M is for ...

After you watch the trailer, you may want to watch the whole movie.  While looking for the trailer, I saw that a "full version" of the movie is currently uploaded there at YouTube ... do a quick YouTube search for "The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain" -- it is a great movie ...

I mentioned that the DVD of this movie was one of two that my father-in-law actually liked (when he thought televisions were totally worthless ...).  Well, there was a third movie he liked when I played its DVD -- the Jackie Chan version of "Around The World In 80 Days."

Why did he like this movie?

Well, his father was a Courier during WWI.  He delivered messages from one outpost to another ... often crossing enemy lines in the process.  At least once he got gassed, but when he stumbled into the medic tent, he was told to get back to his duties since he was still on his feet.

After the war, and only one of four young men from his town that survived the war to come back home, it was difficult to fit into the farming community around him once again.  He encountered the families of those who did not survive, had to deal with survivor's guilt along with their inability to grasp the fact that (as hubby put it into words for me) "... in a war the elements of chance are massively increased.  There is no way to ensure your survival;  a soldier with the best training, the best equipment and the best support staff cannot guarantee that a stray bullet, a sniper's round, a landmine, an unexpected shell (theirs or ours) or fields of mud that drowned many a soldier won't get them."

Today we might recognize and try to help a victim of shell shock, but in those days it was not acknowledged in the US;  it was considered cowardice.  My father-in-law's father became an alcoholic.  On the 4th of July, during the town's fireworks display, my FIL's father would crawl under the porch and huddle there, shaking and afraid.  Even his family was appalled by this behavior.

Then, my FIL came over to watch this movie with me one night;  he had sat across the room in his chair, listening to it before but this time, he came to watch it. 

There is a thunderstorm in the movie and a young man back from the war who was shell shocked.  He lay on the ground having a "fit" ...

After we watched the movie, my FIL went back to his chair and eventually Charles (my father-in-law) said, "You've heard about my father?"  When I said I had, he nodded but did not say more but I realized -- this was the first time he ever understood his father and for decades he had dealt with the "shame" of having a "coward" for a father ...

The movie is billed as a comedy -- there are lots of comedic moments.  It, also, was a vehicle of healing for an old man.  For that reason alone, I am thankful this movie was made -- and if that one old man was the only person 'touched' and helped by that movie -- it was money well spent.

I better find a "lighter note" after all that ... :)

The video below is an instrumental, so you can keep on reading while the video plays out ...

The Mikado Overture

(sorry if an ad pops up at the beginning of the video -- that is something YouTubers can agree to have added to their videos -- lets the Tuber make a few cents per view of their upload ... recent ads, I think, are inappropriate for some audiences, but I have no say in whether they pop up or what it will be)

Monogram 

You have probably run across some of these (below) in your Internet travels.  I like them so much I decided to share some of them with you:

Mini People

Hubby loves trains.  Life-size to the two smallest gauges ... He told me that most of the figures in these photos are probably from the Hobby Shop (as in a place that sells trains and model kits for planes, ships and the tools and supplies needed for these hobbies -- not the "Hobby Lobby" that carries those things but also lots of art/craft items for wifey to spend tons of money on while hubby spends his paycheck on the important things -- planes, trains and ships ... and the incorrect color of paint for those ships, especially the submarines, can be found in the movie "Operation Petticoat"!)

I'm not sure if one of these three videos goes into it or not -- while I was going through a list of possible vids from YouTube, there was one that shows the figures being made.  I really did not think all those poses would be available in the hobby shop or the catalogs ... though there are quite a few in the catalogs!  Seems like the scale train hobbyists want lots of different types of scenes for their trains to visit ... (I had a watercolor teacher, for a group of students who met in his garage once a week in Flemington, NJ, who suggested we invest in HO Gauge animals if we wanted to include them in our paintings, since they would be "to scale" ... great idea!)

Monkey Bread

Today's Baker's Dozen Plus ...

