Dr Seán Ketchem

Frankenstein is a 2025 American Gothic science fiction drama film written, produced, and directed by Guillermo del Toro, based on the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley. The film stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the Creature, with Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz in supporting roles. The story follows the life of Frankenstein, an egotistical scientist whose experiment in creating new life results in dangerous consequences. Del Toro had long imagined a faithful Frankenstein film as a "dream project". This was initially in development for Universal Pictures, with del Toro casting frequent collaborator Doug Jones as the Creature, and Bernie Wrightson being considered for the monster's design. However, Universal suspended the project in relation to its planned Dark Universe franchise. Netflix revived the project in 2023, with Elordi instead portraying the Creature. Filming took place from February to September 2024. Although Wrightson died in 2017, his illustrated compilation Bernie Wrightson's Frankenstein was a key inspiration for the film's look. Frankenstein premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on August 30, 2025. It had a limited theatrical release in the United States from October 17 and was globally released on November 7 on Netflix. The film received generally positive reviews from critics. Both the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute named it as one of the top ten films of 2025. It received five nominations at the 83rd Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture – Drama, and nine nominations at the 98th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Elordi).

Holy smokes, trust Benicio del Toro to make an actual tearjerker horror film. Finally watched Frankenstein, what with the run-up to the Oscars next week and all. Just amazing. Jacob Elordi is going to win Best Supporting Actor next week, and if he doesn't, everyone in the Academy should be arrested.

Well that should do the trick.

I know there is still a large German minority in the Opole (Oppeln) Voivodship. Not sure why that area was an exception. It is a major coal region, but Poland had that already. In the case of Reichenberg/Liberec, it was because of skilled glassmakers and jewellers that made popular export products.

Opinion | One President’s Whim. A World in Crisis.

"The reason the Constitution gave Congress the authority to declare war is because putting the authority into a single person makes it subject to their whims and impulses. It's supposed to be something that the public and its representatives discuss among themselves."
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/o...

I knew about the pueblos (was born in Arizona after all) but blew it on the Huns. Damn those Huns!

Flashback: Your Weekly History Quiz, March 7, 2026 Can you sort 8 historical events?

Flashback for March 7, 2026

25 points
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Play here:
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

https://www.texasescapes.com/MichaelBarr/Turn-Verein.htm On March 16, 1871 Charles Jung, Charles Nauwald, Wilhelm Luckenbach, Carl Weirich, Sylvester Kleck, August Nagel and Henry Langerhans founded the Fredericksburg Turn Verein. The stated purpose of the organization was "to help make its members physically strong and spiritually clean; men without prejudice and filled with understanding and good will towards their fellow man." The Turn Verein also promoted "understanding of social, political and religious reforms." The Fredericksburg Turn Verein was originally a men's only club. At first the group met downtown but soon traded that location for property on the 100 block of West Travis Street, across from the public school, in a space then known as Central Park.

Central Texas had German Turnvereine well into the present day. Fredericksburg still had a Turner Hall until 2016, when the building burned down in a fire. If you are visiting a small U.S. town with German heritage, there is a good chance that "Turner Street" wasn't named after someone called Turner

Turners (German: Turner, German: [ˈtʊʁnɐ]) are members of German-American gymnastic clubs called Turnvereine. They promoted German culture, physical culture, and liberal politics. Turners, especially Francis Lieber, were the leading sponsors of gymnastics as an American sport and the field of academic study. In Germany, a major gymnastic movement was started by Turnvater ("father of gymnastics") and nationalist Friedrich Ludwig Jahn in the early 19th century when Germany was occupied by Napoleon. The Turnvereine (German: [ˈtʊʁnfɛɐ̯ˌʔaɪ̯nə]; "gymnastic unions"; from German turnen meaning "to practice gymnastics" and Verein meaning "club, union") were not only athletic but also political, reflecting their origin in similar ethnocentric "national gymnastic" organizations in Europe (such as the Czech Sokol), who participated in various national movements for independence. The Turner movement in Germany was generally liberal in nature, and many Turners took part in the Revolutions of 1848. After the failure of the 1848 Revolution in Germany, the Turner movement was suppressed, and many Turners left Germany, some for the United States, especially the Ohio Valley region, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Texas. Several of these Forty-Eighters became Union soldiers and some became Republican politicians. Besides serving as physical education, social, political, and cultural organizations for German immigrants, Turners were also active in public education and labor movements. They were leading promoters of gymnastics in the U.S. as a sport and a school subject. In the U.S., the movement declined after 1900, and especially after 1917.

