Another visit to the beautiful city of Prague
September 2nd, 2016 by Roger Darlington
i blog so regularly on NightHawk that, if I miss a couple of days, some of my faithful readers worry that I might have been kidnapped. So this is a short note to explain that I’m making a short visit to Prague and won’t be blogging much For a few days.
Over the last three decades, I’ve visited this wonderful city, where I have friends as close as family, many times and this is in fact my 27th visit. This trip is especially joyous because I came for the wedding yesterday of my dear Czech friend Kaca to her New Zealand beloved Hamish.
It was a very informal event with the actual ceremony at 3 pm taking mere minutes in the open air in blazing sunshine. But the fun went on until midnight. Hamish had compiled a great soundtrack of upbeat music and, once all the children had done, we danced – yes, dear reader, I danced – until the place closed at 12.
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A review of the Spanish film “Julieta”
August 31st, 2016 by Roger Darlington
You may be reluctant to see sub-titled films but you should make an exception for the latest work from Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. “Julieta” is an admirable work and you can read my review here.
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A review of the Quentin Tarantino film “The Hateful Eight”
August 30th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
This is a slow-burning movie but it has many of Tarantino’s trademarks including fine acting, clever dialogue and lots of blood. Check out my review of “The Hateful Eight” here.
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Did you know that the United States has a Flag Code?
August 29th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
I’d always thought that the practice of Americans in placing their right hand over their heart for the raising of the flag and the singing of the anthem was simply tradition. But, as this piece from the BBC site explains, there is actually a Flag Code.
The code was first drawn up only in 1923, under the auspices of the American Legion, and only became law, when the USA was at war, in 1942. It seems that the code is never enforced, however, and there is no punishment for breaching it.
Amazingly the full Flag Code runs to 14 pages and you can check out the text here.
All this reminds me of my visit to Fort McHenry near Baltimore, the location for the crafting of the US anthem ‘The Star-Spangled Banner” – check out my short account here.
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Word of the day: femtosecond
August 28th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
This is an unimaginably small unit of time. One femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second.
I came across the term in an obituary of the Nobel prize-winning scientist Ahmed Zewail which opens as follows:
“Before 1990, all students of chemistry and adjacent sciences were taught that it was impossible to determine the precise atomic rearrangements that occurred during the course of any chemical reaction at the instant when some chemical bonds are ruptured and others formed. The timescale for such events is around femtoseconds, and one femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second.
The major contribution made by Ahmed Zewail, who has died aged 70, was to break through this barrier. At the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), he developed ultrafast lasers which delivered pulses of femtosecond duration, thus making it possible to “photograph” the fundamental process of bond rupture and bond formation. For this outstanding work, he was awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1999.”
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The day they invented the Internet
August 27th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
“If you had walked into Rossotti’s beer garden on 27 August 1976, you would have seen the following: seven men and one woman at a table, hovering around a computer terminal, the woman typing. A pair of cables ran from the terminal to the parking lot, disappearing into a big grey van.
Inside the van were machines that transformed the words being typed on the terminal into packets of data. An antenna on the van’s roof then transmitted these packets as radio signals. These signals radiated through the air to a repeater on a nearby mountain top, where they were amplified and rebroadcast. With this extra boost, they could make it all the way to Menlo Park, where an antenna at an office building received them.
It was here that the real magic began. Inside the office building, the incoming packets passed seamlessly from one network to another: from the packet radio network to Arpanet.”
This is an extract from an article published in the “Guardian” six weeks ago describing a pivotal point in the evolution of the Internet – arguably the day it was invented 40 years ago today.
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A review of the film “The Age Of Adaline”
August 26th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Such is serendipity that a couple of weeks ago I’d never heard of the actress Blake Lively and then I see her in two films.
The first movie was the newly-released work “The Shallows” which I viewed at the cinema [see my review here].
The second film was the earlier (2015) work “The Age Of Adaline” which I rented from Lovefilm and you can read my review here.
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Do you know why my personal blog is called NightHawk?
August 25th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
It has nothing to do with my sleeping habits which fortunately are excellent. It is in fact a reference to a Second World War night intruder ace whom the media dubbed ‘the Czech Night Hawk’. He was Flight Lieutenant Karel Kuttelwascher who was my wife’s father and I wrote a biography of him which was titled “Night Hawk” and published by William Kimber in 1985.
Amazingly, some three decades later, another publisher – Fonthill Media – now wants to reprint the book. The problem is that they need a digital copy of the text and the book was written before the age of personal computers when we all used typewriters. So Fonthill has taken a copy of the original book and produced an optical character recognition version of the text.
However, the transposition is far from perfect, especially when Czech names and Czech accents are involved. So one of my summer projects is to read slowly all 70,000 words of the OCR text and make all the necessary corrections. Fonthill reckon that this will involve up to 40 hours of careful reading. I’ve made a start …
The new version of “Night Hawk” will be published in 2017 but, in the meanwhile, you can read a short account of KK’s exploits here.
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What was the best ever romantic comedy?
August 24th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
I’ve recently watched a Channel Four documentary called “There’s Something About Romcoms” which reviewed some of the best romantic comedies of the last 30 years. The starting point for the programme was the 1989 movie “When Harry Met Sally …” I just loved this film and you can read my review of it here.
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I’m a granddad again and I couldn’t be prouder
August 23rd, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Regular visitors to NightHawk will be aware that I have a granddaughter called Catrin whom I used to see about once a week until a year ago when her parents relocated to Nairobi. She’s now five and a half.
Well, at 9.30 pm local time last night, I became the proud grandfather of a second granddaughter born to my son Richard and daughter-in-law Emily in Nairobi. Mother and child are both doing well and the baby weighed in at 7lb/3.4kg.
Granddaughter No 2 has a great name: Kara Jo Darlington.
The Kara name comes from Thomas Sankara who was a Burkinabé military captain, Marxist revolutionary, pan-Africanist theorist, and President of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987. Viewed by supporters as a charismatic and iconic figure of revolution, he is commonly referred to as “Africa’s Che Guevara”.
The Jo name refers to Joanne Cox who was the British Labour Party Member of Parliament for the Batley and Spen constituency from her election in May 2015 until her brutal killing on 16 June 2016. Emily – who was a Labour Party candidate in the same General Election – knew Jo well and was one of the organisers of and speakers at a commemorative ceremony in Nairobi.
So, as Kara Jo grows up, we will always remember when and where she was born.
I try to make a Skype call to the family in Nairobi each week and I hope that this week I’ll see Kara as well as Catrin and then in October I’ll be going over there for the week of Catrin’s half term. I’m so proud of them all and will be so excited at seeing them all.
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