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Showing posts from November, 2016

Above Ground on the London Underground–Day 50: We're in a Book ... What the Dickens!

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If it's Friday we must be back in London.   Every Friday I take a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Using  my Tube guide & my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings We're currently following the Central Line.  Here are the previous days . This is Day 50. Wandering along the Oxford Road from the Marble Arch we’re traveling parallel to our walk along the Piccadilly Circus route. We’re quite near places we’ve visited before, Marble Arch which we’ve just left, the British Museum , and Selfridges. Today heading towards Chancery Lane, we’re having a look at a couple of literary locations, one well known to anyone who has read Charles Dicken’s Bleak House and the other made famous by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code. Photograph: Kurt Hutton/Getty images/1951 The entrance to Old Buildings and Old Square which leads into Lincoln

Above Ground on the London Underground—Day 49: The Marble Arch (RIP Leonard Cohen)

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The Marble Arch via onelondonone.blogspot.com If it's Friday we must be back in London.   Every Friday I take a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Using  my Tube guide & my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings We're currently following the Central Line.  Here are the previous days . This is Day 49. We ended our virtual walk a couple of weeks ago at the Marble Arch, the second time on this cross-city trek we’ve had it in our sights. This week, with the passing Leonard Cohen, it’s time to stop and pay our respects, the lyrics of Cohen’s song Hallelujah—some of the most discussed (and changed) lyrics ever written— echoing in our ears.  Am I going to try to analyze Cohen’s lyrics? No, I’m not. That’s been done to death: biblical references tied up with love and sexuality, spirituality, the glory of love, its ultimate failure. Yet

How heavy The Crown?

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With apologies to those of you come looking for my weekly virtual walk in London but another detour is in order. I feel duty bound to take my British Isles Friday space to make sure you’re aware of the new series The Crown . You won’t find it on Masterpiece. It’s not a BBC production. It’s a Netflix original and it’s Downton Abbey good. Most of you already know that I’m pretty proud of my British roots, and that starts with my birth in Richmond, on the outskirts of London, just a few days before Elizabeth’s coronation in June of 1953. I’ll save you the bother of doing the math, I’m 63. A very youthful 63, mind you:) My mother used to tell me they missed getting a year’s worth of free nappies because I came on May 28th instead of sticking around until June 2nd as she and my father had hoped. Sorry about that, mum! In spite of that accident of birth, they gave me Elizabeth as my middle name in the Queen's honor, anyway. The 10 episode series focuses on the young Elizabeth.  H

Margot Robbie Options Film Rights to Gin Phillips Upcoming: Beautiful Things

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Margot Robbie with Domhnall Gleeson/A.A. Milne biopic WHOA! I just discovered the problem with having two blogs! I posted this Chapter1-Take1 blog in the wrong place. I'll leave it here —I guess—but I'll also post it where I always post movie based on a book news. As pretty as she is, Margot Robbie is definitely not just a pretty face. At 26* and still fairly new in H’wood—she started working in film in her native Australia about a decade ago—the actress has her own production company called Lucky Chap, so now she’ll be that hyphenate, actor-producer. That production company just partnered with Warner Bros to buy Beautiful Things , a new book from author Gin Phillips. The book only sold to Viking in September and won’t hit the shelves until May, 2017. It’s not entirely clear whether Robbie plans to star in the film herself but it seems likely. It’s a thriller, set in a zoo, with all the action taking place in the course of a few hours. Interested?  Here’s how the au

Above Ground on the London Underground—Day 48: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

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If it's Friday we must be back in London.   Every Friday I take a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Using  my Tube guide & my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings We're currently following the Central Line.  Here are the previous days . This is Day 48. Last week my post about Kensington Gardens focused mainly on the palace and Princess Diana’s place within and without. Our fearless British Isles Friday leader, Joy, left a comment that her must-see in the gardens was the Peter Pan statue, which, she added, she found ‘remarkably difficult to photograph.’  It’s even harder when one is writing from California!  I hadn’t thought about Peter Pan—I rarely plan these walks ahead of time, simply pick up where I left off—but of course before we return to the Central Line via the Marble Arch station, I have to visit the statue. What youn

Growing up in Niagara Falls #ThrowbackThursday

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Living in Niagara Falls in the 1960 ’ s, my parents cooled their itchy feet long enough to buy a house. Here ’s a piece I dug up out of the cellar about those years.  Of Brasso and Brownies It’s daunting to move into a new house and make it yours. A never before lived in house seems more than new as it stands before you, untouched, immaculate, strangely virginal. The difference between new and brand new can be an almost empty hollow feeling. No ghosts live within those walls. No child’s smudged fingerprints have been wiped away. I was ten years old when we moved into our new house in Niagara Falls. We moved in the spring of 1963, the season of change in what would turn out to be a decade of change. In a house without history it fell to us to write the first page. Real the rest here.