Friday Ephemera
Romanian scenes. || The baby-repelling properties of grass. || Perfect every time. || Exactly how should we perceive you, madam? || The progressive retail experience, parts 401, 402, 403 and 404. || Classing the place up no end. || “I’ve decided to dissolve my wiener in acid.” || An educator speaks: “We have to find a way to re-regulate white people.” || The walking dead. || What cotton buds are for. || “The covert world of spy centres and secret bases.” (h/t, Things) || That’s exactly how I would’ve done it. || It seemed like a good idea at the time. (h/t, Damian) || One month of the Sun. || Stalker, thwarted. || A bathroom tale. || Turning back time. || And finally, enticingly, “I’m working on a children’s book…”
Robyn has thoughts about anatomy and physiology.
Sequoiaphoenix share thoughts ups and downs of being a lesbian.
“I wish to binge.”
I finally got around to watching Father Ted, which was recommended by someone here. It turned out to be a “watch once” comedy. But David could take lessons from that show: Just decorating the Correction Booth like the house the priests live in would greatly increase the trauma of a visit. If Vogons designed wallpaper…
This may not be your cup of tea, but I’ve just this morning finished Episode 3 of Amazon’s latest, Wheel of Time.
.. it’s almost worth it just for the many panoramic shots of the world its set in, some of which are very striking indeed…there are a number of very irksome interjections of what the Critical Drinker refers to as “the message”.
Watched the first three last night. Unlike some I am less on the sci-fi and more on the fantasy wagon of SF&F. That said, it was pretty atrocious. “THE MESSAGE” is writ large throughout. The acting is wooden. The pacing is queer at times (no, the other kind of queer).
Like much modern entertainment it is pretty, vapid and forgettable. We have now reached the stage where 1% of effort is put into writing, 4% into characterization and 95% into set decoration and effects.
I myself am awaiting Season 6 of The Expanse. I hope they manage to stick the landing. In the interim, I am reading the books over again as I gave up in Book 3 some years ago for reasons I can’t remember (literally. I have to maybe slow down on my appreciation of the distillers art in the new year).
p.s. massive lifelong Jeremy Brett fan. He embodied Sherlock in a way no one else has before or since. Much to his own personal detriment.
Just decorating the Correction Booth like the house the priests live in would greatly increase the trauma of a visit.
I recall the scorching, stains and explosive residue immediately behind Father Jack’s chair.
Father Jack’s chair.
Indeed. But have you seen James Lileks’ book “Interior Desecrations”?
I think of Marple as comfort TV. Yes, there’s quite a lot of poisoning and questionable will-altering, and bodies piling up everywhere, but it’s oddly comforting.
This.
Well, watched the first episode of ‘Wheel..’
All I have to say is, ‘What a load of Trollocs!’
All I have to say is, ‘What a load of Trollocs!’
Was the, um, male scenery insufficiently diverting?
[ Checks whereabouts of fire extinguisher. ]
I liked Stephen King better before he started spouting off about things he does not understand
I found Marple much more entertaining.
And you mocked me for watching Murder, She Wrote.
Have you tried watching Brave New World? I’m about half way through. There are differences between the series and the book, but it’s not bad. And if you want to see just how much morality has changed since 1960, Route 66 on the ROKU channel is interesting viewing and there are over 100 episodes. There are early career roles for some actors and actresses who went on to become very big.
David, if you were too young to be bothered the first time around, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy might be worth your time. If so, you can follow up with Smiley’s People.
The first time around, I found I, Claudius absorbing. A year ago, I tried it again, and couldn’t be bothered, so will re-read the books. Nevertheless, the TV series may appeal to you.
I have recommended it before, but anyone who has not watched Ken Clark’s Civilisation is in for a treat. Mind you, his hopeful passage from the new University of East Anglia now gives me a laugh.
And you mocked me for watching Murder, She Wrote.
I merely said I was pleased that you felt comfortable voicing that choice. I stand by my decision.
I can respect boldness.
if you were too young to be bothered the first time around, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy might be worth your time.
I’ve seen the original series, belatedly, and the more recent film.
