I’ve read this for decades on my passport, feeling even today that we enjoy special privileges in far-off lands. But it’s a testament to how fast things change now that one week the Queen dies, and the next, the King is having to shore up membership in the Commonwealth. Maybe Charles will be a different kind of King. As The Guardian notes, “Prince Charles is eccentric, impassioned, impatient, indiscreet — which, while manageable faults in a prince, are difficult ones in a king.”
And now for this week’s Omnium-Gatherum…
1. The Queen’s short, unhappy life. One last note on Elizabeth’s life, here’s the best of the lot (the whole lot) of summing ups of her reign over us.
2. What does a nuclear explosion feel like? This archival tape from World War II showed how little the Americans and British cared – especially about their own men.
3. The Architecture of Health. Eb Zeidler was the storied architect who designed Ontario Place, the Toronto Eaton Centre, and Canada Place in Vancouver. He died at age 95 in January. Not so well known is the McMaster Health Sciences Centre in Hamilton which Zeidler designed in the late 60s for their then first dean of medicine, Dr. John Evans, who would go on to be the President of the University of Toronto. Their collaboration created what architectural historian Annmarie Adams claims is one of the most important buildings in Canada and in the world of medicine. This week, she gave the first Zeidler-Evans Lecture which you can see here.
4. They came in waves. And what gorgeous ones here, and waves here too, where the waves are words.
5. How to fake your own death. As The Browser notes: “Don’t Google yourself after your “death”. Don’t stage a “drowning” to explain the absence of a body, it raises red flags, 99% of faked deaths are “water accidents.” Hiking is the way to go; people disappear hiking all the time, legitimately. Don’t try to fake a new identity unless you really have to, because that is fraud, whereas it’s no crime simply to disappear.”
6. Where would Apple be without your iPhone? Still one of the biggest companies on earth. Yet for a product that didn’t exist before 2007, the iPhone has swallowed humanity.
7. The most important forces shaping the world. Morgan Housel appears a lot here because he writes so clearly on such complex things. I urge you to read him regularly. Here’s why.
8. You think you’ve got legal problems? Donald Trump is beset by so many lawsuits and investigations, it’s hard to keep them straight. He has at least 19 attorneys. Here’s who’s after him.
9. Women conductors are rare. Movies about them are rarer still. But the rarest of all is Cate Blanchett playing a woman conductor in a big-screen superflick, like TÁR. Plus Shira Haas, slated to play Montreal’s Ethel Stark, the founder and conductor of the Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra, in the movie, Ethel.
10. Rule Britannia. When you’ve done that for 70 years, plenty of versions of “God Save the Queen” abound, from the Sex Pistols to her great-grandson, Prince George, singing it earlier this year.