22.9.05

Spoilers to Older Things Abound

Note: I do not reveal the Harry Potter spoiler but I do blithely reveal the ending to The Perfect Storm, Alexander Kent's Richard Bolitho series, some bits of the Horatio Hornblower series, and some other bits of the Aubrey-Maturin series. These are all sufficiently old and I am sufficiently behind-the-times to figure that anyone reading this who cares already knows the endings to everything mentioned.

Post: I read somewhere that there is a Harry Potter spoiler tee-shirt. Not having read any of the Harry Potter franchise and finding the one bit of one of the movies that I had seen incredibly boring, I googled "Harry Potter spoiler shirt" or something like that and I had a gander at the spoiler. The sad thing is, I know so very little about the Harry Potter franchise, that I have no idea what the impact of this spoiler is. It must be important because there's a spoiler tee-shirt for cripes sakes (in British and American versions) but, still, it meant nothing to me. I had to do some further googling.

And then Ptichka watched The Perfect Storm because she's a natural disaster type of gal and I mentioned in passing, as she was preparing to watch it, that she should have some tissue handy because I had heard that one of the more likeable characters bites it. The next morning, I thought that she was going to throw the now-empty box of Kleenex at me. Everyone dies. Why hadn't I told her that? Well, I have never seen the movie. She dug the CGI, though. The making of doc on the DVD has her seal of approval, which is hard to earn.

The same day as I was dodging empty tissue boxes because everyone had bit in The Perfect Storm I was googling "Richard Bolitho" of Alexander Kent's Bolitho books for lord only knows what reason. I'm going to assume that I was procrastinating. Or maybe I wanted to figure out how to pronounce "Bolitho." Eh, whatever. I was googling in avoidance. I came across the author's homepage. I discovered that there's a Richard Bolitho figurine, that the reason I couldn't find the third book in the Bolitho-as-midshipman trilogy is because it was just published, and that Richard Bolitho bites it on the eve of an armistice. His nephew carries on the tradition but still. I suppose that I'll keep reading to see how Herrick, Bolitho's best friend, and Allday, his coxswain, bite it. I don't really mind when the main protagonists bite it in books and films because there's that whole cycle-of-life, blah blah blah thing going on but I'd prefer it if the more likeable minor characters carried on. But, really, Brown dies in the Horatio Hornblower books, Aubrey's coxswain dies in the Aubrey-Maturin books, so it seems like when Bolitho goes, he needs to take all his disseminated wisdom (except for the stuff he's passed on to the nephew) with him, which means that Herrick and Allday have got to go.

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