Late lunch, now the bread has cooled down: a roast beef sandwich. The bread has turned out very nicely, light but not too bubbly, with a lovely crisp crust 
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Tea has been steak with fried onions and chips
This was accompanied by more of Apollo 13: Survival on Netflix, which I started watching a few days ago - maybe even last week. It’s a documentary that proclaims that it’s made using only original recordings, photos, and footage, which is true enough. But they still do things like stretching out the time between Odyssey saying “We’ve had a problem” and Houston replying “Say again” by an extra couple of seconds to increase dramatic tension, so not wholly factual
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Weird scenes inside the goldmine tonight, as the living room “smart bulb” glows an ominous red whenever I turn it “off” and I have to turn it off properly at the wall to stop the place looking like a brothel
Anyway, tonight’s major motion picture premiere was Play Dirty (2025) on Amazon Prime. I was a bit hesitant about this as Prime heist movies can be a bit crap, but then I saw in the opening credits that it was based on stories by Richard Stark. So that’s alright then! Richard Stark was one of the several pen names used by the American writer Donald E. Westlake for stuff that didn’t fit into his usual brand, and the stuff he wrote under that name was mainly about a character called Parker who was a somewhat psychopathic criminal, and that’s the main character in the film. And it’s better than the average heist movie, I reckon
Westlake’s usual style under his own name was humorous stuff about New York petty criminals trying to enact heists which proved to be beyond their capabilities and landed them in ridiculous situations. I first came across his work when my Dad came back from one of his visits to his publishers, Hodder & Stoughton, in 1977 with a copy of Nobody's Perfect which was to be published a couple of months later and is a kind of pastiche of Joyce’s Ulysses in the context I just described. Very clever, and very funny. I enjoyed it so much (which I can’t say for Ulysses because I’ve never got more than about forty pages into that before giving up) that I then read every Westlake novel Bedford Library had, which was a lot, but we didn’t have Wikipedia back then so I didn’t know he also wrote stories under other names. The Richard Stark thing is quite weird, as Stark’s style was very different to his own, and in the 1970s he suddenly found himself unable to “channel” that author any more. So no new novels “by” Stark appeared for about twenty years, until the 1990s when he found himself able to write that way again after working on a film script in a similar vein
After that, I rewatched A Complete Unknown (2024) because I was in the mood for some Dylan and it’s a good film if you’re into Dylan
And then the penultimate episode of Alien: Earth, which continues to be not as good as it could have been, which is a shame
Goodnight all
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