The Sokol movement (Czech: [ˈsokol], lit. 'falcon') is an all-age gymnastics organization founded in Prague in the Czech lands of Austria-Hungary in 1862 by Miroslav Tyrš and Jindřich Fügner. It was based upon the principle of "a strong mind in a sound body". Sokol, through lectures, discussions, and group outings, provided what Tyrš viewed as physical, moral, and intellectual training for the nation. This training extended to men of all ages and classes, and eventually to women. The movement spread across all the regions populated by Slavic cultures, most of them part of either Austria-Hungary or the Russian Empire: present-day Slovakia, the Slovene Lands, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Poland (Polish Sokół movement), Ukraine, and Belarus. In many of these nations, the organization also served as an early precursor to the Scouting movements. Though officially an institution "above politics", Sokol played an important part in the development of Czech nationalism and patriotism, which found expression in articles published in the Sokol journal, lectures held in Sokol libraries, and theatrical performances at the gymnastic mass festivals called slets.

There are some creative renamings in the modern map: Turnerstraße (Gymnasts' Street) in German Reichenberg is now Sokolská ulice in Czech Liberec, as Sokol is in fact the Czech equivalent of the German Turnvereine that combined gymnastics with a kind of youth nationalism (mens sana in corpore sano).

Even with my bad Czech, I can recognize a few: Breite Straße became Siroká ulice, Grabengasse became Na Prikope, Tuchplatz is today's Soukenné Namestí, Färbergasse is now Barvirská. Even Liberec is a hard-to-recognize spinoff of Reichenberg, due to the L/R metathesis and some other sound gymnastics.

Over 130,000 Germans were expelled from the Reichenberg region, but a surprising number were allowed to remain, in order to preserve the vital Bohemian glass and jewellery trade. There are still a few thousand German speakers in the town, and a German Gymnasium.

Street names compared. Many are 1:1.

In fact, the southern half of East Prussia which stayed in German hands but became Polish territory after 1945, already largely had a Polish majority, which turned down annexation in a plebiscite out of fear the new state would fall to Soviet Russia, not for ethnic reasons. It is now Warmia-Masuria.

Despite centuries of colonization and settlement, the German linguistic hold on territories east of the Oder and Neisse (lost of course after 1945) was never as strong as a political map of the German Empire may suggest. Large areas of what went to reborn Poland in 1919 were already Polish-speaking.

What actually happened to the Bohemian Germans who enthusiastically cheered on the arrival of the Nazis, and who now had dramatically less rights and freedoms than they had just the week before as part of Czechoslovakia, shows the usual thread of what *really* happens when the far right takes power.

Cat on a balcony table with books

Trying to plan a nice little Spring Break getaway on the cheap, but Soda Pop is putting her foot down.

And just over a month later, the decades-old flagship newspaper of German speakers in North Bohemia changed its masthead to the "Local Paper of the Sudeten Germans."

And this was their very last issue. Just a few weeks into their "liberation," the Nazis had all the independent newspapers shut down.

For the non-German speakers:
On October 1, German troops began marching into northern Bohemia.
On October 2 the Reichenberg newspaper masthead still read "Journal for the German People of Czechoslovakia".
On October 3, the masthead had already been changed to "Journal for the Sudeten German People".

