Calamity Jane

They were to exterminate all the animals in the 30 km exclusion zone, so they were going from village to village, and I would imagine there were multiple teams because that’s a lot of territory. I believe the tent city was outside the exclusion zone, but I’m not positive. The people who worked on the other three reactors for up to 14 more years lived outside the zone and were transported in every day. Everyone was monitored every day for radiation exposure, and those who reached the designated level were sent home. Some of the clean-up crew would leave their detector badges behind so they could work longer, the work seemed so crucial to them (and was). There are so many stories of heroism and self-sacrifice in this incident!

People were in Pripyat continuously for a good while. Shcherbina ran his operation from there. Residents were allowed back in for one day to collect possessions, in rotating shifts of about a hundred, as I recall. Anything too radioactive had to be left behind, but apparently a fair number of things were below the mandated level. (Suddenly they had all kinds of radiation detectors.) It really is fascinating to read about. And, for others upset about the animal slaughter, some dogs made it out of the exclusion zone and found new homes, some with liquidators.

How I made it through this one, I’m not quite sure, but my eyes certainly had a lot of dust or something in them. I’ll never get over the proud momma dog with her puppies. I think the point would have been made by just what Bacho (?) told Pavel about their task, since the opening showed the cow being shot. At least, thank merciful heaven, they didn’t try to show Lyudmila’s baby, or go into detail about that horrifying death. I think this is one episode I will not re-watch.

I find the podcasts almost necessary for fully understanding the episode. And they inspired me to start more reading into the accident. Midnight at Chernobyl is a very good read. From it, I conclude that Legasov himself is a bit of a portmanteau character, in that he is shown making decisions and conclusions in the show that other people either had a hand in or actually were responsible for. Anyway the story as it is being told does follow the facts as told in this book, but there’s just so much more. It’s heartbreaking.

Wow, just wow. Read it, and am at a complete loss for words.

And so many of them use either incorrect or hopelessly awkward language. It is really a hallmark of pharmaceutical ads. About Charmin’s “Enjoy the go” tag line - not to over share, but any time I haven’t enjoyed the go, it had nothing to do with the TP I used. Stupid line.

I keep wondering about that voice, too. It sounds like damaged vocal cords to me. It makes me want to clear my own throat. I hope it’s nothing serious; he is a very good actor.

I think part of the reason for including her story (she is a real person) was to illustrate how little people understood about radiation and its dangers. It seems the government concealed this from everyone they could, and certainly the facility seems not to have been supplied with protective clothing and equipment. Why on earth didn’t they have “good” dosimeters in every room?? Gas masks, lead aprons, at least? I still flinch when I think of those men running around in their thin lab suits to look at an open nuclear reactor. The general unawareness of the danger among the general population was also pretty evident the night of the event when everyone stood in the rain of radioactive ash admiring the beauty of the ionizing air, and when Lyudmila worried about chemicals at the fire. Lyudmila’s story was also a way to get us in to the hospital to see the firefighters and the progression of their damage, and thereby to educate us the audience about the horrendous effects of excess radiation exposure. We all know radiation is bad for us, but I don’t think most people understood it to this degree.

Once again, absolutely gripping. As someone above said, the hour flies by, and I am left desperate to know what happened next. Legasov and Shcherbina walking along with the gradually increasing pack of stray dogs looking for treats was another stab in the heart, knowing that in short order the dogs will all be killed, or die from radiation and starvation anyway. The miners were a welcome dose of levity - the Minister of Coal getting his shiny new suit repeatedly slapped with coal dust will never stop being funny - but it's heartbreaking to know that all those men were exposed to life-altering danger for a might-happen. No wonder Legasov wanted out; who wants that on his conscience? I have to say, though, that coal miners who smoke seem hardly to be the risk-averse sort to begin with. I too plowed through the wikipedia article on Chernobyl and quickly found myself way out of my depth trying to understand the ins and outs of nuclear physics. Suffice it to say that the people running those plants probably needed to be more experienced and vastly more trained in the first place. A 25-year-old as senior engineer? Yike. I am looking forward to the explanation the show gives us because I think they'll do a good job reducing it to terms I can wrap my head around better than the varying rates of decay of various unstable elements, insertion and extraction of control rods, why the graphite mattered, etc., etc. And I have to thank this show for being my methadone to help ease me through the withdrawal from GOT. PS - Does anyone know the origin of the title? It sounds like something from a burial ritual, but I can't find it. My lab is almost 12, and spends much of his time snoozing on the couch. 🙂

Oh, I don't doubt at all that he found a reliable source. He is more or less a master of whisperers, especially online. I just wondered which source.

My son told me last week in separate conversations that Jon would end up in the north with Ghost, and that Bran would end up king. Didn’t believe either prediction. Now I want to know where he figured it out.

