Cyber flatpack

Many of us know all about torture by flatpack - what happens when you get an innocuous looking cardboard box home from IKEA (or wherever) and then spend a stressful afternoon trying to convert the contents of the box into something vaguely useful. Best to get in something that warms beforehand.

Today we have upped our game and the innocuous looking cardboard box contains a television from Samsung, something ultra or extra and with a model number of Ue43bu8500. After a couple of hours or so we can now get a reasonable variety of terrestrial television channels, including the all-important ITV3. Don't know about the relatively new heritage Maigret from BBC on Freeview channel No.82 yet.

We decided that this was quite enough for day one. ITV Hub, Amazon Primark and all that sort of thing can wait for another day. In the meantime, BH has been unanimously elected to the vital role of Device Controller (First Class), to which end she has been given televised access to the cyber manual. Near 300 pages of it, so rather a lot to print out, even at our handy print shop, to be found at reference 4.

While I have retired upstairs to the civilised prose of Leersson of reference 1, last mentioned at reference 2, to study the emergence of Germany and Italy in their modern forms during the second half of the nineteenth century. A coming together of all kinds of interesting stuff - some of it dangerous - which we in France and England largely avoided, by having emerged as coherent nation states relatively early on. 

There is neither an audio nor a video option, but it should be required reading for all those foreigners involved or interested in the affairs of the Ukraine. And for the energetic, there is always the rather different take to be found at reference 3. I no longer own a copy, but there is one available at the Main Library at the University of Edinburgh.

PS: the cover includes part of the famous table of nationalities known as the Völkertafel, produced at the end of the 17th century in what is now southern Germany and widely read there and thereabouts. The racial prejudices of the time. For once Wikipedia fails me, only offering entries in German or Dutch (Deutsche), so I have been unable to find out which column is for us Brits. But Spaniards are left and Turks right.

References

Reference 1: National thought in Europe: a cultural history - Joep Leerssen - 2006.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/learning-french.html.

Reference 3: On the national question - J. Stalin - 1942.

Reference 4: https://aiprinters.co.uk/products/posters.