Doing some research on Liberec/Reichenberg, which in the 1930s was the center of the "Sudetendeutsch" political movement, and after annexation was the capital of the Gau Sudetenland. The Munich Agreement was signed on 30 Sept 1938. Look at how the masthead of the city newspaper changes on October 3.

And you could argue there was something very Teutonic about Fantasy Island, despite its Polynesian setting. The plots were all basically variations of the Faust legend, basically "be careful what you wish for, because you might actually get it."

When I was a little kid, my mom would often invite the other German ladies in our neighborhood (believe it or not there were a few of them) over to our house to watch The Love Boat and Fantasy Island back to back. They drank white wine and made little open-faced sandwiches, sort of Abendbrot-style.

The Love Boat is an American romantic comedy-drama television series created by Wilford Lloyd Baumes that originally aired on ABC from September 24, 1977, to May 24, 1986. In addition, three TV movies aired before the regular series premiered and four specials and a TV movie aired after the series ended. The series was set on the cruise ship MS Pacific Princess, and revolved around the ship's captain Merrill Stubing (played by Gavin MacLeod) and a handful of his crew, with passengers played by guest actors for each episode, having romantic, dramatic and humorous adventures. The series was part of ABC's popular Saturday-night lineup of the time, which also included Fantasy Island until 1984. The executive producer for the series was Aaron Spelling, who produced several television series for Four Star Television and ABC from the 1960s into the 1990s. The series was nominated four consecutive times for a Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy between 1978 and 1981, without winning any. Gavin MacLeod and Lauren Tewes also received several Golden Globe nominations for their roles in the series. In 1997, the episode with segment titles "Hidden Treasure", "Picture from the Past", and "Ace's Salary" (season 9, episode 3) was ranked No. 82 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time list.

The Pacific Princess enjoyed huge fame as the cruise ship in The Love Boat, making its way to Mazatlán every Saturday night with a passenger list of celebrity has-beens, but sadly met an ignominious end. It was seized for repayment of a debt and ended up being scrapped (during with 2 workers died).

RMS Cedric was an ocean liner owned by the White Star Line. She was the second of a quartet of ships over 20,000 tons, dubbed the Big Four, and was the largest vessel in the world at the time of her entering service. Her career, peppered with collisions and minor incidents, took place mainly on the route from Liverpool to New York. Requisitioned as an auxiliary cruiser in World War I, Cedric carried out patrol missions until 1916, but her large size was detrimental to her assigned role. She was then transformed into a troop transport and transported soldiers from Egypt and Palestine, then from the United States in the direction of the European fronts. She then resumed civilian service in 1919. In the 1920s Cedric faced competition from increasingly modern ships. After having been refitted several times to adapt to new clienteles, she was withdrawn from service in 1931 and scrapped the following year.

I think if it had been the RMS Cedric that hit the iceberg, they never would have made the movie. It just doesn't have the same ring to it.

"Cedric was called the ship of dreams. And it was. It really, really was."

Connections
Puzzle #1000🎉
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Surfers in Munich (Yes, Munich) Just Want Their Wave Back

"For more than three decades, the Eisbach wave was a beloved Munich attraction, drawing tens of thousands of visitors a year and spawning imitators in Munich and elsewhere in Europe."
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/w...

Absolutely laser focused on the real concerns of the American people and the issues he was elected on.

Lowest solve stat I have ever seen in three years of playing Wordle:

Wordle's getting jiggy

Wordle 1,721 4/6

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The U.S. has now had multiple quarters of negative job growth for the first time since the Great Recession under George W Bush. Tell me again how Republicans are better on the economy.

Wars Often Lose Public Support Over Time. Trump Started This One Without Much.

Rightwing media gleefully masturbated about renaming the DoD the "Department of War" and now suddenly from one day to the next, it is the Department of Defense again on state media (which technically it always was, only Congress can rename government departments).
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/u...

A very nasty crew that have done massive damage to their country are now turning the knives on each other.

"History isn't one thing after another, it's the same damn thing over and over again." (with apologies to Edna St. Vincent Millay)