1. monkey
2. money
3. mild
4. mill
5. marble
6. marmoset
7. marmalade
8. musical
9. marimba
10. mineral
11. minimal
12. manual
13. man
14. milliner
15. maximum
16. minimum
17. mount
18. mountain
19. maintain
20. mouth
21. moss

Today is ...

Thank you once again to brownielocks.com/april.html

* Rubber Eraser Day

* World Art Day (DaVinci's Birthday)

and

* Take A Wild Guess Day

Call to Action

There are 5 things you can do to earn a free gift (probably a selection of Color-Your-Own SuseDoodle postcards from a forthcoming collection to be released soon! WOO HOO!)  All five  Call to Action options can be found here -- two can be  answered in the Comments Section here or via the InLinkz section at the end of the post ... I wanted to set the closing date as May 7 but InLinkz would not let  me run a link list for that long ... so the deadline is May 1 ...

More Books "On A Subject" -- Sort of

I don't know what sent me down this path to create this reading list.  I know that I wanted to watch an old movie but the DVD did not work ...

The movie was Arsenic and Old Lace.  But I think the desire to watch that movie came somewhere after the reading list was being created and being worked through.

The sort of unifying theme was Teddy Roosevelt and WWI.

Many years ago, I introduced myself to WWI (having learned very little 20th century history in my history classes at school but wanting to know more about it), starting with Barbara Tucman's The Proud Tower -- a look at the  European events and forces that came together to create the atmosphere that spawned the Great War.
 

Here is a sort of Reading List on the subject plus some fiction that in some way is informed by that time and / or that Great Disaster:

• The Proud Tower - A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914, Barbara Tuchman
• The War That Ended Peace - The Road to 1914, Margaret MacMillan [While Tuchman's book did not really explain what the Dreyfus Affair was in France, and this one did ... seems to be more an expansion on Tuchman's book than much new info -- but that could be just my impression;  there have been a few years between Tuchman's book and this one in my reading list]
• The Imperial Cruise - The Secret History of Empire and War, Richard Poe [I thought I was getting a book about the world cruise of the first large warships, this book turned out to be quite different AND quite informative.  The book description did say when this cruise occurred, but I did not trust the description.  I have encountered far too many inaccurate book descriptions to take them seriously any more -- sometimes I doubt that the editorial staff of the publishing house ever read the book being described ... Anyhow, I am glad I borrowed this book from my public library!]
• Colonel Roosevelt, Edmund Morris [A different view of the Rough Rider ...]
• A World Undone - The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918,  G. J. Meyer  [Kind of slow as it takes the reader through the war and its battles, covering just about all of the ground covered in the battles of Ypres.  I did learn something, not explicitly in the book but inferred from it -- why it is important that the President of the USA is considered the Commander-in-Chief of the US Military.  If you read this book and have an idea what I am referring to, leave your idea(s) in the comments for a downloadable bookmark & bookmark I will send to you.  This book also described how the assassination of an Austrian Archduke ended up causing a World War -- finally, something that never made any sense to me was explained.]
• Overthrow - America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, Stephen Kinzer [this book relates more to The Imperial Cruise than to WWI but sort of fits in to the list in its own way]
• The First Casualty, Ben Elton 
• The Maisie Dobbs series, Jacqueline Winspear 
• The Star of Kazan, Eva Ibbotson (This book really does not fit the theme, but after learning about Austria and WWI in A World Undone, it put a different tint on the story -- at least for me)

There are plenty more that could be added to the list, including Agatha Christie novels featuring Hercule Poirot, a refuge from Belgium who emigrated from Belgium to Britain during WWI, particularly the first book The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and those books that are set between the wars where the gentry often refer to how things have changed since the war in terms of being able to get proper maids and gardeners.

So, why did I want to watch Arsenic and Old Lace?  Leave your answer in the comments, get it right and I'll send you a bookmark and bookplate you can download and print. 

That gives you two chances to get a bookmark and bookplate ... If you answer both, you'll get two ...

Good reads to ya!

Sue 

PS -- OOPS, this got posted at the wrong place.  I'm leaving it here and then going to cut and paste it to the correct place.  **Sigh**