On Watching YouTube!

 I do enjoy watching YouTube. There is such a variety of channels. I download Andre Rieu concerts for my mother. There are quite a few films and TV shows I would be happy to buy, but which are not available for download, at least not in Australia - films such as The Last Starfighter, Love at First Bite, some Shakespeare films not available for purchase elsewhere(maybe on American streaming  services?). I’ve gone to Premium, which allows me to download and is ad free. It costs, but is worth it.

I also have favourite channels.

Scottish comedian Eleanor Morton does skits in which she plays all the roles. My favourites are the hilarious conversations between J.R.R Tolkien and C.S Lewis. As Tolkien, she puffs on an invisible pipe. The skits always end with Tolkien saying that author Mervyn Peake is coming in later. She also does skits about someone famous reading their hate mail, from Marie Antoinette to Edgar Allan Poe. Arthur Conan Doyle reads a long list of hate mail from people annoyed about his killing Sherlock Holmes. One of the letters is signed, “Love, Mum.”

Someone else who plays all the roles in his skits is Ryan George, whose channel Pitch Meeting mainly focuses on pitch meetings for various films. There are two characters, the writer and “Producer Guy.” If the film is an old one, eg the original Star Wars, there is a typewriter in the background, otherwise a computer, depending when the film was made. The writer then tells the story, including whatever about the film didn’t make sense, pointed out by Producer Guy. His response is “I don’t know” why or “I need you to get all the way off my back about this.” The best known line, after the producer says “That must be very hard” is “No, super easy, barely an inconvenience.”

There is a rather nice channel called Cinema Therapy, in which a film loving therapist and a friend talk about characters from films and analyse them. It really gives you something to think about.

I also have some book and history themed channels. My favourite book channel is owned by Dominic Noble, who begins every review with “Hello, my beautiful watchers!” Most of them are comparing books with their film adaptations, though he did spend some time just talking about books during the Hollywood writers’ strike. He has done several reviews of the Narnia books, several more of the Hercule Poirot novels and film adaptations. He is very lively and often puts on costumes and acts out scenes from the stories. He has also reviewed some cringeworthy novels which are about women who start as feminists, but change their minds, often with Donald Trump as a character or mentioned positively. His descriptions of the stories are hilarious.

Claire Ridgway, a Tudor England expert, has a channel dedicated to her Anne Boleyn Files and Tudor Society. She does also have a web site of the same name, but pretty much everything there ends up on her YouTube channel anyway. It’s chatty and interesting. It’s not just about Anne Boleyn, also about well known people in Henry VIII’s England, but Henry VIII also plays a major part. Sometimes she answers fan questions. Sometimes it’s “What if this or that was different?” such as “What if Arthur Tudor had lived?” But she never says, “I’m right!” She usually says, “This is what I think, and here’s why, I’m not necessarily right, what do you think?” She has written some books, which are available in ebook.

Another chatty Tudor era historian is “Dr Kat.” She is very similar to Claire Ridgway on her channel Reading The Past. 

There are quite a few comedy channels. Aussie Mark Gallagher slips himself into scenes from Harry Potter as an Australian student who abuses characters like Malfoy. He is hilarious. Foil Arms and Hog are an Irish comedy group, also very funny. The most recent is someone trying to get workmates to swap work on Christmas Day.

A very recent channel for me, and a new favourite is Tasting History with Max Miller. He researches historical foods, talks about them and makes them. I have tried one of them, First Class breakfast on the Titanic. Apart from the sad story, it really was fun to have a go. I made buckwheat pancakes and a baked apple, added smoked salmon and marmalade. I couldn’t get Oxford marmalade, but the one I bought was acceptable. I used it on the pancakes. I did think baked apple was a bit over the top for breakfast, but did it anyway, just to see what people ate in First Class on that ship. It worked beautifully. He has written a cookbook called Tasting History. I might get it some time, but for now the YouTube channel will do. I’m currently watching his video on making real historical sugar plums. 

So, any YouTube fans out there?

What I’m Reading Now!

 As usual, I’m reading or rereading several books at a time. Some are books I read years ago and have indulged in buying ebook versions. 

To my astonishment, I discovered that a book I read in my teens, Those About To Die, by Daniel P Mannix, a history of the Roman games, is still around as The Way Of The Gladiator. Interestingly, the intro is written by someone who read it at fourteen, about the same age as I was when I first discovered it. It’s quite charming, for a book about gruesome happenings. The author describes them through the eyes of real people who were there, or at least, chooses those real people, in order to describe the games. So it’s not just “this and this happened” but the possible story of top gladiator Flamma or bestiarius Carpophorus. We know their names, but nothing else. Who knows? I’m halfway through a reread and enjoying it again

I’m reading children’s book Septopus, about a seven tentacled octopus, by Aussie author Rebecca Fung. It will be reviewed here soon, plus I am hoping to interview the author, who has started a publishing company. 

I found the ebook of Drinking Gourd by Barbara Hambly, one of her Benjamin January series about African American musician, teacher, surgeon - and sleuth, sometimes even paid for it - Benjamin January, set in the 1830s and 1840s. I read it years ago, but remembered so little that it was worth a reread. This one involves a murder, as usual, and the Underground Railroad.

The Incompleat Enchanter, by L.Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt, is a book I read years ago when I was first discovering speculative fiction. Someone mentioned it, oddly enough, while commenting on some fan fiction on web site Archive Of Our Own. It made me decide to check it out on Apple Books as I have no idea where my print copy is. I ended up buying all three books in the series. It’s strange to remind myself that this was written in the 1940s. The premise is that a couple of psychologists working at an institute figure out the mathematics of magic. You use a formula and are taken to an alternative universe where a literary world is real. The hero, Harold Shea, first decides to visit the world of Irish myth, but ends up in the world of Norse mythology instead - right before Ragnarok. He does eventually get the hang of it, and the next world is based on Spenser’s Faerie Queen, where he falls in love with warrior girl Belphebe, and takes her home. Other worlds are Orlando Furioso, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, which, being unfinished, is a repeating world, The Kalevala and, finally, Irish myth. A lot of fun! 

I have finally bought The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. It’s the first of a series set in a rather lavish retirement village. Four residents, Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron and Ibrahim, have weekly meetings to discuss - and hopefully solve - cold cases. This time someone actually has been murdered and they work on the case, with the reluctant help of police officers Chris and Donna. A nice cosy, though a number of characters die in the course of the novel. Still, nice to see a story centred around older sleuths. I’ve bought the second book.

There are more - I’ve recently bought the audiobook of Joanne Harris’s Gospel Of Loki, for example - but these will do for now. Are you a person who reads several books at a time, like me? Tell us about your current reading!