"Pompeii: The Last Day"

[lethargic_man]

Having just watched Pompeii: The Last Day on BBC One (<plug>*; with interactive whodunnit accompaniment by Yours Truly et alii</plug>), it struck me this was rather much a portrayal of the disaster for our time. The Roman woman ordering her slaves back to work, thus causing their deaths and her own, brought to mind stories of the same thing happening during the attacks on the World Trade Center -- an impression strengthened by the subsequent portrayal of fleeing pedestrians being overtaken by clouds of smoke and dust when the first pyroclastic flow to reach Pompeii stopped just short of the town.

That's how it struck me, at least.

* Blowing my own trumpet with a sardine sordino in.

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The smoke and rushing down the street when the WTC came down was very reminiscent of any number of disaster movies - it makes me wonder what the historians of a hundred or a thousand years time will make of it assuming the records survive: will they suspect they've got the dates wrong, for instance?

[liv]

Wow. Most cool. Lots of people were talking about this programme in the coffee room today, so I felt vaguely smug on your behalf. In fact it's so cool that I think you can probably get away with the horrible pun :-p

Your pretty footnotes and stuff do not like my overrides, though. This is obviously a problem with my overrides; I've forced the font too heavy-handedly, I suspect. If I had any time at all I'd be tempted to fiddle and see if I can find a way to override the LJ defaults while not overriding intentional text prettifying like yours.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Your pretty footnotes are completely illegible for anyone reading text on a black background, frex. Must I give the rant about never changing text colour without checking or taking control of background colour again ?

....but I thought anything goes with black. ;^b

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

What happened was I put in a <font> tag, and something in the style sheet decided it was going to colour that the grey colour the text defaulted to before I overrode it for the main text in the journal. So I put in a color attribute, and for priority reasons I was disinclined to put in the effort to working out, nothing happened, in the main journal, though it did in the comments, where it was a different colour to the main text -- precisely what I was trying to avoid.

I have now taken out that color attribute, so it should be readable again for you, hopefully.

Call me old-fashioned, but I'm just not used to web stuff being presented a different colour from the way I typeset it.

Re: ....but I thought anything goes with black. ;^b

[ewx.livejournal.com]

HTML isn't really typesetting...

[(Anonymous)]

The pun's dreadful but the image it evokes is rather cool. Just had a look at the website. Most interesting, and brought back memories of six years of Latin plus a school trip to Pompeii.

EM