iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Now over to Downing Street for a general update on everything

Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

ArtAsiaPacific reported last week that a coalition of Philippine artists and creatives have been organising a series of activities aimed at preventing the establishment of a 1,600-hectare AI manufacturing hub planned by Pax Silica, a US-led initiative. www.artasiapacific.com/news/philipp...

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Miriam Hopkins was a relative newcomer when she was cast as a judge’s wayward granddaughter in ‘The Story of Temple Drake’ (1933). Far from loving the frivolous roles that would best fit her bubbly blondness, Hopkins was delighted to be cast as Temple.

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

Heat will be getting a rewatch in honour of Mr Kilmer. Farewell sir.

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

At the beginning of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Jill Lawrence (Edna Best) breaks all of the conventions of motherhood and being a wife. She openly flirts with another man in the company of her husband, and does not seem at all maternal towards her daughter Betty (Nova Pilbeam).

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

The movie so good that Alfred Hitchcock made it twice - The Man Who Knew Too Much. The first one was in 1934, and side by side with the 1956 version proves itself the ‘racier’ offering. I’m going to do a deep-dive this week into how & what it tells us about cinema reflecting society at both points

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

While not quite PC now, Ona Munson’s haughty performance as ‘Mother’ Gin Sling in Josef Von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture (1941) adds much to the film’s jaded atmosphere. There’s a connection between her and Gene Tierney’s Poppy that all the opium in the world cannot erase.

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

The ‘fallen women’ of 1932’s Shanghai Express, played by Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich, would be an impossibility once the Hays Code was implemented in 1934. They would have to be seen to be on a moral journey, and punished for their ‘transgressions’.

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

Me, superstitious af: HELLO MR MAGPIE, HELLO MR MAGPIE, HELLO MR MAGPIE Magpie: wow everyone is so polite

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

The House in Marsh Road (1960) went straight to television in the United States, where it was known as Invisible Creature. The creature in question is Patrick the Poltergeist who takes a dim view of David (Tony Wright)’s behaviour towards his long suffering wife Jean (Patricia Dainton).

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

What is clear even a quarter of the way through this is that Truss’s career trajectory after her 49 days in ‘power’ is fuelled by spite, arrogance, incredulity and a complete inability to laugh at herself.

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

Frank Sinatra sailed a little too close to the wind reputationally with his mob connections. Here he is in 1950 with mobster Aniello Dellacroce, who later became an underboss of the Gambino crime family #hollywood #vintagehollywood #classic #legends #sinatra #blackandwhite #history

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

Like the class doofus won a raffle to be popular for the day but is still a massive doofus

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

1981 was the year of Sam Neill being the most intense bastard in cinema

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers had a field day with stories about the trial of Roscoe Arbuckle for the murder of Virginia Rappe in 1921. Hearst himself said that the scandal ‘sold more newspapers than the sinking of the Lusitania’. Arbuckle had been a fan favourite, and was finally acquitted .

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

The studios tried to convince the public that Rock Hudson and starlet Mamie Van Doren were an item, with them attending the 10th Golden Globes together. Mamie wrote a deliciously dirty anecdote about their get-together, which finds Rock in a very sticky situation. You can find it online.

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Is the premise of this new Bear Grylls programme that he hunts down sex offenders so he can baptise them in a river?

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

The Mirror Crack’d (1980) hasn’t quite reached the level of ‘beloved and classic Agatha Christie adaptations, mainly owing to purists disliking Angela Lansbury’s portrayal of Miss Marple. True, it’s not textbook Marple, but the point is being missed.

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Purple light this evening in remembrance of all who were lost. #HolocaustMemorialDay

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

The office drunk is in early and has started already

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

Sharon Tate is luminous in her big screen debut as Odile de Caray in Eye of the Devil (1966), but the film was a commercial flop, which did nothing for Tate’s career on the US side of the Atlantic.

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

‘I’m looking at some property over here’. Fuckin buffoon lives with his mother.

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

Supernatural (1933). A recent watch and very much a curio, being a rare dramatic/villainous role for Carole Lombard. An heiress becomes possessed by the spirit of an executed murderess, with shocking results.

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

Me when the fibromyalgia throws my sleep pattern up the wall

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Imagine coming in at 3am stinking of Bensons and gin and the dog is sitting there like this saying just what time do you call this

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

It’s the 49th anniversary of Agatha Christie’s death. Here’s my pilgrimage to her gravesite a few years back. My cultural life would have been so drastically different without her in it

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Results of my latest eBay treasure hunt

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 05/01/2025

Did any other writer have such a run of stone-cold classics that became classic films as Ira Levin? A Kiss Before Dying (1953), Rosemary’s Baby (1967), The Stepford Wives (1972) and The Boys from Brazil (1976). An outstanding body of work.

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Teenage showgirl Beverly Aadland at dinner with her ‘mentor’ Errol Flynn and a friend. Flynn had begun dating the girl when she was fifteen. It wouldn’t be long before Flynn was dead, his body exhausted by his constant debauch.

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

William Bendix’s ex-serviceman Buzz struggling to ward off his demons in The Blue Dahlia (1946). The original script saw Buzz guilty of murder, but pressure from the top brass in the US Navy saw that this idea never made it to the screen.

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 25/12/2024

Me nibbling on my Christmas snacks, trying to ignore that my husband has made everything fall out of the under stairs cupboard looking for a table cloth that wasn’t even under there

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

Merry Christmas you wonderful people. Thanks for all the support and love this year

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

Woman in Tescos near the sherry: forgive me I’m talking to myself Me: I am too, I’m talking to him (points in husband’s direction) which is more or less the same thing *she and I both cackle*

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

C.Aubrey Smith’s face, seeming as if it were carved out of granite, added much gravitas to his many film roles. He came to Hollywood at the beginning of the 1930s after some stage success in his native England, believing, rightly, that it was in California that he would find his fortune.

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Limbering myself up for Tescos carnage tomorrow

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

The night is young and the Polynesian Pearl Diver cocktails are going down well for Anne Baxter and Raymond Burr in The Blue Gardenia (1953). But the evening soon sours, with Burr on the slab and Baxter unable to remember how he got there.

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

Marlene Dietrich said of Charles Laughton ‘I would rather play a love scene with Charles Laughton than any other man in the world’ The man’s charisma was off the chart. Both seen here in 1957’s ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ #oldmovies #vintage #movies #oldhollywood #hollywoodhistory

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Husband while we’re doing the Christmas tree: what you’ve got to do with the lights is… Me (who has been dressing our Christmas trees for 23 years):

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Distracted everyone by letting them think he needed a wee then ran round the kitchen when they were at the front door to nick half a hot-dog bun that had been left on a plate

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Claire L Meadows MA FRSA @clmeadows.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Big Tony Todd’s entrance in Candyman. Chaos ensues from this point on

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