I, Claudius
I’ve seen it three times. Of an evening hereabouts, it is sometimes quoted. Usually Livia, or Caligula’s remark about what he’d like to do to the Roman public.
If World War II movies are your cuppa, there’s Battleship Island, an epic-scale retelling of a true story (escape of Korean prisoners, slave-working for Imperial Japanese war effort). The action is blown up to near-Die Hard proportions; effectively and satisfyingly. Add a wide array of characters, cross-purposes, intrigue… An emotional wringer wrapped in a walloping spectacle.
Shamelessly stolen…
Shamelessly stolen…
Hahahaha! Good response.
Someone thinks very highly of themselves, don’t they. Yon blue check done gone to her head.
“Was the, um, male scenery insufficiently diverting?”
There was, frankly, a paucity! Not only that, but the characters are dull, and not really very likeable. I don’t know if that’s a factor of the adaptation (or actor choice?) or the original source material; I have a vague memory of trying out one of the books long ago and deciding a few chapters in it just wasn’t for me, so maybe the latter. With ‘LotR’ you root for the characters as they set out on their journey because you care for them. But this bunch? Nah.
Never mind, there’s ‘Hawkeye’ on Wednesday, and if the trailers are anything to go by, that’s going to be tons of fun.
for American fare, Magnum P.I. (go ahead and laugh)
I tried rewatching it this summer and only made it halfway through the second season. It starts well, but by S02 the 80’s cheese is in full effect and the original concept has been lost.
If you like Magnum PI, try The Rockford Files.
This, in spades[1]. It balances the humour with the noir rather better, I think.
I’ll recommend S01 of The Dukes of Hazzard, entirely because your memories of the show are of the latter seasons after the show was toned down for the children in the audience. The first season is raunchy, sardonic, and dances between being an homage to and a vicious satire of Southern redneck culture. Bit like Letterkenny, really.
For really old stuff I’ve quite enjoyed 12 O’Clock High, as much for the many guest stars who went on to become major celebrities as anything else.
Currently rewatching Supernatural, although I haven’t decided if I’ll continue past Season 5.
Yes, there’s quite a lot of poisoning and questionable will-altering, and bodies piling up everywhere, but it’s oddly comforting
I’ll just leave this here.
How does it compare to the original novels?
About as well as Carnival Row, Tales From The Loop and The Man in the High Castle, which is to say not at all. The original novels are fairly typical zero-to-hero D&D-inspired fantasy with a male adolescent-power-fantasy protagonist. I have no idea where all this Handmaid’s Tale nonsense came from. Then again I couldn’t make it through the first of the books, so maybe it comes in later.
I can respect boldness.
Still working my way through S10 of Smallville. God, it’s a trainwreck.
[1] Pun intended.
Of an evening hereabouts, it is sometimes quoted.
This transplanted Brit, on the west coast of NA, applauds you Sir. Your turn of phrase reminds me of all I miss about the country I was born and raised in.
I’m thrown and overblown with bliss. Annie Lennox.
Carnivale
Season 1 was magnificent, season 2 wandered about a bit but ended with a great setup for season 3 (which sadly never happened due to budget constraints).
really old stuff
I haven’t searched for these and don’t know if they’re currently available anywhere, but I have fond memories of (1) Blue Light, a spy series that only ran two years, starring Robert Goulet. Very very very loosely based on the once-famous memoir (and William Holden movie) The Counterfeit Traitor. And (2) in a lighter vein, T.H.E. Cat, Robert Loggia as a cat burglar turned hero, but still devious.
Sometimes I think I wouldn’t mind re-watching them, other times … memories … afraid of popping the bubble.
Anyone seen Ghostbusters: Afterlife yet? Was I right?
Still working my way through S10 of Smallville. God, it’s a trainwreck.
There’s just no helping some people.
There’s just no helping some people.
It’s become my white whale at this point. Allegedly he puts on the suit and flies in the final episode. At this point he could resurrect Chris Reeves from the dead and reshoot Superman II with the Richard Donner script and it still wouldn’t justify seasons 9 and 10.
It’s become my white whale at this point.
