Summat and Nowt

I'm currently fascinated by Yorkshire accents. This sketch is a pretty good representation of what they sound like, though they occasionally slip up and say "the", which is not used in region.

Dig it!

Tintin, knitted

Starring Yaphet Kotto as Idi Amin

Over the weekend, I watched (via Netflix streaming) this well-made TV movie from 1977.  I remember hearing about it when it was originally on (5th grade), but didn't see it at the time.  And back then, you only got one chance!  I got interested because the hijacking and rescue was referenced in a circa 1980 British TV series I like, The Sandbaggers.  Raid on Entebbe does what I like a good political/action thriller to do--take its time to set up the story, keep the action grounded in real life, and have a high level of tension.*  Since I knew some details of the real-life story, I knew that it would have a fairly upbeat ending, so it wasn't really an unpleasant experience.  It's also got a great cast, with the great Martin Balsam, one of my favorite B-movie stars, John Saxon, and especially Yaphet Kotto in the choice role of General Idi Amin Dada, who he plays accurately as cuckoo, dangerous, and extremely annoying.  The film has great production values, and by virtue of being made contemporary to the actual event, is chock full of seventies verisimilitude.  It was much better than I expected it to be--highly recommended to those who like that kind of thing.

*The first two of these qualifications are largely lost today, due to the need to keep everything on a video game level of excitement and physical implausibility.  The third qualification (high level of tension) is often killed by movies failing to take some time to breathe and let the audience build up a feeling of dread.

The Diana Dors Code

An interesting mystery about this blog's current cover girl, British bombshell Diana Dors.

Illustration by G. Foulard

From Wikipedia:

Before she died [in 1984], Dors apparently hid away what she claimed to be over £2million in banks across Europe. Eighteen months before her death, she gave her son Mark Dawson a sheet of paper, which she told him was a code that would reveal the whereabouts of the money.

Her widower, Alan Lake, supposedly had the key that would crack the code. But Lake committed suicide only five months after Dors died, leaving Dawson an apparently unsolvable code. Dawson, however, was determined to discover his late mother's fortune. He sought out computer forensic specialists Inforenz, who recognised the encryption as the Vigenère cipher. Inforenz then used their own cryptography software to suggest a ten-letter decryption key, DMARYFLUCK (short for Diana Mary Fluck, Dors's real name).

Although the company was then able to decode the entire message and link it to a bank statement found in some of Lake's papers, the location of the money is still unknown. Some speculate whether there may have been a second sheet, whose information might have led to the discovery of the money. Channel 4 made a television programme about the mystery and created a website (now removed) where users can read more and help solve the mystery.

Portrait of Mexi-Cokes

Lately, I've grown very fond of the now-ubiquitous Mexi-Cokes. They remind me of having a Coke when I was a kid, which seemed like a treat, even though we drank a lot of them in my house. Once soft drinks (or sodas, depending on where you grew up) started being sold in larger and larger sizes, they lost a lot of their magic, as far as I'm concerned. Opening a heavy glass bottle with a bottle opener has a nice substantial feel, like opening a beer. The fact that they're more expensive makes them feel more special, too--I'm less likely to open one unless I really want it. Once I have one 12-ounce bottle, I'm done.

Also, they're made with cane sugar, rather than high fructose corn syrup. I've read that there really may not be that much difference in terms of causing obesity--the trick is just not to drink sweet drinks all the time--but it seems more real, like using butter instead of margarine.

Happy Thursday!

I totally stole this from the Shadowplay blog, but it's too good not to share with those of you who don't read it...

Happy Estonian Independence Day!

Now let us celebrate by having some ice cream!

Thanks to Tiny Miss Fran and "Bucky" for the reminder!