Jessica Zafra's Blog, page 54

Captain (Fantastic) squared

We assumed a lot of things from the poster of Captain Fantastic. The image of a family standing by a bus conjures up Little Miss Sunshine, the palette The Royal Tenenbaums. The brief summary brings up Peter Weir’s Mosquito Coast, in which Harrison Ford plays a father who takes his family “back to nature”, somewhere […]

Those who have left

Poem for when you can’t leave the house because it’s raining elephants

Irony in daily life

On “shipping”: When fandom becomes a crusade, things get ugly

G-rated Johnlock fanart Shipping is as old as fandom itself. But traditionally, fans never expected their particular pairing to “become canon” — that is, to officially happen on a show or in a storyline. In modern fandoms, however, fans of movies and TV shows often root for their ships to become canon the way sports […]

There are vast differences between the UK and US editions of Cloud Atlas.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2004, Cloud Atlas is already complicated enough: telling the story of six interlocking lives and hopping back and forth across centuries and genres. But differences between the US and UK editions highlighted by Eve in a journal article published on Wednesday on the Open Library of Humanities run […]

Archaeologists unearth Tintagel Castle of Arthurian myth

The palace is just one of a dozen structures that ground penetrating radar surveys picked up on the Tintagel peninsula, some of which likely housed workman, soldiers and artists. Whoever lived in the main structure, however, lived a pretty glamorous lifestyle considering it was the dark ages. The researchers have evidence that they drank wine […]

Book Oracle: Pick up the book nearest to you and turn to page 45.

The first sentence will describe your lovelife. I had just bought these two books so they were in my bag. “Now we’re trying to figure out why the fundamental fabric of reality is one way rather than some other way.” “…axioms, in the dust of outsiders and mistrust of insiders, in wanderers’ totes and Judas’s […]

Is time real, or is it an illusion?

Einstein once described his friend Michele Besso as “the best sounding board in Europe” for scientific ideas. They attended university together in Zurich; later they were colleagues at the patent office in Bern. When Besso died in the spring of 1955, Einstein—knowing that his own time was also running out—wrote a now-famous letter to Besso’s […]

Meet some heroic cats

Crimean Tom, also known as Sevastopol Tom, saved British and French troops from starvation during the Crimean war in 1854.The regiments were occupying the Russian town of Sevastopol and could not find food. Tom could. He led them to hidden caches of food stored by Russian soldiers and civilians.Tom was taken back to England with […]