It’s right up there with Steve’s stunning and brave confession about Murder, She Wrote. As you know, we’re a very tolerant and accepting crowd, so, of course, we won’t judge you for it. Not to your face.
I’ll just leave this here.
Thing is, I don’t watch Marple, for instance, for the mystery as such. The clues and detection are very much secondary. (Hence the repeat viewings.) It’s more about spending 90 minutes or so in a different world – a world of stoicism, manners, propriety, and emotional buttoned-upness. A holiday of sorts from modern sensibilities. Not unlike the appeal of, say, Downton Abbey, where Mrs Patmore’s kitchen crises or the scandal of a missing button tend to be more engaging than the grander, more conventional dramas upstairs.
I fear Jaden, if that is his real name, is not trolling.
Yet more of the progressive retail experience…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10226929/Gang-80-thieves-ransacks-California-Nordstrom-store-organized-raid-lasted-just-one-minute.html
I’m starting to wonder why anyone in California pays for anything anymore.
Seriously, have Californians figured out yet that when you decriminalize crime and stop enforcing laws, the world turns into one ongoing Mad Max scene?
Yet more of the progressive retail experience…
Or, how to undermine a high-trust society.
“Shamelessly stolen…“
POW!
Heheh. I like the cut of Ms. Salt’s jib. There may yet be hope for the world.
Viewing recommendations?
Mapp & Lucia, with Geraldine McEwan as Lucia, Prunella Scales as Miss Mapp and Nigel Hawthorne as Georgie Pillson. Marvellous stuff.
Mrs. Oik and I also enjoyed Friday Night Lights– even though it was about that American version of rugby football as played by school kids.
It’s more about spending 90 minutes or so in a different world – a world of stoicism, manners, propriety, and emotional buttoned-upness.
This is actually why I like so much detective noir. It’s a world where bad things happens and wealthy and powerful people have nasty little secrets, but unlike our world there’s one man willing to uncover the mess and follow the truth wherever it leads in pursuit of justice. Often there’s no justice to be had, but it’s the pursuit that matters.
I don’t know what your tolerance for Jane Austen is, but the miniseries Lost in Austen, about a hapless modern young woman magically swapped for Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, is a fun little romp. Her attempts to keep the novel plot on track despite her hamfisted ignorance of the period result in amusing catastrophes, and the writers have some fun with Elizabeth’s perceptions vs. the actual reality.
the world turns into one ongoing Mad Max scene
Well, no, because while shoplifting is no longer a crime hitting these miscreants in the face with a barbed wire-wrapped bat certainly still is. It’s not about decriminalizing crime, it’s about removing you ability to defend yourself against the left’s shock troops. Cf. also “Rittenhouse, Kyle”.
I don’t know what your tolerance for Jane Austen is…
It barely exists.
This is actually why I like so much detective noir.
There’s a tendency to anachronistically graft today’s fashionable sensibilities onto period dramas, even those set centuries earlier, and often to an absurd degree. It’s not that the social world of, say, Marple is necessarily preferable; more that it’s a reminder of how sensibilities and assumptions can be local and contingent. Which quite a few modern dramatists, among others, would rather not acknowledge.
Yeah.
I grew up in that culture. The same culture that was satirized in film/TV/pop-culture as being the very face of ignorance and racism to the point that the mere presence of a southern drawl meant that you were ipso facto almost too stupid to breath.
I laughed my ass off when the Yankees in Massachusetts were upset when they had to endure force busing for integration years after I had graduated from High School. I had been in integrated classrooms from my very first day in school. That would have been in 1964.
Working class folks in the South tend to be part of that “redneck” culture. The very term “redneck” meant that you were someone working in the fields; you’d be bent over to pull weeds/pluck cotton/whatever and the sun would burn your neck.
If you have enough melanin in your skin, your neck won’t turn red. It will turn a darker color, however.
But if you’re a redneck white working in the same field (or factory) as a “person of African heritage”, you may find that all of you have very similar concerns about the world in which you live.
I have just watched the first episode of Lost in Austen and thoroughly enjoyed it.
One muddy puddle not to splash in.
some other dirtbag who got himself killed
If it’s the Kenosha dirtbag Blake we’re talking about, he’s not dead, just paralysed from the waist down.