Ignore above. I still haven’t figured out how to delete something I’ve started. I just realized that Jon had to pull back his army to save them, not from the enemy, but from Daenerys, their own leader. As my husband would have said, “Uff da!” That is just not good.

Just as gripping as last week. Being a dog person, I was pretty torn up that pets were left behind, and the dog running after its owner on the bus gutted me. Russians do have a centuries-long heritage of sacrifice, it’s baked into them. In war, the strategy (tactic?) most favored was simply to throw soldiers at the enemy’s guns, thousands, millions of them. So men volunteering to go in would not be surprising. I’m pretty sure the writer said he used the names of the three who actually went in. He says there is a lot of conflicting evidence, so at times he just had to pick what seemed best substantiated. In 1979, I had my own experience with radiation burns during radiation therapy for Hodgkin lymphoma. It is terrifying to lie there knowing that if something goes wrong, they could cook you to death, and you’d never know because you don’t feel a thing, just like regular x-rays. The part that really burned was under my arms, apparently because of the curvature. It was unbelievably painful, and what I received was minuscule compared to what was beaming into those people. I can’t imagine the horror of it. It is truly terrifying to learn how close the world came to enormous catastrophe in this incident. We all owe thanks to the brave souls who willingly put themselves in harm’s way to prevent a greater disaster. Truly the best of human nature compensating for the worst, which caused the original problem.

Every person who went to see what was happening seemed to me to have a “Danger! You’re going to die!” sign above him. And all the people who rushed out to watch the fire, too. The firefighter’s wife is pregnant, right? She was vomiting in the toilet at the start? Bad, bad feeling about that baby’s future. I had to re-watch because so much information came so quickly, I couldn’t make much sense of it the first time. Also, all the plant workers seemed to look alike the first time, which didn’t help I think part of the message is that bureaucracy and hierarchy in general are the enemies of truth, not just communist rigidity. I do wish I could binge watch the whole thing. I found it gripping. Anyone my age (born in 1950) most likely had nuclear fears - I had nightmares from the Cuban crisis forward until the wall came down - and Chernobyl was just another one. And bad as my memories of it are, it seems the truth was worse.

I hear it as “hookers.” 😉. Getting hard of hearing, miss a lot of initial sounds, and my brain tries to fill in the gaps.

I have not gotten over Ghost looking so sad. Missandei has been on the danger list for a while, Arya and Gendry were unlikely to last, Jaime leaving Brienne was foreseeable — but for Ghost to survive and then get sent away, it’s breaking my heart. My son believes it means Jon will end up in the North. I’ll hope for that.

I liked Elaine much better, too. Karlie seems like a pretty close approximation of a human, whereas I thought Elaine had some actual charisma and genuineness.

I have to thank Hester for calling up a long-ago memory of my husband singing the Chiquita Banana song for our son, including the admonition never to put bananas in the refrigerator, in his inimitable, glass-shattering, off-key voice, and trying to dance like Carmen Miranda. I thought everything that came down the runway looked cheap and ugly, sad to say. I was imagining what Ulli would have done with this challenge. Miss those talents and personalities from the first years.

I have thought for quite a while that Alfie Allen has shown an almost incredible range in his portrayal of Theon, and each stage has been perfectly believable. He is simply amazing.

I learned a couple of years ago to do that, mimicking a movie theater. Always much better.

I always love the music on this show. It’s one of a number of things that make re-watching a rewarding experience. To my great surprise, the song during the montage at the end got me to feel a bit of compassion for Cersei for the first time since her walk of shame. The expression on her face as she followed Jaime when he left broke through my negativity about her this time, when it did not last season. All owing to that great music. If that guy doesn’t win some big awards, I’m going to be, um, displeased. PS - just realized this may only be on the Florence + the Machine version. We missed a lot because of poor connection and how dark the picture was.

Attributed to Winston Churchill: “That is the sort of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.” (Probably apocryphal). The point is that that rule was cooked up by some scholars who ignored the Germanic core of our language. They felt the more French construction sounded more elevated, which it may sometimes, but you can drift into absurdities like the one attributed to Churchill.

Just got a chance to watch (sort of - overseas and connection wasn’t good), and after that song, oh my god, so many people are gonna dieeeeeee! I don’t know how I’ll make it through, I really don’t.

I think they’ve always been a bit cagey about this. The three-eyed raven and Jojen both clearly had visions of future events, and it was always implied that Bran’s powers were stronger, plus he did see the Sept of Baelor blowing up in a vision, so it seems he should have some ability to see future events. But they never come out and confirm it.

It wasn’t really his riding out to try to get Rickon that was the problem because nobody followed him then. It was after Rickon dropped and Jon decided to charge towards Ramsay’s army alone that the troops also charged to give him support, and that led to the slaughter. So it wasn’t his impulse to save Rickon that caused the disaster, it was what he did afterwards.