading a famous outdoor brand logo as a Viking helmet!), and following popular request (at least from a few participants to our Bayesian school at CIRM two years ago!), I took advantage of one of the numerous make-your-own-tee websites to create a norse farce shop(pe) for afficionadas and  afficionados..!

a journal of the plague year [grey November reviews]

Read Evil for Evil, K.J. Parker’s second tome in the Engineer trilogy, published in 2009! Surprisingly, I remembered enough of the first volume for the story to make sense and I enjoyed it, for the same reason I liked Sixteen ways to defend &tc., namely for its attention to logistics and medieval industry taking over the muscle-display of standard equivalents, plus the self-demeaning attitude of most characters, again a welcome change from the standards! The pace of the story sometimes get bogged down, though.

Slowly cooked pulled pork with a hellish amount of red peppers, meaning I ended up eating most of it by myself over a few days. Tried cauliflower risotto, and liked it. Took my mom to a nice restaurant in Caen, À Contre Sens, after an oyster breakfast with her on the quays of a nearby Channel harbour, with a surprise lunch based on local (Norman) products. Finding hardly anyone in the restaurant due to COVID regulations made the experience even more enjoyable. And such a difference from the previous Michelin we sampled this summer!

Wasted hours watching the US presidential vote counting slowly unraveling, computing & recomputing from the remaining ballots the required percentage of Biden’s votes towards catching up, and refreshing my NYT & Fivethirtyeight webpages way too often. And remain fazed by an electoral system stuck in a past when less than 50,000 men elected George Washington.

Cleaned up our vegetable patch after collecting the last tomatoes, pumpkins, and peppers. And made a few jars of green tomato jam, albeit not too sweet to be used as chutney!

Watched the TV series The Boys, after reading super-positive reviews in Le Monde and other journals. Which is a welcome satire on the endless sequence of super-heroes movies and series, by simply pushing on the truism that with super-powers does not come super-responsibility. Or even the merest hint of ethics. Plus some embarrassing closeness with the deeds and sayings of the real Agent Orange. Among the weaknesses, a definitive excess of blood and gore, ambiguous moral stands of the [far from] “good” guys who do not mind shooting sprees in the least, and some very slow episodes. Among the top items, the boat-meet-whale incident, “Frenchie” from Marseille almost managing a French accent when speaking some semblance of French, and Karl Urban’s maddening accent that’s a pleasure to listen even when I understand a sentence out of two, at best.

 

20 years ago…