Which I see as a thoroughly unsatisfactory conclusion to the incident.
I have just watched the first episode of Lost in Austen and thoroughly enjoyed it.
It feels like it doesn’t quite know what to do with itself in the third act, and it has a fairy tale ending, but by that point all the comedy that can be has been extracted from the premise and it winds up all right.
For some complementary viewing pair it with 2013’s Austenland, about a dissatisfied young woman who spends her entire life’s savings on a trip to a Jane Austen LARP.
Which I see as a thoroughly unsatisfactory conclusion to the incident.
If he had died, we would have been hearing “He was turning his life around!” and so on.
Remember all those “Congratulations Mike Brown (or Trayvon Martin): One Year Without an Arrest” memes?
A liberal journalist reminding us that liberal journalists are scum.
Why, oh why, couldn’t all the victims of this horrific attack have been smarmy liberal news vermin?
Why we learn to spell…
A liberal journalist reminding us that liberal journalists are scum.
I think the practice of horsewhipping a miscreant down the public street and beyond the city limits should return.
“Why, oh why, couldn’t all the victims of this horrific attack have been smarmy liberal news vermin?”
Early reports sem to indicate it’s less ‘an attack’ and just another habitual felon fleeing the scene of his latest crime and taking a wrong turn, and not caring who is in the way as long as he escapes.
He should have been in jail, but was out on bail. So smarmy liberal news vermin almost certainly all supported the legislation that ensured he wasn’t.
Horsewhipping is too good for ’em!
just another habitual felon fleeing the scene of his latest crime and taking a wrong turn, and not caring who is in the way as long as he escapes.
Yes, that is what the latest data suggest.
He should have been in jail, but was out on bail. So smarmy liberal news vermin almost certainly all supported the legislation that ensured he wasn’t.
Don’t forget the wealthy liberals who fund the political careers of the politicians who release these criminals onto the streets. And the middle class liberal asswipes who vote for them.
Horsewhipping is too good for ’em!
A suitable punishment is no longer legal in any Western nation.
Don’t forget the wealthy liberals who fund the political careers of the politicians who release these criminals onto the streets. And the middle class liberal asswipes who vote for them.
Yeah. More that latter part. And they’re not all liberals. Got curious how the Rittenhouse story was going down with the conservatives…”conservatives” at Patterico. Chock full of the imbecilic “he shouldn’t have been there” and “SMH over 17 yo being legally allowed to open carry an AR-15″, etc. Then I see a good number of my conservative…”conservative” friends, even the Trump-supporting (though hesitantly so) kind saying similar. When I point out that maybe, just maaaaybe a woman beater and a guy who had anally raped 10 yo boys shouldn’t have been there at all….crickets. When pressing further I am informed that you’re not supposed to say the words “anal rape” and “10 year old boy” in the same breath. It upsets people.
WTP: Agreed. You’ve got to question the bona-fides of conservatives who say Kyle Rittenhouse “shouldn’t have been there” but forget that the rioters “shouldn’t have been there”. Also those who say that Kyle and the rioters are equally guilty of being where they shouldn’t have been. “Hi! I’m here to make the conservative case for gutting the right of self defense.”
It’s been years since I’ve visited the Patterico blog, so I’m not up on what he’s been saying. Shrug.
@pst314
“It turned out to be a “watch once” comedy”
Great turn of phrase. For me:
Mr. Bean – once
Blackadder – DVD is worn down to half its original thickness
Blackadder – DVD is worn down to half its original thickness
I’ll bet you are old enough to remember phonograph records, which would slowly wear out if you played them enough. (Which is why I was so conscientious about taking good care of them.) Did you know that phonograph needles were called needles because the first ones were actual cactus needles? My Dad described how those needles, being soft, would wear down as they played records. It was customary to keep a set of needles, and change them frequently in the course of an evening of playing records. And there was a device for re-sharpening those needles.
” Did you know that phonograph needles were called needles because the first ones were actual cactus needles?”
I come this classy joint for the snark, but I stay for the trivia…
I come this classy joint for the snark, but I stay for the trivia…
Classy snark. Also classy snacks.