Wasteland wrap-up #85

More hot times in Paris, some very uninformed thoughts on the World Cup, a post-apocalyptic road trip film from the early 1960s, thoughts on on multiversal time travel plots...

Last week was once again a hot one here. Not as bad as the canicule a few weeks ago — or maybe I’m just getting more used to it. On the really hot days, though, it’s just unpleasant inside and out. Inside one feels like one is shut in, hiding from heat, with fans that help but don’t really provide respite. Outside one quickly gets tired and feels put-upon. On the days where there is a breeze, it’s not so bad, but on the days when there isn’t, it’s a slog. Well, it should cool off soon. Until it heats up again…

On these hot days, Lyndon enjoys going to the Jardin du Luxembourg relatively easy and sitting in the shade, birdwatching. We bring plenty of water for him.

I am not a sports fan (of any sport, I don’t discriminate), but it has been fun to be in France during the World Cup, particularly as they have been doing so well. One does not need to watch it to know how they are doing — the cheers from every café, bar, brasserie, etc. that has pulled out a big-screen television (which is to say, almost all of them) can be heard from blocks away. But the game last week, between France and Morocco, was interesting, because there are a significant number of Moroccans who live in Paris, and so sometimes the cheers would be for things that worked against France.

I do not have an informed opinion about who “ought” to win the World Cup (I’m happy to root for France because I’m living here, and it is fun to see the people so happy about it, but if I wasn’t living here, I wouldn’t care one way or the other), although like many I was glad that after Trump’s interference on behalf of team USA that they were thoroughly pasted by the Belgians, because there really was no other just outcome.

Some interesting birds worth watching, from this morning — at bottom left, a crow, at top right, a parakeet. Not shown is a pigeon who was also initially part of the mix.

I feel bad for team USA, because I am sure that they did not want to be cast as the beneficiaries of bully-corruption, but once they were, they were trapped: if they did well, it would be roundly considered as a tainted victory. But that is how it goes when there’s a narcissistic bully heading a country, someone who has just no sense of when he should not try to make everything about him, and who is surrounded by yes-men cultists. As always, he finds the way to squander any possible goodwill that people might have towards the United States, while simultaneously sabotaging it. I don’t think people who are not Americans can quite appreciate how burdensome it gets to have this kind of daily psychological assault. The prospect of having to deal with that, and the acuteness of living under it on a daily basis, is one reason why we wanted to leave.

For Doomsday Machines this week, I wrote about Panic in Year Zero! (1962), a nuclear post-apocalyptic road-trip film that was marketed as a titillating grind-house film but is a bit more complex than that. I liked it more than I expected to, in the end — it is in many ways very much a product of its time, but it is also more complex and ambiguous than it really had any right being.

The film is one of many that I looked at while compiling a list of 13 “essential” nuclear films for an article for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which should be coming out next week, I believe. I will probably just re-post a version of it as my blog post for next week, as I will be out of town anyway (at the History of Science Society meeting in Edinburgh).

The list was a tricky one to compile, because there are some “obvious” films that need to be on there (Dr. Strangelove, The Day After, Threads, etc.) but I wanted to make it a bit more than just the obvious ones. So there are some ones that would be perhaps unfamiliar to even people who are fairly steeped in this stuff. And I tried to give brief commentary/discussion of what I thought made each of them worthy of being on the list, beyond, again, the obvious things one could say…

OK, that’s all for this week — a downside of the canicule (heat wave) is that I mostly just stay inside working/hiding from the heat, so I have little to report! But next week I will be in Edinburgh so there should be much more.