09:40 – Barbara and I just finished watching series one of Borgia on Netflix streaming. This is the 2011 version starring John Doman as Rodrigo Borgia. Barbara and I agree that this version is immensely better than the 2011 Showtime series The Borgias. It does have that one essential element of any good historical drama: lots of pretty young women running around topless and bottomless. Borgia plays fast and loose with historical fact, but not as much the Showtime version. Both versions do a hatchet job on Lucrezia, who by unbiased contemporary accounts was a very nice young woman. That’s what happens when your enemies win and get to write the histories. You find yourself accused after the fact of murdering people and having sex with your father and brothers.
I’m working on kit stuff and the prepping book. At the moment I’m writing about establishing a defensive perimeter for your neighborhood. I even stole an image from Nick Scipio’s page:
For organizing a Neighborhood Watch on steroids, I’m trying to focus on important issues that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere. For example, what happens if/when things return to normal? When the police finally do show up, it could be embarrassing to have a pile of dead looter bodies at the entrance to your neighborhood. So I’ll recommend, for example, using shotguns whenever possible, because they are impossible to match forensically to a specific projectile. Mixing and sharing buckshot shells, for the same reason. Wearing balaclavas or panty hose masks, so that no one can say for sure who did what when. Wearing armbands in bright pink, blaze orange, or blaze green, both to make it easier to identify friendlies and as a sort of “uniform” for fig-leaf legal cover. Organizing overwatches for roadblocks and barricades, along with a rapid reaction force to support those overwatches. Centralizing communications and management of the local security force. And so on.
This is the kind of stuff that’s too extreme for Barbara’s tastes. (Wait until I get to the part about making grenades and Molotov cocktails…) I started writing the book with her name on it as co-author, but she said she doesn’t want her name on the book, so as I work on it now I’m removing “we” and replacing it with “I”.